At the turn of the century the telegraph connected the world. Messages could be sent quickly between any two places connected by wire. Cable had been laid across the Atlantic Ocean connecting England and North America. But if you couldn’t hook up a wire, you were out of touch. Principally, for this book, the realm of the unconnected was the realm of the sea.
In the late 1890s, Guglielmo Marconi set out to change that. He was a tinkerer, a hobbyist with electricity as a young man on his father’s estate in Italy. But he was one of the first to figure out how to send messages over a distance, though the invention of the technology belonged to others, notably Oliver Lodge. Rather than invent from scratch, Marconi played and experimented with Lodge’s coherer device and antenna configurations of his own devising. After a bit, he had put together a system that no one else had previously done. From that point through the early 1900s Marconi kept refining the system to achieve ever greater distances.
Marconi’s story is one half of Thunderstruck. In 1910, Marconi’s invention intersected with the subject of the other half of the book, Hawley Harvey Crippen. An American living in London, Crippen worked as a homeopathic doctor for a series of patent medicine firms. Snake oil purveyors. His wife Cora performed badly in variety (vaudeville) shows as Belle Elmore. Crippen was mild-mannered and devoted to his wife. She was domineering and treated her medical husband badly, constantly threatening to leave him to coerce his obedience (and monetary support). She even renamed him Peter
to which he apparently acquiesced. But in 1910 he had enough, and Belle Elmore abruptly disappeared. Murder was suspected by many. Crippen and his lover fled to America by ship.
And that’s where the stories intersect. The world watched. Everyone knew of the pursuit of the suspect Crippen as he headed toward freedom and Canada. Everyone except Crippen. Everyone knew because the captain of the ship Montrose, having been alerted by Scotland Yard, thought he recognized the fugitives. He used the ship’s Marconi wireless to inform his company and Scotland Yard. Contents of radio waves could hardly be kept secret in those days, and news spread quickly. But the Montrose’s captain controlled the wireless for his ship, and so Crippen did not know he was pursued. Wireless radio technology became indispensable afterward.
Larson writes a riveting tale of Crippen’s life. I found Marconi’s story to be less compelling however. There is no climax for Marconi like there is for Crippen. At the end, it is only Marconi’s technology that intersects with Crippen, not Marconi himself. Larson’s version of the story focuses on Marconi’s trials and tribulations (as well as that of his company), but not the technology. There’s barely any discussion at all of how a Marconi wireless worked. Just Marconi’s dogged pursuit of ever greater distances in transmission. It’s a good story, nonetheless. It’s just that there’s an abrupt switch in the last portion of the book. Marconi drops out and the interplay of his technology with the ship Montrose and Scotland Yard takes center stage. Larson can’t magically make Marconi personally involved without subverting the truth however, so his hands were tied.
After the stories have concluded, Thunderstruck includes dozens of pages of notes and a bibliography. At only one point in the whole thing did I feel like Larson took poetic license with the facts, and that was merely a minor bit of clear speculation. Despite the meticulously factual nature of his work, Larson still manages to write two engrossing character studies as well as a compelling narrative of the plot. This reads like a good novel. I’m quite impressed.
Title: Thunderstruck
Author: Erik Larson
Imprint / publisher: Crown / Random House
Format: Hardcover
Length: 463 p. (includes notes and index)
Publication date: October 2006
ISBN-10: 1-4000-8066-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-4000-8066-3
Subject: Crippen, Hawley Harvey, 1862-1910
Subject: Murderers — England — London — Biography
Subject: Murder — England — London — Case studies
Subject: Murder — Investigation — Great Britain — Case studies
Subject: Telegraph, Wireless — Marconi system — History
LC classification: HV6248.C75L37 2006
