Thunderstruck (2006)

Larson has a wonderful ability to find historical nexuses and use them to spin a compelling and very readable yarn while providing interesting and descriptive social contexts. He has done so here with the linked stories of Hawley Crippen, a mild mannered doctor who murdered and dismembered his wife in London and then, as the police began asking questions, tried to flee to Quebec (this in 1910) on a passenger ship with his female partner (Ethel) disguised, but not very well, as a boy. Interwoven with this is the story of Marconi’s invention of wireless communication; a story that starts late in the 1800s with various scientists feeling their way towards this breakthrough, Marconi’s experimentation that led him to greater and greater feats of distance in transmitting messages through morse code, his breakthrough in 1901 with trans-Atlantic signals to Signal Hill in St.John’s Newfoundland, and the vicissitudes of his personal and professional lives before and after he proved his invention. Those vicissitudes largely stemmed from Marconi’s inability to share any of the plaudits of success, or to establish meaningful relationships with a partner or his children; for Marconi, his work came first and everything else just had to fit in around that; he could be ungracious and petty to friend and foe and quite oblivious to the hurt he caused.

The nexus connecting Crippen and Marconi is the role that wireless communications played in tracking Crippen and Ethel across the Atlantic in the summer of 1910 with a detective from Scotland Yard in pursuit in a faster liner that got him to Canada first. Crippen was entirely unaware that he had been discovered, but the whole world knew and was gripped by the story in the daily newspapers as the public tracked the movement of the two passenger liners thanks to wireless messages from Crippen’s ship.

The story moves back and forth between Crippen and Marconi and also moves back and forth in time, but Larson has it under control and he weaves a compelling tale.

I was intrigued with the Canadian connections that kept popping up in the story. I had known about Marconi’s breakthrough on Signal Hill, but did not know that he then set up a major transmission station in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia (where, I am told, there is a statue to him and at least one street named after him). And there, in Glace Bay, occurred a truly bizarre event. Germany was very interested in wireless communications, especially for military purposes. German scientists and businessmen were pursuing their own plans, but were unhappy that Marconi kept so much of his technical information secret. One day the men working on the transmission station in Glace Bay spotted a fleet of German ships anchored just off shore. A German Admiral and party came ashore and asked to see the station. The man in charge said certainly, if the Admiral could produce written authorization from Marconi or the board of directors of the company. The Admiral had neither and left in high dudgeon. The next day about 150 sailors from the German ships rowed ashore and made for the construction site; they tried to push their way in, but construction workers gathered and the prospect of some violence was in the air; the German officers called their men to discipline and left. This was 1902; the first and only time German forces landed on Canadian soil!

Another Canadian connection was that the ship on which Crippen and Ethel tried to flee was part of the fleet owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway; and the captain who alerted the police, and the world, to the whereabouts of the two had a long career with the CPR. After Crippen was hanged, Ethel left England and worked in Toronto for awhile but she returned to England after a couple of years, married and had children.

Another interesting incident occurred in 1903 during a lecture and demonstration by one of Marconi’s main engineers. Marconi claimed that he had solved the problem of interference from different wireless transmissions, but a magician named Maskelyne, who spent a good deal of time debunking charlatans and who was not convinced that Marconi had achieved what he claimed, managed to transmit directly to the Marconi machine being used in the lecture. The audience was not aware of what was happening, but the Marconi technicians were. I guess we could characterize Maskelyne as the first hacker in communications technology!

A very good read. Recommended .

Didn't enjoy this one nearly as much as Larson's Devil in the White City.
( )

It took me about two thirds of the book for me to have an "aha" moment and understand what the connection between Guglielmo Marconi and Hawley Crippen other than living at the same time was - I couldn't figure out why Larson had picked these two particular men out of all the those who lived at the turn of the 20th Century. Until then, it was "just" an interesting story of an single minded inventor and a murderer who thinks himself clever.. Others probably figure out the connection a lot sooner than I, and I won't spoil it for future readers by writing details.

This is the third book by Eric Larson I have read. (The Devil in White City, The Garden of Beasts, and Thurnderstuck) I have found them both dramatic and full of details. If you like well reasearched history that can read like fiction, read Eric Larson. I do read them over a long period slowly in the beginning absorbing and thinking about the details and then at the end find I can't put them down. ( )

Alternately boring and fascinating. While I loved all the gossip and background on Marconi, I greatly disliked all of the scientific "pages" that went with it. I could care less about what he went through to get his towers and such built.
Same with the patent medicine guy. While it was fun to read some of the background on medicines in his day, there was way to much dedicated to it that wasn't necessary.
Editing Badly Needed and it would have been a great book. ( )

Thunderstruck is the first work Erik Larson’s that I have felt like lacked…well, thunder. Mr. Larsen is one of a hand full of non-fiction writers, along with Jon Meacham, Alex Kershaw, and Laura Hillenbrand, whose writing stood out to me in the past year. In fairness to Mr. Larson, it is quite possible that I’m suffering from literary transference. Every time Marconi’s name came across my mind, it was quickly chased away by Jefferson Airplane/ Jefferson Star ship/Starship/ Jefferson Pensioner’s “We built this city” apparently on very bad rock and roll.
Even with Grace Slick’s imaginary mind control, the ending of the book did show some of the same tension and suspense I enjoyed in his other works. ( )