Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [160]
Chandler felt sympathy for Crippen. “You can’t help liking this guy somehow,” he wrote in another letter. “He was one murderer who died like a gentleman.”
A play called Captured by Wireless made the rounds in America and for one week in April 1912 occupied the stage of the Opera House in Coldwater, Michigan, Crippen’s hometown. “The play is full of comedy throughout,” the Coldwater Courier reported. In England the case continued to engage the popular imagination for decades and sparked the creation of a second theatrical production, a musical entitled Belle, or the Ballad of Doctor Crippen. It debuted on May 4, 1961, at the Strand Theater in London and presented its audience with two dozen musical numbers, including “Coldwater, Michigan,” “Pills, Pills, Pills,” and “The Dit-Dit Song.” The show lasted forty-four performances but proved a failure. England was not yet ready to mock this tragic confluence of love, murder, and invention. The Daily Mail headlined its review, “A Sick Joke With Music.”
DURING WORLD WAR II a Luftwaffe bomb hurtling shy of its mark landed on Hilldrop Crescent, obliterating No. 39 and a good portion of the block.
THE MARRIAGE THAT NEVER WAS
THE CRIPPEN SAGA DID MORE TO ACCELERATE the acceptance of wireless as a practical tool than anything the Marconi company previously had attempted—more, certainly, than any of Fleming’s letters or Marconi’s flashiest demonstrations. Almost every day, for months, newspapers talked about wireless, the miracle of it, the nuts and bolts of it, how ships relaying messages from one to another could conceivably send a Marconigram around the world. Anyone who had been skeptical of wireless before the great chase now ceased to be skeptical. The number of shipping companies seeking to install wireless increased sharply, as did public demand that wireless be made mandatory on all oceangoing vessels.
This effect of the Crippen case tended to be overlooked, however, because of an event a year and a half later that further sealed Marconi’s success. In April 1912 the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, but not before the ship’s wireless operator, a Marconi employee, managed to summon help.
Marconi and Beatrice were supposed to be passengers on the Titanic, as guests of the White Star Line. Marconi canceled, however, and sailed a few days earlier on the Lusitania. Compulsive as always, he wanted to take advantage of the Lusitania’s public stenographer, whom he knew to be very efficient. Beatrice retained her booking. On the eve of the voyage, however, she too canceled. Their son Giulio had fallen ill with a high fever. The family was living then in a rented house called Eaglehurst, whose grounds had an eighteenth-century tower that overlooked Southampton Water. Beatrice and her daughter Degna, then three and a half, climbed to the top and watched the great ship as it left on its maiden voyage. They waved, and “dozens of handkerchiefs and scarves were waved back at us,” Degna wrote. The departure saddened Beatrice. She had wanted very much to be aboard.
In remarks before the House of Commons, Lord Herbert Samuel, England’s postmaster general, said, “Those who have been saved have been saved through one man, Mr. Marconi and…his wonderful invention.” On March 8, 1913, a ship equipped with wireless set out to hunt and report the presence of icebergs—and sparked the formal inauguration in 1914 of the International Ice Patrol. Since then no ship within protected waters has been lost to a collision with an iceberg.
Marconi and Telefunken reached a truce. The companies agreed to stop challenging each other’s patents; they formed a European consortium to share technology and ensure that their systems could communicate with each other. The truce did not last long. On July 29, 1914, a group of Marconi engineers paid a visit to the giant Telefunken transmitter at Nauen, said to be the most powerful in the world.