Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [105]
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