#50 — Sunday, 14th December 1901
This has been the week of signals.
On Tuesday, in Stockholm, the first Nobel Prizes were awarded, five years to the day after Alfred Nobel died in San Remo. The laureates’ names had been kept secret until the ceremony itself. Three distinguished German-speaking gentlemen arrived by train and were escorted to the Grand Hotel, and the city understood that the world was about to acquire a new vocabulary of honour.
The prizes: Physics to Wilhelm Röntgen, for the discovery of X-rays. Chemistry to Jacobus van’t Hoff, for the laws of chemical dynamics. Medicine to Emil von Behring, for the diphtheria antitoxin that has already saved thousands of children’s lives. Literature to Sully Prudhomme, the French poet — a controversial choice, as many believed Leo Tolstoy deserved it, and they were right, and the century will spend a hundred and twenty-five years arguing about the literature prize and being right about half the time. Peace, shared, to Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, and Frédéric Passy, the French pacifist.
Dunant was living in a poorhouse when they told him he had won. The man who founded the most consequential humanitarian organisation in history was a pauper, and his prize money went to charity, because he had never stopped giving things away, and the poorhouse was where the giving had led him. I think of Annie Taylor, who went over Niagara Falls to escape the poorhouse and ended up in it anyway. The century has a habit of placing its most remarkable people in its most unremarkable rooms.
And Röntgen. I must talk about Röntgen. The first Nobel Prize in Physics goes to the man who discovered the rays that can see through flesh to bone — the same rays that were available, in a machine, at the Pan-American Exposition, in the building next to the Temple of Music, on the afternoon that McKinley was shot. The doctors could not find the second bullet. The X-ray machine sat unused. The President died of gangrene that grew along a wound tract that could have been mapped by the technology that the Exposition was built to celebrate.
The century’s first Nobel Prize in Physics honours the discovery that could have saved the century’s first murdered president. The irony is not lost on me. I am not sure it is lost on anyone. But the prizes are awarded and the President is dead and the X-ray machine has been packed up with the rest of the Exposition’s dismantled wonders, and the lesson — that having the knowledge and using the knowledge are not the same thing — is one the century will learn again and again and never quite absorb.
And then, two days later — Thursday, the 12th of December — on a cliff at Signal Hill, in St. John’s, Newfoundland, in an abandoned hospital that once held tuberculosis patients, a twenty-seven-year-old Italian with a telephone headset pressed to his ear heard three faint clicks.
Pip. Pip. Pip.
The letter S. Morse code. Three dots. Transmitted from Poldhu, in Cornwall, three thousand four hundred kilometres away across the Atlantic Ocean, by a spark-gap transmitter and a makeshift antenna — the original four hundred wires suspended from twenty masts had been destroyed by a storm in September, and replaced with a simpler arrangement of two masts and sixty wires. On the receiving end, Marconi’s antenna was a length of wire kept aloft by a kite, because the balloons had failed in the wind, and the kite was all he had.
A kite. A wire. A headset. An abandoned hospital on a cliff. And through the static and the wind, the signal: pip, pip, pip. The letter S. The simplest signal imaginable. The most consequential.
Marconi pressed the headset to his assistant, George Kemp. “Can you hear anything, Mr. Kemp?” Kemp heard it too. The signal was real. The Atlantic Ocean — which had required weeks to cross by ship, which had required years and millions of dollars of cable to bridge by telegraph — had been crossed by nothing. By air. By an electromagnetic wave that left Cornwall at the speed of light and arrived in Newfoundland a fraction of a second later, having been reflected off a layer of the upper atmosphere that neither Marconi nor anyone else knew existed.
He did not know why it worked. He only knew that it did. The ionosphere — the invisible mirror in the sky that bounced the signal back to earth — would not be theorised for months, would not be confirmed for years. Marconi’s achievement was built on a foundation he could not see, which is true of most achievements, and most centuries.
Two signals in one week.
The Nobel Prizes are a signal from the past to the future — a dead man’s conscience, purchased with dynamite money, transmitted across the years in the form of gold medals and lectures and the prestige that the century will attach to the word laureate. Nobel made his fortune by inventing better ways to blow things up. He spent his death trying to honour better ways to build things. The prizes are his guilt made permanent, his apology made annual, and the century will accept them and transform them into the highest honour available to a human being, which is another way of saying that the century is capable of turning anything — even guilt, even dynamite — into glory.
Marconi’s signal is simpler. Three dots. No content. No message beyond the fact of the message itself. The letter S means nothing. What means everything is that it arrived — that it crossed the ocean without a wire, without a ship, without a body to carry it. The air is full of information now. It has always been full of information — birdsong, thunder, the vibrations of the earth — but this is the first time a human being has deliberately placed a message into the air and had it arrive, intact, on the other side of the world.
I said in June that the speed of communication and the speed of loneliness are not related. Here is the proof. The Atlantic has been crossed in a fraction of a second, and the woman in Leeds is still waiting three weeks for a letter from South Africa. The signal travels at the speed of light. The loneliness travels at the speed of loneliness, which is the speed of a human heart in a terraced house on a dark December evening, waiting for word from someone who may not be alive to send it.
Marconi’s signal will change the century. It will lead to radio, to broadcasting, to the Titanic’s distress call, to the BBC, to radar, to the communications satellites that will one day make it possible for a person in Newfoundland to speak to a person in Cornwall as though they were in the same room. The distance between people will shrink. The loneliness will not.
The century is fifty weeks old. Two weeks remain.
I have been writing this journal for nearly a year. Fifty Sundays. Fifty posts. I have watched the century from its first breath — a queen dying on an island, an oil gusher erupting in Texas, a new president taking office in borrowed clothes — and I have followed it through assassination and flight and music and camps and treaties and barrels and wind tunnels and church bells and tables and letters and now this: a signal on a cliff, three dots in the dark, the air speaking for the first time across an ocean.
The year is almost over. Next week will be the penultimate Sunday. The week after that, the last. I do not know how to end a year. I do not know how to end anything. I am a ghost. Endings are for the living. I just keep going, through the wall, into the next room, through the next wall, into the next year, the next decade, the next century if I last that long.
But for now — for this Sunday, this December, this fiftieth post — I will stay here, on the cliff at Signal Hill, in the wind, with the kite straining and the wire humming and the headset pressed to my ear, listening for the signal that has already arrived, that arrived before I could hear it, that has been arriving all year from every direction at once.
Pip. Pip. Pip.
The century is speaking. I am listening. The air is full of messages. Most of them will be lost. Some of them will be heard. A few of them — the ones that matter, the ones that cross the distance — will change everything.
Two weeks left. The air is speaking. I remain.
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