by Erik Larson
It made her uncomfortable. She wished the ladies could just accept the fact of her relationship with Crippen and be done with it.
But she had made the mistake of allowing the affair to become public: This was the England of Edward VII, but it was also the England that served as the setting for Howards End, to be published later that year, in which E. M. Forster plunged one of his heroines, Helen Schlegel, into an illicit pregnancy. He wrote, “The pack was turning on Helen, to deny her human rights.”
On March 12 Crippen took a cab to Mrs. Jackson’s house on Constantine Road and thanked her for all she had done for his “little girl,” but now, he said, he was taking her away. They loaded all her things into a cab, then went to a nearby public house to celebrate. Even Mrs. Jackson’s husband came along, though he did not approve of Crippen and did not consider Le Neve’s recent behavior at all ladylike. Crippen bought champagne. They all drank.
Then Crippen took Ethel home.
“I DON’T BELIEVE IT”
MARCONI HAD EXPECTED SOME SKEPTICISM about his Newfoundland success, but he was dismayed to find himself now confronting a barrage of incredulous commentary.
“I doubt this story,” Thomas Edison told the Associated Press. “I don’t believe it.” He said, “That letter ‘S’ with the three dots is a very simple one, but I have been fooled myself. Until the published reports are verified I shall doubt the accuracy of the account.”
In London that same day the Daily Telegraph reported, “Skepticism prevailed in the city…. The view generally held was that electric straysand not rays were responsible for activating the delicate instruments recording the ‘S’s’ supposed to have been transmitted from near the Lizard to Newfoundland on Thursday or Friday.” The paper cited one widely held theory making the rounds that the signals had come from a “Cunarder fitted with the Marconi apparatus, which was, or should have been, within 200 miles of the receiving station at St. John’s on the day of the experiment.” It also quoted William Preece as stating that “the letters S and R are just the letters most frequently signaled as the result of disturbance in the earth or atmosphere.”
Two days later The Electrical Review called Marconi’s claim “so sensational that we are inclined for the present to think that his enthusiasm has got the better of his scientific caution.” The Review proposed that the signals most likely came from a station in America. “A practical joker who had learned when the signals were expected, might easily have fulfilled the expectations of the watchers at the Newfoundland station.”
The Times of London published a letter from Oliver Lodge that was a model of artful damnation. “It is rash to express an opinion either way as to the probability of the correctness of Mr. Marconi’s evidently genuine impression that he has obtained evidence on the other side of the Atlantic of electrical disturbances purposely made on this side, but I sincerely trust he is not deceived.” Acknowledging that he had been critical of Marconi in the past, Lodge wrote, “I should not like to be behindhand in welcoming, even prematurely, the possibility of so immense and barely expected an increase of range as now appears to be foreshadowed. Proof, of course, is still absent, but by making the announcement in an incautious and enthusiastic manner Mr. Marconi has awakened sympathy and a hope that his energy and enterprise may not turn out to have been deceived by the unwonted electrical dryness of the atmosphere on that wintry shore.”
But at least one longtime skeptic took Marconi at his word, and saw in his achievement a glimmer of threat.
ON THE EVENING OF MONDAY, December 16, 1901, as he dined at his hotel in St. John’s, Marconi was approached by a young man bearing a letter addressed to him. Marconi’s dinner companion was a Canadian postal official named William Smith, who was staying at the same hotel and had a room just off the dining room. As the young man crossed the room toward the table, Marconi was telling Smith that he now planned to build a permanent station on Newfoundland, most likely at Cape Spear, a spit of land that jutted into the sea four miles southeast of Signal Hill.
Smith watched as Marconi opened the letter. As Marconi read, he became distraught. When Smith expressed concern, Marconi passed him the letter.
Smith too found it appalling. The letter was from a law firm representing the Anglo-American Telegraph Co., the big undersea cable company that provided telegraph service between Britain and Newfoundland.
The letter was brief, a single long paragraph that charged Marconi with violating Anglo-American’s legal monopoly over telegraphic communication between Britain and Newfoundland. “Unless we receive an intimation from you during the day that you will not proceed any further with the work you are engaged in and remove the appliances erected for the purpose of telegraph communication legal proceedings will be instituted to restrain you from the further prosecution of your work and for any damages which our clients may sustain or have sustained; and we further give you notice that our clients will hold you responsible for any loss or damage sustained by reason of [your] trespass on their rights.”
Marconi was furious, but he took Anglo-American’s threat seriously. He knew his own company could not withstand litigation with so powerful a foe, and he recognized too that harm had indeed been done to Anglo-American, because of the decline in the price of its stock.
Smith asked him into his room, calmed him, and on impulse invited him—“begged him,” Smith recalled—to bring his experiments to Canada. (At this point Newfoundland was a colony of Britain; it did not join Canada until 1949.) Over the next few days Smith arranged a formal invitation from the Canadian government. Marconi relented and set off for Nova Scotia, part of Canada since 1867, to scout a new location.
A party of dignitaries met him at the wharf in North Sydney, at the eastern tip of Nova Scotia, and whisked him into a train for a brief trip south to Glace Bay to show him a spot called Table Head. Aptly named, it was a flat plateau of ice and blown snow atop cliffs striated with bands of blue-gray and rust that fell a hundred feet straight down to the sea. “The site,” Smith said, “delighted Marconi.”
He set off for Ottawa to negotiate a formal agreement with the government.
ON CHRISTMAS DAY two operators with Anglo-American Cable exchanged salvos of doggerel. One in Nova Scotia tapped out,
Best Christmas greetings from North Sydney,
Hope you are sound in heart and kidney.
Next year will find us quite unable
To exchange over the cable.
Marconi will our finish see,
The Cable Co’s have ceased to be.
No further need of automatics
Retards, resistances and statics.
I’ll then across the ether sea
Waft Christmas greetings unto thee.
His counterpart in Liverpool responded,
Don’t be alarmed, the Cable Co’s
Will not be dead as you suppose.
Marconi may have been deceived,
In what he firmly has believed.
But be it so, or be it not,
The cable routes won’t be forgot.
His speed will never equal ours,
Where we take minutes, he’ll want hours.
Besides, his poor weak undulations
Must be confined to their own stations.
This is for him to overcome,
Before we’re sent to our long home.
Don’t be alarmed, my worthy friend.
Full many a year precedes our end.
North Sydney ended the exchange:
Thanks old man, for the soothing balm,
Which makes me resolute and calm.
I do not feel the least alarm,
The signal S can do no harm.
It might mean sell to anxious sellers,
It may mean sold to other fellers.
Whether it is sold or simply sell,
Marconi’s S may go to—well!
IN NEW YORK JOSEPHINE Holman spent Christmas without her fiancé. She was coming to see that being pledged to a man so ob
sessed with work brought with it certain disadvantages, one of them being loneliness.
NEWS FROM AMERICA
Letter,
Sunday, March 20, 1910
To Clara and Paul Martinetti
Dear Clara and Paul,
Please forgive me for not running in during the week, but I have really been so upset by very bad news from Belle that I did not feel equal to talking about anything, and now I have had a cable saying she is so dangerously ill with double pleuropneumonia that I am considering if I had better not go over at once. I don’t want to worry you with my troubles, but I felt that I must explain why I had not been to see you. I will try and run in during the week and have a chat. Hope both of you are well, with love and good wishes.
Yours very sincerely,
Peter
Telegram,
Thursday, March 24, 1910
To Paul and Clara Martinetti
Belle died yesterday at 6 o’clock.
“DAMN THE SUN!”
ON HIS WAY BACK TO LONDON, with a formal offer from Canada in hand, Marconi stopped off in New York and attended a January 13, 1902, banquet of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, where he was to be the guest of honor. Unknown to him, the affair nearly proved to be a disaster.
At first a number of prominent scientists declined to attend, expressing doubt as to whether Marconi really had sent signals across the Atlantic, but by the night of January 13 the institute’s leaders had managed to recruit a ballroom full of believers. They held an elaborate banquet. Black signs at three points in the room bore the names Marconi, Poldhu, and St. John’s, with strings of lamps hung between them. At intervals, the lamps flashed three dots. The menus were printed with ink made from Italian olive oil, and the soup for the evening was “Potage Electrolytique.” Bowls of sorbet emerged, decorated with telegraph poles and wireless masts.
Thomas Edison had been invited but could not attend. Instead he sent a telegram, which the master of ceremonies read aloud. Clearly Edison had changed his mind and now accepted Marconi’s claims. His telegram read, “I am sorry that I am prevented from attending your dinner tonight especially as I should like to pay my respects to Marconi, the young man who had the monumental audacity to attempt and succeed in jumping an electric wave clear across the Atlantic Ocean.”
Cheers and applause rose from the audience. For Marconi, it was a rare moment of adulation, but he understood that his achievement in Newfoundland, though striking, was only the beginning of a long struggle. What he did not recognize was the extent to which the applause masked a deep and pervasive skepticism toward him and his claims of success.
IN LONDON AMBROSE Fleming sulked. After learning of remarks Marconi had made in Canada and at the banquet, he felt doubly hurt. He believed that he deserved a big share of the credit for Marconi’s success, yet when the great moment had arrived, he had been frozen out. In his own account of events, Fleming wrote that during Marconi’s celebratory lunch with the governor of Newfoundland, Marconi had “made no frank acknowledgement…of the names of those who had assisted him but spoke continuously of ‘my system’ and ‘my work.’” At the New York banquet, Fleming wrote, Marconi “pursued the same policy.”
Josephine Holman too grew disenchanted. If she had expected to be the center of Marconi’s attention during his stay in New York, she now found that she was mistaken. Marconi attended luncheons and dinners and kept busy in between by overseeing the installation of wireless aboard the SS Philadelphia, the ship that would take him and Kemp back home.
Josephine conceded defeat. On January 21, 1902, her mother, Mrs. H.B. Holman, issued an announcement to the press: Her daughter had asked Marconi to release her from the engagement, and Marconi had done so.
It made the front page of the Indianapolis News in an article just three paragraphs long under the headline, “ENGAGEMENT IS BROKEN.” The item offered few details.
Later, a News reporter managed to catch up with Marconi at the Hoffman House in New York and asked if he had anything more to say.
“No, except that I am sorry.”
The reporter asked, “Have your feelings in any way changed toward Miss Holman?”
“I don’t think I can answer that—just say simply, please, that I am sorry.”
The reporter probed further: “Had your experiments reached the point where you were at liberty to be married?”
“Well, hardly,” Marconi said, “but if other things had not occurred things might have been arranged.” He continued: “I have not one word of criticism to make on Miss Holman’s notion. She concluded, I suppose, that her future happiness did not rest in my keeping, and the letter of request followed. I had reason to believe that our relations were quite happy and mutual until lately, and it is only natural that I should feel a little depressed at the result.”
He added a tincture of mystery when he told another reporter that while delays in his work had indeed been a factor, “there was also a very delicate question involved.” He gave no further explanation.
Miss Holman said little but did tell one newspaper, “There have been disasters on both sides.” She was not referring to the collapse of the masts at Poldhu and South Wellfleet.
By the end of the day, Wednesday, January 22, 1902, as gossip about the breakup became the opening course at dinner tables in Indianapolis, New York, and London, both Marconi and Holman were at sea, Marconi aboard the Philadelphia bound for Southampton, Holman aboard the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, one of the few German liners afloat that was equipped with her ex-lover’s apparatus.
Holman sought escape to the Continent, hoping that travel would prove a salve for her broken heart; Marconi got back to work.
Loath to let a day pass without further experimentation, Marconi installed himself in the Philadelphia’s wireless cabin. As the liner approached the English coast, he made contact with Poldhu and set a new record for ship-to-shore communications: 150 miles.
Despite his failed romance, Marconi arrived in London feeling more confident than he had in a long time—a good thing, for he faced a year that would prove especially trying and raise a grave new threat from Germany.
IN LONDON MARCONI explained the details of the new Canadian arrangement to his board of directors. Much to the directors’ delight, Canada had agreed to pay for the construction of the Nova Scotia station. Less delightful was Marconi’s promise to provide transatlantic wireless service for 60 percent less than the rate charged by the cable companies, a maximum of ten cents a word. This was a bold commitment, given that all Marconi had sent thus far was a couple of dozen three-dot signals. Nonetheless, the board gave its approval.
Next Marconi addressed the annual meeting of his company’s shareholders and for the first time in public launched into a direct attack against William Preece and Oliver Lodge and their much-publicized harping about flaws in his system. A man more able to sense the subtler bounds of accepted scientific behavior might have omitted this attack or at least phrased it differently, with the kind of oblique but slashing wit at which British parliamentarians seemed so adept, but Marconi was about to cross a dangerous invisible line—especially in touching on that most sensitive of subjects, Lodge’s interest in ghosts.
First Marconi took on Preece. “Sir William Preece is, I believe, a gentleman with various claims to scientific distinction; but, whatever his attainments in other walks of science, I regret to say that the most careful examination reveals absolutely no testimonial to his competency for this most recent of his undertakings. Such knowledge of my work as he may possess is at least three years old—a very long period, I would remind you, in the brief history of my system…. Of the conditions under which the system is now worked Sir William Preece is, in fact, wholly ignorant.”
Now he addressed Lodge’s criticisms. “I regret to say that, distinguished as Dr. Lodge may be as a professor of physics or as a student of psychical phenomena, the same statement applies also in his case, so far as my present system or wireless telegraph
y is concerned.”
Marconi declared that his tuning technology allowed him to send messages across the Atlantic “without interfering with, or, under ordinary conditions, being interfered with, by any ship working its own wireless installations.” He then challenged Preece and Lodge to attempt to interfere with his transmissions and even offered them the use of his own stations for the experiment.
His shareholders applauded, but to others outside the company, his remarks, published in the press, smacked of impudence and mockery.
The Westminster Gazette suggested that “Signor Marconi would have done better if he had spared his sneers at the capacity of the more important of his critics…. Bitter retorts and jeers at the intelligence of opponents are not the marks of the scientific spirit. There would seem to be no a priori reason why the student of psychic phenomena should not be permitted to express an opinion upon the future of wireless telegraphy.”
The Electrical Times condemned Marconi for speaking “with scarcely veiled contempt” of Lodge and Preece. “Had it not been for the scientific work of the former it is doubtful whether Mr. Marconi would have had any wireless telegraphy to boast about, while to the latter he is indebted for help and encouragement when he first came to England…. But, apart from that, the tone Mr. Marconi adopts is hardly decent in so young a man towards one so much his senior and of so high a standing in the engineering and scientific world.”