Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [58]
“I am desired to say,” Flood Page wrote, “that while they recognize fully the great assistance you have given to Mr. Marconi with reference to the Cornwall Station, yet they cannot help feeling that if we get across the Atlantic, the main credit will be and must be Mr. Marconi’s. As to any recognition in the future in the event of our getting successfully across the Atlantic, I do not think you will have cause to regret it, if you leave yourself in the hands of the Directors.”
That Fleming truly understood the point—understood the lengths to which Marconi and his company would go to train the spotlight on Marconi alone—is doubtful. Fleming’s roots lay in the loam of British academic science and in the British ideal of fair play. In his acceptance note, which he mailed to Flood Page two days later, Fleming wrote, “As regards any special recognition in the event of my services assisting in the accomplishment of transatlantic wireless telegraphy I can confidently leave this to be considered when the time arrives, assured that I shall meet with generous treatment.”
As if on cue, the company now changed its name, from the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Co. to Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Co., though the name change would not become official until February.
SPEED WAS ESSENTIAL. Each week’s issue of The Electrician brought some new and disturbing evidence of a groundswell of competition. Experiments involving wireless were occurring around the world, and in Britain there were troubling developments.
The Royal Navy installed thirty-one of its thirty-two new Marconi sets, but it shipped the last to an electrical equipment company where engineers, without authorization from Marconi, built fifty duplicates for the navy’s use.
In December Nevil Maskelyne conducted tests in the Thames Estuary with his own wireless apparatus. The distance wasn’t great—a few miles—but the customer who arranged the tests was impressive indeed, Col. Henry Montague Hozier, secretary of Lloyd’s of London, a post he had held since 1874. He was the Lloyd’s official who in 1898 had invited Marconi to conduct experiments on Rathlin Island, which, despite their success, failed to generate a Lloyd’s contract. Now Hozier and Maskelyne formed an independent syndicate to develop and market Maskelyne’s technology.
And there was Lodge: He continued to experiment with wireless and talked with his friend Muirhead, the instrument-maker, about possibly forming a new company to market the system. Happily for Marconi, however, Lodge became distracted once again. In 1900 he was appointed principal—the equivalent of president—of Birmingham University.
He accepted the position only after receiving assurance that he would be allowed to continue his investigations of the paranormal.
THE END OF THE WORLD
CRIPPEN BECAME CAUGHT UP in the social web of the Ladies’ Guild. He attended parties thrown by music hall artists, visited their clubs, and when Belle felt it necessary to have a companion, dined out with other guild members and their husbands.
One afternoon Seymour Hicks, the performer and memoirist, encountered Crippen at London’s Vaudeville Club. An acquaintance of Hicks’s introduced them, and they spent half an hour together, over cocktails. Hicks knew something of Crippen and of the dynamics of his marriage to Belle. It was hard to understand—so large and robust a woman, exuding energy from every pore, coupled with so mild and self-erasing a man as Crippen.
“The most noticeable thing about him was his eyes,” Hicks wrote. “They bulged considerably and appeared to be closely related to some kind of ophthalmic goiter. Added to this, as they were weak and watery he was obliged to wear spectacles with lenses of more than ordinary thickness, which so magnified his pupils that in looking at him I was by no means sure I was not talking to a bream or mullet or some other open-eyed and equally intelligent deep sea fish. He spoke with