Thunderstruck (7 page)

G
UNFIRE

E
ACH MOMENT MATTERED
. M
ARCONI
shrank the size of his coherer until the space containing the filings was little more than a slit between the two silver plugs. He tried heating the glass tube just before he sealed it so that once the air within cooled and contracted to room temperature it would create a partial vacuum. This by itself caused a marked improvement in the coherer’s sensitivity.

A persistent irritant was the need to tap the coherer to return it to a state where it once again could respond to passing waves. No telegraph system could survive such a laborious and imprecise procedure.

Marconi devised a clapper like that from a bell and inserted it into the receiving circuit. “Every time I sent a train of electric waves,” Marconi wrote, “the clapper touched the tube and so restored the detector at once to its pristine state of sensibility.”

He took his experiments outdoors. He managed to send the Morse letter S, three dots, to a receiver on the lawn in front of the villa. With additional tinkering and tweaking to improve the efficiency of his circuits, he increased his range to several hundred yards. He continued trying new adjustments but could send no farther.

One day, by chance or intuition, Marconi elevated one of the wires of his transmitter on a tall pole, thus creating an antenna longer than anything he previously had constructed. No theory existed that even hinted such a move might be useful. It was simply something he had not yet done and that was therefore worth trying. As it happens, he had stumbled on a means of dramatically increasing the wavelength of the signals he was sending, thus boosting their ability to travel long distances and sweep around obstacles.

“That was when I first saw a great new way open before me,” Marconi said later. “Not a triumph. Triumph was far distant. But I understood in that moment that I was on a good road. My invention had taken life. I had made an important discovery.”

It was a “practician’s” discovery. He had so little grasp of the underlying physics that later he would contend that the waves he now harnessed were not Hertzian waves at all but something different and previously unidentified.

Enlisting the help of his older brother, Alfonso, and some of the estate’s workers, he experimented now with different heights for his antennas and different configurations. He grounded each by embedding a copper plate in the earth. At the top he attached a cube or cylinder of tin. He put Alfonso in charge of the receiver and had him carry it into the fields in front of the house.

He began to see a pattern. Each increase in the height of his antenna seemed to bring with it an increase in distance that was proportionately far greater. A six-foot antenna allowed him to send a signal sixty feet. With a twelve-foot antenna, he sent it three hundred feet. This relationship seemed to have the force of physical law, though at this point even he could not have imagined the extremes to which he would go to test it.

Eventually Marconi sent Alfonso so far out, he had to equip him with a tall pole topped with a handkerchief, which Alfonso waved upon receipt of a signal.

The gain in distance was encouraging. “But,” Marconi said, “I knew my invention would have no importance unless it could make communication possible across natural obstacles like hills and mountains.”

Now it was September 1895, and the moment had come for the most important test thus far.

H
E SAT AT THE WINDOW
of his attic laboratory and watched as his brother and two workers, a farmer named Mignani and a carpenter named Vornelli, set off across the sun-blasted field in front of the house. The carpenter and the farmer carried a receiver and a tall antenna. Alfonso carried a shotgun.

The plan called for the men to climb a distant hill, the Celestine Hill, and continue down the opposite flank until completely out of sight of the house, at which point Marconi was to transmit a signal. The distance was greater than anything he had yet attempted—about fifteen hundred yards—but far more important was the fact that it would be his first try at sending a signal to a receiver out of sight and thus beyond the reach of any existing optical means of communication. If Alfonso received the signal, he was to fire his shotgun.

The attic was hot, as always. Bees snapped past at high velocity and confettied the banks of flowers below. In a nearby grove silver-gray trees stood stippled with olives.

Slowly the figures in the field shrank with distance and began climbing the Celestine Hill. They continued walking and eventually disappeared over its brow, into a haze of gold.

The house was silent, the air hot and still. Marconi pressed the key on his transmitter.

An instant later a gunshot echoed through the sun-blazed air.

At that moment the world changed, though a good deal of time and turmoil would have to pass before anyone was able to appreciate the true meaning of what just had occurred.

E
ASING THE
S
ORE
P
ARTS

D
ESPITE THE
P
ANIC OF
’93, one branch of medicine expanded: the patent medicine industry. The depression may even have driven the industry’s growth, as people who felt they could not afford to pay a doctor decided instead to try healing themselves through the use of home remedies that could be ordered through the mail or bought at a local pharmacy. That the industry was indeed booming was hard to miss. All Crippen had to do was open a newspaper to see dozens of advertisements for elixirs, tonics, tablets, and salves that were said to possess astonishing properties. “Does your head feel as though someone was hammering it; as though a million sparks were flying out of the eyes?” one company asked. “Have you horrible sickness of the stomach? Burdock Blood Bitters will cure you.”

One of the most prominent patent medicine advertisers was the Munyon Homeopathic Home Remedy Co., headquartered in Philadelphia. Photographs and sketched portraits of its founder and owner, Prof. J. M. Munyon, appeared in many of the company’s advertisements and made his face one of the most familiar in America and, increasingly, throughout the world. The Munyon glaring out from company advertisements was about forty, with a scalp thickly forested with dark unruly hair and a forehead so high and broad that the rest of his features seemed pooled by gravity at the bottom of his face. His firm-set mouth anchored an expression of sobriety and determination, as if he had sworn to wipe out illness the world over. “I will guarantee that my Rheumatism Care will relieve lumbago, sciatica and all rheumatic pains in two or three hours, and cure in a few days.” A vial of the stuff could be found, he promised, at “all druggists” for twenty-five cents, and indeed small wooden cabinets produced by his company stood in almost every pharmacy, packed with cures for all manner of ailments but highlighting his most famous product, a hemorrhoid salve called Munyon’s Pile Ointment, “For Piles, blind or bleeding, protruding or internal. Stops Itching almost immediately, allays inflammation and gives ease to sore parts. We recommend it for Fissure, Ulcerations, Cracks and such anal troubles.”

In other advertisements Professor Munyon allied his remedies with the Good Lord himself. Wearing the same stern expression, he thrust his arm toward the heavens and urged readers not simply to buy his products but also to “Heed the Sign of the Cross.” Later, during the Spanish-American War, he would publish sheet music for “Munyon’s Liberty Song,” with photographs of Pres. William McKinley, Adml. George Dewey, and other important officials on the front cover, but a single large photograph of himself on the back, implicitly tying his name to the great men of the age.

In 1894 Crippen applied for a job at Munyon’s New York office, on East Fourteenth Street off Sixth Avenue, at that time one of New York’s wealthier neighborhoods. Something about Crippen appealed to Munyon—his homeopathic credentials, perhaps, or his experience in London treating patients at the world’s best-known lunatic asylum—for he offered him a position and, further, invited Crippen and his wife to live in rooms upstairs from the office.

Crippen accepted. He proved adept at preparing Munyon’s existing line of treatments and at devising formulations for new products. Munyon was impressed. He called Crippen “one of the most intelligent men I ever knew, so proficient I gave him a position readily, nor have I ever regretted it.”

What also impressed him was the gentleness in Crippen’s character. Munyon described him as being “as docile as a kitten.” But Cora was another story. She was, Munyon said, “a giddy woman who worried her husband a great deal.”

He detected in Crippen signs of a deepening unhappiness and attributed it to the behavior of his wife. She engaged other men in conversations of candor and energy, flexing the power of her personality and physical presence. She conveyed appetite. Crippen was growing jealous, and Munyon believed any man would have felt likewise. Munyon’s son, Duke, also noticed. He said, “She liked men other than her husband, which worried the doctor greatly.”

T
WO FOR
L
ONDON

M
ARCONI UNDERSTOOD THAT THE TIME
had come to bring his invention into the world. His first thought, or so legend holds, was to offer it to the Italian government, specifically Italy’s post and telegraph authority, only to have his offer rebuffed. But in a brief memoir, his grandson, Francesco Paresce, challenged this account. “No matter how much one might enjoy this idea or how plausible it might seem in a place like Italy even today, there is actually no hard proof whatsoever that he ever did so.” The legend was too tidy and did not give enough weight to the fact that at twenty-one Marconi possessed the shrewd demeanor of a businessman twice his age. Always tuned to the importance of being first to stake claim to a new idea, Marconi may have had his next step in mind all along.

He resolved to bring his invention to London. It was the center of the world, yes, but also the locus of a patent system that granted broad rights to whomever was first to apply for them, not necessarily the inventor or discoverer of the underlying technology.

Marconi’s mother endorsed Marconi’s plans and persuaded her husband that the journey was necessary. In February 1896 mother and son left for London, Marconi carrying a locked box containing his apparatus. He wore a deerstalker cap of the kind that later would be identified with Sherlock Holmes.

On his arrival in England the alert agents of the customs house immediately confiscated his equipment, fearing it was a bomb or other device capable of placing the queen at risk.

In the course of their inspection they destroyed the apparatus.

A
T
M
UNYON’S
, C
RIPPEN PROSPERED
. His career advanced quickly. After a few months in New York he was transferred to Philadelphia, where he and Cora lived for about a year. Next Professor Munyon sent him to Toronto, to manage the company’s office there. He and Cora stayed for six months, then returned to Philadelphia.

All this was good for Crippen’s career, but Cora grew restive. She had spent the better part of a decade married to Crippen and still was no closer to her dream of becoming a diva. She told Crippen she wanted to renew her studies of opera. She wanted only the best and insisted on going to New York.

Ever indulgent, Crippen agreed to pay for an apartment and all her expenses. By this time Professor Munyon was paying him well. Patent medicine was a lucrative field, and money flowed into the company in a torrent. Crippen could afford the cost of Cora’s lessons and her life in New York. What made him uneasy was the prospect of her living alone, without his presence to keep her from associating with other men. Subsequent events suggest that for Cora such freedom may in fact have been as important as the caliber of her song masters.

In 1897 Munyon assigned Crippen his biggest responsibility yet, to take over management of the company’s London office. Munyon proposed to pay him $10,000 a year, an astonishing sum equivalent to about $220,000 in twenty-first-century dollars, and paid in an era when federal income tax did not exist. Crippen told Cora the news, expecting that she would find a move to London an irresistible prospect.

He was wrong. She complained that she could not give up her lessons and told him he would have to go alone, that she would join him later. On the question of when, she was disconcertingly vague.

As always he assented, though now an ocean would separate them and her freedom would be complete.

Full of sorrow and unease, the little doctor sailed to England. It was April 1897. Intent on establishing permanent residence, he brought all his belongings, including supplies of his favored poisons.

He arrived without challenge.

I
N
L
ONDON,
C
RIPPEN AND
M
ARCONI
both entered a realm of unaccustomed anxiety. Outwardly the stones of empire remained in place, snug and solid and suitably grimed, but there existed in certain quarters a perception that the world was growing unruly and that Britain and her increasingly frail queen had seen their best days.

London was still the biggest, most powerful city in the world. Its four and a half million people inhabited 8,000 streets, many only a block long, and did their drinking in 7,500 public houses and rode in 11,000 cabs pulled by 20,000 horses, the cab population divided among four-wheeled “growlers” and two-wheeled hansoms, named not for their appearance, which was indeed handsome, but rather for their inventor, Joseph Hansom. Crippen joined an estimated 15,000 of his countrymen already living in London, which number by coincidence equaled the total of known lunatics residing within the city’s five asylums. Most important, London formed the seat of an empire that controlled one-quarter of the world’s population and one-quarter of its land.

Cab whistles screamed for attention, one blast to summon a growler, two for a hansom. Horse-drawn omnibuses clotted the streets. The buses had two levels, with open-air “garden seating” on top, reached by a stairwell spiraling in a manner that allowed ladies to ascend without concern. Motorcars, or simply “motors,” added a fresh layer of noise and stench and danger. In 1896 their increasing use forced repeal of a law that had limited speed to a maximum of two miles per hour and required a footman to walk ahead carrying a red flag. The new Locomotives (on Highways) Act raised the speed limit to fourteen and, wisely, did away with the footmen. Underneath the city there was hell in motion. Passengers descending to the subterranean railways encountered a seismic roar produced by too much smoke, too much steam, and too much noise packed into too small an enclosure, the Tube, into which the trains fit as snugly as pistons in a cylinder.

There was fog, yes, often days of it on end, and with a depth so profound as to classify it as a species distinct from the fogs of elsewhere. Londoners nicknamed these fits of opacity “London particulars.” The fog came thick and sulfurous and squeezed the flare of gas lamps to cats’ eyes of amber that left the streets so dark and sinister that children of the poor hired themselves out as torchbearers to light the way for men and women bent on walking the city’s darker passages. The light formed around the walkers a shifting wall of gauze, through which other pedestrians appeared with the suddenness of ghosts. On some nights the eeriness was particularly acute, especially after an evening of engaging in what had become a common pastime, the holding of séances. The walk home afterward could be a long one, suffused with sorrow and grief and marked by the occasional glance behind.

This turn toward the veil was largely Darwin’s fault. By reducing the rise of man to a process that had more to do with accident than with God, his theories had caused a shock to the faith of late Victorian England. The yawning void of this new “Darwinian darkness,” as one writer put it, caused some to embrace science as their new religion but turned many others into the arms of Spiritualism and set them seeking concrete proof of an afterlife in the shifting planchettes of Ouija boards. In the mid-1890s Britain had 150 Spiritualist societies; by 1908 there would be nearly 400. Queen Victoria herself was rumored to have consulted often with a medium who claimed to be in touch with her dear dead husband, Albert, the prince consort.

There were other signs that the confidence and contentment that had suffused Britain under the queen were beginning ever so slightly to erode. Britain’s birthrate was falling rapidly. The Panic of ’93 had rattled the princes of industry. Britain and France seemed on the verge of war, though in fact events under way in Germany, as yet largely unnoticed by the public, soon would refocus the nation’s attention and bring an end to its long-standing policy of “splendid isolation,” rooted in the perception that because of its military and economic power the empire needed no alliances.

Unsettling, too, was the rising clamor from suffragists seeking the vote for women. The hostility that greeted the movement masked a deeper fear of an upwelling of sexual passion and power. It was kept quiet, but illicit sex occurred everywhere, at every level of society. It was on people’s minds and in their hearts; it took place in back alleys and in elegant canopied beds at country homes. The new scientists of the mind studied sex, and in keeping with the revolution ushered in by Darwin, they sought to reduce it to sequences of stimuli and adaptive needs. Starting in 1897, Henry Havelock Ellis devoted six volumes to it: his pioneering
Studies in the Psychology of Sex,
sprinkled with case studies of unexpected explicitness and perversity. One memorable phrase from volume four,
Sexual Selection in Man:
“the contact of a dog’s tongue with her mouth alone afterward sufficed to evoke sexual pleasure.”

There existed, too, a rising consciousness of poverty and of the widening difference between how the rich and the poor lived. The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire owned an estate, Chatsworth, so large it could house more than four hundred weekend guests and the squads of servants that accompanied them. The wealthy served meals of extravagance, recalled J. B. Priestley, “probably including, if the chef were up to it, one of those quasi-Roman idiocies, in which birds of varying sizes were cooked one inside the other like nests of Oriental boxes.” Barbara Tuchman, in
The Proud Tower,
recounted how at one luncheon at the Savoy Hotel for the diva Nellie Melba, guests enjoyed a dessert of fresh peaches, then “made a game of throwing them at passers-by beneath the windows.”

With this new awareness of the great rift between rich and poor came the fear that extremists would seek to exploit class divisions and set Britain tumbling toward revolution. Anarchism had flamed into violence throughout Europe, often with an Italian holding the match. In late 1892 Scotland Yard arrested two Italians who confessed to planning to blow up the Royal Stock Exchange. The aptly named Errico Malatesta—literally, “evil headed”—preached revolution throughout Europe and found a willing audience. On June 24, 1894, a young Italian baker, Sante Caserio, attacked the president of France, Sadi Carnot, with a newly bought dagger and stabbed him to death. A bomb exploded in posh Mayfair but hurt no one. Many in England feared that worse was yet to come and blamed the unrest on policies that allowed too many foreigners to seek refuge within the nation’s borders. There were so many French anarchists in London that one, Charles Malato, published a guide with information about how to avoid the police, including a brief dictionary of useful phrases, among them
“Je vous tirerai le nez,”
meaning “I will pull your nose.”

But these fears and pressures existed as a background tremolo, audible mainly to the writers, journalists, and reformers who made it their business to listen. Otherwise Britons had much to be pleased with. Though the murder rate was up, overall crime was on the wane. The Metropolitan Police, known more commonly as Scotland Yard, had grown larger and moved to new headquarters at Whitehall on the Victoria Embankment, on the north bank of the Thames. The building and the department became known as
New
Scotland Yard. The new location at first proved a bit problematic, albeit appropriately so. While excavating its foundation, in the midst of the terror raised by Jack the Ripper, workers had found the torso of a woman, without head, arms, or legs, triggering fears that this too had been Jack’s work. The story got grislier still. A police surgeon tried fitting the torso to a severed arm, with armpit, that had been retrieved from the Thames several weeks earlier. It fit. Next, a reporter used a dog to search the excavation and turned up a left leg. This too fit. Soon afterward a second leg was fished from the Thames.