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Thunderstruck Hardcover – October 24, 2006
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A true story of love, murder, and the end of the world’s “great hush.”
In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men—Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication—whose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.
Set in Edwardian London and on the stormy coasts of Cornwall, Cape Cod, and Nova Scotia, Thunderstruck evokes the dynamism of those years when great shipping companies competed to build the biggest, fastest ocean liners; scientific advances dazzled the public with visions of a world transformed; and the rich outdid one another with ostentatious displays of wealth. Against this background, Marconi races against incredible odds and relentless skepticism to perfect his invention: the wireless, a prime catalyst for the emergence of the world we know today. Meanwhile, Crippen, “the kindest of men,” nearly commits the perfect murder.
With his unparalleled narrative skills, Erik Larson guides us through a relentlessly suspenseful chase over the waters of the North Atlantic. Along the way, he tells of a sad and tragic love affair that was described on the front pages of newspapers around the world, a chief inspector who found himself strangely sympathetic to the killer and his lover, and a driven and compelling inventor who transformed the way we communicate.
- Print length480 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherCrown
- Publication dateOctober 24, 2006
- Dimensions6.41 x 1.48 x 9.51 inches
- ISBN-109781400080663
- ISBN-13978-1400080663
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The Splendid and the Vile | The Devil in the White City | In the Garden of Beasts | Dead Wake | Isaacs’s Storm | Lethal Passage | |
An intimate chronicle of Winston Churchill and London during the Blitz—an inspiring portrait of courage and leadership in a time of unprecedented crisis. | The true tale of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and the cunning serial killer who used the magic and majesty of the fair to lure his victims to their death. | A dazzling account and cautionary tale set during the years before WWII. | A true story weaving two men’s lives together with love, murder, invention, and the end of the world’s “great hush.” | The true story of the deadliest hurricane in history. | This devastating book illuminates America's gun culture – and tells the story of how a disturbed teenager was able to buy a weapon advertised as "the gun that made the eighties roar." |
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Review
About the Author
From The Washington Post
In his last book, the mega-bestseller The Devil in the White City, Larson perfected the technique of focusing on a nearly forgotten incident of history, in that case the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893, and exploding it into a suspenseful chronicle of an entire era, packed with vivid portraits of a huge cast of characters. Larson repeats that design in Thunderstruck. Against a panoply of late-Victorian and Edwardian society and with entertaining verve and colorful style, he weaves together the lives of Hawley Harvey Crippen, murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the genius responsible for wireless technology.
The story begins in 1894. British scientific circles were riveted both by the mysteries of invisible electromagnetic waves and by attempts to prove scientifically the veracity of séances. Enter Marconi, a young man of Italian-Irish heritage, who dreamed of harnessing electromagnetic waves for long-distance communication. No matter that his contemporaries considered this idea far-fetched. Marconi's lack of a traditional scientific education, particularly his ignorance of physics, became an advantage as he worked obsessively to achieve his goal. Step by slow step, in an all-consuming process of trial and error, he was able to increase the distance over which he could send messages. This work wasn't simply theoretical: Ships at sea traveled in silence, cut off from the world around them, oblivious to danger. As the technology improved and became practicable, business bickering ensued, with Marconi forced to fight off competition, struggle to find customers and deal with accusations of patent infringement.
By contrast, Hawley Harvey Crippen was a homeopathic doctor and a purveyor of patent medicines. A small, retiring man with thick glasses, he had the misfortune to marry a voluptuous, flamboyant and domineering woman who fancied herself an opera singer and, when that failed, a music-hall performer. Crippen and his wife moved frequently before settling in London, where his wife continued to exploit him. When he fell deeply in love with a young woman who adored him, he found a solution to his marital predicament in the form of a powerful poison, hyoscine hydrobromide. Larson tells the tale of Crippen and his lover with an eloquent, almost heartbreaking poignancy.
Nonetheless, the narrative style that served Larson well in The Devil in the White City seems to bedevil him here. The constant shifts between his two plot lines become strained and confusing. Years separate Marconi's work from Crippen's machinations, giving the book a jarring, disjointed feel as it bounces back and forth in time. Each section ends with a cliffhanger; soon these feel tiresome rather than suspenseful. Larson seems to share Marconi's obsession with every twist and turn in the development of wireless technology, portraying it in mind-numbing detail. His frequent digressions -- joyful and captivating in The Devil in the White City -- here come to feel like extraneous padding. For no apparent reason except geographic proximity, Larson presents a history of the Bloomsbury group, active years after the events he is describing. The digressions also short-circuit emotional involvement with the story. In the midst of a moving portrayal of Crippen's lovesick mistress, Larson suddenly presents a technical disquisition on the hair curlers she might be using, probably "the Hinde's Patent Brevetee, about three inches long, with a Vulcanite central core and two parallel metal bands." So much for love.
Even so, Larson's gift for rendering an historical era with vibrant tactility and filling it with surprising personalities makes Thunderstruck an irresistible tale. Of London, he writes, "There was fog . . . that left the streets so dark and sinister that children of the poor hired themselves out as torchbearers . . . the light formed around the walkers a shifting wall of gauze, through which other pedestrians appeared with the suddenness of ghosts." He beautifully captures the awe that greeted early wireless transmissions on shipboard: "First-time passengers often seemed mesmerized by the blue spark fired with each touch of the key and the crack of miniature thunder that followed." Larson can be forgiven his obsessions as he restores life to this fascinating, long-lost world.
Reviewed by Lauren Belfer
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Ghosts and Gunfire Distraction
In the ardently held view of one camp, the story had its rightful beginning on the night of June 4, 1894, at 21 Albemarle Street, London, the address of the Royal Institution. Though one of Britain’s most august scientific bodies, it occupied a building of modest proportion, only three floors. The false columns affixed to its facade were an afterthought, meant to impart a little grandeur. It housed a lecture hall, a laboratory, living quarters, and a bar where members could gather to discuss the latest scientific advances.
Inside the hall, a physicist of great renown readied himself to deliver the evening’s presentation. He hoped to startle his audience, certainly, but otherwise he had no inkling that this lecture would prove the most important of his life and a source of conflict for decades to come. His name was Oliver Lodge, and really the outcome was his own fault— another manifestation of what even he acknowledged to be a fundamental flaw in how he approached his work. In the moments remaining before his talk, he made one last check of an array of electrical apparatus positioned on a demonstration table, some of it familiar, most unlike anything seen before in this hall.
Outside on Albemarle Street the police confronted their usual traffic problem. Scores of carriages crowded the street and gave it the look of a great black seam of coal. While the air in the surrounding neighborhood of Mayfair was scented with lime and the rich cloying sweetness of hothouse flowers, here the street stank of urine and manure, despite the efforts of the young, red-shirted “street orderlies” who moved among the horses collecting ill-timed deposits. Officers of the Metropolitan Police directed drivers to be quick about exiting the street once their passengers had departed. The men wore black, the women gowns.
Established in 1799 for the “diffusion of knowledge, and facilitating the general introduction of useful mechanical improvements,” the Royal Institution had been the scene of great discoveries. Within its laboratories Humphry Davy had found sodium and potassium and devised the miner’s safety lamp, and Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction, the phenomenon whereby electricity running through one circuit induces a current in another. The institution’s lectures, the “Friday Evening Discourses,” became so popular, the traffic outside so chaotic, that London officials were forced to turn Albemarle into London’s first one-way street.
Lodge was a professor of physics at the new University College of Liverpool, where his laboratory was housed in a space that once had been the padded cell of a lunatic asylum. At first glance he seemed the embodiment of established British science. He wore a heavy beard misted with gray, and his head—“the great head,” as a friend put it—was eggshell bald to a point just above his ears, where his hair swept back into a tangle of curls. He stood six feet three inches tall and weighed about 210 pounds. A young woman once reported that the experience of dancing with Lodge had been akin to dancing with the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Though considered a kind man, in his youth Lodge had exhibited a cruel vein that, as he grew older, caused him regret and astonishment. While a student at a small school, Combs Rectory, he had formed a club, the Combs Rectory Birds’ Nest Destroying Society, whose members hunted nests and ransacked them, smashing eggs and killing fledglings, then firing at the parent birds with slingshots. Lodge recalled once beating a dog with a toy whip but dismissed this incident as an artifact of childhood cruelty. “Whatever faults I may have,” he wrote in his memoir, “cruelty is not one of them; it is the one thing that is utterly repugnant.”
Lodge had come of age during a time when scientists began to coax from the mists a host of previously invisible phenomena, particularly in the realm of electricity and magnetism. He recalled how lectures at the Royal Institution would set his imagination alight. “I have walked back through the streets of London, or across Fitzroy Square, with a sense of unreality in everything around, an opening up of deep things in the universe, which put all ordinary objects of sense into the shade, so that the square and its railings, the houses, the carts, and the people, seemed like shadowy unrealities, phantasmal appearances, partly screening, but partly permeated by, the mental and spiritual reality behind.”
The Royal Institution became for Lodge “a sort of sacred place,” he wrote, “where pure science was enthroned to be worshipped for its own sake.” He believed the finest science was theoretical science, and he scorned what he and other like-minded scientists called “practicians,” the new heathen, inventors and engineers and tinkerers who eschewed theoretical research for blind experimentation and whose motive was commercial gain. Lodge once described the patent process as “inappropriate and repulsive.”
As his career advanced, he too was asked to deliver Friday Evening Discourses, and he reveled in the opportunity to put nature’s secrets on display. When a scientific breakthrough occurred, he tried to be first to bring it to public notice, a pattern he had begun as early as 1877, when he acquired one of the first phonographs and brought it to England for a public demonstration, but his infatuation with the new had a corollary effect: a vulnerability to distraction. He exhibited a lofty dilettantism that late in life he acknowledged had been a fatal flaw. “As it is,” he wrote, “I have taken an interest in many subjects, and spread myself over a considerable range—a procedure which, I suppose, has been good for my education, though not so prolific of results.” Whenever his scientific research threatened to lead to a breakthrough, he wrote, “I became afflicted with a kind of excitement which caused me to pause and not pursue that path to the luminous end. . . . It is an odd feeling, and has been the cause of my not clinching many subjects, not following up the path on which I had set my feet.”
To the dismay of peers, one of his greatest distractions was the world of the supernatural. He was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, established in 1882 by a group of level-headed souls, mostly scientists and philosophers, to bring scientific scrutiny to ghosts, séances, telepathy, and other paranormal events, or as the society stated in each issue of its Journal, “to examine without prejudice or prepossession and in a scientific spirit, those faculties of man, real or supposed, which appear to be inexplicable on any generally recognized hypothesis.” The society’s constitution stated that membership did not imply belief in “physical forces other than those recognized by Physical Science.” That the SPR had a Committee on Haunted Houses deterred no one. Its membership expanded quickly to include sixty university dons and some of the brightest lights of the era, among them John Ruskin, H. G. Wells, William E. Gladstone, Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain), and the Rev. C. L. Dodgson (with the equally prominent pen name Lewis Carroll). The roster also listed Arthur Balfour, a future prime minister of England, and William James, a pioneer in psychology, who by the summer of 1894 had been named the society’s president.
It was Lodge’s inquisitiveness, not a belief in ghosts, that first drove him to become a member of the SPR. The occult was for him just one more invisible realm worthy of exploration, the outermost province of the emerging science of psychology. The unveiling during Lodge’s life of so many hitherto unimagined physical phenomena, among them Heinrich Hertz’s discovery of electromagnetic waves, suggested to him that the world of the mind must harbor secrets of its own. The fact that waves could travel through the ether seemed to confirm the existence of another plane of reality. If one could send electromagnetic waves through the ether, was it such an outrageous next step to suppose that the spiritual essence of human beings, an electromagnetic soul, might also exist within the ether and thus explain the hauntings and spirit rappings that had become such a fixture of common legend? Reports of ghosts inhabiting country houses, poltergeists rattling abbeys, spirits knocking on tables during séances—all these in the eyes of Lodge and fellow members of the society seemed as worthy of dispassionate analysis as the invisible travels of an electromagnetic wave.
Within a few years of his joining the SPR, however, events challenged Lodge’s ability to maintain his scientific remove. In Boston William James began hearing from his own family about a certain “Mrs. Piper”—Lenore Piper—a medium who was gaining notoriety for possessing strange powers. Intending to expose her as a fraud, James arranged a sitting and found himself enthralled. He suggested that the society invite Mrs. Piper to England for a series of experiments. She and her two daughters sailed to Liverpool in November 1889 and then traveled to Cambridge, where a sequence of sittings took place under the close observation of SPR members. Lodge arranged a sitting of his own and suddenly found himself listening to his dead aunt Anne, a beloved woman of lively intellect who had abetted his drive to become a scientist against the wishes of his father. She once had told Lodge that after her death she would come back to visit if she could, and now, in a voice he remembered, she reminded him of that promise. “This,” he wrote, “was an unusual thing to happen.”
To Lodge, the encounter seemed proof that some part of the human mind persisted even after death. It left him, he wrote, “thoroughly convinced not only of human survival, but of the power to communicate, under certain conditions, with those left behind on the earth.”
Partly because of his diverse interests and his delight in new discoveries, by June 1894 he had become one of the Royal Institution’s most popular speakers.
The evening’s lecture was entitled “The Work of Hertz.” Heinrich Hertz had died earlier in the year, and the institution invited Lodge to talk about his experiments, a task to which Lodge readily assented. Lodge had a deep respect for Hertz; he also believed that if not for his own fatal propensity for distraction, he might have beaten Hertz to the history books. In his memoir, Lodge stopped just short of claiming that he himself not Hertz, was first to prove the existence of electromagnetic waves. And indeed Lodge had come close, but instead of pursuing certain tantalizing findings, he had dropped the work and buried his results in a quotidian paper on lightning conductors.
Every seat in the lecture hall was filled. Lodge spoke for a few moments, then began his demonstration. He set off a spark. The gun- shot crack jolted the audience to full attention. Still more startling was the fact that this spark caused a reaction—a flash of light—in a distant, unattached electrical apparatus. The central component of this apparatus was a device Lodge had designed, which he called a “coherer,” a tube filled with minute metal filings, and which he had inserted into a conventional electric circuit. Initially the filings had no power to conduct electricity, but when Lodge generated the spark and thus launched electromag- netic waves into the hall, the filings suddenly became conductors—they “cohered”—and allowed current to flow. By tapping the tube with his finger, Lodge returned the filings to their nonconductive state, and the circuit went dead.
Though seemingly a simple thing, in fact the audience had never seen anything like it: Lodge had harnessed invisible energy, Hertz’s waves, to cause a reaction in a remote device, without intervening wires. The applause came like thunder.
Afterward Lord Rayleigh, a distinguished mathematician and physicist and secretary of the Royal Society, came up to Lodge to congratulate him. He knew of Lodge’s tendency toward distraction. What Lodge had just demonstrated seemed a path that even he might find worthy of focus. “Well, now you can go ahead,” Rayleigh told Lodge. “There is your life work!”
But Lodge did not take Lord Rayleigh’s advice. Instead, once again exhibiting his inability to pursue one theme of research to conclusion, he left for a vacation in Europe that included a scientific foray into a very different realm. He traveled to the Ile Roubaud, a small island in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of France, where soon very strange things began to happen and he found himself distracted anew, at what would prove to be a critical moment in his career and in the history of science.
For even as Lodge conducted his new explorations on the Ile Roubaud, far to the south someone else was hard at work—ingeniously, energetically, compulsively—exploring the powers of the invisible world, with the same tools Lodge had used for his demonstration at the Royal Institution, much to Lodge’s eventual consternation and regret.
The Great Hush
It was not precisely a vision, like some sighting of the Madonna in a tree trunk, but rather a certainty, a declarative sentence that entered his brain. Unlike other lightning-strike ideas, this one did not fade and blur but retained its surety and concrete quality. Later Marconi would say there was a divine aspect to it, as though he had been chosen over all others to receive the idea. At first it perplexed him—the question, why him, why not Oliver Lodge, or for that matter Thomas Edison?
The idea arrived in the most prosaic of ways. In that summer of 1894, when he was twenty years old, his parents resolved to escape the extraordinary heat that had settled over Europe by moving to higher and cooler ground. They fled Bologna for the town of Biella in the Italian Alps, just below the Santuario di Oropa, a complex of sacred buildings devoted to the legend of the Black Madonna. During the family’s stay, he happened to acquire a copy of a journal called Il Nuovo Cimento, in which he read an obituary of Heinrich Hertz written by Augusto Righi, a neighbor and a physics professor at the University of Bologna. Something in the article produced the intellectual equivalent of a spark and in that moment caused his thoughts to realign, like the filings in a Lodge coherer.
“My chief trouble was that the idea was so elementary, so simple in logic that it seemed difficult to believe no one else had thought of putting it into practice,” he said later. “In fact Oliver Lodge had, but he had missed the correct answer by a fraction. The idea was so real to me that I did not realize that to others the theory might appear quite fantastic.”
What he hoped to do—expected to do—was to send messages over long distances through the air using Hertz’s invisible waves. Nothing in the laws of physics as then understood even hinted that such a feat might be possible. Quite the opposite. To the rest of the scientific world what he now proposed was the stuff of magic shows and séances, a kind of electric telepathy.
His great advantage, as it happens, was his ignorance—and his mother’s aversion to priests.
Product details
- ASIN : 1400080665
- Publisher : Crown; First Edition (October 24, 2006)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 480 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9781400080663
- ISBN-13 : 978-1400080663
- Item Weight : 1.7 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.41 x 1.48 x 9.51 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #81,451 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #52 in History of Technology
- #135 in Scientist Biographies
- #355 in Murder & Mayhem True Accounts
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Erik Larson is the author of five national bestsellers: Dead Wake, In the Garden of Beasts, Thunderstruck, The Devil in the White City, and Isaac’s Storm, which have collectively sold more than nine million copies. His books have been published in nearly twenty countries.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 14, 2019
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Because I had read other books by Erik Larson, I selected this one after tiring of reading the umpteenth book on politics leading up to the November 2020 elections in the US. As it turns out, I had switched almost entirely to reading books on my Kindle app and was pleased when I discovered Amazon.com would alert me if I had already purchased and downloaded a title. When I purchased this book copyrighted in 2006, it was not flagged as previously purchased but as I started to read it the story line was very familiar and lo and behold, I had purchased and still had a hardcover copy of the book. As I continued to read my Kindle version, I was reminded of how well Larson writes and how much interesting and entertaining technical detail he provides in his stories. This book is well worth purchasing and reading … even twice.
One of Marconi’s competitors was one with a strong academic background but one who also suffered and benefited from two traits: one his willingness to consider and investigate new phenomenon (including the paranormal) and the other the curiosity to be easily distracted to follow a new lead. Marconi in contrast was a classic experimentalist continually trying new adjustments to his equipment in the hopes of improving their performance without really any scientific understanding of why changes were leading to improvements. In the process, he comes close to bankrupting his company before later going on to win the Nobel prize.
The author states: “Historians often place humankind’s initial awareness of the distinct character of electrical phenomena in ancient Greece, with a gentleman named Thales, who discovered that by rubbing amber he could attract to it small bits of things, like beard hair and lint. The Greek word for amber was elektron.
Initially scientists were pleased just to be able to launch a spark, as when Isaac Newton did it in 1643, but the technology quickly improved …” Larson goes on to remind the reader that: “But it was James Clerk Maxwell who really shook things up. In 1873 in his A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism he proposed that such oscillations produced invisible electromagnetic waves, whose properties he described in a series of famous equations. He also argued that these waves were much like light and traveled through the same medium, the mysterious invisible realm known to physicists of the day as ether.” And goes on to remind the reader that: “In 1886 Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of such waves through laboratory experiments and found also that they traveled at the speed of light.”
Larson goes on to state that after doing a presentation on a short distance communications demonstration that: “Lodge’s own statements about his lecture reveal that he did not think of Hertzian waves as being useful; certainly the idea of harnessing them for communication never occurred to him. He believed them incapable of traveling far—he declared half a mile as the likely limit. It remained the case that as of the summer of 1894 no means existed for communicating without wires over distances beyond the reach of sight. This made for lonely times … in the many places where wires did not reach, but nowhere was this absence felt more acutely than on the open sea, a fact of life that is hard to appreciate for later generations accustomed to the immediate world-grasp afforded by shortwave radio and cellular telephone.”
Larson identified the key to Marconi’s ultimate success stating: “The true scholar-physicists, like Lodge, had concluded that waves must travel in the same manner as light, meaning that even if signals could be propelled for hundreds of miles, they would continue in a straight line at the speed of light and abandon the curving surface of the earth. … Marconi saw no limits. He fell back on trial and error, at a level of intensity that verged on obsession. It set a pattern for how he would pursue his quest over the next decade.” Moreover, Larson, explaining Marconi goes on to state: “As he worked, a fear grew within him, almost a terror, that one day he would awaken to discover that someone else had achieved his goal first. He understood that as research into electromagnetic waves advanced, some other scientist or inventor or engineer might suddenly envision what he had envisioned. … And in fact he was right to be concerned. … Scientists around the world were conducting experiments with electromagnetic waves, though they still focused on their optical qualities. Lodge had come closest, but inexplicably had not continued his research.”
Larson goes on to state: “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. … “That was when I first saw a great new way open before me,” Marconi said later. “Not a triumph. Triumph was far distant. But I understood in that moment that I was on a good road. My invention had taken life. I had made an important discovery.””
And then, we are treated to a (at the time) notorious murder case and the fascinating people it involved. At the end of the book Marconi's invention and the capture of the murderer intersect.
Marconi's troubles and the murder case are woven around each other throughout the book. A bit jarring sometimes, but still intensely interesting.
I have read three of Erik Larson's books. For me the stand out of the three is the Splendid and the Vile. I wish I could have given it ten stars. Still, the pages flew by in this book and I know much more about Marconi and a most interesting murder case than I could not have dreamed of.
Dr. Hawley Crippen was an American homeopath who basically sold patent medicines in the US, and later in London. Infatuated with a blowsy young woman named Cora who wished to become a musical performer, he married her. From all accounts he was a gentle, indulgent husband who bought his wife a huge wardrobe, supported her career even though she wasn't that talented, and didn't seem to mind her having a supposedly non-sexual relationship with a fellow male performer, Bruce Miller. Cora later changed her stage name to Belle Ellmore, and it was under that name she disappeared. Crippen initially told everyone that she'd gone home to America to nurse an ailing relative, had gotten sick herself, and died, to cover up the fact, he confessed, that she had run away to the US with Miller. By this time Crippen was being unfaithful with his secretary, Ethel Neave. The police had no reason to doubt his story, until Crippen and Neave left town and someone started poking at the bricks in the cellar.
As in DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY, Larson tells Crippen's story parallel with Guglielmo Marconi's efforts to transmit wireless telegraph signals. Marconi, a driven, spoiled man with an Italian father and Irish mother, had read about Hertz's discovery of electromagnetic waves, and, not really understanding them, pressed on with inventions that transmitted them, and was convinced that these waves could carry telegraph signals "through the ether." At the time transatlantic cables could carry messages from land to land stations, but ships at sea had to rely on passing ships to tell them news or flares to signal distress. Marconi's massive wireless stations, with their blue sparks and thunderclap sounds, would revolutionize communication with ships. But he faced stiff competition with British scientist Oliver Lodge and scientist and magician Nevil Maskelyne, among others, who also had been working on Hertz's "waves," but in a less aggressive fashion, and who considered Marconi a foreign interloper with an unproven system.
As always with Larson, well written, but if you're in this for the true crime stuff (Crippen's was the second most famous British murder case, after Jack the Ripper), the Marconi stuff will bore you, and if you're in it for the science, the Crippen portrayal of a disintegrating marriage will probably make your eyes glaze over. There's also a great deal of Marconi's legal disputes with Lodge, Maskelyne, and even people he's recruited to help him, like Forrest. But there's also a great deal to like in the Marconi parts, especially the portraits of early wireless telegraphy stations—the blue sparks and the crackling of the early transmitters sound at once both frightening and fascinating—and the weather they battled against. Enjoyed, but you must have patience with it.
Top reviews from other countries

Larson's other books have stuck to a winning formula, and he does not deviate from this simple framework for Thunderstruck. In the Devil and the White City the story of the Chicago World Fair, and the awesome demonstration of science and technology that went with it, was narrated alongside the gruesome story of mass murderer [ ]. In the Drowning of Galveston the nascent science of meteorology was tested and found flawed with devastating consequences, and again Larson wove a story of technological progress around human suffering.
In Thunderstruck the technological progress takes the starring role. The main thrust of this book is the story of radio waves, wireless telegraphy and the intriguing personalities that developed them. This is the story of Marconi, Fleming, Lodge and Tesler in an age where the transmission of messages through the ether to once isolated ships seemed as miraculous as the psychic and metaphysical demonstrations of mediums that fascinated late Victorian England.
But once again Larson ties the story of progress with something darker. In this case it is the case of Dr Crippen, his domineering and eventually dismembered wife Belle and Ethel Le Neve, his mysterious mistress. Most people will be familiar with the story of Crippen, the body in the basement and his eventual capture by use of wireless telegraphy. This is the connections that binds the two stories.
What makes Larson such an enjoyable and consummate writer of historical prose is his gift with the language, his ability to pace the stories to gripping, electric finishes and the diligent research which ensures he is able to inject life and interest into the past.
Anyone who has read any of his previous work and enjoyed them will be well served by this latest offering. Any one unfamiliar with Larson, but who enjoys deliciously well written history, would be advised to give them a go.
Would give 4.5, but obviously the Amazon rating system won't allow this!

There, the 'White City' as a human construct, built to highlight the brightest of men's achievements, serves as an unknowing and unwilling lure to the deadly and dark ensnarement of 'The Devil' - Almost a case of "The brighter the light, the darker the shade"; In this book the tales of Marconi and Crippen are also related in parallel, but in a slightly hazy chronological order sometimes, and the two stories really only touch, make contact, at the end.
It doesn't make it any less satisfying which is why I've given it a 5*, and it's fascinating to read about people's incredulous amazement that any kind of messages could be sent through the ether (given how wireless technology in all its forms is absolutely embedded in our civilisation, just a hundred or so years later).
On a total side-note, years ago I'd read a book about the sinking of the Empress of Ireland, captained by Henry Kendall - It was interesting to get a glimpse into his eventful past and the part he played in the capture of Dr Crippen.



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