Thunderstruck (32 page)

In this case, however, someone else happened to have been listening in, without Marconi’s knowledge.

That summer the Eastern Telegraph Co., an undersea cable concern, had decided to install a wireless station of its own, at its cablehead at Porthcurno in Cornwall, about eighteen miles from Poldhu. The transatlantic cable industry still did not expect much competition from wireless but did see that it might have value as a source of additional traffic to be fed into their cables and for communicating with cable-repair ships. Eastern Telegraph hired Nevil Maskelyne for the job, and in August 1902 the magician erected a temporary antenna twenty-five feet tall. Immediately Maskelyne began picking up Morse signals from Poldhu, something the Marconi company had touted as being next to impossible given its tuning technology.

Maskelyne picked up a repeated signal, the letters CBCB. “Knowing that experiments were in progress between Poldhu and the Carlo Alberto,” Maskelyne wrote, “it did not take a Sherlock Holmes to discover that ‘CBCB’ was the call signal for the Carlo Alberto.” He and Eastern’s men nicknamed the ship the
Carlo Bertie.

Maskelyne not only listened but kept copies of the tapes that emerged from his own Morse inker. Their true significance was not yet clear to him.

T
HE
L
ADIES
I
NVESTIGATE

F
IRST SHE DISAPPEARED, ALLEGEDLY TO
A
MERICA
, and now she was dead. None of it made sense; all of it stretched credibility. It was wonderful, in the Edwardian sense of the word, yet here was Crippen, the very soul of credibility, telling them it was so. He was, according to Maud and John Burroughs, “a model husband”; so “kind and attentive,” said Clara Martinetti; a “kind-hearted humane man,” said Adeline Harrison.

And yet.

There was the rising sun brooch worn so brazenly by the typist, and the fact that Belle had neither written nor cabled her friends since her departure and had not thought to send a wireless message—by now a “Marconigram”—from her ship, the kind of thing she would have delighted in doing for the surprise of it. There was the fact too that Crippen all along had seemed unsure of Belle’s exact whereabouts and was unable to produce an address. She was in the “wilds of California,” as he had put it, yet Belle never had mentioned relatives in California, let alone in the state’s nether portions.

Even before word arrived of Belle’s death, her successor as guild treasurer, Lottie Albert, asked a friend, Michael Bernstein, to make inquiries about Belle on behalf of the guild.

Crippen had said Belle had sailed aboard a ship of French registry and that it had sailed out of Le Havre. The name, he thought, was something like
La Touee
or
Touvee.
Bernstein searched the passenger lists of French ships for a passenger named Crippen or Elmore but found nothing.

On March 30, a Wednesday and thus a day when the Ladies’ Guild met, Clara Martinetti and Louise Smythson walked down the hall to Crippen’s office ostensibly to offer condolences. In fact, they intended to perform a kind of interrogation.

Mrs. Martinetti asked him for the address of the person who had nursed Belle in her last moments, but Crippen said he did not know who it was.

She asked how long Belle had been ill. Crippen said she had become ill on the ship and failed to look after herself and as a consequence contracted pneumonia.

Mrs. Martinetti asked where Belle was buried and explained that the guild wanted to send an “everlasting wreath” to place on her grave. Crippen said she had not been buried—she had been cremated, and that soon her ashes would arrive by post.

Cremated.

Belle had never once mentioned a wish to be cremated after death. She was so forthcoming about everything in her life, to the point of having friends touch her scar, that surely she would have mentioned something as novel as cremation.

Mrs. Martinetti asked where Belle had died. Crippen did not answer directly. He said only, “I will give you my son’s address.”

“Did she die with him, and did he see her die?” Mrs. Martinetti asked.

Crippen answered yes, but in a confused manner, then gave her Otto’s address in Los Angeles.

She and Mrs. Smythson left, their suspicions aflame. Mrs. Martinetti immediately wrote a postcard to Otto asking for details of Belle’s death.

It took him a month to reply. He apologized for the delay but explained that he had been distracted by the illness and death of his own son.

Turning to the subject at hand, he wrote, “The death of my stepmother was as great a surprise to me as to anyone. She died at San Francisco and the first I heard of it was through my father, who wrote to me immediately afterwards. He asked me to forward all letters to him and he would make the necessary explanations. He said he had through a mistake given out my name and address as my step-mother’s death-place. I would be very glad if you find out any particulars of her death if you would let me know of them as I know as a fact that she died at San Francisco.”

A
T
N
O
. 39 H
ILLDROP
C
RESCENT
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.”

T
HE 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.

S
TRANGE 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 D
UTY TO
B
E
W
ICKED

M
ARCONI’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.

N
EVIL
M
ASKELYNE 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 twice a day audiences watched magic shows and encountered illusions and mechanical chimeras. By then Maskelyne and Cooke, as they were known, had achieved fame by exposing two celebrated American spirit mediums, the Davenport brothers. The magicians billed themselves as “The Royal Illusionists and anti-Spiritualists.” One of their most popular attractions was an automaton named Psycho, an oriental mystic whose robe and turban disguised internal mechanical devices that enabled him to solve math problems, spell words, and most famously, play whist with members of the audience. Nevil Jr. took over from his father, and when he was not dabbling in wireless, he performed in shows alongside his own partner, a magician named David Devant. Together Maskelyne and Devant revealed to audiences the tricks deployed by mediums, with such aplomb that some Spiritualists believed they really did have psychic powers and merely pretended disbelief in a cynical drive to make profits.

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.”

A
T
G
LACE
B
AY
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.