Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [102]
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