Thunderstruck by Erik Larson
AT NO. 39 HILLDROP CRESCENT Ethel Le Neve cleaned house. This proved a challenge. To begin with, the place smelled terrible, especially downstairs in the vicinity of the kitchen, though the odor to a degree had permeated the entire house. Mrs. Jackson sensed it immediately on her first visit and mentioned it to Ethel. “The smell,” Jackson said, “was a damp frowsy one, and might have resulted from the damp and dirt. It was a stuffy sort of smell.”
“Yes,” Ethel told her, “the place is very damp and in a filthy condition. This is how Belle Elmore left it before she went away to America.”
Ethel opened windows and cleared away clothing and excess furniture, piling much of it in the kitchen. Crippen invited his longtime employee William Long to come over and see if there was anything he wanted. “A night or two after this,” Long said, “I went there and in the kitchen he shewed me a pile of woman’s clothing such as stockings, underclothing, shoes and a lot of old theatrical skirts, and old window curtains, table cloths, rugs, etc.”
Over several evenings Long took it all. Crippen also gave him the gilt cage and the seven canaries.
Ethel hired a servant, a French girl named Valentine Lecocq. “I have at last got a girl which I am thankful for,” Ethel wrote to Mrs. Jackson. “She is only 18 yrs. but seems anxious to learn & willing enough. The poor girl however hasn’t hardly a rag to her back, not a black blouse or anything & as Dr. is asking some friends to Dinner next Sunday, I feel I must rig her out nice & tidy.”
With the French girl’s help, Ethel made progress. In another letter to Mrs. Jackson she wrote, “Have been ever so busy with that wretched house and think you would hardly recognize same.” She found it hard to keep the house “anywhere near clean” and at the same time attend to her duties at Crippen’s office. “It gives me little time to myself,” she complained.
But the housework soon would end, she knew. Crippen’s lease was to expire on August 11, at which point they planned to move to a flat in Shaftesbury Avenue.
“Still,” she told Mrs. Jackson, “notwithstanding the hard work [I] am indeed happy.”
She delighted in the little moments with Crippen. In her memoir she wrote, “He used to come with me to the coal cellar, scuttle in hand, and while he was shoveling up the coals I would lean up against the door holding a lighted candle and chatting with him.”
The house grew brighter and more welcoming, and the awful scent dissipated. Crippen helped whenever he could and every day held her, kissed her, talked with her. They were not yet married in the eyes of the law and could not be married until Belle’s death in America was duly certified, but they were as much husband and wife as could be.
“So time slipped along,” Ethel wrote, “—both of us extremely happy and contented, working each of us hard in different ways.”
THE LADIES WATCHED.
They saw Crippen leave with the typist and arrive with the typist. They saw them walking together. The typist wore furs that looked very much like Belle’s, but of course one could never be sure, as furs were hard to tell apart. They saw them together at the theater and at restaurants. One day Annie Stratton and Clara Martinetti ran into Crippen on New Oxford Street. “Whilst we were talking to him,” Mrs. Martinetti said, “he seemed anxious to get away, and after he left us I saw him joined by the typist, and both got into a bus.”
And the ladies learned a troubling fact: Only one French liner had been scheduled to sail for America on the day of Belle’s departure, a steamer called La Touraine.
The ship had never left port, however. It was under repair.
STRANGE NEWS, BUT THEN these were strange times. On May 6, 1910, at 11:45 P.M. King Edward VII died, casting the nation into mourning. For the first time in England’s history the directors of Ascot ruled that all in attendance must wear black, a moment known ever after as “Black Ascot” and familiar in future generations to anyone who saw My Fair Lady.
As if the world really were coming to an end, Halley’s comet appeared in the skies overhead, raising fears of a collision and prompting rumors of dire events yet to come.
A DUTY TO BE WICKED
MARCONI’S LONG VOYAGE OF EXPERIMENT aboard the Carlo Alberto ended on Halloween morning 1902, when the ship arrived at Nova Scotia. Marconi’s goal—his hope—was now to move beyond mere three-dot signals and send the first complete messages from England to North America. It was imperative that he succeed. Skepticism about his transmission to Newfoundland had continued to deepen. Success would not only counter the doubters but also ease growing worries among his board of directors about whether all this costly experimenting would ever yield a financial return.
By now Marconi had completed construction of the new stations at South Wellfleet and Poldhu, and on Table Head at Glace Bay, the most powerful of all. Each station had more or less the same design: four strong towers of cross-braced wood, each 210 feet tall, supporting an inverted pyramid of four hundred wires. Each station had a power house nearby, where steam engines drove generators to produce electricity, which then entered an array of transformers and condensers. At South Wellfleet the process yielded 30,000 watts of power, at Glace Bay 75,000. At South Wellfleet a thick glass porthole and soundproof door had to be installed between the sending room and the sparking apparatus to prevent injury to the operator’s eyes and ears.
Marconi began his new attempt the day after his arrival, coordinating each step with his operators at Poldhu through telegrams sent by conventional undersea cable. The first signals to arrive “were very weak and unintelligible,” according to Richard Vyvyan. But they did arrive. Heartened by the fact that Poldhu had been operating only at half power, Marconi ordered his engineers there to increase wattage to maximum, expecting it would resolve the problem. It didn’t. Now he heard nothing at all.
The hundreds of wires that comprised the Glace Bay aerial could be used all at once or in segments. Marconi and Vyvyan tried different combinations. Again, nothing. Night after night they worked to find the magic junction with only trial and error as their guide. To attempt to receive by day seemed hopeless, so they often worked the entire night. Over eighteen consecutive nights they received no signals. Tensions grew, especially in the Vyvyan household. He had brought his new wife, Jane, to live with him at Glace Bay, and now she was pregnant, hugely so, the baby due any day.
Snow began to fall and soon covered the clifftop. At night the sparks from the transmitter lit the descending flakes. With each concussion a pale blue aura burst across the landscape, as if the transmission house were a factory stamping out ghosts for dispersal into the ether. Three-foot daggers of ice draped wires.
In the midst of it all Marconi received a telegram from headquarters, stating that the price of his company’s stock was falling. Though Marconi did not yet know it, the decline was conjured by a magician.
NEVIL MASKELYNE LOATHED FRAUD but loved to mislead and mystify audiences. His base was the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, one of London’s most popular venues for entertainment and one of the city’s strangest buildings. “It is beyond the powers of delineation to attempt any thing in the shape of a description of the front of this most singular piece of architecture,” wrote one early visitor. Built in 1812, its facade mimicked the entrance to an Egyptian temple. Two huge figures jutted from its yellow cladding, and hieroglyphs covered its pilasters and sills. The building originally served as a museum of natural history but failed to draw many visitors and became instead a venue for the display of a succession of oddities, including an entire family of Laplanders, an eighty-pound man called the Living Skeleton, and in 1829 the original Siamese twins. Its most famous living exhibit was one of its smallest, a native of Bridgeport, Connecticut, named Charles S. Stratton, placed on display here in 1844 by Phineas T. Barnum. By then Stratton was best known by his stage name, General Tom Thumb.
Nevil’s father, also named John Nevil Maskelyne, took over the Egyptian Hall with a partner, George A. Cooke, and by 1896 turned it into “England’s House of Mystery,” where twi
Maskelyne did not trust Marconi. The Italian claimed to have performed amazing feats but provided little hard proof beyond the testimonials of such allies as Ambrose Fleming and Luigi Solari. The latest example was Solari’s glowing report in The Electrician about Marconi’s Carlo Alberto experiments.
Maskelyne read it with distaste, then delight. Suddenly he realized that the tapes he had collected while eavesdropping on Marconi’s transmissions included some of the messages Solari described. These tapes showed that Marconi’s system was more flawed than he was letting on.
Maskelyne decided to reveal his findings. In an article published by The Electrician on November 7, 1902, he disclosed that using his own apparatus at the Porthcurno station near Poldhu, he had intercepted Marconi’s signals and that the tapes from his Morse inker proved that Solari’s account had been less than accurate. He stopped short, however, of accusing Solari and Marconi of fraud.
The tapes, he wrote, showed that errors due to atmospheric distortions were common and that transmissions from some other station had interfered with communication between Poldhu and the Carlo Alberto. Maskelyne also challenged Solari’s claim that the Poldhu station could transmit at a rate of fifteen words a minute. By his own count, he wrote, the rate was closer to five.
He also addressed a claim by Solari that a message from the Italian Embassy in London, transmitted by wireless from Poldhu, had been received without flaw aboard the ship at precisely four-thirty P.M. on September 9, 1902. In fact, Maskelyne found, transmission of the message had begun several nights earlier, on September 6 at nine o’clock. (This may have been the message that drove Marconi to smash his equipment.)
One thing was certain: Maskelyne had proven that Marconi’s transmissions could be intercepted and read. He wrote, “The plain question is, can Mr. Marconi so tune his Poldhu station that, working every day and all day, it does not affect the station at Porthcurno? Up to September 12th, on which date my personal supervision of the experiments at Porthcurno ceased, he had only succeeded in proving that he cannot do so.”
Cuthbert Hall, Marconi’s managing director, countered with a letter to The Electrician in which he wrote that “the evidence furnished of interception of our messages…is not conclusive.” He argued that anyone could take the messages published in Solari’s article and use a Morse inker to produce counterfeit tapes. “To have any value whatever as evidence, Mr. Maskelyne’s article should have been published before, not after, Lieut. Solari’s report.”
Hall’s argument must have struck Maskelyne as ironic, given Marconi’s penchant for describing his own triumphs through trust-me testimonials that could not be counterchecked for validity.
In the next issue Maskelyne responded: “Clearly Mr. Hall is between the horns of a dilemma. He must either say I am a liar and a forger, or he must accept the situation as set forth in my article…. If it be the former, I shall know how to deal with him. If it be the latter, the airy fabric of over-sanguine and visionary expectation, which we have so long been called upon to accept as a structure of solid fact, must fall to the ground.”
AT GLACE BAY silence prevailed. Nothing explained the persistent failure to receive signals from Poldhu. In Newfoundland, with kites bobbing in the air, he had received signals, but here at this elaborate new station with its 210-foot towers and miles of wire, he received nothing. He and Vyvyan decided to try something they so far had not attempted—reversing the direction of transmission, this time trying to send from Nova Scotia to England. They had no particular reason for doing so, other than that nothing else had worked.
They made their first attempt on the night of November 19, 1902, but the operators at Poldhu received no signals.
Marconi and Vyvyan made countless adjustments to the apparatus. Vyvyan wrote, “We did not even have means or instruments for measuring wavelengths, in fact we did not know accurately what wavelength we were using.”
They tried for nine more nights, with no success. On the tenth night, November 28, they received a cable stating that the operators at Poldhu had received vague signals, but that they could not be read. This buoyed Marconi, though only briefly, for the next night Poldhu reported that once again nothing had come through. The silence continued for seven more nights.
On the night of Friday, December 5, Marconi doubled the length of the spark. Later that night he received word back, via cable, that Poldhu at last had achieved reception:
Weak readable signals for first half-hour, nothing doing during the next three-quarters, last three-quarters readable and recordable on tape.
The next night Marconi tried exactly the same configuration.
Nothing.
The following night, silence again.
Marconi had borne these weeks of failure with little outward sign of frustration, but now he cursed out loud and slammed his fists against a table.
But he kept trying. Failure now, even rumor of failure, would be ruinous. Not surprisingly, word had begun to leak that he might be in trouble. On Tuesday, December 9, 1902, a headline in the Sydney Daily Post asked, “WHAT’S WRONG AT TABLE HEAD?” The accompanying article said, “Something strange seems to have happened at Table Head, but that something doesn’t look very encouraging to the promoters of the scheme.”
That night every attempt to reach Poldhu failed. Failure dogged him for the next four nights. On the fifth night, Sunday, December 14, after hours of pounding messages into the sky, a cable arrived from Poldhu: “Readable signals through the two hours programme.”
Given all they had experienced since Marconi’s Halloween arrival, this was cause for celebration. The men tore from the operator’s room into the frozen night and danced in the snow until they could no longer stand the cold.
It seemed, for the moment, that by sheer chance Marconi had struck exactly the right combination of variables. Rather than wait to confirm this, as prudence might have dictated, Marconi now proceeded to the next step of his plan, to send the first-ever public message across the ocean by wireless. He made the decision to try it, according to Vyvyan, “owing to financial pressure and to quiet the adverse press criticism that was making itself noticeable.”
This time he recognized that his testimony alone would not be enough to persuade a skeptical world of his achievements. He invited a reporter, George Parkin, Ottawa correspondent for the London Times, to write this historic message and to serve as a witness to the process. First, however, Marconi swore Parkin to secrecy until accurate reception of the message by the Poldhu station could be confirmed.
Marconi made the first attempt to send the message early on Monday, December 15, less than twenty-four hours after the cable from Poldhu that had caused so much celebration. He asked Parkin to make a change in the wording of his message just before transmission, to neuter any potential claim that Marconi’s men in Britain had somehow acquired an advance copy. At one o’clock in the morning, Marconi grasped the heavy key and began levering out the message. “All put cotton wool in their ears to lessen the force of the electric concussion,” Parkin wrote. He likened the clatter to “the successive explosions of a Maxim gun.”
Marconi repeated the attempt that evening, first at six o’clock, then at seven, without success. Later that night, between ten and midnight, Parkin’s message did at last reach Poldhu. It read:
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.
Marconi arranged a celebration later that morning, during which the flags of Britain and Italy were raised with great ceremony.
A sudden gale promptly destroyed both.
PARKIN’S MESSAGE WAS NOT immediately relayed to The Times. Marconi’s sense of protocol and showmanship required that first two other messages of greeting had to be transmitted, one to King Edward, the other to King Victor Emmanuel in Rome. Marconi had instructed Poldhu not to relay Parkin’s message, and Parkin to hold back his story, until the two royal messages could be transmitted and their contents confirmed by return cable. This process required six days.
Parkin crafted an account that glowed with praise, including his “feeling of awe” at the fact that impulses sent from Glace Bay would reach Poldhu in one-thirtieth of a second. He neglected to mention the six-day delay.
Vyvyan, in his memoir, was more candid. “Although these three messages were transmitted across the Atlantic and received in England it cannot be said that the wireless circuit was at all satisfactory. There was a great element of uncertainty as to whether any message would reach its destination or not, and so far the cause of this unreliability had not been ascertained. All conditions remaining the same at the two stations, the signals would vary from good readable signals to absolutely nothing and often vary through wide degrees of strength in two or three minutes.”