Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [63]
CRIPPEN’S RELATIONSHIP WITH ETHEL deepened. Later he would recall a particular Sunday in the summer of 1904 when “we had a whole day together, which meant so much to us then. A rainy day indeed, but how happy we were together, with all sunshine in our hearts.” He recalled it as a time when he and she were in “perfect harmony with each other. Even without being wedded.”
For her part Ethel came to view Crippen as “the only person in the world to whom I could go for help or comfort. There was a real love between us.”
It was at about this point that Ethel, “by sheer accident,” came across the letters Bruce Miller had sent to Belle. “This, I need hardly say, relieved me somewhat of any misgivings I had with regard to my relations with her husband.”
WITHIN SIX MONTHS Aural Remedies also failed, and Crippen went back to work for Munyon’s, this time out of a new location in a building called Albion House, also on New Oxford Street. Again he brought Ethel but also another past employee, William Long. Crippen returned not as a full-time employee but rather as an agent paid by commission. He made less than he had hoped. Finding a cheaper place to live became imperative, but here a challenge had no easy resolution: to find lodging that was not only less expensive but also much bigger and nice enough to keep Belle happy, or if not happy—which at this point must have seemed an impossible goal—at least to stop her behavior from degrading further. These clashing imperatives drove his search farther and farther from Bloomsbury.
“THE THUNDER FACTORY”
THE HUNT FOR LAND ON WHICH to build his first American station lasted far longer than Marconi had planned. Accompanied by Richard Vyvyan and an employee named John Bottomley, a nephew of Lord Kelvin, Marconi toured the coasts of New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, taking trains as far as possible, then proceeding in wagons or on foot. Marconi before leaving Britain had appointed Vyvyan to build and run the new station.
Every piece of land seemed to harbor a critical flaw. No drinking water, no nearby town to supply labor and supplies, no rail line, and—a flaw that particularly rankled Marconi—no fine hotels of the kind that were common on the windswept coasts of Britain.
In February 1901 the group made its way to Cape Cod, landing at Provincetown. On a map the cape looked appealing, especially its midpoint where it hooked northward and the land rose to form oceanside cliffs over one hundred feet high.
In Provincetown Marconi hired a guide named Ed Cook, who was said to have a thorough knowledge of the cape’s coastal lands. Cook did indeed know the beaches well. He was a “wrecker” who salvaged ships and boats wrecked off the cape on their way to Boston. In the previous century Henry David Thoreau had toured the cape and in his book Cape Cod described how wreckers descended on the remains of one ship, the St. John, even as grieving relatives came to the beach in search of lost loved ones. Cook used the profits of his salvage work to buy land.
Cook led Marconi the full length of the cape, traveling in Cook’s wagon exposed to the frigid winds of February. When Cook led Marconi to the Highland Light, near the north end of the cape, opposite North Truro, Marconi believed he had found exactly the location he needed. The lighthouse stood atop a 125-foot cliff overlooking the shipping lanes that led to Boston harbor, which lay about fifty miles to the northwest. Here the keepers watched for inbound ships and consulted guidebooks to identify them, then telegraphed the news to the ships’ owners in America and abroad, the latter messages traveling first by land line, then by cables laid under the Atlantic.
But the operators of the Highland Light did not trust Marconi. “They thought he was probably a charlatan,” his daughter Degna wrote, “and they knew he was a foreigner. Not even Ed Cook was able to override their thorny New England resistance to strangers and