Thunderstruck

by Erik Larson

1900 to 1910, when Edward VII ruled the British Empire with a slightly pudgy cigar-stained hand, assuring his subjects that duty was important but so too was fun. “It doesn’t matter what you do,” he said, “so long as you don’t frighten the horses.”

One day, by chance or intuition, Marconi elevated one of the wires of his transmitter on a tall pole, thus creating an antenna longer than anything he previously had constructed. No theory existed that even hinted such a move might be useful. It was simply something he had not yet done and that was therefore worth trying. As it happens, he had stumbled on a means of dramatically increasing the wavelength of the signals he was sending, thus boosting their ability to travel long distances and sweep around obstacles.

DESPITE THE PANIC OF ’93, one branch of medicine expanded: the patent medicine industry. The depression may even have driven the industry’s growth, as people who felt they could not afford to pay a doctor decided instead to try healing themselves through the use of home remedies that could be ordered through the mail or bought at a local pharmacy.

This turn toward the veil was largely Darwin’s fault. By reducing the rise of man to a process that had more to do with accident than with God, his theories had caused a shock to the faith of late Victorian England. The yawning void of this new “Darwinian darkness,” as one writer put it, caused some to embrace science as their new religion but turned many others into the arms of Spiritualism and set them seeking concrete proof of an afterlife in the shifting planchettes of Ouija boards.

With this new awareness of the great rift between rich and poor came the fear that extremists would seek to exploit class divisions and set Britain tumbling toward revolution.

“We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly irrespective of distance,” Tesla wrote in the Century article. “Not only this, but through television and telephone we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face.” That word: television. In 1900.

In marked contrast to the old queen, the king-to-be was affable, indulgent, even funny. As Victoria lay dying, someone asked, not intending an answer, “I wonder if she will be happy in heaven?” To which Edward replied, “I don’t know. She will have to walk behind the angels—and she won’t like that.”

In the 1880s a businessman named Charles Booth set out to conduct a block-by-block survey of London to determine the economic and social well-being of its residents as a means of contesting the outrageous claims of socialists that poverty in England was vast and deep. To conduct his survey, he employed a legion of investigators

Booth was stunned to find that the incidence of poverty actually was greater than even the socialists had proclaimed. He found that just over 30 percent of the city’s population lived below the “poverty line,” a term he invented.

But this question raised a corollary: Were the men of England up to the challenge? Ever since the turn of the century, concern had risen that forces at work in England had caused a decline in masculinity and the fitness of men for war. This fear intensified when a general revealed the shocking fact that 60 percent of England’s men could not meet the physical requirements of military service. As it happened, the general was wrong, but the figure 60 percent became branded onto the British psyche.

It was after eight when the detectives said good night and exited the house. They had found Crippen’s story, especially his fear of scandal, entirely plausible, though the fact that Crippen clearly had lied was troubling.

On this score the police were especially wary, for Scotland Yard was still smarting from the infamous example of Adolph Beck, a Norwegian engineer who over the preceding decade and a half had been erroneously imprisoned for fraud, not once but twice, on the basis of eyewitness testimony, while the look-alike who actually had done the crimes remained free. The most important lesson of this “lamentable business,” wrote Sir Melville Macnaghten, “was unquestionably the extreme unreliability of personal identification.”

The phrase that police heard most often in describing Crippen was “kind-hearted.”

For editors around the world, one point seemed obvious: Wireless had made the sea less safe for criminals on the run.

The London Times said, “There was something intensely thrilling, almost weird, in the thought of these two passengers traveling across the Atlantic in the belief that their identity and their whereabouts were unknown while both were being flashed with certainty to all quarters of the civilized world.” From the moment of their departure, the paper said, the two “have been encased in waves of wireless telegraphy as securely as if they had been within the four walls of a prison.”

Ethel’s jury accepted without quarrel her defense that she knew nothing of the killing. And yet there were aspects of Ethel that abraded the popular image of her as an unwitting and lovestruck companion. She wrote with sophistication. She was daring and craved adventure. Richard D. Muir, who led her prosecution as well as Crippen’s, seemed to have his doubts about her innocence. He wrote later, “Full justice has not yet been done.”

THE CRIPPEN SAGA DID MORE TO ACCELERATE the acceptance of wireless as a practical tool than anything the Marconi company previously had attempted—more,

Anyone who had been skeptical of wireless before the great chase now ceased to be skeptical. The number of shipping companies seeking to install wireless increased sharply, as did public demand that wireless be made mandatory on all oceangoing vessels.

This effect of the Crippen case tended to be overlooked, however, because of an event a year and a half later that further sealed Marconi’s success. In April 1912 the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, but not before the ship’s wireless operator, a Marconi employee, managed to summon help.

In remarks before the House of Commons, Lord Herbert Samuel, England’s postmaster general, said, “Those who have been saved have been saved through one man, Mr. Marconi and…his wonderful invention.”

In 1923 he joined the Fascist Party and became a friend of Mussolini, though as time passed he became disenchanted with the increasing bellicosity of the Fascists and Nazis. He loathed Hitler.