Thunderstruck

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.

FAME 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.

ANARCHISTS AND SEMEN

CRIPPEN FOUND QUARTERS IN ST. JOHN’S WOOD, 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 emigres, 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