by Erik Larson
Further evidence of this unreliability struck close to home for Vyvyan. On January 3 his wife gave birth to a healthy daughter. There was celebration and of course a transatlantic message by wireless to The Times of London. But an atmospheric distortion converted a reference to Jan as in January, to the name Jane. The telegram as received in Poldhu had a Bluebeardesque cast:
Times London by transatlantic wireless Please insert in birth column Jane 3rd wife of R. N. Vyvyan Chief Engineer Marconi’s Canadian Station of a daughter. Marconi.
EMBOLDENED BY HIS NEW VICTORY, Marconi now prepared to capitalize on it with a final achievement that he hoped would at last empty the sea of doubt. On January 10, 1903, he left for Cape Cod, intent on sending the first all-wireless message from the United States to England. He carried in his pocket a greeting from President Theodore Roosevelt to be sent to King Edward. He believed he could not send the message directly from Cape Cod because the station did not have the necessary power, and planned instead to send it by wireless from South Wellfleet to Glace Bay in Nova Scotia, for relay across the ocean.
Roosevelt’s message trudged from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia in fits and starts, as if Glace Bay were at the far side of the planet, not just six hundred miles to the northeast. Meanwhile, to everyone’s astonishment, the message also traveled direct to Poldhu, where it arrived long before the relayed message came struggling in from Glace Bay.
For once the system had performed far better than expected. But now came a miscalculation, and a costly one.
The operators at Poldhu sent a return greeting from King Edward, for Roosevelt. They sent it, however, by conventional undersea cable.
Marconi had seen no other choice: His hard experience at Glace Bay had shown that for whatever reason the Poldhu station could not transmit messages to Nova Scotia. In reporting the event, however, countless newspapers reprinted the two messages one atop the other, a juxtaposition that suggested a fluid back-and-forth exchange entirely by wireless.
When it became clear that Edward’s message had traveled the conventional route, Marconi’s critics seized on the episode as evidence of the continuing troubles of wireless and accused Marconi of creating the false impression that two-way wireless communication across the sea had been achieved. In London managing director Cuthbert Hall claimed the decision to send the return message by cable was due solely to a need to be courteous to King Edward. He explained that the royal reply had been handed in on a Sunday, when the telegraph office nearest to Poldhu was closed. The telegram would not have been delivered to the operators at Poldhu until Monday morning at the earliest, and only then could they have begun their attempt to send it by wireless. It was far more respectful, Hall argued, to get the king’s message out immediately, even if that meant sending it by cable.
Marconi’s critics sensed blood. The head of the Eastern Telegraph Co., Sir John Wolfe Barry, cited Marconi’s use of cable as further evidence that wireless never would become a serious competitor.
The Westminster Gazette sent a reporter to ask Marconi about the incident.
“I was not concerned with the reply, nor how it came,” Marconi said. “You know the local telegraphic office near Poldhu was closed, and all that. But what I wished to demonstrate was that a message could be sent across the Atlantic. It did not matter from a scientific point of view whether it came from east to west or west to east. No scientific man would say that it did.” But Marconi said nothing about the previous winter’s struggle at Glace Bay to receive anything at all from Poldhu, let alone a complete message from a king. Instead, he told the reporter, “If it could go one way, why not the other?”
Yet Marconi and his engineers were fully aware of the shortcomings of his transatlantic system. Vyvyan wrote, “It was clear that these stations were not nearly in a position to undertake a commercial service; either more power would have to be used or larger aerials, or both.” On January 22, 1903, at great cost to his company and to the dismay of his board, Marconi shut down all three stations for three months to reappraise their design and operation. He sailed for home aboard Cunard’s Etruria.
ON RETURNING TO LONDON he discovered that Maskelyne’s attacks had begun to resonate with investors and the public alike. In the Morning Advertiser a writer adopting the name Vindex proposed that Marconi could easily resolve public doubt about his invention by subjecting it to a test whose every aspect would be open to public scrutiny. He proposed that Marconi send a transatlantic message to Poldhu at a predetermined time, with transmission and receipt observed by the editors of four American newspapers and four English.
Dubbed immediately the “Vindex Challenge,” the proposal gained popular endorsement. The public had grown accustomed to verifiable displays of progress, such as races between transatlantic ocean liners. Now Marconi was promising the ultimate in speed. If he wanted the world to believe his fantastic claims that he could send messages across the Atlantic in an instant, he should provide evidence and reveal his methods.
One reader wrote to the Morning Advertiser, “If ‘Vindex’ does no more than secure the demonstration for which he asks, he will be doing a great service to the Marconi Company, and a greater service to the public in destroying the rumors which are current about the Transatlantic service, and, further, in establishing the claim of the Marconi Company to the assistance of the public in its fight with the vested interest of the cable companies….
“If Mr. Marconi successfully passes his test I am sure he will have the whole-hearted support not only of your paper but of every honest Englishman in his fight against capital and political influence.”
He signed his letter, “A BELIEVER IN FAIR PLAY.”
The Westminster Gazette put the question directly to Marconi: Why not give a demonstration for the press?
“Well, we have got beyond that,” Marconi said. “It would be casting doubt upon what is clearly proved. What is there to demonstrate? It might have done some time ago, I admit; but not now, I think. But I should not mind showing to anyone of standing and position who does not start off from a sceptical point of view. I will not demonstrate to any man who throws doubt upon the system.”
THE TIMING OF THIS CONTROVERSY was especially awkward. Even as it flared, Marconi and Fleming were preparing a series of tests meant to quash the equally prevalent skepticism about Marconi’s ability to send tuned messages, and to address a new concern raised by critics as to whether a transmitter big enough to send signals across the Atlantic would disrupt communication with other stations. Marconi asked Fleming to devise an experiment to prove that high-power stations would not, as Fleming put it, “drown the feebler radiation” involved in communication between ships and between ships and shore.
Instead of trying to incorporate transmissions from actual ships into his experiment, Fleming installed a small marine set in a hut about one hundred yards away from the giant Poldhu aerial and connected it to a simple one-mast antenna. He planned to send messages from the big and small transmitters simultaneously, each on a different wavelength, to Marconi’s station at the Lizard. He attached two receivers to the Lizard’s antenna, one tuned to capture the high-power messages, the other to receive messages from the simulated ship.
Fleming created sixteen messages, eight to be sent from the high-power transmitter, eight from the low. He put each into an envelope, “no person except myself knowing the contents,” and wrote on each the time at which the enclosed message was to be sent. Four messages were in code. Each high-power message was to be transmitted at the same time as a low-power message and repeated as many as three times.
On the day of the experiment, Fleming gave all the envelopes to an assistant “unconnected with the Marconi Company, in whose integrity and obedience I had confidence” and instructed him to deliver the envelopes to the operators at the times selected. The assistant signed an affidavit confirming that Fleming’s instructions had been “precisely obeyed.”
But as any of Fleming’s peers in academic science instantly coul
d see, Fleming’s precautions—his sealed envelopes, the coded messages, the unknowing assistant—created only an illusion of scientific rigor. They reflected the tension between science and enterprise, openness and secrecy, that continued to shape the behavior of Marconi and his company and that in turn had the perverse effect of helping sustain the suspicions of his most steadfast critics.
By Fleming’s account, all the messages arrived at the Lizard on schedule and were recorded on tape by two Morse inkers. Fleming collected the ink rolls and turned them over to Marconi for translation from Morse to English. “In every case he gave the absolutely correct message which was sent,” Fleming reported.
Well, not absolutely. In the next sentence of his report Fleming dimmed the glow of his own testimonial. The first set of messages had been distorted. “Only in one case was there some little difficulty in reading two or three words, and that was in the messages sent at 2 p.m.” Marconi’s explanation, according to Fleming, was that the messages “had been slightly blurred in the attempt of two ships somewhere in the Channel to communicate with each other.”
Though Fleming dismissed this as “some little difficulty,” in fact the distortions were significant and gave further testimony to the problematic nature of wireless telegraphy. The garbling of “two or three words” was no small thing. The two o’clock message from the high-power station was in code and consisted of five words, “Quiney Cuartegas Cuatropean Cubantibus Respond.” If only two words came through fractured, the distorted portion would amount to 40 percent of the message; if three words, 60 percent. The coding made the distortion even more problematic since the coded messages looked like gibberish anyway and the receiving operator would be unlikely to recognize that errors had occurred.
Nonetheless, Fleming and Marconi promoted the experiment as nothing less than a total success. In a much-publicized lecture on March 23, 1903, Fleming crowed that it proved beyond doubt that Marconi’s tuning technology prevented interference. A week later Marconi applauded the experiment in a speech to shareholders at his company’s annual meeting. Four days later Fleming wrote a letter to The Times in which he again extolled Marconi’s tuning prowess.
At the Egyptian Hall, Nevil Maskelyne read Fleming’s accounts and was struck by how much the sealed envelopes and other trappings of false rigor reminded him of techniques used by spirit mediums to convince audiences of their powers. He sensed fraud and longed for a way to reveal it.
A friend, Dr. Horace Manders, came to him with an idea: If Marconi would not willingly subject his system to public challenge, why not attempt to do so without his cooperation? Dr. Manders believed he knew of just such an opportunity.
Though somewhat wicked, the idea delighted Maskelyne, who later wrote that he “at once grasped the fact that the opportunity was too good to be missed.” As for the wicked part, he argued that carrying out his plan was “something more than a right; it was a duty.”
Soon, thanks to Maskelyne, Fleming would experience a vivid demonstration of the true vulnerability of wireless, one that would erode his status within the Marconi company, wound his friendship with the inventor, and shake the reputations of both.
IN NOVA SCOTIA, when winter and spring collide, an event called a silver thaw can occur. As rain falls, it freezes and sheathes everything it touches with ice until tree limbs begin to break and telegraph wires to fall. Marconi’s men at Glace Bay had never experienced a silver thaw before, and they were unprepared for the phenomenon.
On April 6, 1903, the rain came. Ice accumulated on the station’s four hundred wires until each wore a coat about one inch thick. It was lovely, ethereal. A giant crystal pyramid hung in the sky.
The weight of so much ice on so many miles of wire became too great. The whole array pulled free and crackled to the ground.
BLUE SERGE
FOR TWO OF BELLE’S FRIENDS, John Nash and Lil Hawthorne, the news of Belle’s death came as an especially harsh surprise. On March 23, 1910, the day before Crippen telegraphed the news, Nash and his wife had set sail for America, after a doctor recommended a sea voyage to ease Hawthorne’s nerves. No one thought to send them word by wireless. After their arrival in New York, they paid a visit to Mrs. Isabel Ginnette, president of the guild, who also was in New York. To their shock, the Nashes now heard that Belle had died.
Nash promised Mrs. Ginnette that on his return to England he would go and talk to Crippen. Once safely back in London, the Nashes got together with their friends in the guild and discovered that no one believed Crippen’s account of what had happened. Nash was appalled that his friends had done little to learn the truth. “I came over here and found that no one had had the courage and pluck to take up this matter,” Nash said. “I therefore felt it my duty to take action myself.”
Nash and his wife stopped by Crippen’s office. “It was the first time we had seen him since his wife’s death,” Nash said. “He seemed much cut up—in fact, sobbed; he seemed very nervous, and was twitching a piece of paper about the whole time.”
Crippen told him that Belle had died in Los Angeles, but then corrected himself and said it had happened in “some little town” around San Francisco. Nash knew San Francisco and pressed Crippen for a more precise location. Exasperated, Nash said, “Peter, do you mean to say that you don’t know where your wife has died?”
Crippen said he could not remember but thought the place was called “Allemaio.”
Nash changed direction. “I hear you have received her ashes.”
Crippen confirmed it and said he had them in his safe. Nash did not ask to see them. Instead, he asked for the name of the crematorium and whether Crippen had received a death certificate.
“You know there are about four Crematoria there,” Crippen said. “I think it is one of those.”
“Surely you received a certificate.”
Crippen became visibly nervous.
Nash said later, “I began to feel there was something wrong, as his answers were not satisfactory when a man cannot tell where his wife died or where her ashes came from.”
Two days later, June 30, Nash and his wife set out to visit a friend who worked at New Scotland Yard. No mere functionary, this friend was Superintendent Frank C. Froest, head of the Yard’s Murder Squad, established three years earlier as a special unit of its Criminal Investigation Department or CID.
ANYONE APPROACHING THE HEADQUARTERS of the Metropolitan Police from the north along the Victoria Embankment saw a building of five stories topped by a giant mansard roof, with Westminster Hall and Big Ben visible two blocks south. Huge rectangular chimneys marched along the top of the roof. Turrets formed the corners of the building and imparted the look of a medieval castle, giving their occupants—one of whom was the police commissioner—unparalleled views of the Thames. The lower floors were sheathed in granite quarried by the residents of Dartmoor Prison; the rest up to the roofline was brick.
The Nashes were anxious, but being creatures of the theater, they were also excited by the prospect of their interview with Froest. The building and its setting conveyed melodrama, and Froest himself was a man of some fame, for his pursuit in the mid-1890s of a crooked financier, Jabez Balfour, whom he captured in Argentina.
Froest listened with care as Nash and Lil Hawthorne told their story, then summoned a detective from the Murder Squad, one of its best. When the man entered, Froest introduced the Nashes and explained they had come because a friend of theirs seemed to have disappeared. Her name, he said, was Mrs. Cora Crippen, though she also used the stage name Belle Elmore and was a member of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild. Her husband, Froest said, was a physician “out Holloway way,” named Hawley Harvey Crippen.
“Mr. and Mrs. Nash are not satisfied with the story the husband has told,” Froest said. “Perhaps you had better listen to the full story.”
The detective took a chair.
HIS NAME WAS WALTER DEW; his rank, chief inspector. He was a tall man, built solid, with blue eyes and a large cow-catcher mustach
e, neatly groomed. He had joined the force at nineteen; he now was forty-seven. He had received his detective’s badge in 1887 and shortly thereafter won the nickname “Blue Serge” for always wearing his best suit on duty. He took part in the Yard’s investigation of the Ripper killings in 1888 and had the good luck, or bad, to be one of the detectives who discovered the remains of Jack’s last and most horribly mutilated victim, Mary Kelly. “I saw a sight which I shall never forget to my dying day,” Dew wrote in a memoir. “The whole horror of that room will only be known to those of us whose duty it was to enter it.” What stayed with him most keenly, he wrote, was the look in the victim’s eyes. “They were wide open, and seemed to be staring straight at me with a look of terror.”
Now Nash told Dew his story:
“When we got back from America a few days ago, we were told that Belle was dead. Our friends said she had gone suddenly to America without a word of good-bye to any of them, and five months ago a notice was out in a theatrical paper announcing her death from pneumonia in California. Naturally, we were upset. I went to see Dr. Crippen. He told me the same story, but there was something about him I didn’t like. Very soon after his wife’s death Dr. Crippen was openly going about with his typist, a girl called Ethel Le Neve. Some time ago they went to a dance together and the girl was actually wearing Belle’s furs and jewelry.”
He told Dew, “I do wish you could make some inquiries and find out just when and where Belle did die. We can’t get details from Dr. Crippen.”
Froest and Dew asked a few more questions, then Froest said, “Well, Mr. Dew, that’s the story. What do you make of it?”
Under ordinary circumstances, Dew would have been inclined to reject the inquiry and turn it over to the uniformed branch for handling as a routine missing-person case. Dew did not suspect foul play and sensed that the Nashes also did not. “What was really in the minds of Mr. and Mrs. Nash, what prompted them to seek the assistance of Superintendent Froest, I cannot say, but it is quite certain that neither of them dreamt for a moment that there was anything very sinister behind the affair,” Dew wrote. “It is probably that they were actuated more than anything else by Crippen’s lack of all decency in placing another woman so soon and so completely in the shoes of his dead wife.”
