A DUTY TO BE WICKED

MARCONI’S LONG VOYAGE OF EXPERIMENT aboard the Carlo Alberto ended on Halloween morning 1902, when the ship arrived at Nova Scotia. Marconi’s goal—his hope—was now to move beyond mere three-dot signals and send the first complete messages from England to North America. It was imperative that he succeed. Skepticism about his transmission to Newfoundland had continued to deepen. Success would not only counter the doubters but also ease growing worries among his board of directors about whether all this costly experimenting would ever yield a financial return.

By now Marconi had completed construction of the new stations at South Wellfleet and Poldhu, and on Table Head at Glace Bay, the most powerful of all. Each station had more or less the same design: four strong towers of cross-braced wood, each 210 feet tall, supporting an inverted pyramid of four hundred wires. Each station had a power house nearby, where steam engines drove generators to produce electricity, which then entered an array of transformers and condensers. At South Wellfleet the process yielded 30,000 watts of power, at Glace Bay 75,000. At South Wellfleet a thick glass porthole and soundproof door had to be installed between the sending room and the sparking apparatus to prevent injury to the operator’s eyes and ears.

Marconi began his new attempt the day after his arrival, coordinating each step with his operators at Poldhu through telegrams sent by conventional undersea cable. The first signals to arrive “were very weak and unintelligible,” according to Richard Vyvyan. But they did arrive. Heartened by the fact that Poldhu had been operating only at half power, Marconi ordered his engineers there to increase wattage to maximum, expecting it would resolve the problem. It didn’t. Now he heard nothing at all.

The hundreds of wires that comprised the Glace Bay aerial could be used all at once or in segments. Marconi and Vyvyan tried different combinations. Again, nothing. Night after night they worked to find the magic junction with only trial and error as their guide. To attempt to receive by day seemed hopeless, so they often worked the entire night. Over eighteen consecutive nights they received no signals. Tensions grew, especially in the Vyvyan household. He had brought his new wife, Jane, to live with him at Glace Bay, and now she was pregnant, hugely so, the baby due any day.

Snow began to fall and soon covered the clifftop. At night the sparks from the transmitter lit the descending flakes. With each concussion a pale blue aura burst across the landscape, as if the transmission house were a factory stamping out ghosts for dispersal into the ether. Three-foot daggers of ice draped wires.

In the midst of it all Marconi received a telegram from headquarters, stating that the price of his company’s stock was falling. Though Marconi did not yet know it, the decline was conjured by a magician.



NEVIL MASKELYNE LOATHED FRAUD but loved to mislead and mystify audiences. His base was the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, one of London’s most popular venues for entertainment and one of the city’s strangest buildings. “It is beyond the powers of delineation to attempt any thing in the shape of a description of the front of this most singular piece of architecture,” wrote one early visitor. Built in 1812, its facade mimicked the entrance to an Egyptian temple. Two huge figures jutted from its yellow cladding, and hieroglyphs covered its pilasters and sills. The building originally served as a museum of natural history but failed to draw many visitors and became instead a venue for the display of a succession of oddities, including an entire family of Laplanders, an eighty-pound man called the Living Skeleton, and in 1829 the original Siamese twins. Its most famous living exhibit was one of its smallest, a native of Bridgeport, Connecticut, named Charles S. Stratton, placed on display here in 1844 by Phineas T. Barnum. By then Stratton was best known by his stage name, General Tom Thumb.

Nevil’s father, also named John Nevil Maskelyne, took over the Egyptian Hall with a partner, George A. Cooke, and by 1896 turned it into “England’s House of Mystery,” where twice a day audiences watched magic shows and encountered illusions and mechanical chimeras. By then Maskelyne and Cooke, as they were known, had achieved fame by exposing two celebrated American spirit mediums, the Davenport brothers. The magicians billed themselves as “The Royal Illusionists and anti-Spiritualists.” One of their most popular attractions was an automaton named Psycho, an oriental mystic whose robe and turban disguised internal mechanical devices that enabled him to solve math problems, spell words, and most famously, play whist with members of the audience. Nevil Jr. took over from his father, and when he was not dabbling in wireless, he performed in shows alongside his own partner, a magician named David Devant. Together Maskelyne and Devant revealed to audiences the tricks deployed by mediums, with such aplomb that some Spiritualists believed they really did have psychic powers and merely pretended disbelief in a cynical drive to make profits.

Maskelyne did not trust Marconi. The Italian claimed to have performed amazing feats but provided little hard proof beyond the testimonials of such allies as Ambrose Fleming and Luigi Solari. The latest example was Solari’s glowing report in The Electrician about Marconi’s Carlo Alberto experiments.

Maskelyne read it with distaste, then delight. Suddenly he realized that the tapes he had collected while eavesdropping on Marconi’s transmissions included some of the messages Solari described. These tapes showed that Marconi’s system was more flawed than he was letting on.

Maskelyne decided to reveal his findings. In an article published by The Electrician on November 7, 1902, he disclosed that using his own apparatus at the Porthcurno station near Poldhu, he had intercepted Marconi’s signals and that the tapes from his Morse inker proved that Solari’s account had been less than accurate. He stopped short, however, of accusing Solari and Marconi of fraud.

The tapes, he wrote, showed that errors due to atmospheric distortions were common and that 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.”

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.”

But as any of Fleming’s peers in academic science instantly could see, Fleming’s precautions—his sealed envelopes, the coded messages, the unknowing assistant—created only an illusion of scientific rigor. They reflected the tension between science and enterprise, openness and secrecy, that continued to shape the behavior of Marconi and his company and that in turn had the perverse effect of helping sustain the suspicions of his most steadfast critics.

By Fleming’s account, all the messages arrived at the Lizard on schedule and were recorded on tape by two Morse inkers. Fleming collected the ink rolls and turned them over to Marconi for translation from Morse to English. “In every case he gave the absolutely correct message which was sent,” Fleming reported.

Well, not absolutely. In the next sentence of his report Fleming dimmed the glow of his own testimonial. The first set of messages had been distorted. “Only in one case was there some little difficulty in reading two or three words, and that was in the messages sent at 2 p.m.” Marconi’s explanation, according to Fleming, was that the messages “had been slightly blurred in the attempt of two ships somewhere in the Channel to communicate with each other.”

Though Fleming dismissed this as “some little difficulty,” in fact the distortions were significant and gave further testimony to the problematic nature of wireless telegraphy. The garbling of “two or three words” was no small thing. The two o’clock message from the high-power station was in code and consisted of five words, “Quiney Cuartegas Cuatropean Cubantibus Respond.” If only two words came through fractured, the distorted portion would amount to 40 percent of the message; if three words, 60 percent. The coding made the distortion even more problematic since the coded messages looked like gibberish anyway and the receiving operator would be unlikely to recognize that errors had occurred.

Nonetheless, Fleming and Marconi promoted the experiment as nothing less than a total success. In a much-publicized lecture on March 23, 1903, Fleming crowed that it proved beyond doubt that Marconi’s tuning technology prevented interference. A week later Marconi applauded the experiment in a speech to shareholders at his company’s annual meeting. Four days later Fleming wrote a letter to The Times in which he again extolled Marconi’s tuning prowess.

At the Egyptian Hall, Nevil Maskelyne read Fleming’s accounts and was struck by how much the sealed envelopes and other trappings of false rigor reminded him of techniques used by spirit mediums to convince audiences of their powers. He sensed fraud and longed for a way to reveal it.

A friend, Dr. Horace Manders, came to him with an idea: If Marconi would not willingly subject his system to public challenge, why not attempt to do so without his cooperation? Dr. Manders believed he knew of just such an opportunity.

Though somewhat wicked, the idea delighted Maskelyne, who later wrote that he “at once grasped the fact that the opportunity was too good to be missed.” As for the wicked part, he argued that carrying out his plan was “something more than a right; it was a duty.”

Soon, thanks to Maskelyne, Fleming would experience a vivid demonstration of the true vulnerability of wireless, one that would erode his status within the Marconi company, wound his friendship with the inventor, and shake the reputations of both.



IN NOVA SCOTIA, when winter and spring collide, an event called a silver thaw can occur. As rain falls, it freezes and sheathes everything it touches with ice until tree limbs begin to break and telegraph wires to fall. Marconi’s men at Glace Bay had never experienced a silver thaw before, and they were unprepared for the phenomenon.

On April 6, 1903, the rain came. Ice accumulated on the station’s four hundred wires until each wore a coat about one inch thick. It was lovely, ethereal. A giant crystal pyramid hung in the sky.

The weight of so much ice on so many miles of wire became too great. The whole array pulled free and crackled to the ground.

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