Thunderstruck (10 page)

Something happened during that stay, though exactly what isn’t clear. When Crippen returned to London in June 1900, he was no longer employed by Munyon’s. He took over management, instead, of another patent medicine company, the Sovereign Remedy Co., on nearby Newman Street. At about this time, he and Cora moved back to Bloomsbury, this time to Store Street, where a century earlier Mary Wollstonecraft had lived. The Crippens’ new apartment was only half a block away from their old home on South Crescent and a brief walk to Crippen’s new office.

Crippen learned to his displeasure that while he was in America Cora had begun singing again, at “smoking concerts for payment.” She told him, moreover, that she intended to try once more to establish herself as a variety performer and had adopted a new stage name, Belle Elmore. And she had become even more ill tempered. “She was always finding fault with me,” he complained, “and every night she took some opportunity of quarrelling with me, so that we went to bed in rather a temper with each other. A little later on, after I found that this continued and she apparently did not wish to be familiar with me, I asked her what the matter was.”

And Cora—now Belle—told him. She revealed that during her husband’s absence she had met a man named Bruce Miller and, Crippen said, “that this man visited her, had taken her about, and was very fond of her, and also she was fond of him.”

T
HE
G
ERMAN
S
PY

K
AISER
W
ILHELM
II
HAD INDEED
taken notice of Marconi’s achievements. He long had resented Britain’s self-proclaimed superiority, despite the fact that he himself happened to be a nephew of Edward, the Prince of Wales, who would succeed Queen Victoria upon her death. He made no secret of his intention to build Germany into an imperial power and to hone his army and navy with the latest advances in science, including, if merited, wireless communication.

In the midst of a new series of tests at Salisbury Plain, during which Marconi set a new distance record of 6.8 miles, a German named Gilbert Kapp wrote to Preece to ask a favor. He was doing so, he stated, on behalf of a friend, whom he identified as “Privy Councillor Slaby.” This was Adolf Slaby, a professor in Berlin’s Technical High School. Kapp described him as “the private scientific adviser to the Emperor,” and wrote: “Any new invention or discovery interests the Emperor and he always asks Slaby to explain it [to] him. Lately the Emperor has read of your and Marconi’s experiments…and he wants Slaby to report on this invention.”

Kapp had two questions:

“1) Is there anything in Marconi’s invention?

“2) If yes, could you arrange for Slaby and myself to see the apparatus and witness experiments if we come over to London toward the end of next week?”

He added: “Please treat this letter as confidential and say nothing to Marconi about the Emperor.”

Even though by now Marconi’s fear of prying eyes was more acute than ever, Preece invited Slaby to come and observe a round of experiments set for mid-May 1897, during which Marconi would attempt for the first time to send signals across a body of water.

I
N THE MEANTIME
M
ARCONI
contemplated a surprise of his own, for Preece.

Until now Marconi had considered that a contract with the post office might be the best way to profit from his invention and at the same time gain the resources to develop it into a practical means of telegraphy. But ever aware of each moment lost, Marconi had grown uneasy about the pace at which the post office made decisions. He told his father, “As far as the Government is concerned, I do not believe that they will decide very soon whether to acquire my rights or not. I also believe that they will not pay a great deal for them.”

In the wake of Preece’s lectures, investors had begun approaching Marconi with offers. Two Americans offered £10,000—equivalent to just over $1 million today—for his United States patent. Marconi evaluated this and other early proposals with the cold acuity of a lawyer and found none compelling enough to accept. In April, however, his cousin Henry Jameson Davis came to him with a proposal to form a company with a syndicate of investors linked to the Jameson family. The syndicate would pay Marconi £15,000 in cash—about $1.6 million today—and grant him controlling ownership of company stock, while also pledging £25,000 for future experiments.

Marconi gave the proposal the same scrutiny he had given all previous offers. The terms were generous. At the time £15,000 was a fortune. In H. G. Wells’s novel
Tono-Bungay
one character exults in achieving a salary of £300 a year, because it was enough to provide a small house and a living for himself and a new wife. Best of all, Jameson Davis was family. Marconi knew him and trusted him. The investors, in turn, were known within the Jameson empire. It was too compelling to refuse, but Marconi understood that by accepting the offer he risked alienating Preece and the post office. The question was, could anything be done to keep Preece’s sense of hurt from transforming the post office into a powerful enemy?

What followed was a carefully orchestrated campaign to depict this offer as something that Marconi himself had nothing to do with but that as a businessman he was obligated to take seriously, in the interests of his invention.

Marconi enlisted the help of a patent adviser, J. C. Graham, who knew Preece. On April 9, 1897, Graham wrote to Preece and told him the terms of the offer and added that Marconi had “some considerable doubts about closing with it lest apparently he should be doing anything which even appears to be ungrateful to you, for I understand from him that he is under a great debt of gratitude to you in more than one respect.

“As the matter is evidently weighing heavily on his mind, and as he appears to have only one object in view, viz., to do the right thing, I thought it was just possible that a letter from me might be of some use. I, of course, know nothing more of the case than I have set out above.”

From the text alone, Graham’s motive for writing the letter was far from obvious, and Preece must have read it several times. Was he asking Preece’s opinion, or was his intent simply to notify Preece obliquely that Marconi intended to accept the offer and hoped there would be no hard feelings?

The next morning, Saturday, Marconi stopped by the post office building but found Preece gone. After returning to his home in Talbot Road, Westbourne Park, Marconi composed a letter to Preece.

He began it, “I am in difficulty.”

The rest of the letter seemed structured to follow a choreography established by Marconi, Jameson Davis, and possibly Graham. It struck the same notes as Graham’s letter and, like Graham’s, said nothing about the fact that Jameson Davis happened to be Marconi’s cousin.

Marconi referred to Jameson Davis and his syndicate as “those gentlemen” and couched the letter in such a way that anyone reading it would conclude that all of this was happening without his involvement, certainly without his encouragement—that this poor young man had suddenly found himself pressed to respond to an offer from the blue, one so generous that he found himself forced to consider it, though it gave him no joy to do so.

After setting out the details, Marconi added, “I beg to state, however, that I have never sought these offers, or given encouragement to the promoters.”

Afterward he wrote to his father that he believed, based on what he had heard from Preece’s associates, “that he will remain friends with me.” In so doing, he revealed a trait of his character that throughout his life would color and often hamper his business and personal relationships: a social obtuseness that made him oblivious to how his actions affected others.

For in fact Preece felt deep personal hurt. Years later in a brief memoir, in which for some reason he described himself in the third person, Preece wrote, “Marconi at the end of 1897 naturally came under the influence of the business men who were financing his new Company, and it was no longer possible for Preece as a Government officer to maintain those cordial, and frequently almost parental, relations with the young inventor. No one regretted this more than Preece.”

The depth of his hurt and its consequences would not become apparent for several months. For the moment Marconi’s news did nothing to shake Preece’s intention to make Marconi the centerpiece of his talk at the Royal Institution in June; nor did Preece immediately withdraw his support for Marconi’s experiments. The new company had not yet formed, and Preece believed there was still a chance the government could acquire Marconi’s patents. A decade later a select committee of Parliament would conclude that Preece should have tried harder. Had he done so, the committee reported, “an enterprise of national importance could have been prevented from passing into the hands of a private company and subsequent difficulties might have been avoided.”

I
N
A
PRIL
1897, with Marconi’s over-water tests still a month off, Britain was again wracked by a spasm of fear about the mounting danger of anarchists and immigrants. A bomb exploded on a train in the city’s subterranean railway, killing one person and injuring others. The bomber was never caught, but most people blamed anarchists. Foreigners. Italians.

The world was growing more chaotic and speeding up. Rudyard Kipling could be spotted in his six-horsepower motorcar thundering around at fifteen miles an hour. The race among the great shipping companies to see whose liners could cross the Atlantic in the shortest time intensified and grew more and more costly as the size and speed of each ship increased and as the rivalry between British and German lines became freighted with an ever-heavier cargo of national pride. In April 1897 at the Vulcan shipyard in Stettin, Germany, thousands of workers raced to prepare the largest, grandest, fastest oceanliner yet for its launch on May 4, when it would join the stable of ships owned by North German Lloyd Line. Everything about this new liner breathed Germany’s aspiration to become a world power, especially its name,
Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse,
and its decor, which featured life-size portraits of its namesake and of Bismarck and Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, whose nephew all too soon would lead Germany into global war. The launch was to be overseen by Kaiser Wilhelm II himself.

In early May, Adolf Slaby sailed from Germany for Britain and made his way to the Bristol Channel, between England and Wales, where Marconi, with the help of a postal engineer named George Kemp, prepared for his next big demonstration.

M
ARCONI HOPED TO SEND
messages across all nine miles of the Bristol Channel, but first he planned a more modest trial: to telegraph between Lavernock Point on the Wales side and a tiny island in the channel called Flat Holm, some 3.3 miles away. On Friday, May 7, Kemp traveled by tug to the island carrying a transmitter and took lodging “at a small house owned by the person in charge of the Cremation House.”

Slaby arrived at Lavernock. Generously, if unwisely, Marconi sent a small transmitter to Slaby so that he could monitor the experiments firsthand.

On Thursday, May 13, one week after the tests began, Marconi keyed the message, “So be it, let it be so.”

The sparks generated by his transmitter jabbed the air. Those present had to cover their ears against the miniature thunder of each blue discharge. The resulting chains of waves raced over the channel at the speed of light, from Flat Holm to Lavernock, where Marconi’s main receiver now captured them without distortion.