Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [47]
Bradfield responded with the calm of a watchmaker. He told the intruder he understood his problem and that his experience was not unusual. He was in luck, however, Bradfield said, for he had “come to the only man alive who could cure him.” This would require an “electrical inoculation,” after which, Bradfield promised, he “would be immune to electro-magnetic waves for the rest of his life.”
The man consented. Bradfield instructed him that for his own safety he must first remove from his person anything made of metal, including coins, timepieces, and of course the revolver in his hand. The intruder obliged, at which point Bradfield gave him a potent electrical shock, not so powerful as to kill him, but certainly enough to command his attention.
The man left, convinced that he was indeed cured.
MARCONI’S COMPETITORS FACED the same steadfast reluctance of the world to embrace wireless, but they nonetheless stepped up their own work. In America a new man, Reginald Fessenden, began drawing attention, and in France an inventor named Eugene Ducretet made news by transmitting messages from the Eiffel Tower in Paris to the Panthéon in the city’s Latin Quarter. In Germany Slaby appeared to have joined forces with fellow countrymen Count Georg von Arco and Karl Ferdinand Braun, physicists also experimenting with wireless. Closer to home Nevil Maskelyne, the magician who ran the Egyptian Hall, caused a stir when he placed a transmitter of his own design in a balloon and used it to ignite explosives on the ground below. And a newly roused Lodge, temporarily setting aside his hostility to the commercialization of science, began acting less like an academic and more like a man bent on establishing a business of his own. There were others working in the field as well, their progress revealed only in bits and pieces in the electrical press. No one doubted that even more contenders would emerge.
The race to build the first useful system of wireless telegraphy—the race, really, for distance—was well under way. Someone had to win, and timidity would not be an asset. It became clear to Marconi that he needed a demonstration grander and more daring than anything he so far had attempted. For several months he had been mulling an idea that would have fit well into a novel by H. G. Wells but that he knew was likely to spark nightmares, if not apoplexy, among his board of directors.
“WERE YOU HER LOVER, SIR?”
IN TIME THE PRECISE CHARACTER of the relationship between Bruce Miller and Crippen’s wife would become a subject of interest to Scotland Yard and lead eventually to an interrogation by a barrister named Alfred A. Tobin, one of London’s small cadre of impossibly articulate and learned lawyers who conducted the in-court portions of civil and criminal cases. Sometimes barristers served as prosecutors, assigned to trials by the director of public prosecutions; the rest of their cases came to them through a second tier of attorneys known as solicitors. The location of Miller’s interrogation was the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court. The subject: his letters to Belle Elmore.
“Were you writing to her as a lover?”
Miller: “No.”
“Were you fond of her?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever tell her that you loved her?”
“Well, I do not know that I ever put it in that way.”
“Did you indicate to her that you did love her?”
“She always understood it that way, I suppose.”
“Then you did love her, I presume?”
“I do not mean to say that. I did not exactly love her; I thought a great deal of her as far as friendship was concerned. She was a married lady, and we will let it end at that. It was a platonic friendship….”
“Do you know the difference between friendship and love?”
“Yes.”
“Were you more than a friend?”
“I could not be more than a friend. She was a married lady and I was a married man.”
“Were you more than a friend, sir?”
“I could not be more than a friend—I was not.