Thunderstruck (14 page)

On Christmas Day, after Kemp and crew “managed to get over our Christmas dinner,” a gale arose and the ship began to rise and plunge. Moored to the sea floor, it could not maneuver the way an ordinary ship could. “It was very miserable onboard,” Kemp wrote, especially when the wind and tide conspired to hold the lightship broadside to the waves.

Over the next two days the sea continued to overwash the lightship. Water sluiced down hatchways. Kemp continued signaling. “Everything between decks was as wet as those on deck,” he wrote on December 27.

The next day brought more of the same: “The weather was still bad and I told them at the Foreland that I was feeling ill, but I managed to send the 3 c.m. spark.” Despite the increasingly awful conditions, Kemp recorded “splendid results,” though it is hard to imagine how he achieved anything. “The waves were still breaking over the ship and I could not get on deck for fresh air. I was very cold, wet and miserable and had very little sleep.”

By December 30 even stalwart Kemp began to crack. Conditions were so dangerous he could not venture topside for air. He used the ship’s wireless to send a message of his own. “I told Mr. Marconi that I was not well enough to remain on board any longer and he must send for me when the wind dropped…. I told him that we wanted fresh meat, vegetables, bread and bacon but this was taken, it appeared, as a joke. The fact that I had come on board on Dec. 19, with provisions for one week had evidently been forgotten, also that I had been on board for 12 days living, the latter part, on quarter rations, consequently I had to beg, borrow and steal from the Lightshipmen.”

New Year’s Day 1899, his fourteenth day aboard, was cold and wet, with high seas, high winds, heavy rain. The next day he wrote, “I was so stiff and weak that I could scarcely move.”

But at last, on January 4, the weather eased and became “quite calm.” Supplies arrived for Kemp, “some mutton, a fowl, 2 bottles of Claret, 2 loaves, potatoes, a cabbage, sprouts and fruit.” He added, with an underline for emphasis, “
Had some good fresh food after 17 days
.”

Four months later the lightship’s wireless provided a vivid demonstration of what Marconi long had hoped his technology would accomplish. In April, after heavy fog settled over the Goodwin Sands, a steamship named
R. F. Mathews,
270 feet long and displacing nearly two thousand tons and carrying coal, yes, from Newcastle, rammed the lightship. The crew used Marconi’s wireless transmitter to notify Trinity House and Lloyd’s of the accident. Damage to both ships was minimal, and no one on either vessel was hurt.

D
ESPITE THIS AND OTHER SUCCESSES,
including the first messages sent by wireless across the English Channel, the year 1899 proved a barren one for Marconi and his company, with no revenue from his invention and no prospect of any. Trinity House had been impressed with the Goodwin experiments but did not come forth with a contract. Nor did Lloyd’s of London, though its representatives had been pleased with the Rathlin Island experiment and likely would have kept the system in operation if William Preece, citing the postal monopoly over telegraphy in Britain, had not stepped in and shut it down and replaced it with one of his own induction systems. Meanwhile the wall of skepticism that confronted Marconi seemed just as high and unbreachable as ever. Suspicion persisted about his motives and heritage and about the nature of the phenomena he had harnessed and its potential dangers. Rumor spread that wireless could be used to blow up warships.

In some people suspicion became outright fear, as evidenced by an incident that occurred at the station Marconi had built in France for his cross-channel experiments. The station was at Wimereux on the French coast, thirty-two miles across the English Channel from the South Foreland station that Marconi had erected for the lightship trials.

Anyone passing near the operator’s room at night saw pulses of blue lightning and heard the loud crack of each spark, an eerie and disconcerting effect, especially on nights dusted with sea mist when the spark-light flared as a pale aurora. Inside, the juxtaposition of Marconi’s apparatus against the decor of the room made things still more odd. The wallpaper and the rug and the tablecloth under the machine were all printed, dyed, or stitched with garish flowers.

One night, during a storm, an engineer named W. W. Bradfield was sitting at the Wimereux transmitter, when suddenly the door to the room crashed open. In the portal stood a man disheveled by the storm and apparently experiencing some form of internal agony. He blamed the transmissions and shouted that they must stop. The revolver in his hand imparted a certain added gravity.

Bradfield responded with the calm of a watchmaker. He told the intruder he understood his problem and that his experience was not unusual. He was in luck, however, Bradfield said, for he had “come to the only man alive who could cure him.” This would require an “electrical inoculation,” after which, Bradfield promised, he “would be immune to electro-magnetic waves for the rest of his life.”

The man consented. Bradfield instructed him that for his own safety he must first remove from his person anything made of metal, including coins, timepieces, and of course the revolver in his hand. The intruder obliged, at which point Bradfield gave him a potent electrical shock, not so powerful as to kill him, but certainly enough to command his attention.

The man left, convinced that he was indeed cured.

M
ARCONI’S COMPETITORS FACED
the same steadfast reluctance of the world to embrace wireless, but they nonetheless stepped up their own work. In America a new man, Reginald Fessenden, began drawing attention, and in France an inventor named Eugene Ducretet made news by transmitting messages from the Eiffel Tower in Paris to the Panthéon in the city’s Latin Quarter. In Germany Slaby appeared to have joined forces with fellow countrymen Count Georg von Arco and Karl Ferdinand Braun, physicists also experimenting with wireless. Closer to home Nevil Maskelyne, the magician who ran the Egyptian Hall, caused a stir when he placed a transmitter of his own design in a balloon and used it to ignite explosives on the ground below. And a newly roused Lodge, temporarily setting aside his hostility to the commercialization of science, began acting less like an academic and more like a man bent on establishing a business of his own. There were others working in the field as well, their progress revealed only in bits and pieces in the electrical press. No one doubted that even more contenders would emerge.

The race to build the first useful system of wireless telegraphy—the race, really, for distance—was well under way. Someone had to win, and timidity would not be an asset. It became clear to Marconi that he needed a demonstration grander and more daring than anything he so far had attempted. For several months he had been mulling an idea that would have fit well into a novel by H. G. Wells but that he knew was likely to spark nightmares, if not apoplexy, among his board of directors.

“W
ERE
Y
OU
H
ER
L
OVER
, S
IR
?”

I
N TIME THE PRECISE CHARACTER
of the relationship between Bruce Miller and Crippen’s wife would become a subject of interest to Scotland Yard and lead eventually to an interrogation by a barrister named Alfred A. Tobin, one of London’s small cadre of impossibly articulate and learned lawyers who conducted the in-court portions of civil and criminal cases. Sometimes barristers served as prosecutors, assigned to trials by the director of public prosecutions; the rest of their cases came to them through a second tier of attorneys known as solicitors. The location of Miller’s interrogation was the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court. The subject: his letters to Belle Elmore.

“Were you writing to her as a lover?”

Miller: “No.”

“Were you fond of her?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever tell her that you loved her?”

“Well, I do not know that I ever put it in that way.”

“Did you indicate to her that you did love her?”

“She always understood it that way, I suppose.”

“Then you did love her, I presume?”

“I do not mean to say that. I did not exactly love her; I thought a great deal of her as far as friendship was concerned. She was a married lady, and we will let it end at that. It was a platonic friendship….”

“Do you know the difference between friendship and love?”

“Yes.”

“Were you more than a friend?”

“I could not be more than a friend. She was a married lady and I was a married man.”

“Were you more than a friend, sir?”

“I could not be more than a friend—I was not.”

The presiding judge, Lord Chief Justice Alverstone, now joined in: “Answer the question whether you were or were not?”

“I was not more than a friend.”

“Were there any improper relations between you?”

“No.”

Now Tobin again:

“Did you ever write love letters to her?”

“I have written to her very nice letters perhaps.”

“You know what a love letter is. Did you ever write a love letter to her?”

“Well, I do not remember that I ever put it just in that way. I often wrote to her very friendly letters; I might say they were affectionate letters.”

“Then you wrote affectionate letters to her. Did you write love letters to her?”

“Affectionate letters.”

“Ending ‘Love and kisses to Brown Eyes’?”

“I have done so.”

“Now, sir, do you think those are proper letters to write to a married woman?”

“Under the circumstances, yes….”

“Do you agree now that those letters were most important letters to write to a married woman during her husband’s absence?”

“I do not think they were, under the circumstances.”

“Were you her lover, sir?”

“I was not.”

“Have you been to any house in London with her for the purpose of illicit relationship?”

“I have not.”

“Bloomsbury Street?”

“No place.”

“Have you ever kissed her?”

“I have.”

“Never done anything more than kiss her?”

“That is all.”

“Why did you stop at that?”

“Because I always treated her as a gentleman, and never went any further.”

The interrogation did nothing to clarify the relationship.

F
LEMING

O
NE OF THE EARLIEST MESSAGES
Marconi sent across the English Channel was a brief telegram transmitted from his French station at Wimereux to the South Foreland station, where one of his men took it to an office of the post office telegraphs for relay by conventional land line to London. A messenger boy carried it to University College in Bloomsbury, near the British Museum, and there the telegram made its way to its intended recipient, John Ambrose Fleming, a professor of electrical engineering and friend of Oliver Lodge. On the date of the telegram, March 28, 1899, Fleming was forty-nine years old and possessed a degree of public fame and academic prominence just shy of what Lodge possessed. He was an expert in the amplification and distribution of electrical power.

The telegram read, simply,

Glad to send you greetings

conveyed by electric waves through

the ether from Boulogne

to South Foreland twenty-eight

miles [and] thence by

postal telegraphs Marconi

Though it seemed the most neutral of greetings, in fact it marked the start of Marconi’s next attempt at seduction, and his most important, as future events would show.

Marconi recognized that with no revenue and no contracts and in the face of persistent skepticism, he needed more than ever to capture an ally of prominence and credibility. Through Fleming, however, Marconi also hoped to gain a benefit more tangible. His new idea, the feat he hoped would command the world’s attention once and for all, would require more power and involve greater danger, physical and fiscal, than anything he had attempted before.

When it came to high-power engineering, he knew, Fleming was the man to consult.

U
NLIKE
L
ODGE OR
K
ELVIN
, Fleming was susceptible to flattery and needful of attention, as evidenced by the fact that upon receiving Marconi’s telegram he made sure the London
Times
got a copy of it.
The Times
published it, as part of its coverage of Marconi’s English Channel success. Next Fleming visited Marconi’s station at South Foreland. He was deeply impressed, so much so that he wrote a long letter to
The Times
praising Marconi and his technology and acknowledging how the inventor had removed wireless from “the region of uncertain delicate laboratory experiments.” Now, he wrote, it was a practical system marked by “certainty of action and ease of manipulation.”

For Marconi, the letter was an affirmation of his strategy to gain credibility by refraction. Oliver Lodge too recognized that Fleming’s letter had bestowed upon Marconi a new respectability and saw it as an act of betrayal. He wrote to Fleming, “My attention has been called to a letter of yours in the Times, in which it is suggested that you are attacking me and other scientific men who retain some jealousy for the memory of Hertz.” He called the letter an “indictment against men of science” and asked Fleming for an explanation.

Fleming bristled. “I made no attack on you or any other scientific men in my letter to the Times,” he replied. “I called attention to certain important achievements which in the public interest I thought should be noticed and described.” He wrote that he was simply raising a point acknowledged by others, “that the time had arrived for a little more generous recognition of Signor Marconi’s work as an original inventor. That after all is a matter on which different views may be held and if you dissent from it you are quite entitled to your opinion.”

Soon afterward Marconi asked Fleming to become scientific adviser to his company. On May 2, 1899, Fleming wrote to Jameson Davis to set out certain conditions and to define “my position and views a little carefully.”

If Jameson Davis cringed at this sentence, fearing a reprise of Lord Kelvin’s qualms, he was soon reassured. Fleming wrote: “I have a strong conviction of the commercial possibilities of Mr. Marconi’s inventions apart from their scientific interest provided they are properly handled. I should desire to see a genuine business of a solid character built up.” He added a paragraph that later events would show to be in contradiction to elements of his character, especially his own deep need for recognition. Fleming wrote, “All that a scientific adviser does in the way of invention, suggestion or advice should be the sole property of those retaining him so far as their own affairs are concerned. I have noticed that any other course invariably leads sooner or later to difficulties and perhaps disputes.”

Fleming agreed to work under a one-year contract, renewable at each party’s discretion, for a fee of £300 a year. For the moment it seemed generous.

Now, Marconi revealed to him the nature of the grand experiment that had begun to occupy his thoughts. It would require two gigantic wireless stations and demand the production of more electrical energy than anything Marconi previously had attempted.

Though his 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.