Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [104]
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