Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [107]
On the day of the experiment, Fleming gave all the envelopes to an assistant “unconnected with the Marconi Company, in whose integrity and obedience I had confidence” and instructed him to deliver the envelopes to the operators at the times selected. The assistant signed an affidavit confirming that Fleming’s instructions had been “precisely obeyed.”
But as any of Fleming’s peers in academic science instantly could see, Fleming’s precautions—his sealed envelopes, the coded messages, the unknowing assistant—created only an illusion of scientific rigor. They reflected the tension between science and enterprise, openness and secrecy, that continued to shape the behavior of Marconi and his company and that in turn had the perverse effect of helping sustain the suspicions of his most steadfast critics.
By Fleming’s account, all the messages arrived at the Lizard on schedule and were recorded on tape by two Morse inkers. Fleming collected the ink rolls and turned them over to Marconi for translation from Morse to English. “In every case he gave the absolutely correct message which was sent,” Fleming reported.
Well, not absolutely. In the next sentence of his report Fleming dimmed the glow of his own testimonial. The first set of messages had been distorted. “Only in one case was there some little difficulty in reading two or three words, and that was in the messages sent at 2 p.m.” Marconi’s explanation, according to Fleming, was that the messages “had been slightly blurred in the attempt of two ships somewhere in the Channel to communicate with each other.”
Though Fleming dismissed this as “some little difficulty,” in fact the distortions were significant and gave further testimony to the problematic nature of wireless telegraphy. The garbling of “two or three words” was no small thing. The two o’clock message from the high-power station was in code and consisted of five words, “Quiney Cuartegas Cuatropean Cubantibus Respond.” If only two words came through fractured, the distorted portion would amount to 40 percent of the message; if three words, 60 percent. The coding made the distortion even more problematic since the coded messages looked like gibberish anyway and the receiving operator would be unlikely to recognize that errors had occurred.
Nonetheless, Fleming and Marconi promoted the experiment as nothing less than a total success. In a much-publicized lecture on March 23, 1903, Fleming crowed that it proved beyond doubt that Marconi’s tuning technology prevented interference. A week later Marconi applauded the experiment in a speech to shareholders at his company’s annual meeting. Four days later Fleming wrote a letter to The Times in which he again extolled Marconi’s tuning prowess.
At the Egyptian Hall, Nevil Maskelyne read Fleming’s accounts and was struck by how much the sealed envelopes and other trappings of false rigor reminded him of techniques used by spirit mediums to convince audiences of their powers. He sensed fraud and longed for a way to reveal it.
A friend, Dr. Horace Manders, came to him with an idea: If Marconi would not willingly subject his system to public challenge, why not attempt to do so without his cooperation? Dr. Manders believed he knew of just such an opportunity.
Though somewhat wicked, the idea delighted Maskelyne, who later wrote that he “at once grasped the fact that the opportunity was too good to be missed.” As for the wicked part, he argued that carrying out his plan was “something more than a right; it was a duty.”
Soon, thanks to Maskelyne, Fleming would experience a vivid demonstration of the true vulnerability of wireless, one that would erode his status within the Marconi company, wound his friendship with the inventor, and shake