Thunderstruck (33 page)

It seemed, for the moment, that by sheer chance Marconi had struck exactly the right combination of variables. Rather than wait to confirm this, as prudence might have dictated, Marconi now proceeded to the next step of his plan, to send the first-ever
public
message across the ocean by wireless. He made the decision to try it, according to Vyvyan, “owing to financial pressure and to quiet the adverse press criticism that was making itself noticeable.”

This time he recognized that his testimony alone would not be enough to persuade a skeptical world of his achievements. He invited a reporter, George Parkin, Ottawa correspondent for the London
Times,
to write this historic message and to serve as a witness to the process. First, however, Marconi swore Parkin to secrecy until accurate reception of the message by the Poldhu station could be confirmed.

Marconi made the first attempt to send the message early on Monday, December 15, less than twenty-four hours after the cable from Poldhu that had caused so much celebration. He asked Parkin to make a change in the wording of his message just before transmission, to neuter any potential claim that Marconi’s men in Britain had somehow acquired an advance copy. At one o’clock in the morning, Marconi grasped the heavy key and began levering out the message. “All put cotton wool in their ears to lessen the force of the electric concussion,” Parkin wrote. He likened the clatter to “the successive explosions of a Maxim gun.”

The message failed to reach Poldhu. At two o’clock Marconi tried again. This attempt also failed.

Marconi repeated the attempt that evening, first at six o’clock, then at seven, without success. Later that night, between ten and midnight, Parkin’s message did at last reach Poldhu. It read:

Times London. Being present at transmission in Marconi’s Canadian Station have honour send through Times inventor’s first wireless transatlantic message of greeting to England and Italy. Parkin.

Marconi arranged a celebration later that morning, during which the flags of Britain and Italy were raised with great ceremony.

A sudden gale promptly destroyed both.

P
ARKIN’S MESSAGE WAS NOT
immediately relayed to
The Times.
Marconi’s sense of protocol and showmanship required that first two other messages of greeting had to be transmitted, one to King Edward, the other to King Victor Emmanuel in Rome. Marconi had instructed Poldhu not to relay Parkin’s message, and Parkin to hold back his story, until the two royal messages could be transmitted and their contents confirmed by return cable. This process required six days.

Parkin crafted an account that glowed with praise, including his “feeling of awe” at the fact that impulses sent from Glace Bay would reach Poldhu in one-thirtieth of a second. He neglected to mention the six-day delay.

Vyvyan, in his memoir, was more candid. “Although these three messages were transmitted across the Atlantic and received in England it cannot be said that the wireless circuit was at all satisfactory. There was a great element of uncertainty as to whether any message would reach its destination or not, and so far the cause of this unreliability had not been ascertained. All conditions remaining the same at the two stations, the signals would vary from good readable signals to absolutely nothing and often vary through wide degrees of strength in two or three minutes.”

Further evidence of this unreliability struck close to home for Vyvyan. On January 3 his wife gave birth to a healthy daughter. There was celebration and of course a transatlantic message by wireless to
The Times
of London. But an atmospheric distortion converted a reference to
Jan
as in January, to the name
Jane.
The telegram as received in Poldhu had a Bluebeardesque cast:

Times London by transatlantic wireless Please insert in birth column Jane 3rd wife of R. N. Vyvyan Chief Engineer Marconi’s Canadian Station of a daughter. Marconi.

E
MBOLDENED BY HIS NEW VICTORY,
Marconi now prepared to capitalize on it with a final achievement that he hoped would at last empty the sea of doubt. On January 10, 1903, he left for Cape Cod, intent on sending the first all-wireless message from the United States to England. He carried in his pocket a greeting from President Theodore Roosevelt to be sent to King Edward. He believed he could not send the message directly from Cape Cod because the station did not have the necessary power, and planned instead to send it by wireless from South Wellfleet to Glace Bay in Nova Scotia, for relay across the ocean.

Roosevelt’s message trudged from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia in fits and starts, as if Glace Bay were at the far side of the planet, not just six hundred miles to the northeast. Meanwhile, to everyone’s astonishment, the message also traveled direct to Poldhu, where it arrived long before the relayed message came struggling in from Glace Bay.

For once the system had performed far better than expected. But now came a miscalculation, and a costly one.

The operators at Poldhu sent a return greeting from King Edward, for Roosevelt. They sent it, however, by conventional undersea cable.

Marconi had seen no other choice: His hard experience at Glace Bay had shown that for whatever reason the Poldhu station could not transmit messages to Nova Scotia. In reporting the event, however, countless newspapers reprinted the two messages one atop the other, a juxtaposition that suggested a fluid back-and-forth exchange entirely by wireless.

When it became clear that Edward’s message had traveled the conventional route, Marconi’s critics seized on the episode as evidence of the continuing troubles of wireless and accused Marconi of creating the false impression that two-way wireless communication across the sea had been achieved. In London managing director Cuthbert Hall claimed the decision to send the return message by cable was due solely to a need to be courteous to King Edward. He explained that the royal reply had been handed in on a Sunday, when the telegraph office nearest to Poldhu was closed. The telegram would not have been delivered to the operators at Poldhu until Monday morning at the earliest, and only then could they have begun their attempt to send it by wireless. It was far more respectful, Hall argued, to get the king’s message out immediately, even if that meant sending it by cable.

Marconi’s critics sensed blood. The head of the Eastern Telegraph Co., Sir John Wolfe Barry, cited Marconi’s use of cable as further evidence that wireless never would become a serious competitor.

The
Westminster Gazette
sent a reporter to ask Marconi about the incident.

“I was not concerned with the reply, nor how it came,” Marconi said. “You know the local telegraphic office near Poldhu was closed, and all that. But what I wished to demonstrate was that a message could be sent across the Atlantic. It did not matter from a scientific point of view whether it came from east to west or west to east. No scientific man would say that it did.” But Marconi said nothing about the previous winter’s struggle at Glace Bay to receive anything at all from Poldhu, let alone a complete message from a king. Instead, he told the reporter, “If it could go one way, why not the other?”

Yet Marconi and his engineers were fully aware of the shortcomings of his transatlantic system. Vyvyan wrote, “It was clear that these stations were not nearly in a position to undertake a commercial service; either more power would have to be used or larger aerials, or both.” On January 22, 1903, at great cost to his company and to the dismay of his board, Marconi shut down all three stations for three months to reappraise their design and operation. He sailed for home aboard Cunard’s
Etruria.

O
N RETURNING TO
L
ONDON
he discovered that Maskelyne’s attacks had begun to resonate with investors and the public alike. In the
Morning Advertiser
a writer adopting the name Vindex proposed that Marconi could easily resolve public doubt about his invention by subjecting it to a test whose every aspect would be open to public scrutiny. He proposed that Marconi send a transatlantic message to Poldhu at a predetermined time, with transmission and receipt observed by the editors of four American newspapers and four English.

Dubbed immediately the “Vindex Challenge,” the proposal gained popular endorsement. The public had grown accustomed to verifiable displays of progress, such as races between transatlantic ocean liners. Now Marconi was promising the ultimate in speed. If he wanted the world to believe his fantastic claims that he could send messages across the Atlantic in an instant, he should provide evidence and reveal his methods.

One reader wrote to the
Morning Advertiser,
“If ‘Vindex’ does no more than secure the demonstration for which he asks, he will be doing a great service to the Marconi Company, and a greater service to the public in destroying the rumors which are current about the Transatlantic service, and, further, in establishing the claim of the Marconi Company to the assistance of the public in its fight with the vested interest of the cable companies….

“If Mr. Marconi successfully passes his test I am sure he will have the whole-hearted support not only of your paper but of every honest Englishman in his fight against capital and political influence.”

He signed his letter, “
A BELIEVER IN FAIR PLAY
.”

The
Westminster Gazette
put the question directly to Marconi: Why
not
give a demonstration for the press?

“Well, we have got beyond that,” Marconi said. “It would be casting doubt upon what is clearly proved. What is there to demonstrate? It might have done some time ago, I admit; but not now, I think. But I should not mind showing to anyone of standing and position who does not start off from a sceptical point of view. I will not demonstrate to any man who throws doubt upon the system.”

T
HE TIMING OF THIS CONTROVERSY
was especially awkward. Even as it flared, Marconi and Fleming were preparing a series of tests meant to quash the equally prevalent skepticism about Marconi’s ability to send tuned messages, and to address a new concern raised by critics as to whether a transmitter big enough to send signals across the Atlantic would disrupt communication with other stations. Marconi asked Fleming to devise an experiment to prove that high-power stations would not, as Fleming put it, “drown the feebler radiation” involved in communication between ships and between ships and shore.