Thunderstruck Quotes

“Stephen Gray to devise an experiment that for sheer inventive panache outstripped anything that had come before. He clothed a boy in heavy garments until his body was thoroughly insulated but left the boy’s hands, head, and feet naked. Using nonconducting silk strings, he hung the boy in the air, then touched an electrified glass tube to his naked foot, thus causing a spark to rocket from his nose.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“At night thunderstorms arose often, shedding lightning that gave the terrain the pallor of a corpse. Fog would settle in for days, causing the edge of the cliff to look like the edge of the material world. At regular intervals the men heard the lost-calf moan of foghorns as steamships waited offshore for clarity.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“One night, during a storm, an engineer named W. W. Bradfield was sitting at the Wimereux transmitter, when suddenly the door to the room crashed open. In the portal stood a man disheveled by the storm and apparently experiencing some form of internal agony. He blamed the transmissions and shouted that they must stop. The revolver in his hand imparted a certain added gravity. Bradfield responded with the calm of a watchmaker. He told the intruder he understood his problem and that his experience was not unusual. He was in luck, however, Bradfield said, for he had “come to the only man alive who could cure him.” This would require an “electrical inoculation,” after which, Bradfield promised, he “would be immune to electro-magnetic waves for the rest of his life.” The man consented. Bradfield instructed him that for his own safety he must first remove from his person anything made of metal, including coins, timepieces, and of course the revolver in his hand. The intruder obliged, at which point Bradfield gave him a potent electrical shock, not so powerful as to kill him, but certainly enough to command his attention. The man left, convinced that he was indeed cured.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“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.)”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“As a homeopath, he knew the powers not just of ordinary opiates but also of poisons such as aconite, from the root of the plant monkshood; atropine, from belladonna (or deadly nightshade); and rhus toxin from poison ivy. In large doses each could prove fatal, but when administered in tiny amounts, typically in combination with other agents, such compounds could produce a useful palette of physical reactions that mimicked the symptoms of known diseases.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“Marconi recognized that with no revenue and no contracts and in the face of persistent skepticism, he needed more than ever to capture an ally of prominence and credibility. Through Fleming, however, Marconi also hoped to gain a benefit more tangible. His new idea, the feat he hoped would command the world’s attention once and for all, would require more power and involve greater danger, physical and fiscal, than anything he had attempted before. When it came to high-power engineering, he knew, Fleming was the man to consult. UNLIKE LODGE OR KELVIN, Fleming was susceptible to flattery and needful of attention, as evidenced by the fact that upon receiving Marconi’s telegram he made sure the London Times got a copy of it. The Times published it, as part of its coverage of Marconi’s English Channel success.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“Starting in 1897, Henry Havelock Ellis devoted six volumes to it: his pioneering Studies in the Psychology of Sex, sprinkled with case studies of unexpected explicitness and perversity. One memorable phrase from volume four, Sexual Selection in Man: “the contact of a dog’s tongue with her mouth alone afterward sufficed to evoke sexual pleasure.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“At the Quebec prison, he had read Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope, then had autographed the book and given it to a guard for a souvenir.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“It is true that in this time people set their faces hard for photographs, partly from custom, partly because of deficits in photographic technology, but this crowd might not have smiled for the better part of a century. The women seem suspended in a state somewhere between melancholy and fury and are surrounded by old men in strange beards that look as if someone had dabbed glue at random points on their faces, then hurled buckets of white hair in their direction.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“One day Beatrice entered their stateroom to find Marconi consigning his dirty socks to the sea through a porthole. Stunned, she asked him why.

His explanation: It was more efficient to get new ones than wait for them to be laundered.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“For the first time he began to wonder whether he should jettison his transatlantic dream and settle for something more quotidian, perhaps focus his company on ship-to-shore communication. There was”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“The atmosphere shimmered with hostility.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“Three hours into the voyage Kendall saw two of his passengers lingering by a lifeboat. He knew them to be the Robinsons, father and son, returning to America.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“The edition was full of fresh detail about the North London Cellar Murder and the escalating search for two suspects, a doctor and his lover.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“He joined the crew of the Lake Champlain, a small steam-powered cargo ship owned by the Beaver Line of Canada but subsequently acquired by the Canadian Pacific Railway. He was its second officer in May 1901, when it became the first merchant vessel to be equipped with wireless.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don’t find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting. J. M. Barrie “Dedication” Peter Pan 1904”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“All he asked of life was the best of everything.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“69”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“White Star liner Megantic,”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“As she put it, “All he asked of life was the best of everything.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“confidence men,”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“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.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“the Crippen case tended to be overlooked, however, because of an event a year and a half later that further sealed Marconi’s success. In April 1912 the Titanic struck an iceberg”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“THE CRIPPEN SAGA DID MORE TO ACCELERATE the acceptance of wireless as a practical tool than anything the Marconi company previously had attempted—more, certainly, than any of Fleming’s letters or Marconi’s flashiest demonstrations. Almost every day, for months, newspapers talked about wireless, the miracle of it, the nuts and bolts of it, how ships relaying messages from one to another could conceivably send a Marconigram around the world. Anyone who had been skeptical of wireless before the great chase now ceased to be skeptical. The number of shipping companies seeking to install wireless increased sharply, as did public demand that wireless be made mandatory on all oceangoing vessels.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“An Englishman’s Home, by Guy du Maurier.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“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.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“When men first encountered sparks, as when a lightning bolt incinerated their neighbors, they had no idea of their nature or cause, only that they arrived with a violence unlike anything else in the world. 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.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck

“She persuaded her husband to allow Marconi to turn a portion of the villa’s third-floor attic into a laboratory. Where once Marconi’s ancestors had raised silkworms, now he wound coils of wire and fashioned Leyden jars that snapped blue with electrical energy.”
― Erik Larson, Thunderstruck