by Erik Larson
STRANGE DOINGS
THE ILE ROUBAUD STOOD AMONG a group of small islands in the Mediterranean, off the coast of France, and had only two houses, one occupied by a lighthouse keeper, the other, at the opposite side of the island, by a scientist named Charles Richet, a physiologist who a decade later would win the Nobel Prize for his discovery of anaphylaxis, the extreme reaction ignited in some people by bee stings, peanuts, and other triggering agents. The house served him primarily as an escape from the heat of the mainland, but now even the island was hot. The month, August 1894, would be remembered long afterward for the exceptional temperatures it brought throughout Europe. Those gathered at Richet’s house, however, quickly found themselves distracted by a series of events that would have sent any ordinary mortal rowing for the mainland.
The evening was clear, the air hot and still and scented with brine. Oliver Lodge, Richet, and two others—a man and a woman—collected in the dining room of the house, while a fifth member of the party sat outside in the yard just below a window, notebook in hand, to record observations called to him from inside. Curtains of a sheer, ethereal material framed the window but did not move, testimony to the heat and the lack of breeze.
The woman was an Italian named Eusapia Palladino, and she now took a seat at the table in the center of the room. The men placed a device under her feet that would sound an alarm if either foot lost contact. To prevent her from simply using one foot “to do the duty of two,” as Lodge put it, the men installed a screen around each. They extinguished lamps until the room became darker than the night outside, the windows rectangles of soft blue light.
Richet took a seat on one side of Palladino. Another man, a friend of Lodge’s, sat at Palladino’s other side. He was Frederic W. H. Myers, a poet and school inspector and one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research. Myers had coauthored for the society a catalog of reports of ghostly and telepathic doings called Phantasms of the Living, published in 1886 in two large volumes containing what the authors believed to be dispassionate analysis of seven hundred incidents. This had led Myers and several fellow members to produce a “Census of Hallucinations,” for which 410 people around the world distributed a survey which began: “Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice; which impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external physical cause?” Twelve percent of the women surveyed and 7.8 percent of the men answered yes. The authors concluded, “Between deaths and the apparitions of dying persons a connection exists which is not due to chance alone. This we hold as a proved fact.”
Now, in the darkened dining room of Richet’s summer house, Lodge walked to the table and stood behind Eusapia Palladino. Richet took her right hand, Myers her left. Lodge placed his hands on opposite sides of her head and held fast.
PALLADINO WAS FORTY YEARS OLD. By most accounts, she was illiterate, or nearly so. She claimed that she had been an orphan for much of her childhood—that her mother had died giving her birth and that when she was twelve her father had been murdered by bandits. She then went to live with a family in Naples and earned her keep doing laundry. The family had a Spiritualist bent and in the evening often convened séances, inviting Eusapia to participate. At one such gathering the family learned in a vivid way that there was more to Eusapia than met the eye. As the séance progressed, furniture began to move.
Word of Palladino’s alleged gift spread quickly, and soon she found herself in demand. In the lexicon of paranormal research, she was a “physical” medium as opposed to a trance medium. Trance mediums served merely as a kind of telephone to the beyond. Physical mediums also entered trances but then busied themselves conjuring forces that squeezed hands, touched faces, and moved furniture. During sittings by both types a psychical entity known as a “control” was said to guide communication with those beyond the veil.
Palladino had the right powers at the right time. Spiritualism was gaining adherents around the world, and reports of ghosts and poltergeists and premonitions-come-true became commonplace. Families acquired Ouija boards and scared themselves silly. Legendary mediums emerged, including two of the most famous, Madame Helena Blavatsky, eventually exposed as a fraud, and D. D. Home, whose talents convinced even skeptics.
By 1894 Eusapia Palladino too had achieved global fame. Lodge, Myers, and Richet now planned to put her powers to the test.
THE MEN HELD TIGHT. The room was dark and hot and very still. As Palladino entered her trance, a spirit entity named “John King,” her control, took over the séance. “I am not presuming to judge what John King really was,” Lodge wrote, “but the phenomena were certainly as if she were controlled by a big powerful man.”
With each new manifestation, the men called out to each other, and to the secretary outside the window, to describe what had happened and to confirm that Palladino’s hands and head remained under their grasp. They reported in French, “constantly ejaculating for the benefit of the others, whenever anything occurred,” as Lodge put it.
Myers shouted, “J’ai la main gauche.”
I have the left hand.
Richet: “J’ai la main droite.”
In the darkness Lodge felt the sensation of having his hands squeezed, even though Palladino’s hands were restrained.
“On me touche!” he said.
Something is touching me.
Lodge wrote, “It was as if there was something or someone in the room, which could go about and seize people’s arms or the back of their necks, and give a grip; just as anybody might who was free to move about. These grips were very frequent, and everyone at the table felt them sooner or later.” At one point Lodge felt “a long hairy beard” brush the top of his head. “It was said to be John King’s beard, and the feeling was certainly eerie on my head, which even then was incipiently bald.”
A writing desk stood against one wall. In the darkness, with the men still holding Palladino’s hands, she gestured toward it. “Every time she did this, the piece of furniture tilted back against the wall, just as if she had had a stick in her hand and was pushing it.” The tilting occurred three times. To Lodge this was perplexing though apparently not terrifying. “There must be some mechanical connexion to make matter move: mental activity could never do it,” he wrote. The tiltings suggested the existence of “some structure unknown to science, which could transmit force to a distance.”
As the séance progressed, Lodge wrote, “there appeared to emanate from her side, through her clothes, a sort of supernumerary arm.” It was a ghostly extension, pale, barely visible, yet to Lodge unmistakably present and fluid, not the static shuddering appearance that might be expected from some device hidden underneath Palladino’s clothes. Lodge—renowned physicist, professor at University College of Liverpool, member of the Royal Institution, revered lecturer, soon-to-be principal of Birmingham University, and destined for knighthood—wrote: “I saw this protuberance gradually stretching out in the dim light, until ultimately it reached Myers, who was wearing a white jacket. I saw it approach, recede, hesitate, and finally touch him.”
Myers said, “On me touche” and calmly reported the sensation of a hand gripping his ribs. History is silent on why Myers did not leap from his chair and run screaming into the night.
LODGE STRUGGLED TO HAUL THESE occurrences back from the world of ghosts and into the realm of mechanical law. “As far as the physics of the movements were concerned,” he wrote, “they were all produced, I believe, in accordance with the ordinary laws of matter.” The emanations from Palladino’s body prompted Richet to invent a new word to describe such phenomena: ectoplasm. Lodge wrote, “The ectoplasmic formation which operated was not normal; but its abnormality belongs to physiology or anatomy—it is something which biologists ought to study.” He acknowledged that this was dicey territory and cautioned that care had to be taken to distinguish between real manifestations and those easily fak
ed. “Let it be noted that ectoplasm proper is more than a secretion or extrusion of material: if genuine, it has powers of operating, it can exert force, and exhibit forms. A mere secretion from the mouth, which hangs down and does nothing, is of no interest.”
The events on the island persuaded Lodge that some element of the human mind was able to exist after the body had died. In his formal report to the society he wrote, “Any person without invincible prejudice who had had the same experience would come to the same broad conclusion, viz., that things hitherto held impossible do actually occur.”
Lodge became more and more committed to the exploration of the ether, where he believed the convergence of physical law and psychical phenomena might be found. “Whether there is any physical medium for telepathic communication, whether the ether of space serves for this also, and whether our continued existence is associated with that substance instead of with matter, we do not yet know for certain,” he wrote. “The departed seem to think it is so, and as far as my knowledge goes they may be right.”
Eusapia Palladino’s apparent powers had evoked once again Lodge’s lifelong vulnerability to distraction. Up to this point this flaw in his character had caused him no great harm.
GUNFIRE
EACH MOMENT MATTERED. MARCONI 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.
HE 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.
EASING THE SORE PARTS
DESPITE THE PANIC 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, Crack
s 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.”