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One Friday evening in 1894, Oliver Lodge, a scientific dilettante, gave a lecture at the Royal Institution, on Herzian waves. True to his character, he went on to some other interest and never followed up on his demonstration. This was a time when 'the great silence' ruled on the ocean. Once a ship went beyond the distance its signal flags could be seen, it was out of communication with the rest of the world until it hit land once again. (The Atlantic cable could transmit messages across the ocean but ships couldn't tap into that.) But Guglielmo Marconi, a young Italian-Irish man, barely 20 years old, had an idea. He was sure that Herzian waves could be transmitted for long distances without wires. The British establishment scoffed at this home-schooled Italian, whose Irish mother was the heiress to Jameson's whiskey. Marconi ignored them however, and by trial and error continued to experiment. Meanwhile, Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, from Michigan, had completed his studies and was a homeopathic physician, a widower, whose first wife died in childbirth. He met and married in 1892, a woman who called herself Belle Elmore. Belle believed herself an opera singer and used the timid Crippen to further her 'career.' In 1900, they moved to London, ending up at 39 Hill Drop Crescent in Camden Town, North London. Larson moves between the stories of Marconi and Crippen, even though they were not contemporaneous. It was Marconi's invention that caused Crippen to be finally captured in Canada by Inspector Dew who had found Belle's remains in the cellar of Crippen's North London house. Inspector Dew was a young copper when the last of the Ripper's victims was found, also in a cellar, in 1888. It was the wireless message that Captain Kendall of the SS Montrose sent back to London that caused Dew to board a faster vessel, get to Canada first, apprehend Crippen, and bring him back to London for trial. Larson has a knack for making history seem immediate. Even though the two stories in THUNDERSTRUCK are a bit of a stretch when it comes to matching timelines, they are both fascinating. I do wish he had spent a bit more time on Crippen and a bit less on Marconi, however. The book is well worth reading and should make the bestseller list, as did THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY.
Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, October 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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