dream.”
Here, as
At the close of his lecture great applause rose from the audience. From Lodge and the Maxwellians came more fury. In a striking breach of the decorum that governed Victorian science, Lodge took his anger public. In a letter to
The attack startled even his friend and fellow physicist George FitzGerald, though FitzGerald shared Lodge’s opinion. Shortly after the
FitzGerald did not blame Marconi. “This young chap himself, I understand he is merely 20”—actually, he was twenty-three—“deserves a great deal of credit for his persistency, enthusiasm, and pluck and must be really a very clever young fellow and it would be very hard to expect him to be quite judicial in his views as to everybody’s credit in the matter.” Marconi had not been “very open,” he wrote, “but he is hardly to blame if his head is a bit swelled under the circumstances, and no Italian or other foreigner was ever really fair in their judgments so that it is quite unreasonable to expect them to be so.”
The real problem was Preece, FitzGerald charged. He urged that Lodge focus his attacks on him, in particular on how Preece and the post office—“absurdly ignorant, as usual”—had ignored the scientific discoveries on which Marconi had based his apparatus and instead had been seduced by a “secret box.”
He added, “Preece is, I think, distinctly and intentionally scoffing at scientific men and deserves severe rebuke.”
ON JULY 2, 1897, MARCONI received his full, formal patent and, without Preece’s knowledge, moved steadily closer to join with Jameson Davis to form a new company.
Preece may have believed he had stymied this plan. In a letter to superiors on July 15, in which he argued the time had come to consider acquiring the patent rights to Marconi’s system, he wrote: “I have distinctly told him that as he has submitted his scheme to the consideration of the Post Office, the Admiralty and the War Department, he cannot morally enter into any negotiation with anyone else or listen to any financial proposals which might lead to a species of ‘blackmailing’ of his principal, if not his only, customers. He accepts and recognizes this position.”
Preece recommended the government pay a mere ?10,000 for the patent rights—about $1.1 million today— and doubted Marconi would feel himself in a position to argue. “It must be remembered that Mr. Marconi is a very young man…. He is a foreigner. He has proved himself to be open and candid and he has resisted very tempting offers. He has very little experience. On the other hand he cannot do much without our assistance and his system can scarcely be made practical for telegraphy by any one in this country but by ourselves.”
But just five days later Marconi founded his new company. His representatives registered its name as the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Co. and identified its headquarters as being in London. Jameson Davis became managing director, with the understanding that once the enterprise was well established he would resign. Marconi received sixty thousand shares of stock valued at one pound each, representing 60 percent ownership of the company. He also received the ?15,000 cash, and the company’s pledge to spend another ?25,000 developing the technology.
Within six months, the value of Marconi’s stock tripled and suddenly his sixty thousand shares were worth ?180,000 pounds, about $20 million today. At twenty-three years of age, he was both famous and rich.
IN BERLIN ADOLF SLABY had been busy. On June 17, one month after witnessing the Bristol Channel experiments, he wrote to Preece, “I have now constructed the whole apparatus of M[onsieur] Marconi and it works quite well. After returning from my holidays, which I intend to spend at the sea shore, I will try to signal through some distance. I feel always indebted to your extreme kindness in remembering those very pleasant and interesting days at Lavernock.”
But Slaby’s warm thanks belied grander ambitions, both for himself and for Germany. Soon he and two associates would begin marketing their own system and, with the enthusiastic backing of the kaiser and a cadre of powerful German investors, would become locked in a shadow war with Marconi that embodied the animosities then gaining sway in the larger world.
For the moment, however, Slaby pretended that all that mattered was science and knowledge. He wrote to Preece, “We are happy men, that we need not care for politics. The friendship that science had made cannot be disturbed and I wish to repeat to you the truest feelings of my heart.”
BRUCE MILLER
BRUCE MILLER HAD ONCE BEEN a prizefighter and had the handsome but battered features to prove it. He had given up boxing for the stage and had come to England some months before meeting Belle in hopes of making a career in variety. He was, literally, a one-man band, playing drums, harmonica, and banjo all at the same time, and performed in London and in the provinces, at Southend-on-Sea, Weston-super-Mare, and elsewhere. When he met Belle, however, he was preparing to leave for Paris and the Paris Exposition of 1900, where he had entered into a partnership involving certain “attractions” at the exposition. He met her one evening in December 1899, about a month after Crippen’s departure for Philadelphia. He was sharing an apartment with a male roommate, an American music teacher, on Torrington Square in Bloomsbury, adjacent to University College. That evening Belle came to the apartment to have dinner with his roommate, who introduced them. On that occasion, Miller said, “I merely shook hands with her and went away.”
They met again, perhaps with Miller’s roommate as intermediary, and became friends. Belle clearly was drawn to his size and rugged good looks. Miller was attracted by her energy and buoyancy and by her lush sexuality. He had a wife back in America, whom he had married in 1886, but as far as he was concerned the marriage had failed and he was married in name only.
“I cannot say that I told Belle Elmore that I was married,” Miller conceded later, “but if I kept it from her it was not done intentionally. I never had anything to hide, or any object in keeping the information from her. When I first came to England I was separated from my wife. She wrote to me pleading to go back and live with her, and I showed Belle Elmore the letters.” Belle agreed he should return to America and rejoin his wife.
Belle was not exactly forthcoming about her own marriage. “When I first met her, she was introduced to me as a Miss Belle Elmore,” Miller said. “I met her several times before I knew that she was married. She frequently spoke of Dr. Crippen, and finally roused my curiosity, and I asked her who was Dr. Crippen?”
“That,” she said, “is my husband. Didn’t your friend tell you I was married?”
With Crippen away in America, Miller began coming to the apartment on Guildford Street two or three times a week, “sometimes in the afternoons,” he said, “and sometimes in the evenings,” though he contended later that the only room he entered was the front parlor.
He began calling Belle “brown eyes.” He gave her photographs of himself, one of which she propped on the piano in the apartment. They went out together often, to restaurants popular with the theatrical crowd, like Jones’s and Pinoli’s, Kettner’s in Soho, the Trocadero—the “Troc”—and most charismatic and infamous of all, the Cafe Royal on Regent near Piccadilly Circus, frequented by George Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, the sex researcher Havelock Ellis, the sex-obsessed Frank Harris, and before his fall the sexually indiscreet Oscar Wilde; here one Lady
