unrest on policies that allowed too many foreigners to seek refuge within the nation’s borders. There were so many French anarchists in London that one, Charles Malato, published a guide with information about how to avoid the police, including a brief dictionary of useful phrases, among them
But these fears and pressures existed as a background tremolo, audible mainly to the writers, journalists, and reformers who made it their business to listen. Otherwise Britons had much to be pleased with. Though the murder rate was up, overall crime was on the wane. The Metropolitan Police, known more commonly as Scotland Yard, had grown larger and moved to new headquarters at Whitehall on the Victoria Embankment, on the north bank of the Thames. The building and the department became known as
It did not fit.
Upon examination it proved to be another left leg, causing speculation that a medical student had tossed it into the river as a prank. The case became known as the Whitehall Mystery and was never solved. When the police moved into their new headquarters, one of the departments they left behind at their previous address in Great Scotland Yard was their lost and found division, with 14,212 orphaned umbrellas.
Overall there was a lightening of the British spirit. If any one individual symbolized this change, it was the Prince of Wales, Albert Edward, heir to the throne. In the spring of 1897 he was fifty-six years old and notorious for having an empire-sized appetite for fun, food, and women, the latter despite his thirty-four-year marriage to his wife, Alexandra. That the prince had had sexual dalliances with other women was considered a fact but not a topic for public conversation. Nor was his weight. He drank modestly but adored food. He loved pigeon pie and turtle soup and deer pudding and grouse, partridge, woodcock, and quail, and when the season allowed he consumed mounds of grilled oysters. No one called him fat to his face, for it hurt his feelings, but in private his friends referred to him with affection as “Tum Tum.” When not eating, he was smoking. Before breakfast the prince allowed himself a single small cigar and two cigarettes. Through the remainder of a typical day he smoked twenty cigarettes and a dozen more cigars the diameter of gun barrels.
The prince hated being alone and loved parties and clubs and, especially, going out with friends to the music halls of London. Here he had much company. By the late 1890s music halls with their variety acts had become the most popular form of entertainment in Britain and were fast shedding the seedy image they had acquired earlier in the Victorian era. The number of variety theaters within London multiplied rapidly until the city had five hundred, including such familiar names as Tivoli, Empire, Pavilion, Alhambra, and Gaiety. On any given night a typical variety bill would feature dozens of short acts, called “turns,” including comedy, acrobatics, ventriloquism, mind reading, and acts in which men pretended to be women, and women to be men.
Overseeing this changing empire was Queen Victoria. In 1896 she celebrated her seventy-seventh birthday. She had reigned for nearly sixty years, during which the empire had grown to be the biggest and most powerful ever known. Meanwhile she herself had grown frail. For over three decades she had lived in a state of perpetual mourning over the death in 1861 of her husband. Ever since then, the Widow of Windsor had worn only black satin. She kept a cast of his hand by her bedside, so that she could hold it when she needed comfort. Now her eyesight was failing, and she was plagued by periods of profound sleepiness. She had ruled so long and in such a benign, maternal way that it was hard to think forward to a future in which she did not exist. A man born in the year of her accession, 1837, would by 1897 be on the verge of old age. Yet queen or not, the laws of nature applied. Victoria would die and, given her health and age, probably soon.
As the end of the century approached, a question lay in the hearts of Britons throughout the empire’s eleven million square miles: Without Victoria, what would the world be like?
What would happen then?
THE SECRET BOX
IT IS TEMPTING TO IMAGINE the arrival of Marconi and his mother in London as something from a Dickens novel—the two entering a cold and alien realm, overpowered by the immensity and smoke and noise of the city—but in fact they stepped directly into the warm embrace of the Jameson family and into the center of a skein of blood and business connections that touched a good portion of the British Empire. They were met at Victoria Station by one of Marconi’s cousins, Henry Jameson Davis, and were drawn immediately into the silk and flannel world of London’s upper class, with its high teas, derby days, and Sunday carriage rides through Hyde Park. This inventor had not yet starved, except by choice and obsession, and would not starve now.
The delay caused by the destruction of his equipment amplified his ever-present fear that some other inventor with an apparatus as good as his own or better might suddenly appear. With Jameson Davis’s help, Marconi acquired materials for his apparatus and set to work on reconstruction. He demonstrated the finished product to his cousin and to others in the Jameson diaspora. The effect was as startling as if a dead relative’s voice had just emerged from the mouth of a medium. Here was a means of communicating not just across space but through walls.
They talked of what to do next. A patent was necessary, of course. And a sponsor would help—perhaps the British Post Office, which controlled all telegraphy in Britain.
Here the Jameson network proved invaluable. Through an intermediary, Jameson Davis arranged to have Marconi meet with William Preece, chief electrician of the British Post Office. By dint of his position, Preece, two years from the post office’s retirement age of sixty-five, was the most prominent man in British telegraphy and one of the empire’s best-known lecturers. He was well liked by fellow engineers and employees but was loathed by Oliver Lodge and his allies, who together comprised a cadre of theoretical physicists known as “Maxwellians” for their reverence for Clerk Maxwell and his use of mathematics to posit the existence of electromagnetic waves. To the Maxwellians, Preece was the king of “practicians.” He and Lodge had more than once come to metaphoric blows over whether theory or everyday experience had more power to uncover scientific truth.
Marconi knew of Preece and knew that he had attempted with some success to signal across short distances using induction, the phenomenon whereby one circuit can generate a sympathetic current in another. Preece had never heard of Marconi but with characteristic generosity agreed to see him.
Soon afterward Marconi arrived at post office headquarters, three large buildings on St. Martin’s le Grand, just north of St. Paul’s Cathedral. One building, named General Post Office East, occupied the east side of the street and managed the processing and delivery of 2,186,800,000 letters a year throughout the United Kingdom, 54.3 letters per resident, with deliveries in London up to a dozen times a day. Across the street stood General Post Office West, which housed the Telegraph Department, Preece’s bailiwick, where anyone with a proper introduction from “a banker or other well-known citizen” could visit the Telegraph Instrument Galleries and see the heart of Britain’s telegraphic empire. Here in a room measuring 27,000 square feet stood five hundred telegraphic instruments and their operators, the largest telegraph station in the world. Four large steam engines powered pneumatic tubes that allowed the immediate dispatch of telegrams from the galleries direct to offices throughout London’s financial center, the City, and its neighboring district, the Strand, named for the boulevard that fronted the Thames.
Marconi carried two large bags of equipment. He set out his induction coil, spark generator, coherer, and other equipment, but apparently he had not brought with him a telegraph key. One of Preece’s assistants, P. R. Mullis, found one and together he and Marconi set up sending and receiving circuits on two tables. At this point Preece pulled out his watch and said quietly, “It has gone twelve now. Take this young man over to the refreshment bar and see that he gets a good dinner on my account, and come back here again by two o’clock.”
