Thunderstruck

by Erik Larson

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.

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.

One man who resembled Crippen found himself arrested twice and released twice. “On the first occasion he took the experience in good part,” Dew wrote, “but when the same thing happened a second time he was highly indignant, and said it was getting a habit.”

On this score the police were especially wary, for Scotland Yard was still smarting from the infamous example of Adolph Beck, a Norwegian engineer who over the preceding decade and a half had been erroneously imprisoned for fraud, not once but twice, on the basis of eyewitness testimony, while the look-alike who actually had done the crimes remained free. The most important lesson of this “lamentable business,” wrote Sir Melville Macnaghten, “was unquestionably the extreme unreliability of personal identification.”