Signor Marconi's Magic Box (33 page)

When he died, aged sixty-three, Nobel was unmarried and childless. His family were startled to find that he had left most of his fortune in the trusteeship of two engineers, with instructions that they should award annual prizes for the best work anywhere in the world in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace. By 1901 the Nobel Foundation was established, and was deliberating on who should receive the first awards. Scientists around the globe were asked to put names forward. One of those consulted was Ambrose Fleming, and it occurred to him straight away that Marconi should be a contender. He wrote to him: ‘I do not know whether you have ever heard of the Nobel Prizes of the Swedish Academy. Mr Nobel was the inventor of
dynamite and he left an enormous fortune to the Swedish Academy for funding Institutes and awarding prizes to inventors . . . One of these is for physics or inventions in physics . . . It occurs to me that your name should be put forward . . . and I shall be very pleased to nominate you.’

That first-ever Nobel Prize for physics in fact went to Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen for his discovery of X-rays, which had already had a profound influence on medicine. Wireless was still very new, and Marconi had not yet spanned the Atlantic at the time the first contenders were being considered. For the next seven years his name was always up for consideration by the Swedish Academy, but the award was given to others. Marconi had no expectation of winning it, because he was always conscious of the fact that he was not, technically speaking, a proper scientist with qualifications, and had only honorary academic posts awarded in recognition of his practical achievements.

After the excitement of the great sea rescue in January 1909, Marconi settled back into his work routine, enjoying his frequent trips across the Atlantic in the sumptuous saloons of luxury liners. Beatrice, his young daughter Degna and his mother would still sometimes stay at the Haven Hotel in Poole, where in his few spare moments the faithful George Kemp would try to keep them amused. On occasion, following forlornly in her husband’s foot-steps, Beatrice would travel to the remote wireless stations. The largest of these, at Clifden, was in her native Ireland, and it was while she was staying there in the autumn of 1909 that she discovered she was pregnant once again. Marconi was on a liner returning from America, and in her youthful eagerness Beatrice thought it would be exciting to break the news to him as soon as possible, not by telegraph but face to face before his ship arrived. A tug was due to take supplies to the liner as it approached the Irish coast, and she persuaded the skipper to take her aboard, and to let the captain know that an unexpected passenger should be added to the distinguished list in first class. It should have been a wildly romantic meeting. Beatrice found Marconi in the company
of the great tenor Enrico Caruso and a party of glamorous actresses. The sight of his wife broke the spell. Instead of greeting her warmly, Marconi was angry at this intrusion on his other life. Beatrice was heartbroken, and locked herself in his cabin until the liner docked at Liverpool, refusing all his apologies.

It took a long while for the wound to heal, but by December 1909 they were reconciled. Marconi was away again, but he had read about an exciting rumour. He wrote to Beatrice: ‘Some of the papers have said that I have got the Nobel Prize of £8,000. It rather makes one’s mouth water to think about it just now, but I suppose it’s not true.’

The reports turned out to be correct: Marconi was to share the 1909 Nobel Prize for physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun, the Principal of the Physics Institute at the University of Strasbourg. Braun was hardly known to the public, though he had invented the cathode ray tube, which was to become an essential component of television. He had also studied, both theoretically and practically, many of the same problems as Marconi, although the rivalry between Germany and the Marconi Company had ensured that they knew little of each other’s work. When the two met for the first time in Stockholm both were in a state of pleasant surprise that they had received a share of the award: Marconi because he was not really a scientist, and Braun because he imagined his work was virtually unknown outside German academic circles. Perhaps because he was so conscious of his lack of academic credentials, Marconi’s Nobel speech was highly technical, a detailed account with diagrams of all his experiments going back to 1894. He delivered it in English rather than Italian, explaining at the end that he felt this was a more widely understood language.

Marconi was frank about the fact that he did not understand how his signals had spanned the Atlantic, though he ran through the existing theories about waves bending and the effects of the earth’s ‘magnetic fields’. He made no mention of Oliver Heaviside, who was more than once put up for the Nobel Prize himself, or of Heaviside’s theory about waves being reflected by the ionosphere.

There can have been few successful inventors with as little theoretical understanding of their own achievements as Marconi. But that did not matter much to him, or to his companies, which were now the world’s foremost makers and providers of wireless telegraphy. If an Atlantic liner had a wireless cabin, the equipment would almost certainly be Marconi’s, and the young man operating it one of his employees.

Before they left Stockholm, Marconi and Beatrice, now four months pregnant, were invited to a reception at the Royal Palace along with the other Nobel laureates. Beatrice and her sister Lilah were excited to discover that their old nursemaid Agnes from Dromoland was now looking after the sons of the Crown Prince and Princess of Sweden. Agnes, they found, had portraits of the O’Briens all over her room. Beatrice collected the autographs of other famous guests, and she and Marconi appear to have enjoyed their time together in Sweden with no jealous fits or marital upsets.

Marconi very much hoped that the child Beatrice was carrying would be a boy, and when they returned from Stockholm he persuaded her to go to Italy so that the child would be born an Italian national. Beatrice dutifully complied, though she would have been happier in England.

When, on 21 May 1910, Beatrice gave birth to a son in Bologna, Marconi was once again crossing the Atlantic. He had travelled so frequently that Beatrice did not know which ship he was on. To break the news, she sent a message addressed simply to ‘Marconi - Atlantic’. Passed from one operator to another, it found him with very little delay. By this time there was no escaping Marconi’s wireless signals, which formed an invisible web lying over thousands of square miles of ocean.

T
he electronic crackle of a Marconi wireless aerial had become a familiar feature of the ocean liners that crossed the Atlantic in the years just before the First World War. For the passengers, most of whom were on the westbound voyage from Europe to Canada or the United States, the sound of the sparks flying as messages were fired from the ship’s aerial was both magical and reassuring. Few of those aboard could afford to send greetings to friends and relatives ashore,
¹³
but the knowledge that their ship was not cut off from the rest of the world when the seas ran high, or they skirted close to a floe of icebergs, or the fog came down, was a comfort. While they took a stroll on deck they might wonder what news was flying between the wireless cabin on their ship and the young Marconi men aboard other liners out in the Atlantic or in the many shore stations that lined the British and North American coastlines.

Among the passengers on the
Montrose
of the Canadian Pacific Line, crossing in July 1910 from Antwerp to Quebec, was a small, retiring man who often paced the deck. Hearing the sparking of the aerial, he would remark by way of idle conversation to
the ship’s captain, Harold Kendall, what a wonderful invention Marconi’s wireless was. Kendall, who had been on the first-ever ship to carry commercial wireless equipment, would nod in agreement as he studied the passenger, Mr Robinson, closely. He noted that Robinson had shaved off his moustache and was growing a beard, and that he had spectacle marks on the bridge of his nose, although Kendall never saw him with glasses on aboard the
Montrose
. Robinson nevertheless read a great deal, and the captain made a note of his choice of books.

Mr Robinson was travelling with his son, who appeared to be in his early twenties. A strange boy, Captain Kendall thought, whose hat appeared to be stuffed with paper to make it fit, and whose loose-fitting trousers were held together at the back with safety pins. He ate his meals with the delicacy of a lady, and seemed on occasion to hold his father’s hand rather tightly. Mr Robinson explained that his son was not in the best of health, and that they were en route to California for the climate. They had been to America before, as well as to Canada, where they were now headed with the plan of taking a train to the west coast.

Before the
Montrose
left Antwerp, newspapers in Britain, and in fact all over Europe and North America, had carried stories of the hunt for a murderer, an American called Hawley Harvey Crippen who had lived in London for a number of years with his second wife, a minor music hall performer with the stage name of Belle Elmore. Though Crippen was a quiet, mild-mannered little man, he appeared to be devoted to his ebullient wife, who enjoyed many friendships in the theatrical world. They often had guests at their home at Hilldrop Crescent in North London. Then, quite suddenly, the vivacious Belle Elmore had disappeared. She had last been seen on 1 February 1910. Crippen told her friends she was unwell, and had gone back to America. On 26 March he had a notice put in the newspapers that she had died in California. At the same time it was apparent that Crippen was living with his secretary Ethel Le Neve, who was sometimes seen wearing Belle’s jewellery.

Friends of Belle, suspicious about her mysterious disappearance and her husband’s obvious attachment to another woman, began to make enquiries, and found that there was no record of her death in California. After more than one approach to Scotland Yard, Detective Inspector Walter Dew was put on the case, and finally interviewed Crippen and Ethel Le Neve. Crippen, who called himself ‘Dr’ Crippen and was a dispenser of various medicines for the cure of deafness and other disorders, seemed a respectable sort of chap. After several conversations he confessed on 8 July that he had lied about his wife’s death. She had in fact run off with her lover, he said, and he had made up the story of her illness to avoid social embarrassment. Crippen convinced Inspector Dew that nothing suspicious had happened, and Dew would perhaps have closed the case had not Crippen and Ethel Le Neve suddenly disappeared on 9 July, when they were due to give him a final interview. Two days later police searched the house at Hilldrop Crescent, and noticed a loose brick in the basement. When they began to excavate they found, covered in lime, some body parts of an unidentifiable woman. The hue and cry for Crippen and his lover was on. Newspapers around the world published his photograph and the gruesome details of the murder. Many innocent little men were hauled into police stations from southern France to northern Belgium, but none of them proved to be the notorious Dr Crippen.

There were newspapers aboard the
Montrose
with a photograph of Crippen, showing him bespectacled and sporting a droopy moustache. Quietly Captain Kendall had them all collected and put away. Very early on in the voyage he had become convinced that Mr and Master Robinson were none other than the murderer Hawley Crippen and his lover Ethel Le Neve. Kendall could have arrested the pair himself, but he preferred instead to keep a watch on them. He was concerned that they should not become suspicious, as he had noticed that ‘Robinson’ had a pistol in his pocket, and feared that he might kill his ‘son’ and himself if he were confronted. The maximum range of the Marconi wireless cabin
aboard the
Montrose
was less than 150 miles, but two days into the voyage, as the ship emerged from the English Channel, she was still in touch with Marconi shore stations. Taking only the Marconi operator and his senior officers into his confidence, Captain Kendall sent a message to be relayed to Scotland Yard that he believed Dr Crippen and Ethel Le Neve were on board.

Inspector Dew had no doubt that it was Crippen on the
Montrose
, and he was anxious to catch him before he had any chance of slipping away in Canada. A check with the shipping lines suggested he might just be able to make it. The
Laurentic
, which was about to sail from Liverpool, was faster than the
Montrose
, and should overhaul it at the mouth of the St Lawrence. Dew took a train to Liverpool, and was in pursuit within hours. The newspapers got hold of the story almost immediately, and provided their readers with a day-by-day account of the positions of the two ships, many of them publishing maps showing the
Montrose
and the
Laurentic
like two snails in a race across the Atlantic. The reading public were entertained daily with stories about Dr Crippen and his lover: how he had bought a poison, where he had acquired boy’s clothing, and his flight from Antwerp on the
Montrose
under an assumed name. In France what the papers called ‘
le mystère de Londres
’, and then ‘
le match Dew - Crippen
’, caused particular excitement.

American newspapers brought out special editions as each new piece of information on the race between the
Laurentic
and the
Montrose
was relayed by wireless. Captain Kendall entered into the spirit of the chase with an enthusiasm not quite seemly in a British officer. When his ship was out of range of the British coast he managed to contact the Montreal correspondent of the London
Daily Mail
, and his detailed account of his observations of Dr Crippen and Ethel Le Neve was cabled back, to be printed in full. The whole world had every detail of the pursuit, but Crippen and his lover - and the other passengers on board - remained blissfully ignorant of the messages flying above their heads in Morse code.