Thunderstruck

by Erik Larson

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

He kept a revolver in his cabin for the worst kinds of emergencies; now he placed it in his pocket.

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.

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.

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.

“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,”

His great advantage, as it happens, was his ignorance

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.

Lodge had come closest, but inexplicably had not continued his research.

With each new encounter, she came increasingly to see him as a tool to help her break from Lincoln and achieve her dream of operatic stardom.

Years later Hawley would tell an associate, “The devil took up residence in our household when I was a child, and never left it.”

among them the 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.

Crippen also knew that henbane was used commonly in ophthalmic treatments because of its power to dilate the pupils of the eye both in humans and animals, including cats, a property that would prove particularly important to Crippen’s future.

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.

The emanations from Palladino’s body prompted Richet to invent a new word to describe such phenomena: ectoplasm.

Eusapia Palladino’s apparent powers had evoked once again Lodge’s lifelong vulnerability to distraction. Up to this point this flaw in his character had caused him no great harm.

At that moment the world changed, though a good deal of time and turmoil would have to pass before anyone was able to appreciate the true meaning of what just had occurred.

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.

Until this point the intensity with which Marconi pursued his idea had been stoked only from within; now, suddenly, there were expectations from the outside. “La calma della mia vita ebbe allora fine,” he said—The calm of my life ended then.

In December 1897 he and Kemp had erected a wireless mast on the Isle of Wight, on the grounds of the Needles Hotel at Alum Bay—the world’s first permanent wireless station—

Now at last Kelvin seemed to awaken to the commercial potential of wireless. He insisted on paying Marconi for his message, the first paid wireless telegram and, incidentally, the first revenue for Marconi’s company.

Over the next two weeks Queen Victoria, Edward, and his doctor, Sir James Reid, traded 150 messages, the nature of which demonstrated yet again that no matter how innovative the means of communication, men and women will find a way to make the messages sent as tedious as possible.

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.

One bit of historical resonance was lost on Marconi. During the eighteenth century Wellfleet had been named Poole, after a village in England—the same Poole whose Haven Hotel now served as Marconi’s field headquarters.

The details of the house would, in time, be of avid interest to countless millions around the world.

Nonetheless, despite front stairwells that flared with cobalt and Tuscan rose, the neighborhood exuded an aura of failed ambition.

“poverty line,” a term he invented.

Charles Booth

At his direction, the men at Poldhu erected two new masts, each 160 feet tall, and strung a thick cable across the top. From it they hung fifty-four bare copper wires, each 150 feet long, that converged over the condenser house and formed a giant fanshell in the sky. No particular law of physics dictated the design. It just struck Marconi as right.

On an instinctive level he knew that his signals could cross the Atlantic, even though nothing in the laws of physics as then understood even hinted that such a feat might be possible.

During one action of the Boer War, British troops had used light signals sent by heliograph to ask the opposing Boer forces what they thought of the British artillery shells then raining down on their position. The Boers answered, “Rats,” and the word promptly entered common usage in Britain as a term that connoted “hubris” or “arrogance.”

He clipped funeral advertisements from newspapers and displayed them on a bedside table. Beatrice, grieving her lost daughter and anxious about her husband’s health, did not think this funny.

“That night could not fail to be one of anxiety,” Macnaghten wrote; “but the die was cast, the Rubicon was crossed. If the coup happened to come off, well and good, but, if otherwise, why, then, the case would have been hopelessly messed up, and I didn’t care to dwell on the eventualities of its future.”

Crippen had made a serious error, Priestley wrote: “he had forgotten, if he ever knew, what Marconi had done for the world, which was now rapidly shrinking.

ON ONE OCCASION KENDALL found Crippen sitting on deck looking up at the wireless antenna and listening to the electric crackle coming from the Marconi cabin. Crippen turned to him and exclaimed, “What a wonderful invention it is!” Kendall could only smile and agree.

Dew stepped up, still in his cap. The passenger smiled and held out his hand. Dew took it and with his free hand pulled off his cap. He said quietly, “Good morning, Dr. Crippen.”

John Ellis, a village hairdresser who moonlighted as hangman.

In 1933 the city of Chicago invited Marconi to attend its new world’s fair, the Century of Progress Exhibition, and declared October 2 to be Marconi Day.