Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [86]
“Unmistakably,” he wrote, “the three sharp little clicks corresponding to three dots, sounded several times in my ear.”
He was excited but skeptical. He wanted to hear the clicks so badly that he felt he could not trust his own judgment. He passed the telephone receiver to Kemp.
“Can you hear anything Mr. Kemp?” he asked.
Kemp listened, and he too heard, or claimed to hear, sequences of three dots. They passed the telephone receiver to Paget as well, who listened but heard nothing. He, however, had grown increasingly hard of hearing.
“Kemp heard the same thing as I,” Marconi wrote, “and I knew then that I had been absolutely right in my calculation. The electric waves which were being sent out from Poldhu had traversed the Atlantic, serenely ignoring the curvature of the earth which so many doubters considered would be a fatal obstacle, and they were now affecting my receiver in Newfoundland.”
There was no serenity on Signal Hill. A burst of wind tore the kite free. The men lofted a second one, now with a single wire of five hundred feet. This configuration, Kemp wrote in his diary, “appeared more in harmony with the earth’s electric medium and the signals from Poldhu station. We were able to keep this kite up for three hours and it appeared to give good signals.” In all, they picked up twenty-five of the three-dot sequences.
Marconi wrote a draft of a telegram to Managing-Director Flood Page in London to announce his success but held it back. He wanted to hear more signals before notifying his board and especially before the news became public.
He tried again the next day, Friday, December 13, 1901. The weather grew more ferocious. There was snow, rain, hail, and wind—great gasps of it. Three times they launched kites, and three times the weather drove the kites to ground. During the brief periods the kites were in the air, however, Marconi claimed that he again heard three-dot sequences from Poldhu, though these signals were even less distinct than what he had heard the day before.
Frustrated by the lack of clarity, Marconi still did not send his cable to headquarters. He resolved to wait one more day, until Saturday, to allow time for more trials.
The wind accelerated. On Saturday it reached a point where an attempt to fly anything, balloon or kite, was out of the question. In desperation, Kemp and his helpers began constructing a very different kind of antenna. They began stringing a wire from the top of Signal Hill to an iceberg marooned in St. John’s harbor.
To Kemp’s regret, he never got the chance to test it.
MARCONI DEBATED WHAT to do next. He could wait and hope that the weather would improve or that Kemp’s iceberg antenna would work, or he could simply trust that he had indeed heard signals from Poldhu and go ahead and notify Flood Page in London.
He sent the cable. “SIGNALS ARE BEING RECEIVED,” it read. “WEATHER MAKES CONTINUOUS TESTS VERY DIFFICULT.” That night, he released a statement to The Times of London.
For one so aware of the “doubters” arrayed against him and of the hostility in particular of Lodge, Preece, and the electrical press, Marconi in orchestrating this transatlantic experiment and in now revealing it to the world had made errors of fundamental importance.
Once again he had failed to provide an independent witness to observe and confirm his tests. Moreover, in choosing to listen for the signals with a telephone receiver instead of recording their receipt automatically with his usual Morse inker, he had eliminated the one bit of physical evidence—the tapes from the inker—that could have corroborated his account. He had to have recognized that his claims of so wondrous an accomplishment, deemed impossible by the world’s greatest scientists, would pique skepticism and draw scrutiny, but apparently he believed that his own credibility would be sufficient to put all doubts to rest. This belief was a miscalculation that would prove costly.
THAT SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15, the governor of Newfoundland, Sir Cavendish Boyle, held a celebratory lunch