Thunderstruck Page 12

  Maintaining Belle’s color took a lot of work. “When her hair was down in the morning one could see the original colour on the part nearest the roots,” Belle’s friend Adeline Harrison observed. Belle applied the bleaching chemicals to her hair every four or five days, and sometimes Crippen helped. “She was very anxious that nobody should ever know that she had any dark hair at all,” he said. “She was a woman who was very particular about her hair. Only the tiniest portions of the hairs at the roots after they began to grow could be seen to be dark.”

  At one point Belle’s travels brought her to a well-respected provincial theater in Dudley, the Empire, a theater with a sliding roof, where she wound up on a bill that included a much-loved comedian named George Formby. Another performer, Clarkson Rose, went to see Formby’s act that night and happened also to catch Belle’s performance. “She wasn’t a top-rank artist, but, in her way, not bad—a blowsy, florid type of serio,” meaning a seriocomic, a performer who mixed comedy and drama.

  With so many turns a night, before boisterous audiences, it was never difficult to judge which performers the crowd favored. Belle was not one of them. Her singing was neither good enough nor sad enough to charm the crowd, and her comedy elicited only a halfhearted response from those accustomed to the likes of Formby and Dan Leno, one of the most popular comics of the day. She failed even in the halls of London’s impoverished East End, considered one of the lowest tiers in the business. Robert Machray in his 1902 guide to the evening delights of the city, The Night Side of London, wrote, “To fail at even an East End hall must be a terrible business for an artiste. It means, if it means anything, the streets, starvation, death.”

  But not for Belle. She had Crippen, and she had his money. She did have one talent, however. She was gregarious and had a knack for making friends quickly. She gave up performing but lodged herself snugly among the theatrical crowd. Using Crippen’s money, she continued her participation in the late-night revelries of actors and writers and their lovers and spouses. For appearances she sometimes brought Crippen along. Both kept to their bargain about keeping up the illusion of a happy marriage. They smiled at each other and told charming stories about their life together. Behind his thick glasses Crippen’s magnified eyes seemed to glisten with genuine warmth and delight.

  But not always. A photographer captured Crippen at a formal banquet. In the photograph he is wearing evening attire: black dinner jacket and pants, white bow tie, and a gleaming white shirtfront. He wears a flower in his lapel. He is surrounded by women in white, as if he is about to disappear in a cloud of taffeta, silk, and lace. Belle and two other women are seated on risers behind him. Two pretty young women sit on his right and left, so close to him that their dresses drape over his legs and thighs, meaning also that their bodies and his must be in contact, albeit with layers of cloth in between. The scene is faintly erotic. One woman’s arm rests on his. The camera captures all five women in diverse expressions, odd for this era when one was never to move and above all not to smile. One woman stares into the middle distance, bored or sad or both. Another is smiling and glancing away. Belle, seated behind and above Crippen, has the pained expression of someone trying to get a room full of children to sit still. Only Crippen stares at the camera. His eyes, centered and magnified in the thick lenses of his glasses, are utterly without expression, as if he were a ventriloquist’s dummy, momentarily inert.

  BELLE INSINUATED HERSELF into a group of talented variety players and their spouses, among them Marie Lloyd, Lil Hawthorne of the Hawthorne Sisters, Paul Martinetti, a well-known “pantomimist,” Eugene Stratton, a blackface singer, and others. At one gathering the women resolved to form a charity to provide for performers down on their luck and founded the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild, a more subdued, women’s counterpart to the Grand Order of Water Rats, founded in 1889, which Seymour Hicks, a performer and memoirist, called “the most distinguished brotherhood of world-famous music-hall artists.” The Water Rats’ chairman was called the King Rat. The leader of the ladies’ guild was merely its president: Its first was Marie Lloyd, its most famous member. Belle became treasurer.

  The post gave Belle the kind of recognition she never got on stage. Her peers liked her and her unquenchable good spirits. Meetings were held every Wednesday afternoon, and Belle attended every one. Close friendships blossomed—close enough, certainly, that her friends knew about and had seen, even touched, the scar on her abdomen. Belle was proud of it. That long dark line gave her an element of mystery. When her friend and fellow guild member Clara Martinetti saw it, she was appalled. She had never seen a scar that size before. “Oh Belle does it hurt you?” she exclaimed.

  “Oh no,” Belle said, “it doesn’t hurt me,” and as she said it, she grabbed that portion of her abdomen and twisted.

  “A GIGANTIC EXPERIMENT”

  THE PLAN FLEW IN THE FACE of all that physicists believed about the optical character of electromagnetic waves. Like beams of light, waves traveled in a straight line. The earth was curved. Therefore, the physicists held, even if waves could travel thousands of miles—which they couldn’t—they would continue in a straight line far out into space. Sending waves across the ocean was no more possible than casting a beam of light from London to New York. There was another question: Why bother at all? How could wireless improve on the transoceanic telegraphy already in place via undersea cable? In 1898 fourteen submarine cables draped the sea floor. The dozen in daily use carried 25 to 30 million words annually, only half their potential capacity. Transmission was expensive but fast and efficient.

  Now Marconi proposed to set up a wireless service to do the same thing, with unproven technology, in the face of established physical law, and at the risk of destroying his company. The cost of a pair of wireless stations big enough and powerful enough for Marconi’s plan to succeed would be immense and, if the effort failed, ruinous. And failure seemed a lot more likely than success. The scale of the stations Marconi now envisioned dwarfed anything he had built thus far. It was as if a carpenter, having erected his first house, set out next to construct St. Paul’s Cathedral.

  To Marconi, however, the greater risk lay in not making the attempt. He recognized that from a commercial standpoint his company was inert. He had amazed the world, but the world had not then come rushing to place orders for his apparatus. In the public view, wireless remained a novelty. Marconi saw that he had to do something big to jolt the world into at last recognizing the power and practicality of his technology.

  That his plan might be impossible did not occur to him. He saw it in his mind. As far as he was concerned, he already had proven the physicists wrong. With each new experiment he had increased distance and clarity. If he could transmit across the English Channel, why not across the Atlantic? For him it came down to the height of his antenna and the intensity of charge that he was able to jolt into the sky.

  He recognized, however, that to achieve his goal he needed help. Winding wire to produce an induction coil capable of signaling thirty feet was one thing, but building a power plant capable of sending a message thousands of miles was something else altogether. For this he needed Fleming.

  At first Fleming was skeptical, but by August 1899, after studying the problems involved, he wrote to Marconi, “I have not the slightest doubt I can at once put up two masts 300 feet high and it is only a question of expense getting high enough to signal to America.”

  To better evaluate what it might entail, as well as to arrange another publicity event—coverage by wireless of the America’s Cup race off New York at the request of the New York Herald—Marconi booked his first voyage to the United States. On September 11, 1899, accompanied by three assistants, including W. W. Bradfield, Marconi sailed for New York.

  ON ARRIVAL MARCONI WAS THRONGED by reporters, who were startled by his youth—“a mere boy,” the Herald observed—though at least one writer was struck by his alien appearance. “When you meet Marconi you’re bound to notice that he’s a ‘for’ner.’ T
he information is written all over him. His suit of clothes is English. In stature he is French. His boot heels are Spanish military. His hair and moustache are German. His mother is Irish. His father is Italian. And altogether, there’s little doubt that Marconi is a thorough cosmopolitan.” The passage was not meant as praise.

  Marconi and his colleagues checked into the Hoffman House at Broadway and 24th Street in Manhattan, opposite a deepening triangular excavation that was soon to become the foundation of the Flatiron Building. They had just begun unpacking when the hotel’s steam boiler, in the basement, exploded. A frightened guest blamed it on Marconi and his mysterious equipment. To quash the guest’s concern, Marconi’s men opened their trunks to reveal the quiescent apparatus within—and only then realized that the most important trunk was missing. Without the coherers it contained, Marconi would be forced to cancel his coverage of the America’s Cup. His confident predictions of success had received a lot of attention from newspapers in America and abroad. His failure, with the weak excuse of lost luggage, would get at least as much publicity, perhaps even cause the price of his company’s stock to slide and thereby eliminate any hope of paying for his transatlantic experiment.

  Ordinarily Marconi’s demeanor was cool and quiet. As the Herald noted, Marconi exuded the “peculiar semi-abstract air that characterizes men who devote their days to study and scientific experiment.” The New York Tribune called him “a bit absent-minded.” But now, upon finding the most important trunk missing, Marconi flew into a rage. With the petulance of a child, he proclaimed that he would leave for London aboard the next outbound ship.

  His men calmed him. Bradfield and another assistant raced back to the wharf by horse-drawn cab to try to locate the trunk but failed. They returned to the hotel, no doubt fearing another outburst from their employer.

  Now Bradfield remembered that on the day their ship left Liverpool, another liner also was scheduled to depart for America, but for Boston. He wondered if just possibly the trunk had gotten on the wrong ship. A reporter for the Herald headed north by train to check.

  He found it, and Marconi’s coverage of the yacht race, between the famed Shamrock owned by Sir Thomas Lipton and its American opponent, Columbia II, seized the world’s attention. The Columbia won, and the Herald got the news first, by wireless.

  DESPITE HIS SUCCESS, on November 8, 1899, when Marconi was scheduled to return to England, he had no new contracts to show for his effort. He had hoped to win the U.S. Navy as a customer, and while in America he had conducted a series of coastal trials, but the navy balked. Its report on the tests listed a host of speculative reasons to be wary of wireless, including this one: “The shock from the sending coil of wire may be quite severe and even dangerous to a person with a weak heart.” Also, the navy’s observers were peeved by Marconi’s refusal to reveal his secrets. He allowed them to examine only certain components. Others, the navy complained, “were never dismantled, and these mechanics were explained in a general way. The exact dimensions of the parts were not divulged.”

  Far from being discouraged, Marconi arranged for yet another experiment, this one to take place during his voyage home aboard the St. Paul, a ship of great luxury and speed.

  The ship’s owner, the American Line, agreed to allow Marconi to equip the vessel with wireless and to rig an antenna high above deck. Marconi planned to begin transmitting from the ship to his stations at the Needles and Haven hotels as the liner approached England, to see how far from shore messages could be received.

  As Marconi’s assistants adjusted their shipboard equipment, Marconi demonstrated a paradox in his personality. Though he could be blind to the social needs of others, he also was able to command the allegiance of men older and younger and, as quickly became evident aboard ship, exuded a charm that women found compelling. One young woman, recalling the first time she met Marconi, said, “I noticed his peculiar, capable hands, and his rather sullen expression which would light up all at once in a wreath of smiles.” He was said also to possess a dry humor, though occasionally it emerged heavily barbed. During one experiment, frustrated with the keying skills of an operator, Marconi asked via wireless if that was the best he could do. When the man replied that it was, Marconi fired back, “Well try using the other foot.”

  The St. Paul suited him. He had grown up amid luxury, conducted his first experiments amid luxury, and now, wealthy and famous, he did his traveling surrounded by something beyond luxury, for the designers of the great ships racing the Atlantic had sought to replicate in their first-class cabins and saloons the rich interiors of English country houses and Italian palazzi. Marconi associated with the wealthiest and most prominent of the ship’s passengers, including Henry Herbert McClure, a well-known journalist. Marconi was the focus of attention and the subject of admiring, though discreet, observation by the women of the first-class deck. Always a connoisseur of beauty, Marconi returned the scrutiny.

  As the St. Paul approached England, Marconi and his assistants stationed themselves at their wireless system, located in a first-class cabin, and began hailing the shore stations over and over. Taking turns, they kept at it through the night. They heard nothing in response, and indeed no one expected much this early in the voyage. The system had a maximum range under ideal conditions of perhaps fifty miles.

  On Tuesday, November 14, 1899, the new managing director of Marconi’s company, Maj. Samuel Flood Page, arrived at the Needles station on the Isle of Wight to observe the experiment. Jameson Davis, who several months earlier had retired from the post as planned, also came.

  They calculated that the St. Paul would pass offshore at ten or eleven o’clock the next morning, Wednesday. Just in case, they assigned an operator to spend Tuesday night in the instrument room, where a bell rigged to the apparatus would announce the receipt of any incoming signals. No bells rang.

  Flood Page returned to the instrument room at dawn as the sun began to bathe the Needles, a spine of chalk and flint sea-stacks from which the Needles Hotel took its name. “The Needles resembled pillars of salt as one after the other they were lighted up by the brilliant sunrise,” Flood Page wrote. Marconi’s men watched for ships to appear in the haze off the coast. “Breakfast over, the sun was delicious as we paced the lawn, but at sea the haze increased to fog; no ordinary signals”—meaning optical signals—“could have been read from any ship passing the place at which we were.”

  They saw no sign of the St. Paul. The hours dragged past. Flood Page claimed “the idea of failure never entered our minds,” though this seems unlikely. Another hour passed, then another.

  Then at 4:45 P.M. the bell rang.

  The Needles operator signaled, “Is that you St. Paul?”

  A moment later, an answer: “Yes.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Sixty-six nautical miles away.”

  It was a new record. At Needles and aboard ship there was celebration, but soon the men at both nodes began running out of things to say. Pressed for fresh material, the Needles men began sending the latest news of the Boer War in South Africa, which had begun in mid-October and was now gaining ferocity. They sent other news as well.

  Someone—it’s not clear who—suggested publishing these dispatches in the form of a shipboard newspaper, the world’s first. The captain granted Marconi use of the ship’s print shop, which ordinarily had the more prosaic assignment of printing menus. The result was the Transatlantic Times, volume one, number one, a keepsake that passengers could purchase for a one-dollar contribution to the Seamen’s Fund. “As all know,” the newspaper’s opening section stated, “this is the first time that such a venture as this has been undertaken. A Newspaper published at Sea with Wireless Telegraph messages received and printed on a ship going twenty knots an hour!”

  Anyone reading closely would have found several passengers identified in the masthead of editors, including Marconi’s assistant, Bradfield, as editor in chief and H. H. McClure as managing editor. But there was a third name a
s well, this one unfamiliar: J. B. Holman, treasurer.

  As it happens, another momentous event had occurred during this crossing, albeit one of a rather more personal nature.

  JOSEPHINE BOWEN HOLMAN was a young woman from Indianapolis—and from money. Though she lived now in New York with her mother, her roots lay in Woodruff Place, an enclave of some five hundred wealthy people incorporated as a distinct village within Indianapolis, occupying forested land once known locally as the Dark Woods.

  Her hair was thick and dark, piled atop her head like a rich black turban. She had full lips and large eyes, and eyebrows that arced like gulls’ wings over a gaze that was frank and direct. Marconi, now twenty-five years old, had always been drawn to feminine beauty, and he was drawn now to her.

  They dined and danced and, despite the cold of a mid-November crossing, took long walks around the first-class deck. He taught her Morse code. He asked her to marry him, and she said yes. They kept their engagement a secret. When he disappeared into the wireless cabin for the last two days of the voyage, she was not troubled, though perhaps she should have been.

  Once onshore, to evade discovery of the engagement by her mother, Holman inserted passages in her letters in Morse code.

  BUOYED BY LOVE and by his success in signaling the Needles, Marconi prepared to reveal his idea to the company’s directors and ask approval to build the two gigantic stations. By summer he was ready.

  The directors balked. They considered it too risky and too expensive, and they doubted that apparatus capable of generating and managing the required power could even be built—and if so, whether the resulting station would smother every other Marconi station with interference.