Thunderstruck

“He had stepped into the intersection of two wildly disparate stories, whose collision on his ship in this time, the end of the Edwardian era, would exert influence on the world for the century to come.”

Once Captain Kendall informs the world via wireless that the two most wanted fugitives on the planet are aboard his ship, he is propelled to the front of every news story about the attempted escape. The story of Marconi attempting to lend credit to his invention and the practical uses for it could never have achieved what the public’s fixation on escaping murderers did when Kendall used the wireless to keep the world updated about the murderers aboard his ship. The Western world seemed to be watching the criminals in real time, aware of the trap to capture them and eager for every detail wired as quickly as possible. Kendall’s use of the wireless solidified Marconi’s technology in the mainstream and made the capture of the murderer and his girlfriend possible.

“Whenever his scientific research threatened to lead to a breakthrough, he wrote, ‘I became afflicted with a kind of excitement which caused me to pause and not pursue that path to the luminous end…It is an odd feeling, and has been the cause of my not clinching many subjects, not following up the path on which I had set my feet.’”

Larson opens Marconi’s story with Oliver Lodge in 1894. Lodge is a scientist who demonstrated the power of Hertz’s waves for the transmission of simple messages well before Marconi. Both Lodge and Larson lament that Lodge becomes afflicted with distractions, losing focus on projects of importance, like the device he invented and demonstrated in 1894 that proved waves could be used without wires to transmit messages. Larson goes into detail on how Lodge became distracted by a fascination with the occult, especially convinced that it was possible to speak to the dead.

“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.”

To explain Oliver Lodge’s fixation with the occult, and especially his focus on attempting to confirm the possibility that the dead communicate with the living, Larson explains that it was Darwin who originally brought about a rise in Spiritualism. This fixation on Spiritualism distracts Lodge from his work with electromagnetic waves. If he had not focused on pursuing this line of inquiry, Larson speculates that Lodge would have beaten Marconi to dominate the practical markets of wireless communication.

“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.”

Throughout the book, Larson alleges that xenophobia was a chief cause among the English for their distrust and dislike of the Italian inventor Marconi. Already, terror attacks attributed to Italians were striking Londoners with fear as anarchists attempted to wrest security from a wary population at the end of Queen Victoria’s rule. Many saw the drastic increase in immigrants to the area as an explanation for increased crime rates.

“Marconi was an inventor, an amateur, hardly even an adult, yet he had bested some of the great scientific minds of the age. Lodge had said that half a mile was probably the farthest that electromagnetic waves could travel, yet Marconi claimed to have sent signals more than twice as far and now, in Preece’s office, forecast transmissions to much greater distances with a confidence Preece found convincing.”

Although Marconi is young, a foreigner, and untested, William Preece of the British Post Office takes him under his mentorship and allows Marconi to use his facilities and staff for his inventions. Preece believes Marconi to be a source of great future potential, though very few would agree. Larson depicts Preece as a visionary, albeit one who believed his mentorship of Marconi would result in loyalty to himself, Britain, and the Post Office, which it did not. Marconi’s betrayal of Preece is depicted as one based on greed.

“Though the maximum distance so far had been only thirty-two miles, what Marconi now proposed was to transmit messages across the full breadth of the Atlantic.”

To highlight the extent of Marconi’s vision at the time, Larson is careful to explain the leap in technological capabilities Marconi proposed when he asked John Ambrose Fleming to join his team as an advisor. Later, Fleming would prove instrumental in constructing the towers necessary to transmit long waves for communication, an endeavor Marconi would eventually abandon in favor of focusing on short waves.

“The post gave Belle the kind of recognition she never got on stage. Her peers liked her and her unquenchable good spirits. Meetings were held every Wednesday afternoon, and Belle attended every one. Close friendships blossomed—close enough, certainly, that her friends knew about and had seen, even touched, the scar on her abdomen.”

Eventually several of the Ladies’ Guild members will be responsible for bringing her disappearance to the attention of New Scotland Yard. After her remains are found and inspected, it is the Ladies’ Guild that takes possession of Belle’s remains and ensures they are properly buried. Belle’s work with the guild revealed a woman of two faces: one, a controlling woman intent on torturing her compliant husband, and another, a friendly woman engaged in her work and loved by her peers.

“The article prompted J.P. Morgan to invite Tesla to his home, where Tesla revealed his idea for a ‘world system’ of wireless that would transmit far more than just Morse code. ‘We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly irrespective of distance,’ Tesla wrote in the Century article.”

Tesla was, at the time, one of the most famous American inventors and his views were respected, though skeptics abounded. In an issue of The Century Magazine in June 1900, Tesla explained that not only was wireless communication possible, but he had proven it independently in his lab in Colorado Springs. He had also, he said, proved that it was possible to harness as much energy in the form of electricity as a lightning strike. This news was encouraging to Marconi and his board, who viewed Tesla’s article as further proof of the viability of the technology. The board approved funding for Marconi’s two massive stations.

“Hicks felt sympathy for Crippen. Looking back from the darkling year 1939, knowing by then all that had come to pass, Hicks mused, ‘Miserably unhappy, he would not have been human if he had not sought consolation elsewhere.’”

Seymour Hicks, a performer who knew Crippen through his affiliation with the Ladies’ Guild, spent time with Crippen during his years of marriage to Belle in London. Hicks was gentle with Crippen in his writings, feeling sympathy and pity for a man he saw as tortured by an overbearing wife and ill-suited to the life she made him endure. Characterizations like this were common about Crippen, who garnered pity and sympathy up until his last days.

“‘At first there will be increased slaughter—increased slaughter on so terrible a scale as to render it impossible to get troops to push the battle to a decisive issue.’ At the onset of hostilities armies would try to fight under the old rules of warfare but quickly would find them no longer applicable.”

Written by Ivan S. Bloch in 1900, the idea that a coming war in Europe would bring untold misery and defy traditional warfare was predicted over a decade before war was to break out between Germany and Britain. He predicted a “great War of entrenchments” (161), and soon after, Queen Victoria’s passing brought little relief from the anxiety an impending war brought. It is against this backdrop that Marconi, a foreigner and thus distrusted by a growingly insular Britain, was hoping to gain favor, investors, and public support for his device.

“Only years later would anyone take note of how strange it was that the second officer of the Lake Champlain at this pioneering moment was a young sailor by the name of Henry Kendall.”

Henry Kendall was the second officer on the Lake Champlain, the first of many British ships to install wireless. It was on this voyage that the Lucania was able to send a wireless message to Lake Champlain, the first at-sea transmission. Later, it would be Henry Kendall who used Marconi’s wireless to inform the world that Dr. Crippen was aboard the Montrose.

“Outwardly, the Crippens seemed to have an idyllic marriage. Neighbors in the houses on either side and in the back reported often seeing the couple at work together in the garden, and that Belle often sang.”

There was little reason for friends and neighbors to suspect that Dr. Crippen would eventually murder and dismember his wife, Belle. Among her friends, Belle was liked and respected. To the neighbors, nothing seemed amiss. It was only among Crippen’s closest friends and allies that the nature of their marriage was known. In hindsight, many aspects of their marriage were explored in detail by all who knew them, concluding that she was cruel and demanding while he was placid and consolatory.

“For reasons that remain unclear, Marconi had excluded Fleming from the very thing that he had hired him to achieve. It may simply have been an oversight, owing to the turmoil raised by the destruction of the stations at Poldhu and South Wellfleet. It may, however, have been another example of Marconi’s periodic lapse into social blindness with its attendant disregard for the needs of others.”

Again, Larson points out Marconi’s habit of failing to value his allies, thus converting them unwittingly into foes. Fleming would go on to receive little credit for his work designing the towers that Marconi needed for his experiments. In anger, he would eventually claim Oliver Lodge as the rightful inventor of wireless and abandon all loyalty to Marconi, who he felt never valued him or his contributions.

“‘Kemp heard the same thing as I,’ Marconi wrote, ‘and I knew then that I had been absolutely right in my calculation. The electric waves which were being sent out from Poldhu had traversed the Atlantic, serenely ignoring the curvature of the earth which so many doubters considered would be a fatal obstacle, and they were now affecting my recover in Newfoundland.’”

One of the chief concerns of Marconi’s attempts to transmit across the Atlantic was the assertion that waves moved in straight lines and thus, given the curvature of the Earth, would fail to reach their intended targets and instead shoot away from the surface of the Earth in a straight line. Although he did not understand how or why, Marconi proved that waves bent with the Earth’s curvature.

“Once again he had failed to provide an independent witness to observe and confirm his tests. Moreover, in choosing to listen for the signals with a telephone receiver instead of recording their receipt automatically with his usual Morse inker, he had eliminated the one bit of physical evidence—the tapes from the inker— that could have corroborated his account.”

Marconi faces challenges to his credibility and to the reliability of his claims regarding his invention. He refuses to demonstrate how his device works and obscures the machines in boxes when other scientists and observers are present. He believes his invention will be adopted and perfected by others before he can achieve his aims, and as such takes extensive steps to protect his invention, to the point that many view him as a fraud. Coupled with rising xenophobia in Britain, Marconi’s list of skeptics grows even as his unverified achievements mount.

“With each day that Belle did not return, Ethel Le Neve found her confidence growing. She began wearing the jewelry Crippen had given her and allowed herself to be seen with him on the street, at the theater, and at restaurants.”

The Ladies’ Guild members likely would not have pursued Dr. Crippen for further information about Belle’s disappearance had they not seen Le Neve on Crippen’s arm so soon after Belle’s death was announced and had they not seen Le Neve wearing Belle’s jewelry. These rash actions on Crippen and Le Neve’s parts eventually resulted in the guild pursuing police involvement into Belle’s departure. It was the impropriety of Crippen’s affection for Le Neve that was his undoing.

“‘I doubt this story,” Thomas Edison told the Associated Press. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said.”

In London and across the Western world, skeptics plague Marconi after his Newfoundland experiment is announced as a success, albeit without any proof to the claim. Marconi, who knew his experiments pushed the bounds of what was believed possible, failed to provide a witness or proof of his claims and lost credibility as a result, especially in London where Oliver Lodge and Preece, among other of Marconi’s foes, were busy fanning the flames of doubt.

“He had discovered that during daylight hours, once the ship was more than seven hundred miles out, it receive no signals at all, though reception resumed after dark. He called this the ‘daylight effect.’”

Again, Marconi becomes aware of physical phenomena around him that he cannot explain. As with his assumption that Hertz waves would bend with the atmosphere, which he proved to be true without understanding how or why, Marconi is the first to recognize and name the daylight effect, which distorts Hertzian rays. Marconi goes on to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, though he admits he does not understand the phenomena with which he works.

“Crippen said, ‘I suppose I had better tell the truth.’ ‘Yes,’ Dew said, ‘I think that would be best.’ Crippen said, ‘The stories I have told about her death are unsure. As far as I know she is still alive.’”

Once confronted by Chief Inspector Dew, Dr. Crippen reveals that he made up Belle’s death to avoid scandal and save their reputations among their elite and well-connected friends in London. He claims to have done this at Belle’s request after she fled for America after many years of threatening divorce. Dew finds this line of reasoning believable and even pities Crippen. It is not until much later that Dew realizes Crippen has lied again.

“Harvey—not Peter. It raised the possibility that Peter was a name appended at Belle’s Whim; that she had not only dressed Crippen but named him as well.”

Belle, who had changed her name from Cora Crippen upon arrival in London, had introduced Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen as Peter. Among her friends and their joint friends, he was known as Peter Crippen. This appears to have been a name she gave him, along with his attire and details about his role as provider and spouse to a woman like Belle. It was only after Belle was gone that Le Neve referred to him as Harvey rather than the name he has used since Belle arrived in London, Peter.

“Slowly, through great effort and endless experimentation, Marconi forced his transatlantic service into operation, despite foul weather and frequent malfunctions and in the face of competition that seemed to grow more effective and aggressive by the day.”

Marconi’s belief that transatlantic, instant wireless communication was possible is finally realized, against all odds. His persistence has cost him friends, wives, children, and allies and earned him skepticism, enemies, and a small fortune. Although the service was slow and problematic in 1908, the groundwork was laid for Marconi’s eventual success.

“Have strong suspicions that Crippen London Cellar Murderer and accomplice are amongst saloon passengers. Mustache taken off growing beard. Accomplice dressed as boy voice manner and build undoubtedly a girl. Both traveling as Mr. And Master Robinson. Kendall.”

The message Captain Kendall sends through his Marconi is scrutinized by all who intercept it and eventually by Dew himself, who finds Kendall’s account credible. The message is read widely, and Kendell becomes an overnight sensation for his discovery of the fugitives aboard the Montrose. Although he did not get a response for several days, Kendall hopes his transmission would result in intervention and took steps to keep Crippen and Le Neve occupied and distracted during their crossing.

“Crippen had made a serious error, Priestley wrote: ‘he had forgotten, if he ever knew, what Marconi had done for the world, which was now rapidly shrinking.’”

Journalist J.B. Priestly explained that while Crippen was oblivious to the manhunt underway, the public was watching events unfold in real-time through the wireless. Priestly rightly understood that the story was as much about how technology foiled the murderer’s escape as it was about the murderer himself. He titled his piece “Trapped by Wireless.”