Thunderstruck

by Erik Larson

  But this empire had become complex and costly, and it promised to become more so. In Canada, the company opened nine new shore stations along the routes ships took when approaching the St. Lawrence River. Such stations tended to be remote and required that their operators and managers live on the grounds, a reality that imposed its own set of costs. The new station at Whittle Rocks, for example, required six kitchen chairs, for a total of $2.88; one armchair, for $1.75; two kitchen tables, for $5; two dresser stands, $22; one rocking chair, $3; and one reading chair, $4.25. Every station got a clock, for $2.35, and at least one bed. And telegraphers had to eat. In April 1905 the new station at Belle Isle paid $42.08 for salt pork, Fame Point spent $43.78 on bacon, and Cape Ray spent $42.37 on lard. And of course every station needed a rubber stamp. Each got one, for 34 cents.

  Costs accumulated quickly. In August 1905 Marconi’s bookkeepers found that the cash expenditures of his Canadian operations for just that one month totaled $46,215, more than triple the amount in the previous August. Onetime expenses accounted for much of this increase, but once the new stations began operating and breaking down and freezing and losing aerials to windstorms; once they began hiring employees and cleaners and stationers and freight haulers; once they started buying acid for batteries and paying for postage, telephone service, and land-line telegrams—once all these expenses became routine, they too began to increase, like yeast in a warm oven. Especially wages and salaries. In 1904 Glace Bay alone paid wages and salaries totaling $8,419. This figure would more than double by the end of 1907. Living and general operating expenses at the station increased at an even faster rate, as they did throughout Marconi’s empire.

  To Marconi, all this was just business. It didn’t interest him. As always his true passion lay in transatlantic communication, and here things still were not going well. His Glace Bay station had been disassembled, and the timber and other components had been moved to a new inland location nicknamed Marconi Towers. He had recognized that his Poldhu station also had become obsolete and would have to be replaced by one even larger and more powerful.

  For the first time he began to wonder whether he should jettison his transatlantic dream and settle for something more quotidian, perhaps focus his company on ship-to-shore communication. There was little doubt about the direction his directors would choose if left to decide on their own.

  To better evaluate his future course, Marconi decided to visit the new station in Nova Scotia. In spring 1905 he booked passage aboard the Campania for himself and Beatrice. Despite the deepening financial crisis facing his company, they traveled first class, reflecting yet again a trait that Degna Marconi considered elemental to his character. As she put it, “All he asked of life was the best of everything.”

  On this voyage Beatrice would come to feel herself more prisoner than passenger and would learn that her keeper was quirkier than she had imagined.

  THEY SETTLED INTO THEIR STATEROOM, which had more in common with a Mayfair flat than a ship-borne cabin. Beatrice was startled when Marconi began pulling numerous clocks from his trunk and placing them at various points in the cabin. She knew of his fixation on time. He gave her many wristwatches, but she consigned them all to her jewelry box where, according to Degna, “she left them all unwound to be spared their multiple ticking.” Now she found herself surrounded by ticking clocks, which Marconi set to display the time in Singapore, Chicago, Rangoon, Tokyo, Lima, and Johannesburg.

  Once the voyage was under way, he disappeared into the ship’s wireless cabin, to conduct further experiments and to manage the receipt of news for the onboard newspaper, the Cunard Bulletin.

  Left to herself, Beatrice sought to enjoy the ship, one of the most luxurious in Cunard’s fleet. The dining saloon that served first-class passengers had Corinthian columns and ten-foot ceilings. A central shaft rose thirty feet through the decks above to a dome of stained glass at the top of the ship. The crew of 415 included more than one hundred stewards and stewardesses, who sought to satisfy every legal need. The ship served four meals a day, prepared by forty-five chefs and bakers and their helpers. As Beatrice walked the thrumming decks, she delighted in the celebrity accrued to her by the fact of her marriage to Marconi.

  The attention given her once again caused Marconi to react with jealous anger. Degna wrote, “When her husband did emerge from the wireless cabin and found her talking to the other passengers, he led her stonily to their stateroom and lectured her about flirting.” Marconi taught her Morse code, though she had little interest in learning. Degna suspected he did so in part to prevent Beatrice from wandering the decks and returning the smiles of the Campania’s other male passengers.

  One day Beatrice entered their stateroom to find Marconi consigning his dirty socks to the sea through a porthole. Stunned, she asked him why.

  His explanation: It was more efficient to get new ones than wait for them to be laundered.

  THEY STOPPED BRIEFLY in New York and traveled to Oyster Bay on Long Island to have lunch with Theodore Roosevelt. They met his daughter Alice, who later reported that they were a handsome couple and seemed very happy with each other. They sailed to Nova Scotia, where snow still lay on the ground and the four towers of the newly completed station stood over the landscape like sentries. They moved into the nearby house, which they were to share with Richard and Jane Vyvyan and their daughter. The child was nearly one and a half years old, not the easiest age to manage, especially in close quarters. And these quarters were close. Beatrice had grown up in a castle with rooms seemingly beyond number. This house had a living room, a dining room, two bedrooms, and a single small bathroom. Marconi left Beatrice with Jane and her daughter and immediately joined Vyvyan at Marconi Towers, where they began adjusting and tuning the apparatus.

  The new station encompassed two square miles. The four towers stood at its center. Next came a ring of twenty-four masts, each 180 feet tall, and beyond them another ring, consisting of forty-eight poles, each fifty feet tall. Over it all was draped an umbrella of wire with a diameter of 2,900 feet, comprising fifty-four miles of wire. Another fifty-four lay in ditches below.

  Every day Marconi walked down the “corduroy” road of felled trees to the station compound and remained there for most of each day, while back at the house Beatrice confronted a situation wholly new to her experience. She possessed only limited domestic skills but nonetheless tried to help around the house, only to have Mrs. Vyvyan refuse her offers of assistance in a manner as cold as the weather outside. At first Beatrice kept her unhappiness from Marconi, but after days of enduring such behavior, she broke down and, weeping, told Marconi about all that had happened.

  The news made Marconi furious. He was ready to charge out to the living room to confront the Vyvyans, but Beatrice stopped him. She knew how much Marconi depended on Vyvyan. She resolved to confront Mrs. Vyvyan herself.

  Now it was Jane Vyvyan who burst into tears. She confessed that she had feared that Beatrice, as the daughter of a lord, would act superior and dominate the house or, worse, treat her as if she were a servant. Jane had hoped to assert her own superiority from the start.

  Their talk cleansed the atmosphere. Almost immediately they became friends—and just in time.

  WHILE WORKING AT THE NEW station under its great umbrella of wire, Marconi became convinced once more that transatlantic communication could succeed. He made arrangements to return to London, again aboard the Campania, for a summit with his board and to use the Campania’s wireless to test the reach of the new station.

  Inexplicably, given how prone he was to jealousy, Marconi left Beatrice behind. She found little to occupy herself. Nova Scotia was a male realm, full of male pursuits, like ice hockey, hunting, and fishing. She found it dull.

  In contrast, Richard Vyvyan gauged life in Nova Scotia as “on the whole quite pleasant.” Especially the fishing, which he described as “superlatively good.” Winter, he conceded, could be “trying at times,” but even then the landscape took on a frigid b
eauty. “The stillness of winter in the country in Canada is extraordinary, when there is no wind. All the birds have left, except a few crows, and although the tracks of countless rabbits are to be seen they themselves are invisible. Not a sound can be heard but one’s own breathing, beyond the occasional sharp crack of frost in a tree. The winter air is intensely exhilarating and the climate is wonderfully healthy.”

  Beatrice did not agree. There was no place to walk, save for the barbed-wire grounds of the station, and there she felt imprisoned. She would have loved to bicycle, but there were no roads in the vicinity of sufficient quality to make bicycling possible. She was sad and lonely and became ill with jaundice, possibly the result of contracting a form of hepatitis. And, her daughter wrote, always there was that silence, “so intense it made Bea’s ears ring.”

  Marconi did not return for three months.

  DURING THE VOYAGE Marconi was the toast of the vessel. Though he spent most of his time in the Campania’s wireless cabin, he always emerged for meals, especially dinner, where he sat among the richest and loveliest passengers, in a milieu of unsurpassed elegance.

  During the first half of the voyage transmissions from the new Glace Bay station reached the ship strong and clear. Daylight reception reached a maximum of eighteen hundred miles—a good result, though he had hoped the range would be far greater, given the station’s size and power.

  In England he persuaded his directors to continue investing in his transatlantic quest. He volunteered his own fortune to the effort and sought new capital from investors in England and Italy.

  At Poldhu he inaugurated a new series of experiments.

  First he concentrated merely on trying to achieve communication between Poldhu and Nova Scotia. He tuned and adjusted the Poldhu receiver and via cable directed Richard Vyvyan to make other changes at Marconi Towers. At last, at nine o’clock one morning in June, the Poldhu station received readable messages—a major breakthrough for the simple fact that this transmission occurred when both stations were in daylight.

  Resorting as always to trial and error, Marconi next tested different antenna configurations. He shut down segments of each to gauge the effect on reception. Again, endless variables came into play. He adjusted power and tried different wavelengths. He believed, as always, that the longer the wavelength, the farther waves would travel, though why this should be the case remained a mystery to him.

  He began to see a pattern. An antenna consisting of a single wire stretched horizontally and close to the ground seemed to provide better reception and transmission than its vertical equivalent. He found too that direction mattered. A wire stretched along an east-west axis could send signals most effectively to a receiving wire erected along the same axis. These discoveries freed Marconi from the need to build taller and taller aerials and more complex umbrella arrays. In theory, a single wire or series of parallel wires stretched over a long distance would produce wavelengths longer than anything he had so far achieved.

  He instructed Vyvyan at Nova Scotia to simulate that kind of directional antenna by disconnecting portions of the umbrella array, then learned that his hunch was correct. Transmission and reception improved.

  He realized now that Poldhu was not merely obsolete—the site would have to be abandoned entirely and another location found that had enough land to allow him to stretch a horizontal antenna up to one mile long. The new Nova Scotia station too would have to be replaced and its power-generation equipment enlarged to produce ten times more power.

  The expense would be staggering, but Marconi saw no other path.

  HE RETURNED TO NOVA SCOTIA, and to Beatrice. He was appalled at her condition. Her jaundice was jarringly apparent. He promised to take her back to England.

  Beatrice assumed this would mean a return to London, and friends and family, and city life. It had been nearly half a year since she had seen a hansom cab or felt the rumble of a subterranean locomotive racing through the darkness under her feet.

  But Marconi, her keeper, had a different plan in mind.

  LIBERATION

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, JULY 9, 1910, Crippen left Hilldrop Crescent at his usual hour and went to his office at Albion House. At around ten he approached his assistant, William Long, and asked him to go to a nearby men’s shop, Charles Baker, and buy a few articles of clothing. Crippen gave him a list of things to acquire that included a brown suit cut for a boy, two collars, a tie, two shirts, a pair of suspenders, and a brown felt hat. He was to buy a pair of boots as well, from a shop on Tottenham Court Road. Crippen gave him the necessary money.

  Ethel meanwhile took a taximeter cab to the home of her sister Nina and arrived there at about eleven. She asked the driver to wait.

  Nina came to the door and exclaimed with delight at this surprise visit from her sister, but her joy quickly changed to concern. Ethel looked “rather troubled,” Nina said, and asked hurriedly if anyone else was at home. She was pale, agitated. When Nina stepped close to put her arms around her sister, she found that she was trembling.

  Ethel said, “I had two detectives call to see me yesterday morning about quarter past eight, soon after Harvey had gone.”

  (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.)

  Ethel said, “Belle Elmore’s friends don’t seem to think she is dead.” Her voice wavered. “Who am I?” she cried. “Everyone will think I am a bad woman of the streets.” She broke down. Nina tightened her embrace.

  After a few moments Ethel calmed. “I can’t stop long with you,” she said, “but I could not go without coming and saying goodbye.”

  This startled Nina. She asked where Ethel was going.

  “I don’t know,” Ethel said. Crippen hadn’t told her. She promised that once settled she would send Nina her address.

  But Nina could not understand why Ethel had to leave.

  “What good is it for me to stop without means, and my character gone?” Ethel said.

  And there was another reason, she said. Crippen had told her he wanted to find the person who had sent the cable about Belle’s death and, in so doing, perhaps locate his wife. Only by finding her, Ethel said, could he end this scrutiny by Scotland Yard. “For all I know she may not have gone to America at all,” Ethel told Nina, “she may still be in London and have got somebody across the water to send a bogus telegram informing of her death.” Ethel feared a conspiracy by Belle—that out of pure malice she might simply be hiding somewhere, waiting until Ethel and Crippen got married, and then, as Ethel put it, “confront us with bigamy.”

  Ethel and Nina hugged again. Ethel said good-bye and stepped back into the taxi. She told the driver to head for Bloomsbury, to Albion House.

  THAT MORNING AT NEW Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Dew considered what to do next regarding the disappearance of Belle Elmore. It was tempting to do nothing, but he had been in the police department long enough to know that doing nothing could be ruinous to a man’s career. He did not suspect foul play but recognized the case could not be closed with confidence until Belle was found. The doctor’s advertisement would help, but something more was needed, if only to prove to Superintendent Froest that he had done all he could for the Nashes.

  Dew composed a circular in which he described Belle Elmore and classified her as a missing person. He arranged to have it sent to every police division in London. It was a routine step, unlikely to bear fruit, but necessary all the same.

  AROUND NOON CRIPPEN and Ethel met in the work room of Yale Tooth, on the fourth floor of Albion House. Ethel’s spirits had improved. Her anger of the night before was gone, and having completed the sorrowful task of saying good-bye to her sister, she now found herself caught up in the daring of the moment.

  Crippen showed her the suit of clothes that William Long had bought earlier that morning. “You will look a perfect boy in that,” Crippen said. He grinned. “Especially when you have cut off your hair.�
��

  “Have I got to cut my hair?” she cried.

  His delight increased. “Why, of course,” he said. “That is absolutely necessary.”

  She wrote, “Honestly, I was more amused than anything. It seemed to me an adventure.”

  She removed her clothes.

  ETHEL’S BROTHER, SIDNEY, planned to visit Hilldrop Crescent that same day. Ethel had made the invitation a few days earlier, before everything changed, but was unable to reach him to cancel his visit.

  Now he walked up the ten steps to the front door at No. 39 and knocked. The French maid gave him a note from Ethel.

  “Dear Sid,” it said, “Am sorry to disappoint you to day; have been called away. Will write you later. My love dear to you and all and kisses. From your loving Sis, Ethel.”

  AT ALBION HOUSE Ethel stood before Crippen in a white shirt, suspenders, tie, vest, brown jacket and pants, and a new pair of boots. In trying on the pants she had split the seat, but she reconnected the seam with safety pins. “It was not a good fit,” she wrote. “It was ludicrous.” To complete the outfit she put on the brown felt hat.

  She laughed “at the absurdity” of dressing up as a boy. “Dr. Crippen was just as gay as I was at this transformation. It seemed a merry joke to him.”

  Crippen picked up a pair of scissors.

  “Now for the hair,” he said.