Thunderstruck

But as any of Fleming’s peers in academic science instantly could see, Fleming’s precautions—his sealed envelopes, the coded messages, the unknowing assistant—created only an illusion of scientific rigor. They reflected the tension between science and enterprise, openness and secrecy, that continued to shape the behavior of Marconi and his company and that in turn had the perverse effect of helping sustain the suspicions of his most steadfast critics.

By Fleming’s account, all the messages arrived at the Lizard on schedule and were recorded on tape by two Morse inkers. Fleming collected the ink rolls and turned them over to Marconi for translation from Morse to English. “In every case he gave the absolutely correct message which was sent,” Fleming reported.

Well, not absolutely. In the next sentence of his report Fleming dimmed the glow of his own testimonial. The first set of messages had been distorted. “Only in one case was there some little difficulty in reading two or three words, and that was in the messages sent at 2 p.m.” Marconi’s explanation, according to Fleming, was that the messages “had been slightly blurred in the attempt of two ships somewhere in the Channel to communicate with each other.”

Though Fleming dismissed this as “some little difficulty,” in fact the distortions were significant and gave further testimony to the problematic nature of wireless telegraphy. The garbling of “two or three words” was no small thing. The two o’clock message from the high-power station was in code and consisted of five words, “Quiney Cuartegas Cuatropean Cubantibus Respond.” If only two words came through fractured, the distorted portion would amount to 40 percent of the message; if three words, 60 percent. The coding made the distortion even more problematic since the coded messages looked like gibberish anyway and the receiving operator would be unlikely to recognize that errors had occurred.

Nonetheless, Fleming and Marconi promoted the experiment as nothing less than a total success. In a much-publicized lecture on March 23, 1903, Fleming crowed that it proved beyond doubt that Marconi’s tuning technology prevented interference. A week later Marconi applauded the experiment in a speech to shareholders at his company’s annual meeting. Four days later Fleming wrote a letter to The Times in which he again extolled Marconi’s tuning prowess.

At the Egyptian Hall, Nevil Maskelyne read Fleming’s accounts and was struck by how much the sealed envelopes and other trappings of false rigor reminded him of techniques used by spirit mediums to convince audiences of their powers. He sensed fraud and longed for a way to reveal it.

A friend, Dr. Horace Manders, came to him with an idea: If Marconi would not willingly subject his system to public challenge, why not attempt to do so without his cooperation? Dr. Manders believed he knew of just such an opportunity.

Though somewhat wicked, the idea delighted Maskelyne, who later wrote that he “at once grasped the fact that the opportunity was too good to be missed.” As for the wicked part, he argued that carrying out his plan was “something more than a right; it was a duty.”

Soon, thanks to Maskelyne, Fleming would experience a vivid demonstration of the true vulnerability of wireless, one that would erode his status within the Marconi company, wound his friendship with the inventor, and shake the reputations of both.

IN NOVA SCOTIA, when winter and spring collide, an event called a silver thaw can occur. As rain falls, it freezes and sheathes everything it touches with ice until tree limbs begin to break and telegraph wires to fall. Marconi’s men at Glace Bay had never experienced a silver thaw before, and they were unprepared for the phenomenon.

On April 6, 1903, the rain came. Ice accumulated on the station’s four hundred wires until each wore a coat about one inch thick. It was lovely, ethereal. A giant crystal pyramid hung in the sky.

The weight of so much ice on so many miles of wire became too great. The whole array pulled free and crackled to the ground.

BLUE SERGE

FOR TWO OF BELLE’S FRIENDS, John Nash and Lil Hawthorne, the news of Belle’s death came as an especially harsh surprise. On March 23, 1910, the day before Crippen telegraphed the news, Nash and his wife had set sail for America, after a doctor recommended a sea voyage to ease Hawthorne’s nerves. No one thought to send them word by wireless. After their arrival in New York, they paid a visit to Mrs. Isabel Ginnette, president of the guild, who also was in New York. To their shock, the Nashes now heard that Belle had died.

Nash promised Mrs. Ginnette that on his return to England he would go and talk to Crippen. Once safely back in London, the Nashes got together with their friends in the guild and discovered that no one believed Crippen’s account of what had happened. Nash was appalled that his friends had done little to learn the truth. “I came over here and found that no one had had the courage and pluck to take up this matter,” Nash said. “I therefore felt it my duty to take action myself.”

Nash and his wife stopped by Crippen’s office. “It was the first time we had seen him since his wife’s death,” Nash said. “He seemed much cut up—in fact, sobbed; he seemed very nervous, and was twitching a piece of paper about the whole time.”

Crippen told him that Belle had died in Los Angeles, but then corrected himself and said it had happened in “some little town” around San Francisco. Nash knew San Francisco and pressed Crippen for a more precise location. Exasperated, Nash said, “Peter, do you mean to say that you don’t know where your wife has died?”

Crippen said he could not remember but thought the place was called “Allemaio.”

Nash changed direction. “I hear you have received her ashes.”

Crippen confirmed it and said he had them in his safe. Nash did not ask to see them. Instead, he asked for the name of the crematorium and whether Crippen had received a death certificate.

“You know there are about four Crematoria there,” Crippen said. “I think it is one of those.”

“Surely you received a certificate.”

Crippen became visibly nervous.

Nash said later, “I began to feel there was something wrong, as his answers were not satisfactory when a man cannot tell where his wife died or where her ashes came from.”

Two days later, June 30, Nash and his wife set out to visit a friend who worked at New Scotland Yard. No mere functionary, this friend was Superintendent Frank C. Froest, head of the Yard’s Murder Squad, established three years earlier as a special unit of its Criminal Investigation Department or CID.

ANYONE APPROACHING THE HEADQUARTERS of the Metropolitan Police from the north along the Victoria Embankment saw a building of five stories topped by a giant mansard roof, with Westminster Hall and Big Ben visible two blocks south. Huge rectangular chimneys marched along the top of the roof. Turrets formed the corners of the building and imparted the look of a medieval castle, giving their occupants—one of whom was the police commissioner—unparalleled views of the Thames. The lower floors were sheathed in granite quarried by the residents of Dartmoor Prison; the rest up to the roofline was brick.

The Nashes were anxious, but being creatures of the theater, they were also excited by the prospect of their interview with Froest. The building and its setting conveyed melodrama, and Froest himself was a man of some fame, for his pursuit in the mid-1890s of a crooked financier, Jabez Balfour, whom he captured in Argentina.

Froest listened with care as Nash and Lil Hawthorne told their story, then summoned a detective from the Murder Squad, one of its best. When the man entered, Froest introduced the Nashes and explained they had come because a friend of theirs seemed to have disappeared. Her name, he said, was Mrs. Cora Crippen, though she also used the stage name Belle Elmore and was a member of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild. Her husband, Froest said, was a physician “out Holloway way,” named Hawley Harvey Crippen.

“Mr. and Mrs. Nash are not satisfied with the story the husband has told,” Froest said. “Perhaps you had