Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [77]
The balloons and kites, Marconi wrote later, were a necessary concession to time and the elements, “as it was clearly impossible at that time of the year, owing to the inclement weather and especially in view of the shortness of the time at our disposal to erect high poles to support the aerial.” Marconi envisioned using kites and balloons to loft a wire four hundred feet into the sky—twice the height of the masts at Cape Cod. At his instruction, the operators at Poldhu would send signals over and over at designated times until detected. Once he received a message, he planned then to go to his station at South Wellfleet to send a reply, thereby achieving at least a semblance of two-way communication across the Atlantic.
That evening, before the Sardinian sailed, Marconi, Kemp, and Paget sat down to dinner, their first meal onboard. It was a sumptuous affair, with excellent food and wine. The ship was warm and comfortable, the service attentive—not surprising, given that the three men comprised about half the ship’s roster of passengers. Paget and Kemp shared a cabin; Marconi had his own.
In the middle of the meal a telegram arrived, addressed to Marconi.
AT SOUTH WELLFLEET, November was proving ferocious. The Weather Bureau called it the coldest November “for many years,” with a mean temperature that was “phenomenally low.” All month there was wind, rain, sleet, and snow, but the last week proved especially violent. On Saturday night, November 23, a nor’easter blew in and continued raging all the next day. Over the following two days the wind on Block Island reached eighty miles an hour, hurricane force. Storm flags went up and stayed up.
On Tuesday, November 26, the storm reached its peak. Powerful gusts of wind tore across the clifftop and caused the masts to undulate and twist. The triatic stays linking the tops of the masts caused them to move in unison, like dancers in some primitive ceremony.
The dance turned jagged. Eerily, the South Wellfleet station now experienced the same disaster that had destroyed its sister station in Poldhu. One mast failed; then all failed. A segment of mast the size of a tree trunk pierced the roof of the transmitting room. Another nearly struck Richard Vyvyan. It fell, he wrote, “within three feet of where I was standing at the time.”
Now this station too lay shattered. Marconi’s lavish investment had yielded only a dozen shipwrecks’ worth of damaged spars, royals, and topgallants.
VYVYAN SENT WORD of the disaster via undersea cable to the company’s headquarters in London, which relayed the news to Marconi, now dining aboard the Sardinian. The telegram was concise: “MASTS DOWN CAPE COD.”
THE POISONS BOOK
IN SEPTEMBER 1908 ETHEL LE NEVE became a lodger in a house a few blocks south of Hampstead Heath and a mile or so west of Hilldrop Crescent. The house was occupied by Emily and Robert Jackson. Robert was a “traveler,” or salesman, for a company that sold mineral water; his wife managed the letting of bedrooms in the house and provided the tenants with meals. Mrs. Jackson and Ethel took to each other immediately. Each evening when Ethel returned from work, Mrs. Jackson brought her a cup of tea in her room, where the two would spend a few moments catching up on the day’s events. Soon Ethel was calling Mrs. Jackson “Mum” and “Ma.”
What Mrs. Jackson did not know was that Ethel was four months pregnant, but this became apparent two weeks later, when Ethel had what Mrs. Jackson called