AtDTDA: 18 Off the Moroccan coast [517/518]

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          All hell likewise had broken loose topside. As if syntonic 
          wireless messages, traveling through the Æther, might 
          be subject to influences we remain at present ignorant of 
          [1], or perhaps, owing to the unnaturally shaky quality of 
          present-day "reality", the receivers in the ship's Marconi [2] 
          room were picking up traffic from somewhere else not quite 
          "in" the world, more like from a continuum lateral to it . . .
          around midafternoon the Stupendica had received a 
          message in cipher [3], to the effect that British and German 
          battle groups were engaged off the Moroccan coast [4], and 
          that a state of general European war should be presumed 
          in effect [5].

1. Noted as a typo ["off' is in the first edition] on the AtD Pynchonwiki:

http://tinyurl.com/27rz47

2. It appears that Tesla came up with the radio, but Marconi got the patents.
If Charles Hollander is right [and I'll posit that he is], it's another case of 
TRP's natural attraction to the 'disinherited' and their buried histories:

With his newly created Tesla coils, the inventor soon discovered that he could 
transmit and receive powerful radio signals when they were tuned to resonate at 
the same frequency. When a coil is tuned to a signal of a particular frequency, 
it literally magnifies the incoming electrical energy through resonant action. 
By early 1895, Tesla was ready to transmit a signal 50 miles to West Point, New 
York... But in that same year, disaster struck. A building fire consumed Tesla's 
lab, destroying his work.

The timing could not have been worse. In England, a young Italian experimenter 
named Guglielmo Marconi had been hard at work building a device for wireless 
telegraphy. The young Marconi had taken out the first wireless telegraphy patent 
in England in 1896. His device had only a two-circuit system, which some said 
could not transmit "across a pond." Later Marconi set up long-distance 
demonstrations, using a Tesla oscillator to transmit the signals across the 
English Channel.

Tesla filed his own basic radio patent applications in 1897. They were granted 
in 1900. Marconi's first patent application in America, filed on November 10, 
1900, was turned down. Marconi's revised applications over the next three years 
were repeatedly rejected because of the priority of Tesla and other inventors.

The Patent Office made the following comment in 1903:

Many of the claims are not patentable over Tesla patent numbers 645,576 and 
649,621, of record, the amendment to overcome said references as well as 
Marconi's pretended ignorance of the nature of a "Tesla oscillator" being little 
short of absurd... the term "Tesla oscillator" has become a household word on 
both continents [Europe and North America].
But no patent is truly safe, as Tesla's career demonstrates. In 1900, the 
Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, Ltd. began thriving in the stock markets—due 
primarily to Marconi's family connections with English aristocracy. British Marconi 
stock soared from $3 to $22 per share and the glamorous 
young Italian nobleman was internationally acclaimed. Both Edison and Andrew 
Carnegie invested in Marconi and Edison became a consulting engineer of American 
Marconi. Then, on December 12, 1901, Marconi for the first time transmitted and 
received signals across the Atlantic Ocean.

Otis Pond, an engineer then working for Tesla, said, "Looks as if Marconi got 
the jump on you." Tesla replied, "Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He 
is using seventeen of my patents."

But Tesla's calm confidence was shattered in 1904, when the U.S. Patent Office 
suddenly and surprisingly reversed its previous decisions and gave Marconi a 
patent for the invention of radio. The reasons for this have never been fully 
explained, but the powerful financial backing for Marconi in the United States 
suggests one possible explanation.

Tesla was embroiled in other problems at the time, but when Marconi won the 
Nobel Prize in 1911, Tesla was furious. He sued the Marconi Company for 
infringement in 1915, but was in no financial condition to litigate a case 
against a major corporation. It wasn't until 1943—a few months after Tesla's 
death— that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Tesla's radio patent number 
645,576. The Court had a selfish reason for doing so. The Marconi Company 
was suing the United States Government for use of its patents in World War I. 
The Court simply avoided the action by restoring the priority of Tesla's patent 
over Marconi.

http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_whoradio.html

3. Does any message in AtD show up in "clear"?

4. The Pynchonwiki comes in handy again:

          British and German battle groups were engaged 
          off the Moroccan coast

          This could be a reference to the First Moroccan Crisis 
          (a.k.a. Tangier Crisis) taking place between March 1905 
          and May 1906. This would be in keeping with the timeline 
          of the novel, however, there seems to have been no 
          engagement of troops between British and German forces. 
          On the other hand, this could also be a reference to the 
          Agadir Crisis (a.k.a. The Second Moroccan Crisis) of 1911 
          where the German gunboat, Panther, was deployed to the 
          Moroccan port of Agadir, threatening British naval supremacy. 
          Although the later altercation seems unlikely given the timeline 
          of the story, Pynchon notes that the S.S. Stupendica received 
          its message "from somewhere else not quite in the world, 
          more like from a continuum lateral to it."

http://tinyurl.com/27rz47

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Moroccan_Crisis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agadir_Crisis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I

5. In a way, this is an opening of the gates of hell, the hell of the modern 
age, as these events [in 'real' life, without the 'Transformers' version of 
a luxury liner] off the Moroccan coast in 1905 did open up the gates to WW I.