de Bathe, known best as Lillie Langtry, was said to have launched ice cream down the back of Edward, the future king. (Only partly true, as it happens—the incident did occur, but at a different place, and it involved a different actress.) Bookies mingled with barristers and ordered such drinks of the day as the Alabazan, the Bosom Caressa, Lemon Squash, and the Old Chum’s Reviver.
For Bruce Miller and Belle, however, the drink of choice was champagne, and to commemorate their encounters they marked the date on each cork, until they had a string of them, which Belle kept in her possession. “Anything we do is always satisfactory to my husband,” she told Miller. “I always tell him everything.”
By the time Crippen returned, Miller was in Paris. He wrote to Belle “often enough to be sociable, to be friends.” Crippen never met Miller, but Belle made sure he knew more than perhaps he wished. She continued to display at least one photograph of Miller in their home. In March 1901 she sent him an envelope containing six photographs of herself and told him they were taken by Crippen “with his Kodak.” She hinted that Crippen knew she was sending them.
At one point, either by accident or by Belle’s design, Crippen came across letters from Miller that closed with the line, “with love and kisses to Brown Eyes.”
The letters induced in the little doctor a feeling akin to grief.
LATER, MILLER WOULD BE ASKED at length about these letters and about the true meaning of those closing words.
ENEMIES
DESPITE THE CITY’S ENDORSEMENT OF MARCONI, opposition elsewhere gained momentum, led as always by Oliver Lodge but now joined by new allies.
In September 1897 Britain’s most influential electrical journal,
Meanwhile the public appeared to grow impatient with Marconi’s secrecy and his failure to convert his technology into a practical system of telegraphy, despite reports of his successes at the post office, Salisbury Plain, and the Bristol Channel. This was an age that had come to expect progress. “What we want to know is the truth about all these questionable successes,” one reader wrote in a letter published by
“Wherein are the present difficulties? Are they in the transmitter, in the receiver, or in the intervening and innocent ether, or do they exist in the financial syndicate, who upon the strength of hidden experiments and worthless newspaper reports, have embarked in this great and mysterious venture?”
Once Marconi could have counted on William Preece and the post office to come to his defense, but by now Preece had turned against him—though Marconi seemed oblivious to the change and to the danger it posed. In early September 1897, for example, the post office abruptly barred Marconi from tests it was conducting at Dover, even though the tests involved Marconi’s equipment. Marconi complained to Preece that if he were not allowed to be present, the tests likely would fail. He feared that in the hands of others his wireless would not perform at its maximum; he also knew that the post office’s engineers had not incorporated his latest improvements. He was twenty-three years old, Preece sixty-three, yet Marconi wrote as if chiding a schoolboy: “I hope this new attitude will not be continued, as otherwise very serious injury may be done to my Company in the event of the non success of the Dover experiments.”
Shortly afterward he hired George Kemp away from the post office and made him his personal assistant, one of the most important hiring decisions he would make.
So far all this had taken place out of public view, but early in 1898 the post office exhibited what appeared to be the first official manifestation of Preece’s disenchantment. The postmaster-general’s annual report for the twelve months ended March 31, 1898, disclosed that tests of Marconi’s apparatus had been conducted, “but no practical results have yet been achieved.”
Marconi was stung. He believed he had demonstrated without doubt that wireless was a practical technology, ready for adoption. In December 1897 he and Kemp had erected a wireless mast on the Isle of Wight, on the grounds of the Needles Hotel at Alum Bay—the world’s first permanent wireless station—and established communication between it and a coastal tugboat at a distance of eleven miles. In January 1898 they had erected a second station on the mainland, at another hotel, Madeira House in Bournemouth, fourteen and a half miles west along the coast. The two stations had been in communication ever since.
Seemingly blind to Preece’s changed attitude, Marconi offered to sell the post office rights to use his technology within Britain for ?30,000—an exorbitant price, equivalent to about $3 million today. The offer smacked of impudence. The government rejected the offer.
Now Preece struck again. In February 1899 he turned sixty-five, the post office’s mandatory retirement age, but instead of retiring, he wrangled an appointment as Consulting Engineer to the Post Office, where circumstances contrived to make him an even more dangerous adversary. His superiors asked him to compile a report on Marconi’s technology with an eye to determining whether the government ought to grant Marconi a license that would permit his stations to begin handling messages turned in at telegraph offices operated by the post office. Existing law, which gave the post office a monopoly over all telegraphy in the British Isles, forbade such use.
In his report of November 1899 Preece advised against granting the license. Marconi had yet to establish a viable commercial service anywhere, he argued. To grant a license now would merely enrich Marconi and his backers by causing an “ignorant excitement” among investors. “A new company would be formed with a large capital, the public would wildly subscribe to an undertaking endorsed by the imprimatur of the Postmaster-General and the Government would encourage another South Sea Bubble.”
Later Preece wrote to Lodge, “I want to show you my Report. It is now with the Attorney General. It is very strong and dead against Marconi on all points.”
LODGE WAS PLEASED. He wrote to Sylvanus Thompson about what he called “Preece’s attempt to upset their applecart.”
He wrote: “I can’t help thinking it is a bit well deserved and just, though rather belated.”
MARCONI CAME TO RECOGNIZE that he needed his own allies, both to neutralize the opposition of Lodge and to help dispel the still-pervasive skepticism that wireless telegraphy would ever be more than a novelty.
First he courted one of Britain’s most revered men of science, Lord Kelvin. Early on Kelvin had declared himself a skeptic on the practical future of wireless, stating—famously—“Wireless is all very well but I’d rather send a message by a boy on a pony.”
In May 1898 Kelvin stopped by Marconi’s offices in London, where Marconi himself demonstrated his apparatus. Kelvin was impressed but remained skeptical about its future value. At this point Marconi and Lodge both were developing methods of tuning signals so that messages from one transmitter would not distort those from another, but Kelvin deemed interference a problem that would only grow worse as power and distance increased. Kelvin wrote Lodge, “The chief objection I see to much practical use at distances up to 15 miles is that
