Three Rivers Press, 2007
In Thunderstruck, like in his earlier book Devil In the White City, Erik Larson follows two men — one a visionary and the other a cold-blooded killer. In this case the hero is Guglielmo Marconi, the first man to create a successful method of wireless communication. The villain is Harvey Hawley Crippen, a sometime doctor and seller of patent medicines who was to all outward appearances a kind, gentle, upstanding citizen. Larson follows the lives of the two men from their births in the third quarter of the nineteenth century until their paths (although not the men themselves) met in a very public way in 1910.
Marconi became fascinated with magnetism and electricity at an early age. By his early twenties, he had become an obsessive experimenter, spending days at a time in the laboratory he had put together in the attic of his parents’ villa. Marconi had a basic idea of what he wanted to do — transmit a message using invisible waves — and how to do it — he had read descriptions of earlier experiments by Heinrich Hertz and Oliver Lodge — but he worked almost entirely by trial and error. It was this approach, that of a practician rather than a theorist, that would later make Marconi the subject of other scientists’ derision. Marconi’s method of working would also prove costly for his wireless telegraphy company, as he built ever larger and more complex installations on the coasts of England, Canada, and the United States, trying to perfect wireless trans-Atlantic communication without having a firm grasp on the underlying laws of physics.
Harvey Crippen, trained in homeopathic medicine at the University of Michigan, worked in a variety of medical professions. He had a private medical practice in San Diego and was employed as an optometrist in St. Louis, but spent the bulk of his career working for various patent medicine companies in Philadelphia, New York, and London. Crippen worked hard to support his wife, Cora, whose exotic tastes in clothes, furniture, and jewelery, along with the pursuit of her unrealistic ambitions of becoming a famous singer, proved very expensive. The Crippens presented the front of a happy couple, but mistrust, betrayal, and Cora’s controlling nature lurked beneath the surface.
Larson does a wonderful job of setting the scene for his two stories. Edwardian London is the chief setting, as both Marconi and Crippen spend fair amounts of time there. But the other side of the Atlantic — and indeed the ocean itself — also serve important roles, as ships and radio waves travel back and forth. My complaint about Larson’s previous books has been that his use of dialog and descriptions of individuals’ thought and feelings strains historical credibility. Larson does a much better job in Thunderstruck, using less dialog and more explicitly citing his sources within the text itself.
I found the two stories fascinating — especially that of Marconi — but through much of the book I felt that the connection between the men is tenuous at best. By the end Larson makes a pretty good argument for combining the two, but I’m not sure that I’m convinced. Still, he knows how to tell a good story, and Thunderstruck makes for a compelling read.
