Thunderstruck (12 page)

B
RUCE
M
ILLER

B
RUCE
M
ILLER HAD ONCE BEEN
a prizefighter and had the handsome but battered features to prove it. He had given up boxing for the stage and had come to England some months before meeting Belle in hopes of making a career in variety. He was, literally, a one-man band, playing drums, harmonica, and banjo all at the same time, and performed in London and in the provinces, at Southend-on-Sea, Weston-super-Mare, and elsewhere. When he met Belle, however, he was preparing to leave for Paris and the Paris Exposition of 1900, where he had entered into a partnership involving certain “attractions” at the exposition. He met her one evening in December 1899, about a month after Crippen’s departure for Philadelphia. He was sharing an apartment with a male roommate, an American music teacher, on Torrington Square in Bloomsbury, adjacent to University College. That evening Belle came to the apartment to have dinner with his roommate, who introduced them. On that occasion, Miller said, “I merely shook hands with her and went away.”

They met again, perhaps with Miller’s roommate as intermediary, and became friends. Belle clearly was drawn to his size and rugged good looks. Miller was attracted by her energy and buoyancy and by her lush sexuality. He had a wife back in America, whom he had married in 1886, but as far as he was concerned the marriage had failed and he was married in name only.

“I cannot say that I told Belle Elmore that I was married,” Miller conceded later, “but if I kept it from her it was not done intentionally. I never had anything to hide, or any object in keeping the information from her. When I first came to England I was separated from my wife. She wrote to me pleading to go back and live with her, and I showed Belle Elmore the letters.” Belle agreed he should return to America and rejoin his wife.

Belle was not exactly forthcoming about her own marriage. “When I first met her, she was introduced to me as a Miss Belle Elmore,” Miller said. “I met her several times before I knew that she was married. She frequently spoke of Dr. Crippen, and finally roused my curiosity, and I asked her who was Dr. Crippen?”

“That,” she said, “is my husband. Didn’t your friend tell you I was married?”

With Crippen away in America, Miller began coming to the apartment on Guildford Street two or three times a week, “sometimes in the afternoons,” he said, “and sometimes in the evenings,” though he contended later that the only room he entered was the front parlor.

He began calling Belle “brown eyes.” He gave her photographs of himself, one of which she propped on the piano in the apartment. They went out together often, to restaurants popular with the theatrical crowd, like Jones’s and Pinoli’s, Kettner’s in Soho, the Trocadero—the “Troc”—and most charismatic and infamous of all, the Café Royal on Regent near Piccadilly Circus, frequented by George Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, the sex researcher Havelock Ellis, the sex-obsessed Frank Harris, and before his fall the sexually indiscreet Oscar Wilde; here one Lady de Bathe, known best as Lillie Langtry, was said to have launched ice cream down the back of Edward, the future king. (Only partly true, as it happens—the incident did occur, but at a different place, and it involved a different actress.) Bookies mingled with barristers and ordered such drinks of the day as the Alabazan, the Bosom Caressa, Lemon Squash, and the Old Chum’s Reviver.

For Bruce Miller and Belle, however, the drink of choice was champagne, and to commemorate their encounters they marked the date on each cork, until they had a string of them, which Belle kept in her possession. “Anything we do is always satisfactory to my husband,” she told Miller. “I always tell him everything.”

By the time Crippen returned, Miller was in Paris. He wrote to Belle “often enough to be sociable, to be friends.” Crippen never met Miller, but Belle made sure he knew more than perhaps he wished. She continued to display at least one photograph of Miller in their home. In March 1901 she sent him an envelope containing six photographs of herself and told him they were taken by Crippen “with his Kodak.” She hinted that Crippen knew she was sending them.

At one point, either by accident or by Belle’s design, Crippen came across letters from Miller that closed with the line, “with love and kisses to Brown Eyes.”

The letters induced in the little doctor a feeling akin to grief.

L
ATER
, M
ILLER WOULD BE ASKED
at length about these letters and about the true meaning of those closing words.

E
NEMIES

D
ESPITE THE
C
ITY’S ENDORSEMENT OF
M
ARCONI
, opposition elsewhere gained momentum, led as always by Oliver Lodge but now joined by new allies.

In September 1897 Britain’s most influential electrical journal,
The Electrician,
came just short of accusing Marconi of stealing Lodge’s work. “In fact Dr. Lodge published enough three years ago to enable the most simple-minded ‘practician’ to compound a system of practical telegraphy without deviating a single hair’s breadth from Lodgian methods.” Returning to Marconi’s patent, the journal sniffed, “It is reputed to be easy enough for a clever lawyer to drive a coach and four through an Act of Parliament. If this patent be upheld in the courts of law it will be seen that it is equally easy for an eminent patent-counsel to compile a valid patent from the publicly described and exhibited products of another man’s brain.”

Meanwhile the public appeared to grow impatient with Marconi’s secrecy and his failure to convert his technology into a practical system of telegraphy, despite reports of his successes at the post office, Salisbury Plain, and the Bristol Channel. This was an age that had come to expect progress. “What we want to know is the truth about all these questionable successes,” one reader wrote in a letter published by
The Electrician.
“I say questionable, because this delay, this hanging fire, as regards practical results, raises in my mind certain doubts which in common probably with others I should like to have dispelled.

“Wherein are the present difficulties? Are they in the transmitter, in the receiver, or in the intervening and innocent ether, or do they exist in the financial syndicate, who upon the strength of hidden experiments and worthless newspaper reports, have embarked in this great and mysterious venture?”

Once Marconi could have counted on William Preece and the post office to come to his defense, but by now Preece had turned against him—though Marconi seemed oblivious to the change and to the danger it posed. In early September 1897, for example, the post office abruptly barred Marconi from tests it was conducting at Dover, even though the tests involved Marconi’s equipment. Marconi complained to Preece that if he were not allowed to be present, the tests likely would fail. He feared that in the hands of others his wireless would not perform at its maximum; he also knew that the post office’s engineers had not incorporated his latest improvements. He was twenty-three years old, Preece sixty-three, yet Marconi wrote as if chiding a schoolboy: “I hope this new attitude will not be continued, as otherwise very serious injury may be done to my Company in the event of the non success of the Dover experiments.”

Shortly afterward he hired George Kemp away from the post office and made him his personal assistant, one of the most important hiring decisions he would make.

So far all this had taken place out of public view, but early in 1898 the post office exhibited what appeared to be the first official manifestation of Preece’s disenchantment. The postmaster-general’s annual report for the twelve months ended March 31, 1898, disclosed that tests of Marconi’s apparatus had been conducted, “but no practical results have yet been achieved.”

Marconi was stung. He believed he had demonstrated without doubt that wireless was a practical technology, ready for adoption. In December 1897 he and Kemp had erected a wireless mast on the Isle of Wight, on the grounds of the Needles Hotel at Alum Bay—the world’s first permanent wireless station—and established communication between it and a coastal tugboat at a distance of eleven miles. In January 1898 they had erected a second station on the mainland, at another hotel, Madeira House in Bournemouth, fourteen and a half miles west along the coast. The two stations had been in communication ever since.

Seemingly blind to Preece’s changed attitude, Marconi offered to sell the post office rights to use his technology within Britain for £30,000—an exorbitant price, equivalent to about $3 million today. The offer smacked of impudence. The government rejected the offer.

Now Preece struck again. In February 1899 he turned sixty-five, the post office’s mandatory retirement age, but instead of retiring, he wrangled an appointment as Consulting Engineer to the Post Office, where circumstances contrived to make him an even more dangerous adversary. His superiors asked him to compile a report on Marconi’s technology with an eye to determining whether the government ought to grant Marconi a license that would permit his stations to begin handling messages turned in at telegraph offices operated by the post office. Existing law, which gave the post office a monopoly over all telegraphy in the British Isles, forbade such use.

In his report of November 1899 Preece advised against granting the license. Marconi had yet to establish a viable commercial service anywhere, he argued. To grant a license now would merely enrich Marconi and his backers by causing an “ignorant excitement” among investors. “A new company would be formed with a large capital, the public would wildly subscribe to an undertaking endorsed by the imprimatur of the Postmaster-General and the Government would encourage another South Sea Bubble.”

Later Preece wrote to Lodge, “I want to show you my Report. It is now with the Attorney General. It is very strong and dead against Marconi on all points.”

L
ODGE WAS PLEASED.
He wrote to Sylvanus Thompson about what he called “Preece’s attempt to upset their applecart.”

He wrote: “I can’t help thinking it is a bit well deserved and just, though rather belated.”

M
ARCONI CAME TO RECOGNIZE
that he needed his own allies, both to neutralize the opposition of Lodge and to help dispel the still-pervasive skepticism that wireless telegraphy would ever be more than a novelty.

First he courted one of Britain’s most revered men of science, Lord Kelvin. Early on Kelvin had declared himself a skeptic on the practical future of wireless, stating—famously—“Wireless is all very well but I’d rather send a message by a boy on a pony.”

In May 1898 Kelvin stopped by Marconi’s offices in London, where Marconi himself demonstrated his apparatus. Kelvin was impressed but remained skeptical about its future value. At this point Marconi and Lodge both were developing methods of tuning signals so that messages from one transmitter would not distort those from another, but Kelvin deemed interference a problem that would only grow worse as power and distance increased. Kelvin wrote Lodge, “The chief objection I see to much practical use at distances up to 15 miles is that two people speaking to one another would almost monopolize earth and air for miles around them. I don’t think it would be possible to arrange for a dozen pairs of people to converse together by this method within a circle of 10 miles radius.”

A month later Kelvin and his wife visited Marconi’s station at the Needles Hotel on the Isle of Wight, where Marconi invited Kelvin to key in his own long-distance message. Now at last Kelvin seemed to awaken to the commercial potential of wireless. He insisted on paying Marconi for his message, the first paid wireless telegram and, incidentally, the first revenue for Marconi’s company.

Marconi asked Kelvin to become a consulting engineer. On June 11 Kelvin agreed tentatively to do so, and the value of his support immediately became evident. That same day Kelvin wrote to Oliver Lodge, “I think it would be a very good thing if you would write direct to Marconi an olive branch letter.” He told Lodge that after spending two days with Marconi, “I formed a very favorable opinion of him. He said I might write to you…. I know he would like your cooperation and I think it would be in every way right that you should in some way be connected with the work.” He informed Lodge of his own decision to join with Marconi as consulting engineer and wrote, “I suggested that you also should be asked to act in the same capacity and he thoroughly approved of my suggestion. But before I had any idea of taking part myself I wished to promote the olive branch affair and I hope (indeed feel sure) you will take the same view of it as I do.”

He added an enthusiastic postscript about his time at Marconi’s Needles station: “I saw (and practiced!) telegraphing thence through ether to & from Bournemouth. Admirable. Quite practical!!!”

Kelvin seemed all but certain to join the company, when suddenly he expressed qualms that had nothing to do with Marconi or his technology. What troubled him was the idea that in allying himself with Marconi, he would be joining an enterprise devoted not just to exploring nature’s secrets but to making as much profit as possible. On June 12, the day after his letter to Lodge, Kelvin wrote again. “In accepting to be consulting engineer, I am making a condition that no more money be asked from the public, for the present at all events; as it seems to me that the present Syndicate has as much capital as is needed for the work in prospect…. I am by no means confident that this condition will be acceptable to the promoters. But without it I cannot act.”

For Marconi, this was an untenable condition, and Kelvin never did become consulting engineer.

Now Marconi concentrated on Lodge.

L
ODGE REVELED IN HIS NEW POWER
to command Marconi’s attention. For help in dealing with Marconi, Lodge recruited a friend, Alexander Muirhead, who ran a company that manufactured telegraphic instruments of high quality. Muirhead met Jameson Davis at the Reform Club in London and immediately afterward wrote to Lodge, “Today was only the beginning of the game. I feel sure now that they want to combine with us. Have patience it will come about.”

In July Muirhead offered to sell Lodge’s tuning technology to Marconi—for £30,000, the same steep price Marconi had quoted to the post office for his own patent rights. In a letter to Lodge dated July 29, 1898, Jameson Davis wrote, “This struck me and my directors as being exceedingly high, more especially, as we are without any information as to what the inventions may be.” He wanted specifics, but so far none had been forthcoming. “As we are very anxious to have you with us, I should be very glad if we could have this matter cleared up, and come to some good business arrangement.”