Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [98]
But the fleet remained at anchor. Vyvyan posted a sentry in one of the new towers.
His instincts proved correct. The next day the sentry spotted boats pulling away from the fleet with about 150 men on board. They landed and gathered at the gate. This time, Vyvyan noticed, no officers accompanied them.
The men attempted to push past him “in an unruly mob.”
Vyvyan stood his ground. “I informed them admission was forbidden and if they persisted I would use force to prevent them entering the station.”
The compound behind him was full of workmen, who sensed trouble and began to converge on the gate. Tension mounted.
But then, unexpectedly, one of the Germans blew a whistle. The sailors formed ranks and departed, transformed suddenly into “a disciplined force, and no longer an unruly crowd of men.”
The fleet departed.
FRUSTRATING FAILURES IN MARCONI’S long-range system continued to haunt him.
In June 1902 Edward was to have his coronation but was felled by appendicitis. At first the likelihood of his survival seemed slim, but he underwent surgery and survived, and once again he retreated to a royal yacht, the Victoria and Albert, to recover. Meanwhile the dignitaries dispatched to attend the coronation abruptly found themselves without a mission. Italy had sent a warship, the Carlo Alberto, and now loaned the ship and its six-hundred-man crew to Marconi to use as a floating laboratory until Edward’s recovery was advanced enough for the coronation to take place.
Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III decided that in the interim he would pay a visit to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. He ordered the Carlo Alberto to meet him in Kronstadt, the Russian naval base, where he and the tsar would come aboard for a demonstration of Marconi’s wireless. En route, during a stop at the German naval port of Kiel, Marconi was able to receive signals at six hundred miles, and on the night of July 15, 1902, while in Kronstadt harbor, at sixteen hundred miles. But he found again that sunlight played havoc with daytime reception, and he heard nothing from Poldhu between sunrise and sunset. Which now posed a problem, what with King Victor Emmanuel and Tsar Nicholas about to visit. Marconi wanted to demonstrate the receipt of a message to his royal visitors but knew that it would be awkward to insist that they visit after dark. Luigi Solari proposed that Marconi install a wireless transmitter elsewhere on the ship and send a message from there. He intended no deception, he claimed, merely to demonstrate by day what could easily be achieved at night.
On July 17 the king and tsar came aboard and proceeded to Marconi’s wireless cabin, where Marconi showed off tapes of the messages received from Poldhu. Suddenly the receiver came to life and the Morse inker printed out a message of welcome and congratulations for Nicholas.
Startled and impressed, the tsar asked where the message had originated. Marconi confessed and disclosed the hidden transmitter. The tsar took no offense, apparently, for he asked to meet Solari and applauded his ingenuity.
The next month, while still engaged in experiments aboard the Carlo Alberto, Marconi confronted an inexplicable failure of his system. In one experiment he planned to receive messages for King Victor Emmanuel sent via Poldhu, but no messages came through. Nothing he tried improved reception, and he could find no good reason for the failure. He once had told Solari, “I am never emotional.” But now Solari watched as he smashed the receiver to pieces.
Marconi blamed Fleming. Without consulting Marconi, Fleming had altered a key component of the Poldhu station, thereby reversing a previous change ordered by Marconi himself. Fleming had also installed a new spark device of his own design.
Marconi complained to his new managing director, Cuthbert Hall, who had been the company’s second-ranked manager until the resignation a year earlier of Major Flood Page. Fleming’s device, Marconi wrote, had “proved in practical