Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [110]
The timing was tricky. The message was to arrive in the closing moments of Fleming’s lecture. It was pure theater, a variety show complete with a turn of magic, and if everything had gone according to plan, it might indeed have done much to help Marconi regain some of his lost credibility.
FLEMING BEGAN HIS LECTURE promptly at five o’clock. As always, every seat was taken. He spoke with confidence and flair, and the audience responded with murmurs of approval. One of his assistants, P. J. Woodward, took up position by the receiver and prepared to switch on the Morse inker to record Marconi’s expected message to Dewar. But as the moment approached, something peculiar happened.
Another assistant, Arthur Blok, heard an odd ticking in the arc lamp inside the large brass “projection lantern” in the hall. As he listened, he realized the ticking was not simply a random distortion. The electric arc within the projector was acting as a crude receiver and had begun picking up what seemed to be deliberate transmissions. At first he assumed that Marconi’s men in Chelmsford “were doing some last-minute tuning-up.”
Fleming did not notice. During his tenure with the Marconi company he had become increasingly hard of hearing. The audience too seemed unaware.
Blok was experienced in sending and receiving Morse code. The clicking in the lantern was indeed spelling out a word—a word that no one in Chelmsford would dare have sent, even as a test. Yet there it was, a single word:
“Rats.”
As soon as Blok recognized this, “the matter took on a new aspect. And when this word was repeated, suspicion gave place to fear.”
A few years earlier the expression “rats” had acquired a new and non-zoological meaning. During one action of the Boer War, British troops had used light signals sent by heliograph to ask the opposing Boer forces what they thought of the British artillery shells then raining down on their position. The Boers answered, “Rats,” and the word promptly entered common usage in Britain as a term that connoted “hubris” or “arrogance.”
As the time set for Marconi’s final message neared, the assistant at the receiver turned on the Morse inker, and immediately pale blue dots and dashes began appearing on the ribbon of paper that unspooled from the inker. A new word came across:
There
Blok alternately kept an eye on the clock and on the tape jolting from the inker.
was
a
young
fellow
from Italy
Blok was stunned. “There was but a short time to go,” he said, “and the ‘rats’ on the coiling paper tape unbelievably gave place to a fantastic doggerel”:
There was a young fellow from Italy
Who diddled the public quite prettily
The clicking paused, then resumed. Helpless, Blok and his colleague could only listen and watch.
Now entertain conjecture of a time
When creeping murmur and the poring dark
Fills the wide vessel of the Universe.
From camp to camp through the foul womb of night
The hum of either army stilly sounds,
That the fix’d sentinels almost receive
The secret whispers of each other’s watch
Any well-schooled adult of the time, meaning almost everyone in the audience, would have recognized these lines as coming from Shakespeare’s Henry V.
It was like being at a séance, that mix of dread and fascination as the planchette pointed to letters on the rim of an Ouija board. “Evidently something had gone wrong,” Blok wrote. “Was it practical joke or were they drunk at Chelmsford? Or was it even scientific sabotage? Fleming’s deafness kept him in merciful oblivion and he calmly lectured on and on. And the hands of the clock, with equal detachment, also moved on, while I, with a furiously divided attention, glanced around the audience to see if anybody else had noticed these astonishing messages.”
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