made an important discovery.”
It was a “practician’s” discovery. He had so little grasp of the underlying physics that later he would contend that the waves he now harnessed were not Hertzian waves at all but something different and previously unidentified.
Enlisting the help of his older brother, Alfonso, and some of the estate’s workers, he experimented now with different heights for his antennas and different configurations. He grounded each by embedding a copper plate in the earth. At the top he attached a cube or cylinder of tin. He put Alfonso in charge of the receiver and had him carry it into the fields in front of the house.
He began to see a pattern. Each increase in the height of his antenna seemed to bring with it an increase in distance that was proportionately far greater. A six-foot antenna allowed him to send a signal sixty feet. With a twelve-foot antenna, he sent it three hundred feet. This relationship seemed to have the force of physical law, though at this point even he could not have imagined the extremes to which he would go to test it.
Eventually Marconi sent Alfonso so far out, he had to equip him with a tall pole topped with a handkerchief, which Alfonso waved upon receipt of a signal.
The gain in distance was encouraging. “But,” Marconi said, “I knew my invention would have no importance unless it could make communication possible across natural obstacles like hills and mountains.”
Now it was September 1895, and the moment had come for the most important test thus far.
HE SAT AT THE WINDOW of his attic laboratory and watched as his brother and two workers, a farmer named Mignani and a carpenter named Vornelli, set off across the sun-blasted field in front of the house. The carpenter and the farmer carried a receiver and a tall antenna. Alfonso carried a shotgun.
The plan called for the men to climb a distant hill, the Celestine Hill, and continue down the opposite flank until completely out of sight of the house, at which point Marconi was to transmit a signal. The distance was greater than anything he had yet attempted—about fifteen hundred yards—but far more important was the fact that it would be his first try at sending a signal to a receiver out of sight and thus beyond the reach of any existing optical means of communication. If Alfonso received the signal, he was to fire his shotgun.
The attic was hot, as always. Bees snapped past at high velocity and confettied the banks of flowers below. In a nearby grove silver-gray trees stood stippled with olives.
Slowly the figures in the field shrank with distance and began climbing the Celestine Hill. They continued walking and eventually disappeared over its brow, into a haze of gold.
The house was silent, the air hot and still. Marconi pressed the key on his transmitter.
An instant later a gunshot echoed through the sun-blazed air.
At that moment the world changed, though a good deal of time and turmoil would have to pass before anyone was able to appreciate the true meaning of what just had occurred.
EASING THE SORE PARTS
DESPITE THE PANIC OF ’93, one branch of medicine expanded: the patent medicine industry. The depression may even have driven the industry’s growth, as people who felt they could not afford to pay a doctor decided instead to try healing themselves through the use of home remedies that could be ordered through the mail or bought at a local pharmacy. That the industry was indeed booming was hard to miss. All Crippen had to do was open a newspaper to see dozens of advertisements for elixirs, tonics, tablets, and salves that were said to possess astonishing properties. “Does your head feel as though someone was hammering it; as though a million sparks were flying out of the eyes?” one company asked. “Have you horrible sickness of the stomach? Burdock Blood Bitters will cure you.”
One of the most prominent patent medicine advertisers was the Munyon Homeopathic Home Remedy Co., headquartered in Philadelphia. Photographs and sketched portraits of its founder and owner, Prof. J. M. Munyon, appeared in many of the company’s advertisements and made his face one of the most familiar in America and, increasingly, throughout the world. The Munyon glaring out from company advertisements was about forty, with a scalp thickly forested with dark unruly hair and a forehead so high and broad that the rest of his features seemed pooled by gravity at the bottom of his face. His firm-set mouth anchored an expression of sobriety and determination, as if he had sworn to wipe out illness the world over. “I will guarantee that my Rheumatism Care will relieve lumbago, sciatica and all rheumatic pains in two or three hours, and cure in a few days.” A vial of the stuff could be found, he promised, at “all druggists” for twenty-five cents, and indeed small wooden cabinets produced by his company stood in almost every pharmacy, packed with cures for all manner of ailments but highlighting his most famous product, a hemorrhoid salve called Munyon’s Pile Ointment, “For Piles, blind or bleeding, protruding or internal. Stops Itching almost immediately, allays inflammation and gives ease to sore parts. We recommend it for Fissure, Ulcerations, Cracks and such anal troubles.”
In other advertisements Professor Munyon allied his remedies with the Good Lord himself. Wearing the same stern expression, he thrust his arm toward the heavens and urged readers not simply to buy his products but also to “Heed the Sign of the Cross.” Later, during the Spanish-American War, he would publish sheet music for “Munyon’s Liberty Song,” with photographs of Pres. William McKinley, Adml. George Dewey, and other important officials on the front cover, but a single large photograph of himself on the back, implicitly tying his name to the great men of the age.
In 1894 Crippen applied for a job at Munyon’s New York office, on East Fourteenth Street off Sixth Avenue, at that time one of New York’s wealthier neighborhoods. Something about Crippen appealed to Munyon—his homeopathic credentials, perhaps, or his experience in London treating patients at the world’s best-known lunatic asylum—for he offered him a position and, further, invited Crippen and his wife to live in rooms upstairs from the office.
Crippen accepted. He proved adept at preparing Munyon’s existing line of treatments and at devising formulations for new products. Munyon was impressed. He called Crippen “one of the most intelligent men I ever knew, so proficient I gave him a position readily, nor have I ever regretted it.”
What also impressed him was the gentleness in Crippen’s character. Munyon described him as being “as docile as a kitten.” But Cora was another story. She was, Munyon said, “a giddy woman who worried her husband a great deal.”
He detected in Crippen signs of a deepening unhappiness and attributed it to the behavior of his wife. She engaged other men in conversations of candor and energy, flexing the power of her personality and physical presence. She conveyed appetite. Crippen was growing jealous, and Munyon believed any man would have felt likewise. Munyon’s son, Duke, also noticed. He said, “She liked men other than her husband, which worried the doctor greatly.”
TWO FOR LONDON
MARCONI UNDERSTOOD THAT THE TIME had come to bring his invention into the world. His first thought, or so legend holds, was to offer it to the Italian government, specifically Italy’s post and telegraph authority, only to have his offer rebuffed. But in a brief memoir, his grandson, Francesco Paresce, challenged this account. “No matter how much one might enjoy this idea or how plausible it might seem in a place like Italy even today, there is actually no hard proof whatsoever that he ever did so.” The legend was too tidy and did not give enough weight to the fact that at twenty-one Marconi possessed the shrewd demeanor of a businessman twice his age. Always tuned to the importance of being first to stake claim to a new idea, Marconi may have had his next step in mind all along.
He resolved to bring his invention to London. It was the center of the world, yes, but also the locus of a patent system that granted broad rights to whomever was first to apply for them, not necessarily the inventor or discoverer of the underlying technology.
