Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [99]
Marconi ordered his men at Poldhu to replace Fleming’s invention with one of his own design—and now Fleming felt slighted. He objected that he ought to be consulted before changes of that magnitude were made.
Which only annoyed Marconi further.
In another letter to Cuthbert Hall, Marconi wrote, “It should be explained to [Fleming] that his function as Consulting Engineer is simply to advise upon points which may be expressly referred to him and in no way places upon the Company any obligation to seek his advice upon any matters in which it is deemed unnecessary…. I do not wish to inflict any unnecessary wound on Dr. Fleming’s susceptibilities, but, unless you are able to put the matter before him effectively in a right light, I shall feel bound to make a formal communication to the Board with reference to his general position.”
None of this, however, made it into a report by Luigi Solari on the Carlo Alberto experiments, published in the October 24, 1902, edition of The Electrician. His account made it seem as if everything had gone exactly as planned. Ordinarily readers would have had to accept Solari’s report at face value, for once again Marconi had made no provision for an impartial observer to vouch for his results.
In this case, however, someone else happened to have been listening in, without Marconi’s knowledge.
That summer the Eastern Telegraph Co., an undersea cable concern, had decided to install a wireless station of its own, at its cablehead at Porthcurno in Cornwall, about eighteen miles from Poldhu. The transatlantic cable industry still did not expect much competition from wireless but did see that it might have value as a source of additional traffic to be fed into their cables and for communicating with cable-repair ships. Eastern Telegraph hired Nevil Maskelyne for the job, and in August 1902 the magician erected a temporary antenna twenty-five feet tall. Immediately Maskelyne began picking up Morse signals from Poldhu, something the Marconi company had touted as being next to impossible given its tuning technology.
Maskelyne picked up a repeated signal, the letters CBCB. “Knowing that experiments were in progress between Poldhu and the Carlo Alberto,” Maskelyne wrote, “it did not take a Sherlock Holmes to discover that ‘CBCB’ was the call signal for the Carlo Alberto.” He and Eastern’s men nicknamed the ship the Carlo Bertie.
Maskelyne not only listened but kept copies of the tapes that emerged from his own Morse inker. Their true significance was not yet clear to him.
THE LADIES INVESTIGATE
FIRST SHE DISAPPEARED, ALLEGEDLY TO AMERICA, and now she was dead. None of it made sense; all of it stretched credibility. It was wonderful, in the Edwardian sense of the word, yet here was Crippen, the very soul of credibility, telling them it was so. He was, according to Maud and John Burroughs, “a model husband”; so “kind and attentive,” said Clara Martinetti; a “kind-hearted humane man,” said Adeline Harrison.
And yet.
There was the rising sun brooch worn so brazenly by the typist, and the fact that Belle had neither written nor cabled her friends since her departure and had not thought to send a wireless message—by now a “Marconigram”—from her ship, the kind of thing she would have delighted in doing for the surprise of it. There was the fact too that Crippen all along had seemed unsure of Belle’s exact whereabouts and was unable to produce an address. She was in the “wilds of California,” as he had put it, yet Belle never had mentioned relatives in California, let alone in the state’s nether portions.
Even before word arrived of Belle’s death, her successor as guild treasurer, Lottie Albert, asked a friend, Michael Bernstein, to make inquiries about Belle on behalf of the guild.
Crippen had said Belle had sailed aboard a ship of French registry and that it had sailed out of Le Havre. The name, he thought, was something like La Touee or Touvee. Bernstein searched the passenger lists of French ships for a passenger named Crippen or Elmore but found nothing.