Thunderstruck

by Erik Larson

“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,”

The idea was so real to me that I did not realize that to others the theory might appear quite fantastic.”

His great advantage, as it happens, was his ignorance—and

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.

Her eyes were alight with a knowledge not of books but of how hardship made morality more fungible than the clerics of Brooklyn’s churches might have wanted parishioners to believe.

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.

With this new awareness of the great rift between rich and poor came the fear that extremists would seek to exploit class divisions and set Britain tumbling toward revolution.

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.

As he himself had admitted, he was not a scientist. His grasp of physical theory was minimal, his command of advanced mathematics nonexistent. He was an entrepreneur of a kind that would become familiar to the world only a century or so later, with the advent of the so-called “start-up” company. In his time the closest models for this kind of behavior were unsavory—for example, the men who made fortunes selling quack medicines, immortalized in H. G. Wells’s novel Tono-Bungay.

In Berlin, Slaby immediately got to work replicating Marconi’s equipment.

Tesla revealed his idea for a “world system” of wireless that would transmit far more than just Morse code. “We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly irrespective of distance,” 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.” That word: television. In 1900.

In 1900 Ivan S. Bloch wrote, “At first there will be increased slaughter—increased slaughter on so terrible a scale as to render it impossible to get troops to push the battle to a decisive issue.” At the onset of hostilities armies would try to fight under the old rules of warfare but quickly would find them no longer applicable. “The war, instead of being a hand-to-hand contest in which the combatants measure their physical and moral superiority, will become a kind of stalemate, in which neither army being able to get at the other, both armies will be maintained in opposition to each other, threatening each other, but never able to deliver a final and decisive attack.” They would dig in and hold their ground. “It will be a great war of entrenchments. The spade will be as indispensable to a soldier as his rifle.”

(Until 1971 British currency was configured in pounds, shillings, and pence. One pound equaled twenty shillings, written as 20 s., which in turn equaled 240 pence, or 240 d. A new pound is equal to 100 pennies, with one penny equal to 2.4 of the obsolete pence.)

Thoreau called the beach “a vast morgue” for all the dead men and creatures the sea discharged. “There is naked Nature—inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray.”

Kentish Town,

the neighborhood exuded an aura of failed ambition.

He sought to arrange Lucia’s burial but found that cemeteries refused to accept her because she had not been baptized.

testified that he had determined without doubt that the mark on the six-by-seven-inch piece of skin was indeed a scar and likely to have been caused by surgery to remove a woman’s ovaries. At this point a soup plate containing the skin in question was passed among the jurors.

Prison authorities filled out the required execution form, which they gave to the executioner, John Ellis, a village hairdresser who moonlighted as hangman.

When he was not hanging people or doing their hair, he demonstrated the art of execution at country fairs. On September 20, 1932, he killed himself by slashing his own throat.

Marconi and Beatrice were supposed to be passengers on the Titanic,

On the afternoon of July 19, 1937, Marconi experienced a severe heart attack. At three the next morning he rang for his valet. “I am very sorry, but I am going to put you and my friends to considerable trouble. I fear my end is near. Will you please inform my wife?” Forty-five minutes later he was dead. The first outsider to arrive was Mussolini, who prayed at his bedside.