This episode links together one of the most important inventions in all of maritime technology with one of the most notorious murders in history. In 1910 Dr Hawly Crippen killed his wife Cora in their London home and buried her dismembered body under the floor of his basement. As the net closed in, Crippen ran and he sought his escape by sea, aboard the ss Montrose, a fairly run of the mill steamship, but crucially one that was equipped with the Italian engineer Guglielmo Marconi’s new and world-changing invention, wireless telegraphy. To put the necessary ingredients of this fabulous story in order, Dr Sam Willis travelled to the archives of the Lloyd’s Register Foundation to meet their head archivist, Max Wilson.

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