“Well, that’s a rum bit of business!” Reith exploded, seizing a cigarette. Hilda edged away from the flame. “Where the devil’s Eckersley?”
Miss Shields was already ringing the Engineering Department—people rang the fire brigade with less urgency. Hilda nodded to Maisie, and they sidled out of the room.
As soon as they were out of earshot of Reith’s bellowing, Hilda sped up.
“Look sharp, Miss Musgrave. This is a great chance!”
“Pardon?”
“The 2LO, it’s just up the Strand, at Marconi House. Will take us four minutes at a good clip. Don’t you want to see our transmissions in action?”
“I . . .” Maisie had never really thought about the connection between the microphone and the machine that sent broadcasts into wirelesses around the nation.
“Everyone who works here ought to see a transmitter at least once,” Hilda said, in that way she had that made you feel stupid for arguing.
So they hurried up the road to the Marconi House. Everyone there recognized Hilda—Maisie was pretty sure Hilda would be recognized if she walked into a meeting of the Ancient Order of Hibernians—and they were promptly ushered into an airy room where the 2LO transmitter was still housed.
Despite having made possible the first-ever words broadcast in Britain: “This is 2LO calling,” the 2LO transmitter was an unholy relic, kept only for these occasional days when the newer, smaller, more powerful transmitter in Selfridges went down.
“Always good to have a contingency plan,” Hilda murmured.
“Oh, hullo.” Eckersley greeted them with a hunted expression. He was circling the transmitter, making minor adjustments, readying it to spring to life again. “I suppose the DG is baying for blood? It’s nothing to do with us engineers, I’ve told him, but he can’t seem to understand that.”
“Of course it’s not your fault,” Hilda agreed soothingly. “Never mind, Mr. Eckersley. Have you met my secretary, Miss Musgrave? I thought she’d like to see a transmitter at work, and I’m afraid your misfortune is her great gain.”
“I’ll say one thing for the dear old dinosaur, Miss Musgrave. You can see the workings far more clearly than on the new beast,” Eckersley told her, giving the transmitter a fond pat. “Come on, then, and touch the heart of the matter. But don’t you dare actually touch it,” he warned.
The heart of the matter. A battered anatomy book once taught Maisie that a human heart was the size of a fist. She liked that. Her own heart, always fragile, was bruised and shrunken after Cyril—a dandelion gone to seed; another blow and it would simply scatter. A fist, though, pounding away inside her chest, was much less likely to be crushed. It meant that somewhere inside her she was strong.
The 2LO looked more like a skeleton than an organ. Six meters of machine, comprising a line of valves backed by polished wood. Delicate and solid. Within this elegant contraption lay the power of communication.
Hilda was pointing, naming every segment, her knowledge as intimate as if she had built it herself, while Eckersley buzzed away at whatever he did, making the magic happen. But it wasn’t magic. It was better. This was the result of endless questions, of the search for answers, of not resting until those answers were found. And then beginning all over again, with more questions.
The rectifier, the oscillator, the modulated amplifier, the modulator, the sub modulator. Valves and valves and valves. Making sound fly on airwaves.
How did anyone ask the questions that answered in this configuration of wood and glass and wire that was changing the whole world? Thousands of years ago, someone had gazed into the night sky and seen that some stars were planets. And then they mapped the universe. They unlocked mathematics. They saw the way the sun moved across the earth and how to harness its power, warming homes and baths, growing plants. And they developed tools. The capacity to sail around the globe, to build cathedrals, to run a factory, to capture images on paper and then on screen. And now, to send a story throughout the country, from a machine.
“In its infancy.” That was the phrase. Radio was a form in its infancy.
This is the cradle of civilization.
She stared harder, wanting to read the five pips that began each broadcast, before that call crackled through wirelesses up and down the country.
From Penzance to John o’ Groats, anyone who had a wireless and the license fee could tune in and hear a symphony, poetry, gardening advice, a thriller, a debate, scenes from new plays, sporting events, stories about places scattered throughout the globe, because why shouldn’t a farmwife in South Yorkshire know something of Shanghai, or San Francisco, or S?o Paulo?