Thunderstruck (4 page)

The study of electricity got a big boost in 1745 with the invention of the Leyden jar, the first device capable of storing and amplifying static electricity. It was invented nearly simultaneously in Germany and in Leyden, the Netherlands, by two men whose names did not readily trip from the tongue: Ewald Jürgen von Kleist and Pieter van Musschenbroek. A French scientist, the Abbé Nollet, simplified things by dubbing the invention the Leyden phial, although for a time a few proprietary Germans persisted in calling it a von Kleist bottle. In its best-known iteration, the Leyden jar consisted of a glass container with coatings of foil on the inside and outside. A friction machine was used to charge, or fill, the jar with electricity. When a wire was used to link both coatings, the jar released its energy in the form of a powerful spark. In the interests of science Abbé Nollet went on to deploy the jar to make large groups of people do strange things, as when he invited two hundred monks to hold hands and then discharged a Leyden jar into the first man, causing an abrupt and furious flapping of robes.

Naturally a competition got under way to see who could launch the longest and most powerful spark. One researcher, Georg Richman, a Swede living in Russia, took a disastrous lead in 1753 when, in the midst of an attempt to harness lightning to charge an electrostatic device, a huge spark leaped from the apparatus to his head, making him the first scientist to die by electrocution. In 1850 Heinrich D. Ruhmkorff perfected a means of wrapping wire around an iron core and then rewrapping the assembly with more wire to produce an “induction coil” that made the creation of powerful sparks simple and reliable—and incidentally set mankind on the path toward producing the first automotive ignition coil. A few years later researchers in England fashioned a powerful Ruhmkorff coil that they then used to fire off a spark forty-two inches long. In 1880 John Trowbridge of Harvard launched a seven-footer.

Along the way scientists began to suspect that the sudden brilliance of sparks might mask deeper secrets. In 1842 Joseph Henry, a Princeton professor who later became the first director of the Smithsonian Institution, speculated that a spark might not be a onetime burst of energy but in fact a rapid series of discharges, or oscillations. Other scientists came to the same conclusion and in 1859 one of them, Berend Fedderson, proved it beyond doubt by capturing the phenomenon in photographs.

But it was James Clerk Maxwell who really shook things up. In 1873 in his
A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism
he proposed that such oscillations produced invisible electromagnetic waves, whose properties he described in a series of famous equations. He also argued that these waves were much like light and traveled through the same medium, the mysterious invisible realm known to physicists of the day as ether. No one yet had managed to capture a sample of ether, but this did not stop Maxwell from calculating its relative density. He came up with the handy estimate that it had 936/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000ths the density of water. In 1886 Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of such waves through laboratory experiments and found also that they traveled at the speed of light.

Meanwhile other scientists had discovered an odd phenomenon in which a spark appeared to alter the conducting properties of metal filings. One of them, Edouard Branly of France, inserted filings into glass tubes to better demonstrate the effect and discovered that simply by tapping the tubes he could return the filings to their nonconducting state. He published his findings in 1891 but made no mention of using his invention to detect electromagnetic waves, though his choice of name for his device was prophetic. He called it a radio-conductor. At first his work was ignored, until Oliver Lodge and his peers began to speculate that maybe Hertz’s waves were what caused the filings to become conductive. Lodge devised an improved version of the Branly tube, his “coherer,” the instrument he unveiled at the Royal Institution.

Lodge’s own statements about his lecture reveal that he did not think of Hertzian waves as being useful; certainly the idea of harnessing them for communication never occurred to him. He believed them incapable of traveling far—he declared half a mile as the likely limit. It remained the case that as of the summer of 1894 no means existed for communicating without wires over distances beyond the reach of sight. This made for lonely times in the many places where wires did not reach, but nowhere was this absence felt more acutely than on the open sea, a fact of life that is hard to appreciate for later generations accustomed to pthe immediate world-grasp afforded by shortwave radio and cellular telephone.

The completeness of this estrangement from the affairs of land came home keenly to Winston Churchill in 1899 on the eve of the Boer War, when as a young war correspondent he sailed for Cape Town with the commander of Britain’s forces aboard the warship
Dunottar Castle.
He wrote, “Whilst the issues of peace and war seemed to hang in their last flickering balance, and before a single irrevocable shot had been fired, we steamed off into July storms. There was, of course, no wireless at sea in those days, and, therefore, at this most exciting moment the Commander-in-Chief of the British forces dropped completely out of the world. After four days at sea, the ship called at Madeira where there was no news. Twelve days passed in silence and only when the ship was two days from Cape Town was another ship sighted coming from the ‘land of knowledge’ and bearing vital news. Signals”—visual signals—“were made to the steamer, a tramp, asking for news, upon which she altered course to pass within a hundred yards of the
Dunottar Castle,
and held up a blackboard bearing the words, ‘Three battles. Penn Symonds killed.’ Then she steamed on her way, and the Commander-in-Chief, whose troops had been in action without his knowledge, was left to meditate upon this very cryptic message.”

B
ACK FROM THE
A
LPS,
Marconi immediately set to work devising equipment to transform his idea into reality, with nothing to guide him but an inner conviction that his vision could be achieved. His mother recognized that something had changed. Marconi’s tinkering had attained focus. She saw too that now he needed a formal space dedicated to his experiments, though she had only a vague sense of what it was that he hoped to achieve. She persuaded her husband to allow Marconi to turn a portion of the villa’s third-floor attic into a laboratory. Where once Marconi’s ancestors had raised silkworms, now he wound coils of wire and fashioned Leyden jars that snapped blue with electrical energy.

On hot days the attic turned into a Sahara of stillness. Marconi grew thin, his complexion paler than usual. His mother became concerned. She left trays of food on the landing outside the attic door. Marconi’s father, Giuseppe, grew increasingly unhappy about Marconi’s obsession and its jarring effect on family routine. He sought to reassert control by crimping his already scant financial support for his son’s experiments. “Giuseppe was punishing Guglielmo in every way he knew,” wrote Degna. “Characteristically he considered money a powerful weapon.” At one point Marconi sold a pair of shoes to raise money to buy wire and batteries, but this clearly was a symbolic act meant to garner sympathy from his mother, for he had plenty of shoes to spare.

In his attic laboratory Marconi found himself at war with the physical world. It simply was not behaving as he believed it should. From his reading, Marconi knew the basic character of the apparatus he would need to build. A Leyden jar or Ruhmkorff coil could generate the required spark. For a receiver, Marconi built a coherer of the kind Branly had devised and that Lodge had improved, and he connected it to a galvanometer, a device that registered the presence of an electrical current.

But Marconi found himself stymied. He could generate the spark easily but could not cause a response in his coherer. He tinkered. He tried a shorter tube than that deployed by Lodge, and he experimented with different sizes and combinations of filings. At last he got a response, but the process proved fickle. The coherer “would act at thirty feet from the transmitter,” Marconi wrote, but “at other times it would not act even when brought as close as three or four feet.”

It was maddening. He grew thinner, paler, but kept at it. “I did not lose courage,” he wrote. But according to Degna, “he did lose his youth” and took on a taciturnity that, by her account, would forever color his demeanor.

He wanted distance. He knew that if his telegraphy without wires was ever to become a viable means of communication, he would need to be able to send signals hundreds of miles. Yet here in his attic laboratory he sometimes could not detect waves even an arm’s length from the spark. Moreover, established theory held that transmitting over truly long distances, over the horizon, simply was not possible. The true scholar-physicists, like Lodge, had concluded that waves must travel in the same manner as light, meaning that even if signals could be propelled for hundreds of miles, they would continue in a straight line at the speed of light and abandon the curving surface of the earth.

Another man might have decided the physicists were right—that long-range communication was impossible. But Marconi saw no limits. He fell back on trial and error, at a level of intensity that verged on obsession. It set a pattern for how he would pursue his quest over the next decade. Theoreticians devised equations to explain phenomena; Marconi cut wire, coiled it, snaked it, built apparatus, and flushed it with power to see what would happen, a seemingly mindless process but one governed by the certainty that he was correct. He became convinced, for example, that the composition of the metal filings in the coherer was crucial to its performance. He bought or scavenged metals of all kinds and used a chisel to scrape loose filings of differing sizes, then picked through the filings to achieve uniformity. He tried nickel, copper, silver, iron, brass, and zinc, in different amounts and combinations. He inserted each new mixture into a fragile glass tube, added a plug of silver at each end, then sealed the apparatus and placed it within his receiving circuit.

He tested each mixture repeatedly. No instrument existed to monitor the strength or character of the signals he launched into space. Instead, he gauged performance by instinct and accident. He did this for days and weeks on end. He tried as many as four hundred variations before settling on what he believed to be the best possible combination for his coherer: a fine dust that was 95 percent nickel and 5 percent silver, with a trace of mercury.

At first he tried to use his transmitter to ring a bell at the far side of his laboratory. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. He blamed the Branly-style coherer, calling it “far too erratic and unreliable” to be practical. Between each use he had to tap it with his finger to return the filings to their nonconducting state. He tried shrinking the size of the tube. He emptied thermometers, heated the glass, and shaped it. He moved the silver plugs within the tube closer and closer together to reduce the expanse of filings through which current would have to flow, until the entire coherer was about an inch and a half long and the width of a tenpenny nail. He once stated that it took him a thousand hours to build a single coherer. As a future colleague would put it, he possessed “the power of continuous work.”

Marconi’s obsession with distance deepened. He moved the bell to the next room and discovered how readily the waves passed through obstacles. As he worked, a fear grew within him, almost a terror, that one day he would awaken to discover that someone else had achieved his goal first. He understood that as research into electromagnetic waves advanced, some other scientist or inventor or engineer might suddenly envision what he had envisioned.

And in fact he was right to be concerned. Scientists around the world were conducting experiments with electromagnetic waves, though they still focused on their optical qualities. Lodge had come closest, but inexplicably had not continued his research.

T
HE
S
CAR

T
HE YOUNG WOMAN WHO NOW
presented herself at the Brooklyn, New York, office of Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, and who was destined to cause such tumult in his life, was named Cora Turner. At least that was her name for the present. She was seventeen years old, Crippen thirty and already a widower, but the distance between them was not as great as chronology alone suggested, for Miss Turner had the demeanor and physical presence of a woman much older. Her figure was full and inevitably drew forth the adjective
voluptuous.
Her eyes were alight with a knowledge not of books but of how hardship made morality more fungible than the clerics of Brooklyn’s churches might have wanted parishioners to believe. She was a patient of the physician who owned the practice, a Dr. Jeffrey, and she had come in for a problem described with Victorian reticence as “female.”

Crippen was lonely, and genetic fate had conspired to keep him that way. He was not handsome, and his short stature and small bones conveyed neither strength nor virility. Even his scalp had betrayed him, his hair having begun a brisk retreat years before. He did have a few assets, however. Though he was nearsighted, his eyes were large and conveyed warmth and sympathy—provided he was wearing his glasses. Lately he had grown a beard in a narrow V, which imparted a whiff of continental sophistication. He dressed well, and the sharp collars and crisp-cut suits that tailors of the day favored gave him definition against the passing landscape, the way a line of India ink edged a drawing. Also, he was a doctor. Medicine in this era was becoming a more scientific profession, one that conveyed intellect and character, and, increasingly, prosperity.

Crippen fell for Cora Turner immediately. He saw her youth as no obstacle and began courting her, taking her out to lunch and dinner and for walks. Gradually he learned her story. Her father, a Russian Pole, had died when she was a toddler; her German mother had remarried, but now she too was dead. Cora was fluent both in German and in English. Her stepfather, Fritz Mersinger, lived on Forrest Avenue in Brooklyn. Crippen learned that for one of her birthdays Mersinger had taken her into Manhattan to hear an opera, and the experience had ignited an ambition to become one of the world’s great divas.

As Crippen got to know her, he learned too that her passion had become obsession, which in turn had led her down a path that diverged from the savory. She lived alone in an apartment paid for by a man named C. C. Lincoln, a stove maker who was married and lived elsewhere. He paid for her food and clothing and voice lessons. In return he received sex and the companionship of a woman who was young, vivacious, and physically striking. But a complication arose: She became pregnant. The problem that brought her to the office of Crippen’s employer, Dr. Jeffrey, was not some routine female complaint. “I believe she had had a miscarriage, or something of that kind,” Crippen said. But this may have been code for a circumstance even more wrenching.

Nonetheless Crippen was entranced, and Cora knew it. With each new encounter, she came increasingly to see him as a tool to help her break from Lincoln and achieve her dream of operatic stardom. She knew how to get his attention. During one of their outings she told him that Lincoln had just asked her to run away with him. Whether true or not, the news had the desired effect.

“I told her I could not stand that,” Crippen said.

A few days later, on September 1, 1892, the two exchanged vows in a private ceremony at the home of a Catholic priest in Jersey City, New Jersey. Presumably the priest knew nothing of the past pregnancy.

Soon after the wedding Cora gave Crippen his first glimpse of a trait in her character that would become more salient as the years passed: She liked secrets. She told him her real name was not Cora Turner—though the name she now gave seemed hardly real, more like something concocted by a music hall comedian. Her true name, she said, was Kunigunde Mackamotzki.

She planned, however, to keep calling herself Cora. It had been her nickname since childhood, but more importantly Kunigunde Mackamotzki was hardly a name to foster success in the world of Grand Opera.

Almost immediately the newlyweds found themselves battered by failed decisions and forces beyond their control.

H
AWLEY
H
ARVEY
C
RIPPEN
was born in Coldwater, Michigan, in 1862, in the midst of two wars, the distant Civil War and closer to home the war against Satan, an enemy deemed by most people in the town to be as real, if not as tangible, as the gray-uniformed men of the South.

The Crippen clan came to Coldwater early and in force, their arrival described in a nineteenth-century history of Branch County, Michigan, as “the coming of a colony of methodists.” They spent generously toward the construction of a Methodist church in Coldwater, though at least one prominent member of the family was a Spiritualist. In this he had company, for Coldwater was known as a hotbed not just of Protestant but also of Spiritualist belief, the latter apparently a product of migration. Like so many of their neighbors, the Crippens had moved to Michigan from western New York, a region eventually nicknamed the “burnt-over district” for its willingness to succumb to new and passionate religions.

Crippen’s grandfather, Philo, arrived in 1835 and after courting with alacrity married a Miss Sophia Smith later the same year. He founded a dry goods store, which expanded to become one of the most important businesses in town and a significant presence on Chicago Street, the main commercial corridor, where the Chicago Turnpike sliced through. Soon Crippens seemed to be taking over. One operated a flouring mill on Pearl Street; another opened a store that sold produce as well as general merchandise. A Crippen named Hattie played the organ at the Methodist church, and still another, Mae, became a principal in the city’s schools. There was a Crippen Building and a Crippen Street.

The town of Coldwater grew rapidly, thanks to its location both on the turnpike and on the main line of the Lake Shore Michigan Southern Railroad, and Chicago Street became the center of commerce in southern Michigan. A man with money strolling the street could buy nearly anything from an array of specialized shops that sold boots, guns, hats, watches, jewelry, and locally made cigars and carriages, for which the town was becoming increasingly famous. The most prestigious industry was horse breeding. One farm cultivated racing horses that achieved fame nationwide, among them Vermont Hero, Hambletonian Wilkes, and the most famous, Green Mountain Black Hawk.

Coldwater was wealthy, and its residents built houses to reflect the fact, studding the town’s core with graceful homes of wood, brick, and stone, many destined to survive into the twenty-first century and transform Coldwater into a mecca for students of Victorian architecture. One early edition of the Coldwater city directory observed, “The pleasant drives and parks shaded perfectly by magnanimous maples, the many miles of well kept walks, the brilliantly lighted streets, the neat and substantial residences, the urban appearing business places all in part go to make up this city so fortunately inhabited with well educated, intelligent and thoughtful people whose actions both publicly and privately are devotedly American.”

Philo Crippen and his wife soon had a son, Myron, who in turn married a woman named Andresse Skinner and eventually took over the family’s dry goods empire, while also serving as tax assessor for the city’s first ward and an agent for a sewing machine company. In 1862 Myron and Andresse had their first child, Hawley Harvey, who arrived in the midst of national tumult. Every day the Coldwater newspapers reported the ebb and flow of shed blood, as the country’s breeders shipped off horses to support the Union effort, in all three thousand horses by the war’s end. The
Coldwater Union Sentinel
of Friday, April 29, 1864, when Hawley Harvey was two years old, cast gloom over the town. “The spring campaign seems to have a bad send off,” the newspaper reported: “—disaster, defeat or retreat has attended thus far every effort of our armies.” Branch County’s young men came back with foreshortened limbs and grotesque scars and told stories of heroic maneuvers and bounding cannonballs. In these times conversation at Philo’s dry goods store did not lack for exuberance and gore.

D
ESPITE THE WAR
H
AWLEY
enjoyed a childhood of privilege. He grew up in a house at 66 North Monroe, one block north of Chicago Street, at the edge of an avenue columned with straight-trunked trees having canopies as dense and green as broccoli. In summer sunlight filtered to the ground and left a paisley of blue shadow that cooled the mind as well as the air.

Sundays were days of quiet. There was no Sunday newspaper. Townspeople crossed paths as they headed for their favored churches. In the heat of summer cicadas clicked off a rhythm of somnolence and piety. Hawley’s grandfather, Philo, was a man of austere mien, which was not unusual in Coldwater among the town’s older set. A photograph taken sometime after 1870 shows a gathering of about twenty of Coldwater’s earliest residents, including Philo himself. It is true that in this time people set their faces hard for photographs, partly from custom, partly because of deficits in photographic technology, but this crowd might not have smiled for the better part of a century. The women seem suspended in a state somewhere between melancholy and fury and are surrounded by old men in strange beards that look as if someone had dabbed glue at random points on their faces, then hurled buckets of white hair in their direction. The day on which this photograph was taken must have been breezy because the longest and strangest beard, stuck on the oldest living citizen, Allen Tibbits, is a white blur resembling a cataract. Grandfather Philo stands in the back row, tall and bald at his summit, with tufts of white hair along the sides of his head and the ridge of his jaw. He has prominent ears, which fate and blood passed downward to Hawley.

A man of strong opinion and Methodist belief, Grandfather Philo exerted on the Crippen clan a force like gravity, suppressing passion and whim whenever he entered the room. He hunted evil in every corner. Once he asked the Methodist council to “prevent the ringing of bells for auctions.” In those days members of the congregation paid the pastor for their seats, with the highest-priced pews in front selling for forty dollars a year. It was an impressive sum—over $400 today—but Philo paid it and made Hawley and other members of the family join him every Sunday. In matters involving the Lord, no expense was too great.

Worship did not end with the pastor’s amen. At home Grandfather Philo read the Bible aloud, with special emphasis on the gloomy fates that awaited sinners, in particular female sinners. Years later Hawley would tell an associate, “The devil took up residence in our household when I was a child, and never left it.”

Somewhere in these three generations a weakening occurred. Grandfather Philo and his brother, Lorenzo, had faces that expressed strength and endurance and over time came to resemble dynamited rock more than human flesh. Two generations later Hawley emerged, pale, small, and myopic, harried now and then by bullies but himself gentle in manner and unscarred by hard work. His childhood progressed at a saunter, his days routine save for widely spaced moments of community excitement, such as the installation in 1866 of a toboggan slide and the fire in 1881 that destroyed Coldwater’s Armory Hall, the town’s only theater. The disaster prompted one of the town’s leading cigar-makers, Barton S. Tibbits, to build a striking new opera house, and soon Coldwater began drawing the likes of James Whitcomb Riley, who read his poetry from the stage, and an array of less high-brow entertainers, including the Haverly’s Minstrels with their “$10,000 Acting Dogs,” various traveling companies hell-bent on performing
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
innumerable mind readers and mediums, and most memorably Duncan Clark’s Lady Minstrels and New Arabian Nights, described by the
Coldwater Republican
as “eight females, scantily dressed”; the
Courier
called it “the vilest show that ever appeared in Coldwater.”