“As it is”: Ibid., 112.
“I became afflicted”: Ibid., 112.
“to examine”: Haynes, Psychical Research, 6. At times, surely, it must have been difficult to set aside prejudice and prepossession, as when considering the feats of three sisters known widely as “The Three Miss Macdonalds.” They held seances during which the table would tilt for yes and no and tap out the letters of the alphabet, a tedious process in which communicating just the word zoo would have required fifty-eight distinct taps. A times their tables engaged in high- velocity thumping, so much so, according to one historian of the SPR, “that one of them had to jump on it, crinoline and all, and sit there till it slowed down and stopped at last.” One Macdonald sister later had a son named Rudyard, whose Jungle Book became one of the most beloved books of all time (Haynes, Psychical Research, 61).
“physical forces”: Ibid., xiv.
Committee on Haunted Houses: Ibid., 25.
In Boston William James: James’s encounter with Mrs. Piper prompted him to write: “If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black you must not seek to show that no crows are, it is enough if you prove the single crow to be white. My own white crow is Mrs. Piper. In the trances of this medium I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits.” (Haynes, Psychical Research, 83).
“This,” he wrote: Ibid., 277.
“thoroughly convinced”: Ibid., 279.
In his memoir: Ibid., 184.
“Well, now you can”: Lodge, Past Years, 113. Lodge’s biographer, W. P. Jolly, wrote of Lodge: “He was of the light cavalry of Physics, scouting ahead and reporting back, rather than the infantry of Engineering, who take and consolidate the ground for permanent useful occupation” (Jolly, Lodge, 113).
THE GREAT HUSH
“My chief trouble”: Marconi, My Father, 23. This needs a bit of qualification, for the idea of harnessing electromagnetic waves for telegraphy without wires had been proposed before, in an 1892 article in the Fortnightly Review, written by William Crookes, a physicist and friend of Oliver Lodge. Crookes by this time was one of Britain’s most distinguished scientists, and one of its most controversial because of his interest in the paranormal. In the early 1870s he conducted a detailed investigation of Daniel Douglas Home, a medium who had held seances for Napoleon III, Tsar Alexander II, and other bright lights of the age, and was known for doing such extraordinary things as moving furniture and grabbing hot coals from fireplaces without injury (and in one case depositing said coals on the bald scalp of a seance participant, supposedly without causing harm). In the famous “Ashley House Levitation” of 1868, Home supposedly floated out one window of the seance room and back in through another. Crookes’s investigations led him to conclude that Home did have psychic powers; he claimed, in fact, to have witnessed Home levitate himself several times. This did not endear him to the men of established British science, and probably accounted for why no one paid much attention to his Fortnightly Review article in which he discussed Heinrich Hertz’s discovery of electromagnetic waves. “Here is unfolded to us a new and astonishing world—one which it is hard to conceive should contain no possibilities of transmitting and receiving intelligence,” he wrote. “Rays of light will not pierce through a wall, nor, as we know only too well, through a London fog. But the electrical vibrations of a yard or more in wave-length of which I have spoken will easily pierce such mediums, which to them will be transparent. Here, then, is revealed the bewildering possibility of telegraphy without wires, posts, cables, or any of our present costly appliances.” The article went virtually unread, and even Lodge appeared not to have paid it any attention (Oppenheim, Other World, 14–15, 35, 344, 475; Jolly, Lodge, 102; d’Albe, Crookes, 341–42).
“Che orecchi”: Ibid., 8.
“an aggregate”: Ibid., 8.
Marconi grew up: For descriptions of Villa Griffone see Marconi, My Father, 6, 22, 24, 191.
“my electricity”: Ibid., 14.
“One of the enduring”: Paresce, “Personal Reflections,” 3.
“The expression on”: Marconi, My Father, 16.
“He always was”: Maskelyne Incident, 27.
“the Little Englishman”: Ibid.
Historians often: Isted, I, 48; Jonnes, Empires, 19.
As men developed: Collins, Wireless Telegraphy, 36–37. For a good grounding in all things electrical, see Bordeau, Volts to Hertz, and Jonnes, Empires.
Initially scientists: Collins, Wireless Telegraphy, 36; Jonnes, Empires, 22.
One researcher: Jonnes, Empires, 29.
In 1850: Collins, Wireless Telegraphy, 37. The year 1850 also witnessed one of the strangest attempts at wireless communication. A Frenchman allowed two snails to get to know one another, then shipped one snail off to New York, to a fellow countryman, to test the widely held belief that physical contact between snails set up within them an invisible connection that allowed them to communicate with each other regardless of distance. They placed the snails in metal bowls marked with letters of the alphabet, and claimed that when one snail was touched against a letter, the other snail, at the far side of the ocean, likewise touched that letter. Concluding that somehow signals had been transmitted from one snail to the other, the researchers proposed the existence of an etherlike realm that they called “escargotic fluid.” History is silent on the fate of the snails, though the nationality of the two researchers hints at one possible outcome (Baker, History, 21–22).
In 1880: Ibid., 37.
He came up with: Ibid., 8.
He called it: Massie and Underhill, Wireless Telegraphy, 41.
Lodge’s own statements: Aitken, Syntony, 116, 121; Hong, Wireless, 46.
“Whilst the issues”: Hancock, Wireless at Sea, 20.
“Giuseppe was punishing”: Marconi, My Father, 24.
The coherer “would act”: Hong, Wireless, 19.
“I did not lose”: Marconi, My Father, 26.
“he did lose his youth”: Ibid., 2624 Marconi saw no limits: Interview, Francesco Paresce, Munich, April 11, 2005.
“far too erratic”: Marconi, Nobel, 3.
THE SCAR
Details about Crippen’s roots come mainly from Conover, Coldwater, 26–27, 43; Eckert, Buildings, 201–3; Gillespie, A History, 12–18, 47–49, 89–93, 127, 131; Holmes, Illustrated, throughout; History, 118, 159, 172; Massie, Potawatomi Tears, 270; Portrait, 276; Shipway, 8–13; Michigan Business Directory, 1863; Trial, 34– 39, 87–130; and miscellaneous photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, and other items held in the Holbrook Heritage Room of the Branch County District Library, Coldwater, Mich.
The young woman: Trial, 34–35; Cullen, Crippen, 33–34.
“I believe”: Trial, 88.
“I told her”: Ibid., 35.
