Thunderstruck

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.

EMBOLDENED 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.

ON RETURNING TO LONDON 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.”

THE 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.

Instead of trying to incorporate transmissions from actual ships into his experiment, Fleming installed a small marine set in a hut about one hundred yards away from the giant Poldhu aerial and connected it to a simple one- mast antenna. He planned to send messages from the big and small transmitters simultaneously, each on a different wavelength, to Marconi’s station at the Lizard. He attached two receivers to the Lizard’s antenna, one tuned to capture the high-power messages, the other to receive messages from the simulated ship.

Fleming created sixteen messages, eight to be sent from the high-power transmitter, eight from the low. He put each into an envelope, “no person except myself knowing the contents,” and wrote on each the time at which the enclosed message was to be sent. Four messages were in code. Each high-power message was to be transmitted at the same time as a low-power message and repeated as many as three times.

On the day of the experiment, Fleming gave all the envelopes to an assistant “unconnected with the Marconi Company, in whose integrity and obedience I had confidence” and instructed him to deliver the envelopes to the operators at the times selected. The assistant signed an affidavit confirming that Fleming’s instructions had been “precisely obeyed.”