Thunderstruck

transmissions from some other station had interfered with communication between Poldhu and the Carlo Alberto. Maskelyne also challenged Solari’s claim that the Poldhu station could transmit at a rate of fifteen words a minute. By his own count, he wrote, the rate was closer to five.

He also addressed a claim by Solari that a message from the Italian Embassy in London, transmitted by wireless from Poldhu, had been received without flaw aboard the ship at precisely four-thirty P.M. on September 9, 1902. In fact, Maskelyne found, transmission of the message had begun several nights earlier, on September 6 at nine o’clock. (This may have been the message that drove Marconi to smash his equipment.)

One thing was certain: Maskelyne had proven that Marconi’s transmissions could be intercepted and read. He wrote, “The plain question is, can Mr. Marconi so tune his Poldhu station that, working every day and all day, it does not affect the station at Porthcurno? Up to September 12th, on which date my personal supervision of the experiments at Porthcurno ceased, he had only succeeded in proving that he cannot do so.”

Cuthbert Hall, Marconi’s managing director, countered with a letter to The Electrician in which he wrote that “the evidence furnished of interception of our messages…is not conclusive.” He argued that anyone could take the messages published in Solari’s article and use a Morse inker to produce counterfeit tapes. “To have any value whatever as evidence, Mr. Maskelyne’s article should have been published before, not after, Lieut. Solari’s report.”

Hall’s argument must have struck Maskelyne as ironic, given Marconi’s penchant for describing his own triumphs through trust-me testimonials that could not be counterchecked for validity.

In the next issue Maskelyne responded: “Clearly Mr. Hall is between the horns of a dilemma. He must either say I am a liar and a forger, or he must accept the situation as set forth in my article…. If it be the former, I shall know how to deal with him. If it be the latter, the airy fabric of over-sanguine and visionary expectation, which we have so long been called upon to accept as a structure of solid fact, must fall to the ground.”

AT GLACE BAY silence prevailed. Nothing explained the persistent failure to receive signals from Poldhu. In Newfoundland, with kites bobbing in the air, he had received signals, but here at this elaborate new station with its 210-foot towers and miles of wire, he received nothing. He and Vyvyan decided to try something they so far had not attempted—reversing the direction of transmission, this time trying to send from Nova Scotia to England. They had no particular reason for doing so, other than that nothing else had worked.

They made their first attempt on the night of November 19, 1902, but the operators at Poldhu received no signals.

Marconi and Vyvyan made countless adjustments to the apparatus. Vyvyan wrote, “We did not even have means or instruments for measuring wavelengths, in fact we did not know accurately what wavelength we were using.”

They tried for nine more nights, with no success. On the tenth night, November 28, they received a cable stating that the operators at Poldhu had received vague signals, but that they could not be read. This buoyed Marconi, though only briefly, for the next night Poldhu reported that once again nothing had come through. The silence continued for seven more nights.

On the night of Friday, December 5, Marconi doubled the length of the spark. Later that night he received word back, via cable, that Poldhu at last had achieved reception:

Weak readable signals for first half-hour, nothing doing during the next three-quarters, last three-quarters readable and recordable on tape.

The next night Marconi tried exactly the same configuration.

Nothing.

The following night, silence again.

Marconi had borne these weeks of failure with little outward sign of frustration, but now he cursed out loud and slammed his fists against a table.

But he kept trying. Failure now, even rumor of failure, would be ruinous. Not surprisingly, word had begun to leak that he might be in trouble. On Tuesday, December 9, 1902, a headline in the Sydney Daily Post asked, “WHAT’S WRONG AT TABLE HEAD?” The accompanying article said, “Something strange seems to have happened at Table Head, but that something doesn’t look very encouraging to the promoters of the scheme.”

That night every attempt to reach Poldhu failed. Failure dogged him for the next four nights. On the fifth night, Sunday, December 14, after hours of pounding messages into the sky, a cable arrived from Poldhu: “Readable signals through the two hours programme.”

Given all they had experienced since Marconi’s Halloween arrival, this was cause for celebration. The men tore from the operator’s room into the frozen night and danced in the snow until they could no longer stand the cold.

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.

PARKIN’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.”