Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [106]
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