Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [164]
OVER TIME THE RELATIONSHIP between Ambrose Fleming and Marconi grew more distant, but Fleming maintained his allegiance to the idea that Marconi deserved all credit for the invention of wireless. The company kept him as an adviser until 1931, when it endured one of its many periods of fiscal duress and told him his contract would not be renewed. He saw this as a new betrayal and now changed his opinion. He decided that the man who invented wireless was actually Oliver Lodge and that Lodge had first demonstrated the technology in his June 1894 lecture on Hertz at the Royal Institution.
On August 29, 1937, Fleming wrote to Lodge, “It is quite clear that in 1894 you could send and receive alphabetical signals in Morse Code by Electric Waves and did send them 180 feet or so. Marconi’s idea that he was the first to do that is invalid.”
By this point Fleming was eighty-eight years old but could not resist giving vent to a long-festered bitterness. “Marconi was always determined to claim everything for himself,” he told Lodge, who was now eighty-six. “His conduct to me about the first transatlantic transmission was very ungenerous. I had planned the power plant for him and the first sending was carried out with the arrangement of circuits described in my British patent no 3481 of 1901. But he took care never to mention my name in connection with it.
“However,” Fleming added, “these things get known in time and justice is done.”
VOYAGER
VOYAGER
IT WAS NOVEMBER 23, 1910. Southampton. A woman identified in the passenger manifest as Miss Allen walked aboard a ship, the Majestic of the White Star Line. She was twenty-seven years old but could easily have been mistaken for a girl in late adolescence.
For the second time in four months she felt compelled to use a false name. Though this time the circumstances were very different, the motive was the same: escape from gossip and scrutiny. It had been a whirl, London, Brussels, Antwerp, Quebec, and in that time she had felt finer, more loved, and certainly freer than ever before in her life. But now she had to leave.
On the Majestic she tried to bend her mind away from what had occurred that morning in London. She distracted herself with the glories of the ship and getting herself settled for the voyage. In Camden Town, she knew, a bell had rung fifteen times to mark the moment. She had heard the sound before, at Hilldrop Crescent, when the weather was right, but that was back when she felt safe and the sound of the prison bell was merely the artifact of someone else’s misery, as meaningful as the distant bark of a neighbor’s dog.
After arriving in New York she traveled to Toronto and adopted the name Ethel Nelson. She took a job as a typist. But Canada proved alien ground. In 1916 she braved seas traversed by German submarines and returned to London, where, as a clerk in a furniture store a few blocks from New Scotland Yard, she met a man named Stanley Smith. They married and raised two children in the peaceful middle-class community of East Croydon. In time she and Stanley became grandparents, but soon afterward he died. He never learned her true past.
A few years before her own death she received a visitor who had discovered her secret. The visitor was a novelist using the pen name Ursula Bloom, who hoped to write a novel about Dr. Crippen and the North London Cellar Murder. Ethel agreed to meet with her but declined to talk about her past.
At one point, however, Bloom asked Ethel, if Dr. Crippen came back today, knowing all she knew, would she accept marriage if he asked?
Ethel’s gaze became intent—the same intensity that Chief Inspector Dew had found striking enough to include in his wanted circular.
Ethel’s answer came quickly.
NOTES
THE MYSTERIOUS PASSENGERS
Captain Kendall had: For details about Kendall’s background, see Croall, Fourteen Minutes, 22–25.
The Montrose was launched: For details about the Montrose, see Musk, Canadian Pacific, 59, 74.
“The Cabin accommodation”: Canadian