Thunderstruck

by Erik Larson

“It doesn’t matter what you do,” he said, “so long as you don’t frighten the horses.”

North London Cellar Murder and the escalating search for two suspects, a doctor and his lover.

He had stepped into the intersection of two wildly disparate stories, whose collision on his ship in this time, the end of the Edwardian era, would exert influence on the world for the century to come.

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.

The study of electricity got a big boost in 1745 with the invention of the Leyden jar, the first device capable of storing and amplifying static electricity.

Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem. An asylum for the insane, its name had shrunk through popular usage to Bedlam, which eventually entered dictionaries as a lowercase word used to describe scenes of chaos and confusion.

Charles Richet, a physiologist who a decade later would win the Nobel Prize for his discovery of anaphylaxis, the extreme reaction ignited in some people by bee stings, peanuts, and other triggering agents.

This turn toward the veil was largely Darwin’s fault. By reducing the rise of man to a process that had more to do with accident than with God, his theories had caused a shock to the faith of late Victorian England. The yawning

void of this new “Darwinian darkness,” as one writer put it, caused some to embrace science as their new religion but turned many others into the arms of Spiritualism and set them seeking concrete proof of an afterlife in the shifting planchettes of Ouija boards.

Many in England feared that worse was yet to come and blamed the unrest on policies that allowed too many foreigners to seek refuge within the nation’s borders.

lot of attention from newspapers in America and abroad. His failure,

Tesla wrote in the Century article. “Not only this, but through television and telephone we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face.”

“darkest London” for distant suburbs. But the area around Hilldrop

had been “a great favorite with all whom she came in contact with.” He collected details about her relationship with Crippen.

Dew and Sergeant Mitchell walked up the front steps to No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent. The knocker on the door was new; the house seemed prosperous

“Unfortunate the doctor is out,” he said. “I want to see him rather urgently. I am Chief Inspector Dew of Scotland Yard. Would

it be asking too much for you to take us down to Albion House? I am

notice that she might wish to have lunch as well. “Meanwhile,” she wrote,

about her candor now disappeared.

Crippen at one end of the cab, the detectives at the other. It was a long, silent ride. “I seemed to be living in a nightmare,” Ethel wrote. “I felt rather faint and sick.” The detectives began their search, but there was nothing in particular that Dew hoped to find. “I certainly had

IT WAS irresistible. Here they were, Crippen and Le Neve, aboard his ship, utterly unaware of the

north of Newfoundland that marked a vessel’s entry into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Kendall instructed

hurtle

adjust the narrative to enhance clarity and pace.