Signor Marconi's Magic Box (21 page)

On the last day of October the
Carlo Alberto
with Marconi aboard arrived at Glace Bay to a tremendous reception. A flotilla of boats came out to greet him, and reporters gathered around Marconi to ask when the first transatlantic messages would be sent.

The Glace Bay station, on a promontory called Table Head, was to be even more powerful than Poldhu, and Richard Vyvyan had been given a free hand in its design. Vyvyan was Marconi’s most trusted engineer, though he was not always appreciated by the directors of the company, who complained about his sometimes boorish behaviour: he insisted on smoking his pipe in areas designated as no smoking. Vyvyan had been able to call upon an experienced labour force to put up the buildings and huge aerials of the Glace Bay station, for in the previous ten years Cape Breton Island had undergone a dramatic industrialisation. In 1900 a steelworks had been opened outside the principal town of Sydney, and to supply it with fuel coalmines had been dug on the Cape. Towns grew up around the mines, which also supplied coal to the rapidly growing industries of the eastern seaboard and on the Great Lakes. The massive Dominion Steel and Coal Company, set up by an international conglomerate, advertised for labour not only locally but in Europe, and the migrants flooded in. The people of Cape Breton abandoned their farms and fishing and made for the squalid, hastily built townships, where they could earn much higher wages than in their traditional industries. In just one decade, from 1891 to 1901, the population of Glace Bay had risen from 2459 to nearly seven thousand, and there were five collieries, each employing two thousand men, many of them drawn in from other regions of Cape Breton. Vyvyan’s cosmopolitan workforce spoke more than half a dozen languages. At any time he would have between one and two hundred men labouring under him, including Italians, Poles, Native North Americans, and many from south-eastern Europe.

The station’s four towers, made of pine and embedded in huge concrete blocks, were more than two hundred feet high. They supported cables from which the aerials were suspended. In the middle of the square formed by the four giant towers were the powerhouse and the operating house. The electrical generator was steam-driven, and fuelled by the abundant Cape Breton coal. While some of the labourers found places to live in the newly built streets of the mining towns, others had to make do with rude huts they
constructed themselves until Cape Breton, with revenue from the taxes on coal, managed to catch up with the great influx of people and introduce some town planning.

The Glace Bay station was reached by a muddy road which led to a high barbed-wire fence. For Marconi and his staff a single-storey wooden house was built, with nine bedrooms, a parlour, dining room and sitting room which had a piano, which Marconi sometimes played in rare moments of relaxation. The people of Cape Breton, according to the newspapers, were very proud that such a famous figure had camped in their community, and showed great interest in the station, an interest that was often fuelled by rumour. Journalists were forever arriving in the hope of getting an interview with Richard Vyvyan, who rebuffed them with the warning that he was prepared to talk about anything but the workings of the heavily secured station and its equipment. On his days off he fished in the brook that ran through the station site, catching bags full of sea trout as they swam up the tidal estuary to their breeding grounds.

All appeared to have gone well with the construction of the station, but when Marconi told reporters he could give them no promises about when his much-vaunted transatlantic service would begin to operate, they were disappointed. All along, Marconi had feared that the expectations of his Canadian sponsors were wildly optimistic. Winter was setting in, draping the station in thick fog and obscuring the
Carlo Alberto
, which was moored in the bay awaiting news. And when Marconi began to get to grips with the equipment, there was only silence in his headphones. Fleming and his men were banging out thunderous streams of ‘V’s, but none reached Glace Bay. Fleming was cabled to step up the power, and the monstrous Morse signals echoed around Mullion Cove for twenty-nine days, without any signal getting through to Glace Bay. To add to everyone’s anxiety, Marconi received a telegram from the board of directors telling him the company’s share price was falling. Added to all this, at Christmas the
Carlo Alberto
would have to weigh anchor and head for South America.

On 19 November Glace Bay began to crash out signals which lit up the icy landscape, but nothing was received in Cornwall. For nine days, as the weather hardened, Marconi and others pressed the Morse keys without a result. On the night of 28 November Poldhu picked up signals, but they were weak and unreadable. Snow began to fall on the Glace Bay aerial masts, and soon lay thick on the ground around the transmitting station. Nothing was heard again on either side of the Atlantic until 5 December, when Glace Bay received news from Poldhu that they had received signals, most of which were weak, though some had been strong enough to activate the Morse printer. Another ten days of blindly adjusting equipment went by before the heart-stopping sound of clear signals was heard from Cornwall, telling them that for two hours they had had readable messages.

It was seven o’clock in the morning of 15 December 1902. The men who were working ran out into the snow in mad rejoicing. But not Marconi: he had to make a fateful decision. Once the board of directors knew of this small success they would want to announce that a commercial wireless telegraphy service between Cape Cod, Glace Bay and Poldhu was ready to go into action. It could not begin straight away, because the British Post Office still retained a monopoly on telegraphic messaging, and that problem would have to be sorted out. Left to make his own judgement, Marconi would have kept quiet and said there was more work to do. Richard Vyvyan would have backed him. Communication between the two stations was agonisingly slow and unpredictable. Some messages had to be sent and resent, up to twenty-four times in one case, before they could be deciphered at Poldhu.

But Marconi was now a servant of his own company. His magic boxes had carried him to a point of no return. Without any elation, he carried out a prearranged plan to send greetings from Glace Bay to Victor Emmanuel III in Italy and Edward VII in England. But first he would call in a reliable journalist to witness the sending and receiving of messages. There was still great uncertainty in the minds of many people about what Marconi had achieved in
Newfoundland and aboard the
Philadelphia
. It would have been so easy to pretend that those invisible messages had travelled more than two thousand miles when they had in fact been deceitfully transmitted from some nearby hideaway.

One newspaper of authority which had believed in Marconi in December 1901 was the London
Times.
In recognition of the faith it had shown then, Marconi chose George Parkin, the
Times
correspondent in Ottawa, to witness the messages sent to Poldhu which would be relayed by cable to London. Parkin later described the scene on the night of this historic transmission:

The opening salvo of crashing dots and dashes spelt out: ‘Times London. Being present at transmission in Marconi’s Canadian Station have honour send through Times inventor’s first wireless transatlantic message of greeting to England and Italy. Parkin.’

There then followed short messages of greeting to Edward VII and Victor Emmanuel. Parkin wrote:

During the hours of darkness in the days that followed more messages were sent and received, though there were periods when nothing would get through at all. For Marconi there were diplomatic niceties to be observed: he was Italian, but his company was English. From Edward VII he received the reply via Lord Knollys: ‘I have had the honour of submitting your telegram to the King and am commanded to congratulate you sincerely from His Majesty on the successful issue of your endeavours to develop your most important invention. The King has been much interested by your experiments, as he remembers that the initial ones were commenced by you from the Royal yacht Osborne in 1898.’ From Victor Emmanuel: ‘The King learns with lively satisfaction of the splendid result constituting a new and glorious triumph for Italian science.’ So much for Ambrose Fleming, George Kemp and a Marconi Company staff made up entirely of Englishmen. There was a ceremony with the officers from the
Carlo Alberto
in which both the British and the Italian flags were raised. Once again Marconi was fêted, with a banquet given in his honour in Sydney, Nova Scotia.

On 14 January 1903 Marconi travelled down to Cape Cod to supervise the first transmission from the United States to England. Four days later, President Theodore Roosevelt’s message was flashed to Poldhu from the South Wellfleet station: ‘To His Majesty King Edward Seventh. In taking advantage of the wonderful triumph of scientific research and ingenuity which has been achieved in perfecting the system of wireless telegraphy, I extend on behalf of the American people my most cordial greetings and good wishes to you and the people of the British Empire.’ This had to be sent via the Glace Bay station, as Cape Cod could not transmit directly to Poldhu, and the reply from Edward VII had to be sent back across the Atlantic by cable, as Poldhu was not yet powerful enough to transmit to Cape Cod or Glace Bay. But the following day, 19 January, a message was received in Cornwall direct from Cape Cod, and for once Marconi appears to have gone almost mad with joy and relief.

One of the local men who had the job of keeping a horse and
buggy ready to take Marconi or his engineers to and from the Cape Cod station recalled: ‘All of a sudden I see Marconi come tearing out of the plant with both hands full of white tape. I got my buggy all turned round and ready . . . When he come out again he had two big envelopes in his hand. They were messages to be telegraphed to Washington and New York. “Drive like the wind,” said Marconi.’

The direct transmission from the United States to the western tip of Great Britain was an amazing achievement with the technology then available. But Morse sent by wireless remained incredibly ponderous, and was no match for cable in speed or accuracy. Richard Vyvyan had married just before the triumphant voyage of the
Philadelphia
in February, and his wife had been with him in America and at Glace Bay. On 3 January 1903 she gave birth to a daughter, and he sent a message to
The Times
in London: ‘Jan. 3rd. Wife of R.N. Vyvyan - a daughter.’ The letter ‘E’ in Morse is one dot, and atmospheric interference triggered the receiver’s inker so that the message was recorded as beginning: ‘Jane, 3rd Wife of R.N. Vyvyan’. There were many such mistakes that had to be corrected.

An intermittent news service was provided for
The Times
from 28 March. Then, on 6 April, disaster struck. What Nova Scotians called a ‘silver thaw’, a deluge not of snow but of freezing rain, weighed down the huge antennae with layer upon layer of dripping ice, until the entire structure collapsed. Marconi had overreached himself. There would be no Atlantic service for several years but Marconi’s fame had already given rise to a ferment of speculation in the United States which the more sober commentators called ‘wireless mania’.

W
hen Frank Fayant of the American magazine
Success
came across Abraham White while investigating wireless fraud in 1907, he exclaimed: ‘I have met a real Colonel Sellers in flesh and blood. Could I paint him with Mark Twain’s pen!’ In a retrospective thirty years later, the
Saturday Evening Post
sketched the unscrupulous wireless promoter.