Thunderstruck (9 page)

Convinced now that Marconi truly had accomplished something remarkable, Preece decided to announce Marconi’s breakthrough to the world.

In quick succession he gave a series of important lectures, during which he introduced Marconi as the inventor of a wholly new means of communication. He gave the first in September 1896 before a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, known best simply as the British Association, during which he revealed that “an Italian had come up with a box giving a quite new system of space telegraphy.” He gave a brief description and disclosed that it had proven a great success at Salisbury Plain. In the audience were many of Britain’s most famous scientists and, of course, Oliver Lodge and some of his Maxwellian allies, including a prominent physicist named George FitzGerald. Even in the best of circumstances Lodge and FitzGerald found the experience of listening to Preece to be the intellectual equivalent of hearing a fingernail scrape across a blackboard, but now they heard him describe Marconi as if he were the first man ever to experiment with Hertzian waves, and they were outraged. Both believed Lodge had done as much in his June 1894 lecture on Hertz at the Royal Institution.

FitzGerald wrote to a friend, “On the last day but one Preece surprised us all by saying that he had taken up an Italian adventurer who had done no more than Lodge & others had done in observing Hertzian radiations at a distance. Many of us were very indignant at this overlooking of British work for an Italian manufacturer. Science ‘made in Germany’ we are accustomed to but ‘made in Italy’ by an unknown firm was too bad.” Lodge wrote to Preece and complained, “There is nothing new in what Marconi attempts to do.”

The news may have been stale to Lodge and his friends, but it was not to the world at large. Word spread rapidly about this Italian who had
invented
wireless telegraphy. Newspapers referred to “Marconi waves,” which to Lodge and his allies represented a cruel slight to the memory of Hertz. This Italian had invented nothing, they argued. If anyone could claim to be the inventor, it was Lodge.

Preece knew he had angered the Maxwellians, and he likely reveled in the fact, for he did not back off. Far from it—he resolved to devote his next big lecture entirely to Marconi and his wireless. It was scheduled for December 12, 1896, at London’s Toynbee Hall, a settlement house dedicated to social reform based in London’s impoverished East End, in Jack the Ripper’s old hunting ground. Here, Preece knew, his lecture would draw not just scientists but a broad swath of the city’s intellectual community and representatives of the daily press. The British Association had been mere preamble.

As the date approached, Preece roughed out his lecture. He sought maximum effect. Physicists had become increasingly knowledgeable about Hertzian waves, but not the public. A demonstration of telegraphy without wires was likely to strike the Toynbee audience as so magical as to verge on the supernatural.

Marconi agreed to a demonstration but expressed concern about revealing the secrets of his apparatus. His outlook was more that of a magician protecting his tricks than a scientist unveiling a new discovery to peers. He wrote, “I think it desirable just now that no explanation be given as to the means which I employ for obtaining the effects, as I fear it may give rise to discussions which I would rather avoid until my whole study can be laid before some scientific society.”

Marconi satisfied his need for secrecy by concealing his apparatus. He constructed two boxes and painted them black. In one he installed his transmitter, in the other his receiver, with a bell attached. At the start of the lecture one box was at the podium, the other at the far side of the room.

Preece began the lecture with a brief summary of his own efforts to harness induction to signal across bodies of water. But tonight, he said, he would reveal a remarkable discovery made by a young Italian inventor, Guglielmo Marconi. And then, in the finest tradition of late-nineteenth-century scientific lectures, the demonstration began.

First Preece pressed the key at the box that housed the transmitter. The audience heard the loud crack of a spark. At the same instant, the bell in the receiver box rang.

Nearly everyone in the audience had seen magic acts, and many doubtless had attended at least one of the famed shows at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, “England’s Home of Mystery,” directed by a magician named Nevil Maskelyne. Compared to women sawn in half or men levitated to the ceiling, this at first glance was nothing special. It took a moment or two for the audience to absorb the fact that what they were witnessing was not a magic trick but a scientific effect conjured by the great William Preece of the British Post Office, who stood before them exuding as always absolute credibility, his eyes large behind thick glasses, his great beard marking each motion of his head with a tangled whoosh of gray-white whiskers. Still, many in the audience reacted the way Marconi’s father once had, wondering by what clever means Marconi had hidden the wire connecting the two boxes.

Now Preece and Marconi launched a second phase of the demonstration, meant to quash any lingering skepticism. On a cue from Preece, Marconi picked up the black box that housed his receiver and walked with it through the lecture hall. The spark cracked, the bell rang, over and over, but now the audience could see, clearly, that no wire trailed Marconi as he moved. The audience also saw that Marconi was barely an adult, which only increased the wonder of the moment. No matter where Marconi walked, the bell rang.

F
AME CAME SUDDENLY.
The lay press sought a name for Marconi’s technology and called it space telegraphy or aetheric telegraphy or simply telegraphy without wires.
The Strand Magazine
sent a writer, H.J.W. Dam, to interview Marconi at his home.

Dam wrote, “He is a tall, slender young man, who looks at least thirty and has a calm, serious manner and a grave precision of speech which further gives the idea of many more years than are his.”

Marconi told Dam that it was possible that he had discovered a kind of wave different from what Hertz had found. Asked to explain the difference, Marconi said, “I don’t know. I am not a professional scientist, but I doubt if any scientist can tell you.”

He declined to talk about the components of his apparatus, but he did tell Dam that his waves could “penetrate everything,” including the hull of an ironclad battleship. This caught the interviewer’s attention. “Could you not from this room explode a box of gunpowder placed across the street in that house yonder?”

“Yes,” Marconi said, as matter-of-fact as always. He explained, however, that first he would need to insert two wires or metal plates into the powder to produce the spark necessary for detonation.

Reports of Marconi’s feats now circulated abroad. Military representatives from Austria-Hungary asked for, and received, a demonstration. In Germany Kaiser Wilhelm also took notice and, as soon would be apparent, resolved that this technology needed further, deeper investigation. The Italian ambassador to England invited Marconi to dinner, after which the ambassador and Marconi traveled in an embassy coach to the post office for a demonstration. In a letter to his father, Marconi reported that the ambassador “even apologized a little for not having dedicated his attention to the matter sooner.”

Lodge and his allies of course were enraged, but more broadly, within Britain’s higher social tiers and within the scientific establishment as a whole, there were many others who looked upon Marconi with suspicion, even distaste. He was a troubling character, and not just because he had laid claim to apparatus that Lodge and other scientists had used first. He was something new in the landscape. As he himself had admitted, he was not a scientist. His grasp of physical theory was minimal, his command of advanced mathematics nonexistent. He was an entrepreneur of a kind that would become familiar to the world only a century or so later, with the advent of the so-called “start-up” company. In his time the closest models for this kind of behavior were unsavory—for example, the men who made fortunes selling quack medicines, immortalized in H. G. Wells’s novel
Tono-Bungay.

His obsession with secrecy rankled. Here he was, this young Italian, staking claim to a new and novel technology yet at the same time violating all that British science held dear by refusing to reveal details of how his apparatus worked. Marconi had succeeded in doing something believed to be impossible, but
how
had he done it? Why was he, a mere boy, able to do what no one else could? And why was he so unwilling to publish openly his work, as any other scientist would do as a matter of course? Lodge wrote, with oblique malice, that “the public has been educated by a secret box more than it would have been by many volumes of
Philosophical Transactions
and Physical Society Proceedings.”

To add insult to injury, Marconi was
a foreigner
at a time when Britons were growing concerned about the increasing number of anarchists, immigrants, and refugees on British soil.

In the face of all this, Marconi remained confident. His early letters to his father were full of cool calculation. Somehow he had developed a belief in his vision that nothing could shake. His chief worry was whether he could develop his wireless quickly enough to outstrip the other inventors who, now that the news of his success was circling the globe, surely would intensify their own work on electromagnetic waves.

In this race he saw no room for loyalty, not to Preece, not to anyone.

A
NARCHISTS AND
S
EMEN

C
RIPPEN FOUND QUARTERS IN
S
T
. J
OHN’S
W
OOD
, near Regent’s Park. His Munyon’s office was a distance away on Shaftesbury Avenue, which ran a soft serpentine between Bloomsbury and Piccadilly Circus among shops, offices, and restaurants and past side streets inhabited by actors, musicians, French and German émigrés, and other “foreigners,” as well as a few prostitutes. The avenue was home also to three of London’s best-known theaters, the Palace, the Shaftesbury, and the Lyric. The Munyon’s office stood opposite the Palace.

Crippen made sure his wife had all the money she needed to live well in New York and to pursue her opera lessons. But Cora was growing disenchanted with opera, acknowledging at last what her teachers had recognized long before, that she had neither the voice nor the stage presence to succeed in so lofty a pursuit. She wrote to Crippen that she now planned to try making a career doing “music hall sketches.” In America it was known as Vaudeville; the British called it Variety.

This troubled Crippen. Vaudeville seemed tawdry compared to opera, and even compared to variety, which as Crippen knew was popular in London and becoming increasingly respectable. Even the Prince of Wales was said to enjoy a good night of variety turns. Though some music halls still served as points of commerce for prostitutes and pickpockets, most had become clean and safe. Sarah Bernhardt, Marie Lloyd, and Vesta Tilley did turns, and within a decade so too would Anna Pavlova and the Russian ballet, first introduced to Britain at the Palace.

Crippen wrote to Cora and urged her to reconsider. He recommended that she come right away to London. Here at least she could perform variety without taint.

She agreed to join him, though probably neither love nor Crippen’s plea had much to do with her decision. More likely her career doing musical sketches in New York had also been a failure, and now she wanted to try her hand in London, where she could sing before a sophisticated audience more appreciative of her true talent. Her impending arrival meant that Crippen had to find new lodgings that were large enough and luxurious enough to accommodate a wife with so swollen a sense of self-regard and need. He chose an apartment in Bloomsbury on a pretty street in the shape of a half-circle, one of London’s many “crescents.” This was South Crescent, off Tottenham Court Road, one block from the British Museum and an easy walk to the Munyon’s office on Shaftesbury.

Cora arrived in August, and at once Crippen sensed a difference. “I may say that when she came to England from America her manner towards me was entirely changed, and she had cultivated a most ungovernable temper, and seemed to think I was not good enough for her, and boasted of the men of good position traveling on the boat who had made a fuss of her, and, indeed, some of these visited her at South Crescent, but I do not know their names.”

I
N
B
LOOMSBURY
C
RIPPEN HAD CHOSEN
a neighborhood in which an array of forces then driving deep change in Britain were fully at play. Just east lay Bloomsbury Square and Bloomsbury Road, where within a few years Virginia and Vanessa Stephen, critic Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, and other members of their cadre of writers, poets, and gleaming personalities would become legendary as the Bloomsbury Group. Virginia would marry and take her husband’s name, Woolf. A few blocks to the west, across Tottenham Court Road, was territory soon to be claimed by the visual arts counterpart to Bloomsbury, the Fitzroy Street Group, whose members converged on the Fitzroy Tavern, built in 1897 at the corner of Charlotte and Windmill streets, four blocks due west of the Crippens’ new home. The group’s most prominent and eventually most infamous member was the painter Walter Sickert, who from time to time in the years following his death would be considered a suspect in the Ripper murders. The Crippens shared the sidewalk with the brightest intellects of the day, including G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, and Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford), and the scholars of University College and the British Museum.

The neighborhood vibrated with sexual energy. Among the Bloomsbury Group, once it achieved full intellectual flower, conversation about sex flowed easily. The trigger, according to Virginia Woolf, was a moment when Lytton Strachey, the critic and biographer, walked into a drawing room where she and her sister Vanessa were seated.

Virginia wrote, “The door opened and the long and sinister figure of Mr. Lytton Strachey stood on the threshold. He pointed his finger at a stain on Vanessa’s white dress.

“‘Semen?’ he asked.

“Can one really say it? I thought and we burst out laughing. With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down.”

The dividing line between Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia, as the neighborhood around the Fitzroy Tavern eventually became known, was Tottenham Court Road, which happened also to be a fault line in the world’s political crust and a part of London of no small interest to New Scotland Yard and the French Sûreté. For years the basement at No. 4 Tottenham had housed the Communist Working Men’s Club, where firebrands of all stripe had spoken, raved, and cajoled. Nearby at No. 30 Charlotte was the equally notorious, though more radical, Epicerie Française, a center of the international anarchist movement, kept under periodic watch by French undercover detectives. Here men seethed at the rift between the poor and the rich that was then so glaring in Britain.

Each morning, as Crippen made his way to work at the sumptuous Munyon’s office in Shaftesbury Avenue, he walked down Tottenham Court Road, past the notorious basement and past the Special Branch and Sûreté detectives who kept watch on the street and its surroundings.

None took the least notice of the little doctor, his eyes large behind his glasses, his feet thrown out to his sides as he walked, oblivious to the forces simmering around him.

C
ORA
C
RIPPEN NOW LAUNCHED
her bid for fame in the variety halls of Britain. She had one significant advantage: British audiences loved acts from America. She resolved to make her debut in a brief musical of her own creation, in which of course she would play the leading role. She asked Crippen to pay the production costs, and he gladly assented, for the work seemed to improve Cora’s outlook and her behavior toward him, though she remained prone to dramatic swings of mood, as if she believed volatility were as necessary to a diva as a good voice and an expensive dress, the purchase of which Crippen also cheerfully funded.

Cora drafted a libretto for her show but recognized that it needed work. She arranged a meeting with a woman named Adeline Harrison, a music hall actress and part-time journalist who also worked as an adviser helping other performers craft new acts and improve scripts. Crippen may have had something to do with recruiting Harrison, for the two women met at Munyon’s suite of offices on Shaftesbury.

Harrison recalled her first glimpse of Cora. “Presently the green draperies parted and there entered a woman who suggested to me a brilliant, chattering bird of gorgeous plumage. She seemed to overflow the room with her personality. Her bright, dark eyes were twinkling with the joy of life. Her vivacious rounded face was radiant with smiles. She showed her teeth and there was a gleam of gold.”

A photograph from about this time captured Cora in a pose for the stage. It shows her seated and singing from a songbook, beside a basket heaped with flowers of some lush species, possibly orchids or calla lilies, or both. She is on the far side of plump, with thick fingers and almost no neck. Her dress and the many layers underneath make her appear still larger, more weapon than woman. The dress is printed with daggerlike petals. Its billowing shoulders amplify the breadth of her bodice but also highlight the impossible narrowness of her abdomen, corseted perhaps in the famous “Patti” from the Y.C. Corset company, named for Adelina Patti, one of the world’s most beloved sopranos. Cora wears an expression that conveys both confidence and self-satisfaction. Not quite haughty, but vain and smug. Mighty.

Harrison read Cora’s script. There wasn’t much of it—“a few feeble lines of dialogue,” Harrison wrote.

Cora told Harrison she wanted to make the act longer and asked how that might be achieved. Cora wanted it to be more of a freestanding operetta than a simple variety turn.

“I suggested that a little plot might improve matters,” Harrison said.

The resulting show was called
The Unknown Quantity
and debuted at the Old Marylebone Music Hall, not quite the tier of theater Cora had hoped for. The Marylebone had developed something of a reputation for favoring melodramas that featured coffins, corpses, and blood, but it nonetheless was a known and credible venue that would give her an opportunity to show off her talents. That was all she wanted. Once London got a look at her, her future would be made.

A program from this period identified Cora as Macà Motzki—her maiden name divided in two—and as a principal in “Vio & Motzki’s American Bright Lights Company, From the Principal American Theatres.” Her foil was to be an Italian tenor named Sandro Vio, identified in the program as “General Manager and Sole Director.” Crippen too was on the program, as “Acting Manager.” The plot involved romance and extortion and required Cora at one point to hurl a fistful of banknotes at Vio. She insisted the cash be real, though the resulting first-night scramble by the audience caused the management to command that fake money be used in future performances. The show lasted one week. Cora demonstrated a lack of talent so complete that at least one critic mocked her as “the Brooklyn Matzos Ball.”

The failure humiliated Cora and caused her to give up variety, at least for the time being.

T
HE
C
RIPPENS MOVED FROM
South Crescent to Guildford Street, a block or so from where Dickens once lived, but soon afterward, around November 1899, Professor Munyon called Crippen back to America to run the company’s Philadelphia headquarters for a few months. He left Cora in London.