Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [48]
The presiding judge, Lord Chief Justice Alverstone, now joined in: “Answer the question whether you were or were not?”
“I was not more than a friend.”
“Were there any improper relations between you?”
“No.”
Now Tobin again:
“Did you ever write love letters to her?”
“I have written to her very nice letters perhaps.”
“You know what a love letter is. Did you ever write a love letter to her?”
“Well, I do not remember that I ever put it just in that way. I often wrote to her very friendly letters; I might say they were affectionate letters.”
“Then you wrote affectionate letters to her. Did you write love letters to her?”
“Affectionate letters.”
“Ending ‘Love and kisses to Brown Eyes’?”
“I have done so.”
“Now, sir, do you think those are proper letters to write to a married woman?”
“Under the circumstances, yes….”
“Do you agree now that those letters were most important letters to write to a married woman during her husband’s absence?”
“I do not think they were, under the circumstances.”
“Were you her lover, sir?”
“I was not.”
“Have you been to any house in London with her for the purpose of illicit relationship?”
“I have not.”
“Bloomsbury Street?”
“No place.”
“Have you ever kissed her?”
“I have.”
“Never done anything more than kiss her?”
“That is all.”
“Why did you stop at that?”
“Because I always treated her as a gentleman, and never went any further.”
The interrogation did nothing to clarify the relationship.
FLEMING
ONE OF THE EARLIEST MESSAGES Marconi sent across the English Channel was a brief telegram transmitted from his French station at Wimereux to the South Foreland station, where one of his men took it to an office of the post office telegraphs for relay by conventional land line to London. A messenger boy carried it to University College in Bloomsbury, near the British Museum, and there the telegram made its way to its intended recipient, John Ambrose Fleming, a professor of electrical engineering and friend of Oliver Lodge. On the date of the telegram, March 28, 1899, Fleming was forty-nine years old and possessed a degree of public fame and academic prominence just shy of what Lodge possessed. He was an expert in the amplification and distribution of electrical power.
The telegram read, simply,
Glad to send you greetings
conveyed by electric waves through
the ether from Boulogne
to South Foreland twenty-eight
miles [and] thence by
postal telegraphs Marconi
Though it seemed the most neutral of greetings, in fact it marked the start of Marconi’s next attempt at seduction, and his most important, as future events would show.
Marconi recognized that with no revenue and no contracts and in the face of persistent skepticism, he needed more than ever to capture an ally of prominence and credibility. Through Fleming, however, Marconi also hoped to gain a benefit more tangible. His new idea, the feat he hoped would command the world’s attention once and for all, would require more power and involve greater danger, physical and fiscal, than anything he had attempted before.
When it came to high-power engineering, he knew, Fleming was the man to consult.
UNLIKE LODGE OR KELVIN, Fleming was susceptible to flattery and needful of attention, as evidenced by the fact that upon receiving Marconi’s telegram he made sure the London Times got a copy of it. The Times published it, as part of its coverage of Marconi’s English Channel success. Next Fleming visited Marconi’s station at South Foreland. He was deeply impressed, so much so that he wrote a long letter to The Times praising Marconi and his technology and acknowledging how the inventor had removed wireless from “the region of uncertain delicate laboratory experiments.” Now, he wrote, it was a practical system marked by “certainty of action and ease of manipulation.”
For Marconi, the letter was an affirmation of his strategy to gain credibility by refraction. Oliver Lodge too recognized that Fleming’s letter had bestowed upon Marconi a new respectability and saw it as an act of betrayal. He wrote to Fleming, “My attention