Thunderstruck (19 page)

W
ITHIN THE
C
RIPPEN HOUSEHOLD
the weather did not improve. They moved to another address on Store Street, No. 37, but this new apartment did not offer enough additional space to allow them to stay out of each other’s way. They still had to sleep in the same bedroom. They could not afford anything larger, at least not in Bloomsbury. Crippen was only earning a fraction of the salary Munyon’s had paid. Nonetheless he continued to allow Belle to spend heavily on clothing and jewelry. Crippen said, “although we apparently lived very happily together, as a matter of fact there were very frequent occasions when she got into most violent tempers, and often threatened she would leave me, saying she had a man she could go to, and she would end it all.”

It was clear to Crippen that the man in question was Bruce Miller. In early April Miller came by the apartment for what would prove to be the last time. He wanted to say good-bye to Belle. He told her he was taking her advice and returning to Chicago to reunite with his wife. He sailed from England on April 21, 1904.

If Miller’s departure reignited in Crippen any hope that his own marriage could now be restored, he immediately found those hopes dashed. Belle’s temper worsened, and so too did the couple’s financial situation, though he still made no effort to curb her expenditures. He began looking for another home that would be much larger but also cheaper, which meant necessarily that he would have to look outside the core of the city, at grave risk of annoying Belle even further.

T
HE EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPE
negotiated each day by the Crippens grew still more contorted. On her brief visits to Crippen’s office, Belle had taken note of his typist, Ethel Le Neve. She was young and striking and slender. Her looks alone may have made Belle uneasy, or Belle may have sensed an unusual degree of warmth in the way Crippen and the young woman behaved toward each other, but there was indeed something about the typist that made Belle uneasy.

One morning a friend of Belle’s named Maud Burroughs, who lived in the same building on Store Street, stopped by as Belle was getting dressed. In the course of their conversation, Belle mentioned her past surgery and asked Burroughs if she would like to see the scar.

Burroughs said no.

“Give me your hand,” Belle said, “and you can feel where it was.”

Belle took Burroughs’s hand and, as Burroughs recalled, “placed it underneath her clothing upon her stomach. I felt what seemed to me to be a hole, so far as I remember, a little on one side of the lower part of her stomach.”

The conversation shifted to Crippen, who by now, for reasons unclear, had taken to calling himself Peter. It was by this name that Belle and her friends addressed him.

Belle said, “I don’t like the girl typist Peter has in his office.”

“Why don’t you ask Peter to get rid of her then?” Burroughs asked.

Belle replied that she already had asked him, but Crippen had told her the typist was “indispensable” to the company.

C
RIPPEN’S RELATIONSHIP WITH
E
THEL
deepened. Later he would recall a particular Sunday in the summer of 1904 when “we had a whole day together, which meant so much to us then. A rainy day indeed, but how happy we were together, with all sunshine in our hearts.” He recalled it as a time when he and she were in “perfect harmony with each other. Even without being wedded.”

For her part Ethel came to view Crippen as “the only person in the world to whom I could go for help or comfort. There was a real love between us.”

It was at about this point that Ethel, “by sheer accident,” came across the letters Bruce Miller had sent to Belle. “This, I need hardly say, relieved me somewhat of any misgivings I had with regard to my relations with her husband.”

W
ITHIN SIX MONTHS
Aural Remedies also failed, and Crippen went back to work for Munyon’s, this time out of a new location in a building called Albion House, also on New Oxford Street. Again he brought Ethel but also another past employee, William Long. Crippen returned not as a full-time employee but rather as an agent paid by commission. He made less than he had hoped. Finding a cheaper place to live became imperative, but here a challenge had no easy resolution: to find lodging that was not only less expensive but also much bigger and nice enough to keep Belle happy, or if not happy—which at this point must have seemed an impossible goal—at least to stop her behavior from degrading further. These clashing imperatives drove his search farther and farther from Bloomsbury.

“T
HE
T
HUNDER
F
ACTORY
”

T
HE HUNT FOR LAND ON WHICH
to build his first American station lasted far longer than Marconi had planned. Accompanied by Richard Vyvyan and an employee named John Bottomley, a nephew of Lord Kelvin, Marconi toured the coasts of New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, taking trains as far as possible, then proceeding in wagons or on foot. Marconi before leaving Britain had appointed Vyvyan to build and run the new station.

Every piece of land seemed to harbor a critical flaw. No drinking water, no nearby town to supply labor and supplies, no rail line, and—a flaw that particularly rankled Marconi—no fine hotels of the kind that were common on the windswept coasts of Britain.

In February 1901 the group made its way to Cape Cod, landing at Provincetown. On a map the cape looked appealing, especially its midpoint where it hooked northward and the land rose to form oceanside cliffs over one hundred feet high.

In Provincetown Marconi hired a guide named Ed Cook, who was said to have a thorough knowledge of the cape’s coastal lands. Cook did indeed know the beaches well. He was a “wrecker” who salvaged ships and boats wrecked off the cape on their way to Boston. In the previous century Henry David Thoreau had toured the cape and in his book
Cape Cod
described how wreckers descended on the remains of one ship, the
St. John,
even as grieving relatives came to the beach in search of lost loved ones. Cook used the profits of his salvage work to buy land.

Cook led Marconi the full length of the cape, traveling in Cook’s wagon exposed to the frigid winds of February. When Cook led Marconi to the Highland Light, near the north end of the cape, opposite North Truro, Marconi believed he had found exactly the location he needed. The lighthouse stood atop a 125-foot cliff overlooking the shipping lanes that led to Boston harbor, which lay about fifty miles to the northwest. Here the keepers watched for inbound ships and consulted guidebooks to identify them, then telegraphed the news to the ships’ owners in America and abroad, the latter messages traveling first by land line, then by cables laid under the Atlantic.

But the operators of the Highland Light did not trust Marconi. “They thought he was probably a charlatan,” his daughter Degna wrote, “and they
knew
he was a foreigner. Not even Ed Cook was able to override their thorny New England resistance to strangers and new-fangled contraptions.” They refused access.

Next Cook led him a few miles south to a parcel of land just outside South Wellfleet, consisting of eight acres atop a 130-foot cliff that overlooked the same beach along which Thoreau had walked half a century earlier. Buffeted by wind, now Marconi walked the ground. The land in all directions had been shaved to a stubble by gales and by loggers who over the previous century had stripped it to provide lumber for shipbuilders. Marconi knew he would have to import the tall masts necessary to hold his aerial aloft.

He liked this clifftop parcel. If he stood facing east, all he saw was the great spread of the Atlantic. As Thoreau observed, “There was nothing but that savage ocean between us and Europe.”

When he faced the opposite direction, he saw the harbor at Wellfleet in clear view and very near. A railroad passed less than a mile away, and the nearest telegraph office, at Wellfleet Depot, was only four miles off. This meant lumber and machinery could be delivered to Wellfleet by ship or rail and hauled with relative ease overland to the cliff. A company report on Marconi’s search states, “Plenty of water is available on the site and a very bad inn is situated about 3 miles away; there is, however, a residential house which we can rent on very moderate terms within 200 yards of the site.” One bit of historical resonance was lost on Marconi. During the eighteenth century Wellfleet had been named Poole, after a village in England—the same Poole whose Haven Hotel now served as Marconi’s field headquarters.

Cook assured Marconi there would be no problem persuading the landowner to let Marconi build here. The landowner was Cook himself. He had acquired the land using the proceeds of his work as a wrecker. Whether either man recognized the paradox therein is unclear, but here was Marconi, whose technology promised to make the sea safer, acquiring land from a man who had made his living harvesting precisely the wrecks Marconi hoped to eliminate. In the future these eight acres of seaside land would be some of the most coveted terrain in the world, but at this time the stretch was considered worthless. Marconi bought it for next to nothing.

Marconi also hired Cook to be his general contractor, with a mandate to find workers, arrange living quarters and food supplies, and acquire necessary building materials. Marconi and his men took their initial meals at the nearby inn, but the food was so awful that he vowed never to eat there again. He arranged to have more elegant fare, and the wines to go with it, shipped from Boston and New York. Among the locals this caused a good deal of frowning and saddled Marconi with a lasting reputation as a culinary aesthete.

Soon Marconi headed back to England, leaving Vyvyan to face the true nature of the location.

I
N
L
ONDON
C
OLONEL
H
OZIER
of Lloyd’s and Nevil Maskelyne of the Egyptian Hall, acting together as a syndicate, approached Marconi and offered to sell him Maskelyne’s patents and apparatus. Marconi listened. As negotiations proceeded, Hozier somehow cut Maskelyne out of the syndicate and began negotiating on his own behalf, despite the fact that it was Maskelyne’s technology upon which the syndicate was based. Hozier wanted £3,000—over $300,000 today—and a seat on Marconi’s board. To make the arrangement more palatable, even irresistible, Hozier promised that in return he would broker a deal between Marconi and Lloyd’s itself.

Hozier’s maneuver left Maskelyne embittered. But his anger, for the moment, seemed of no consequence.

T
HE LANDSCAPE THAT NOW
confronted Vyvyan was lovely but spare. There were few trees, none tall enough to be worthy of the name, let alone to be useful for building houses or ships. Most of the surrounding flora hugged the ground. Hog cranberry coated the sand, tufted here and there by beach heather, also called “poverty grass,” a name that captured the overall austerity of the terrain. There was crowberry, savory-leaved aster, mouse-ear, and goldenrod, as well as pitch pine planted during the previous century to keep wind-driven sand from overwhelming towns on the bay side of the cape. Everywhere the wind caught stalks of American beach grass and bent them until their tips scraped the sand, engraving precise circles and earning them the nickname “compass grass.” Thoreau wrote, “The barren aspect of the land would hardly be believed if described.”

Clouds often filled the sky. The Weather Bureau’s Nantucket station, nearest the cape, reported for 1901 only 83 clear days, 101 days identified as partly cloudy, and 181 days where clouds reigned. On such days all color left the world. Sky, sea, and ground became as gray as shale, the color blue a memory. Frequent gales brought winds of fifty or sixty miles an hour and shot snow off the cliff edge in angry spirals. The boom of the sea paced the day like the tick of a gigantic clock.

The plan for the station called for the construction of living quarters for the staff, a boiler room to produce steam to generate electricity, a separate room full of equipment to concentrate power and produce a spark, and another room in which an operator would hammer out messages in Morse code. The most important structure was the aerial, and that was what most worried Vyvyan. In London Marconi had shown Vyvyan plans for a new antenna array to be built at Poldhu, and he ordered Vyvyan to build the same one in South Wellfleet. As soon as Vyvyan saw the plans, he grew concerned. He would have to erect twenty masts similar in design to the masts of sailing ships, complete with top gallants, royals, and yards. The finished masts would rise to 200 feet and stand in a circle about 200 feet in diameter, a Stonehenge of timber. The height of the masts, plus the 130-foot height of the cliff, would give Marconi’s antenna an effective height of well over 300 feet, thus in theory—Marconi’s theory—increasing the station’s ability to send and receive signals over long distances. A complex series of guy wires and connectors was supposed to keep the masts from toppling. The masts in turn would support an aerial of wire. A heavy cable of twisted copper would connect the tops of all the masts, and from it would be strung hundreds of thinner wires, all converging to form a giant cone with its tip over the transmission building. A cable run through the roof would link the cone to the spark generator within.

What troubled Vyvyan most was the rigging. Each mast should have had its own array of guy wires, so that if one mast failed the others would remain standing. Instead, the top of each was connected to the tops of its neighbors with “triatic stays.” Vyvyan realized that if one mast collapsed, these connections would cause the rest to fall as well. He told Marconi of his concerns, but Marconi overruled him and commanded that the station be built as designed. Vyvyan accepted his decision. “It was clear to me, however, that the mast system was distinctly unsafe.”

Construction advanced slowly, hampered by what the Weather Bureau called a “period of exceptionally severe storms.” April brought gales that scoured the coast with winds up to fifty-four miles an hour. May brought rainfall in quantities that broke all records for New England.

The men hired by Ed Cook lived in Wellfleet and adjacent communities, but Vyvyan, Bottomley, and the full-time Marconi employees lived on the grounds in a one-story residence with about two hundred feet of living space, a level of coziness that eventually prompted the station’s chief engineer, W. W. Bradfield, to plead for an additional wing containing more sleeping space and a recreation room. He wrote, “In view of the isolation of the station, I regard it as almost necessary that this should be done in order that the men may be comfortable, contented, and that their best work may be got out of them.”

The men did what they could to improve their living conditions. They dined on a table draped in white and spined with four candles jutting at odd angles from improvised holders. They read books, played the station’s piano, and sang, and from time to time they hiked to the bay side to pick oysters at the mouth of Blackfish Creek, named for the herds of small whales called social whales that locals once drove onto the beach and butchered for oil. They went beachcombing, the sands below the Truro highlands being a lot more interesting in those days given the frequency of shipwrecks. One never knew what treasure might turn up, including crockery, luggage, fine soaps from a ship’s cabin, and the occasional corpse, its cavities filled with sand. Thoreau called the beach “a vast
morgue
” for all the dead men and creatures the sea discharged. “There is naked Nature—inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray.”