Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [103]
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.
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