Thunderstruck

Erik
Larson

 
 Copyright © 2006 by Erik Larson

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the
Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Crown Publishers,

an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.,
New York, in 2006.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Larson, Erik
Thunderstruck / Erik Larson.
Includes biographical references and index.
1. Crippen, Hawley Harvey, 1862–1910.
2. Murderers—England—London—Biography.
3. Murder—England—London—Case studies.
4. Murder—Investigation—Great Britain—Case Studies.
5. Telegraph, Wireless—Marconi system—History. I. Title.
HV6248.C75L37 2006
364.152'309421—dc22
2006011908

ISBN: 978-1-4000-8067-0

Printed in the United States of America

Design by Leonard Henderson

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Paperback Edition

 Distraction

P
I n t h e a r d e n t l y h e l d v i e w of one camp, the story had its
rightful beginning on the night of June 4, 1894, at 21 Albemarle Street,
London, the address of the Royal Institution. Though one of Britain’s
most august scientific bodies, it occupied a building of modest propor-
tion, only three floors. The false columns affixed to its facade were an af-
terthought, meant to impart a little grandeur. It housed a lecture hall, a
laboratory, living quarters, and a bar where members could gather to
discuss the latest scientific advances.
Inside the hall, a physicist of great renown readied himself to deliver
the evening’s presentation. He hoped to startle his audience, certainly,
but otherwise he had no inkling that this lecture would prove the most
important of his life and a source of conflict for decades to come. His
name was Oliver Lodge, and really the outcome was his own fault—
another manifestation of what even he acknowledged to be a fundamen-
tal flaw in how he approached his work. In the moments remaining be-
fore his talk, he made one last check of an array of electrical apparatus
positioned on a demonstration table, some of it familiar, most unlike
anything seen before in this hall.
Outside on Albemarle Street the police confronted their usual traffic
problem. Scores of carriages crowded the street and gave it the look of a
great black seam of coal. While the air in the surrounding neighborhood
of Mayfair was scented with lime and the rich cloying sweetness of hot-
house flowers, here the street stank of urine and manure, despite the ef-
forts of the young, red-shirted “street orderlies” who moved among the
horses collecting ill-timed deposits. Officers of the Metropolitan Police

9
 10 \ E r i k L a r s o n

directed drivers to be quick about exiting the street once their passengers
had departed. The men wore black, the women gowns.
Established in 1799 for the “diffusion of knowledge, and facilitating
the general introduction of useful mechanical improvements,” the Royal
Institution had been the scene of great discoveries. Within its laborato-
ries Humphry Davy had found sodium and potassium and devised the
miner’s safety lamp, and Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic in-
duction, the phenomenon whereby electricity running through one cir-
cuit induces a current in another. The institution’s lectures, 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.
Lodge was a professor of physics at the new University College of
Liverpool, where his laboratory was housed in a space that once had
been the padded cell of a lunatic asylum. At first glance he seemed the
embodiment of established British science. He wore a heavy beard
misted with gray, and his head—“the great head,” as a friend put it—
was eggshell bald to a point just above his ears, where his hair swept
back into a tangle of curls. He stood six feet three inches tall and
weighed about 210 pounds. A young woman once reported that the ex-
perience of dancing with Lodge had been akin to dancing with the dome
of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Though considered a kind man, in his youth Lodge had exhibited a
cruel vein that, as he grew older, caused him regret and astonishment.
While a student at a small school, Combs Rectory, he had formed a club,
the Combs Rectory Birds’ Nest Destroying Society, whose members
hunted nests and ransacked them, smashing eggs and killing fledglings,
then firing at the parent birds with slingshots. Lodge recalled once beat-
ing a dog with a toy whip but dismissed this incident as an artifact of
childhood cruelty. “Whatever faults I may have,” he wrote in his memoir,
“cruelty is not one of them; it is the one thing that is utterly repugnant.”
Lodge had come of age during a time when scientists began to coax
from the mists a host of previously invisible phenomena, particularly in
the realm of electricity and magnetism. He recalled how lectures at the
 T h u n d e r s t r u c k / 11

Royal Institution would set his imagination alight. “I have walked back
through the streets of London, or across Fitzroy Square, with a sense of
unreality in everything around, an opening up of deep things in the uni-
verse, which put all ordinary objects of sense into the shade, so that the
square and its railings, the houses, the carts, and the people, seemed like
shadowy unrealities, phantasmal appearances, partly screening, but
partly permeated by, the mental and spiritual reality behind.”
The Royal Institution became for Lodge “a sort of sacred place,” he
wrote, “where pure science was enthroned to be worshipped for its own
sake.” He believed the finest science was theoretical science, and he
scorned what he and other like-minded scientists called “practicians,”
the new heathen, inventors and engineers and tinkerers who eschewed
theoretical research for blind experimentation and whose motive was
commercial gain. Lodge once described the patent process as “inappro-
priate and repulsive.”
As his career advanced, he too was asked to deliver Friday Evening
Discourses, and he reveled in the opportunity to put nature’s secrets on
display. When a scientific breakthrough occurred, he tried to be first to
bring it to public notice, a pattern he had begun as early as 1877, when
he acquired one of the first phonographs and brought it to England for a
public demonstration, but his infatuation with the new had a corollary
effect: a vulnerability to distraction. He exhibited a lofty dilettantism
that late in life he acknowledged had been a fatal flaw. “As it is,” he
wrote, “I have taken an interest in many subjects, and spread myself over
a considerable range—a procedure which, I suppose, has been good for
my education, though not so prolific of results.” Whenever his scientific
research threatened to lead to a breakthrough, he wrote, “I became af-
flicted with a kind of excitement which caused me to pause and not pur-
sue that path to the luminous end. . . . It is an odd feeling, and has been
the cause of my not clinching many subjects, not following up the path
on which I had set my feet.”
To the dismay of peers, one of his greatest distractions was the world
of the supernatural. He was a member of the Society for Psychical
Research, established in 1882 by a group of level-headed souls, mostly
 12 \ E r i k L a r s o n

scientists and philosophers, to bring scientific scrutiny to ghosts, séances,

telepathy, and other paranormal events, or as the society stated in each
issue of its Journal, “to examine without prejudice or prepossession and
in a scientific spirit, those faculties of man, real or supposed, which ap-
pear to be inexplicable on any generally recognized hypothesis.” The so-
ciety’s constitution stated that membership did not imply belief in
“physical forces other than those recognized by Physical Science.” That
the SPR had a Committee on Haunted Houses deterred no one. Its mem-
bership expanded quickly to include sixty university dons and some of
the brightest lights of the era, among them John Ruskin, H. G. Wells,
William E. Gladstone, Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain),
and the Rev. C. L. Dodgson (with the equally prominent pen name Lewis
Carroll). The roster also listed Arthur Balfour, a future prime minister of
England, and William James, a pioneer in psychology, who by the sum-
mer of 1894 had been named the society’s president.
It was Lodge’s inquisitiveness, not a belief in ghosts, that first drove
him to become a member of the SPR. The occult was for him just one
more invisible realm worthy of exploration, the outermost province of
the emerging science of psychology. The unveiling during Lodge’s life of
so many hitherto unimagined physical phenomena, among them Hein-
rich Hertz’s discovery of electromagnetic waves, suggested to him that
the world of the mind must harbor secrets of its own. The fact that
waves could travel through the ether seemed to confirm the existence of
another plane of reality. If one could send electromagnetic waves
through the ether, was it such an outrageous next step to suppose that
the spiritual essence of human beings, an electromagnetic soul, might
also exist within the ether and thus explain the hauntings and spirit rap-
pings that had become such a fixture of common legend? Reports of
ghosts inhabiting country houses, poltergeists rattling abbeys, spirits
knocking on tables during séances—all these in the eyes of Lodge and
fellow members of the society seemed as worthy of dispassionate analy-
sis as the invisible travels of an electromagnetic wave.
Within a few years of his joining the SPR, however, events challenged
Lodge’s ability to maintain his scientific remove. In Boston William
 T h u n d e r s t r u c k / 13

James began hearing from his own family about a certain “Mrs.
Piper”—Lenore Piper—a medium who was gaining notoriety for pos-
sessing strange powers. Intending to expose her as a fraud, James
arranged a sitting and found himself enthralled. He suggested that the
society invite Mrs. Piper to England for a series of experiments. She and
her two daughters sailed to Liverpool in November 1889 and then trav-
eled to Cambridge, where a sequence of sittings took place under the
close observation of SPR members. Lodge arranged a sitting of his own
and suddenly found himself listening to his dead aunt Anne, a beloved
woman of lively intellect who had abetted his drive to become a scientist
against the wishes of his father. She once had told Lodge that after her
death she would come back to visit if she could, and now, in a voice he
remembered, she reminded him of that promise. “This,” he wrote, “was
an unusual thing to happen.”
To Lodge, the encounter seemed proof that some part of the human
mind persisted even after death. It left him, he wrote, “thoroughly con-
vinced not only of human survival, but of the power to communicate,
under certain conditions, with those left behind on the earth.”
Partly because of his diverse interests and his delight in new discov-
eries, by June 1894 he had become one of the Royal Institution’s most
popular speakers.

O
Th e e v e n i n g ’ s l e c t u r e w a s e n t i t l e d “The Work of
Hertz.” Heinrich Hertz had died earlier in the year, and the institution
invited Lodge to talk about his experiments, a task to which Lodge read-
ily assented. Lodge had a deep respect for Hertz; he also believed that if
not for his own fatal propensity for distraction, he might have beaten
Hertz to the history books. In his memoir, Lodge stopped just short of
claiming that he himself, not Hertz, was first to prove the existence of
electromagnetic waves. And indeed Lodge had come close, but instead
of pursuing certain tantalizing findings, he had dropped the work and
buried his results in a quotidian paper on lightning conductors.
Every seat in the lecture hall was filled. Lodge spoke for a few
 14 \ E r i k L a r s o n

moments, then began his demonstration. He set off a spark. The gun-
shot crack jolted the audience to full attention. Still more startling was
the fact that this spark caused a reaction—a flash of light—in a distant,
unattached electrical apparatus. The central component of this apparatus
was a device Lodge had designed, which he called a “coherer,” a tube filled
with minute metal filings, and which he had inserted into a conventional
electric circuit. Initially the filings had no power to conduct electricity,
but when Lodge generated the spark and thus launched electromag-
netic waves into the hall, the filings suddenly became conductors—they
“cohered”—and allowed current to flow. By tapping the tube with his fin-
ger, Lodge returned the filings to their nonconductive state, and the circuit
went dead.
Though seemingly a simple thing, in fact the audience had never seen
anything like it: Lodge had harnessed invisible energy, Hertz’s waves, to
cause a reaction in a remote device, without intervening wires. The ap-
plause came like thunder.
Afterward Lord Rayleigh, a distinguished mathematician and physi-
cist and secretary of the Royal Society, came up to Lodge to congratulate
him. He knew of Lodge’s tendency toward distraction. What Lodge had
just demonstrated seemed a path that even he might find worthy of
focus. “Well, now you can go ahead,” Rayleigh told Lodge. “There is
your life work!”
But Lodge did not take Lord Rayleigh’s advice. Instead, once again
exhibiting his inability to pursue one theme of research to conclusion, he
left for a vacation in Europe that included a scientific foray into a very dif-
ferent realm. He traveled to the Ile Roubaud, a small island in the
Mediterranean Sea off the coast of France, where soon very strange things
began to happen and he found himself distracted anew, at what would
prove to be a critical moment in his career and in the history of science.
For even as Lodge conducted his new explorations on the Ile
Roubaud, far to the south someone else was hard at work—ingeniously,
energetically, compulsively—exploring the powers of the invisible world,
with the same tools Lodge had used for his demonstration at the Royal
Institution, much to Lodge’s eventual consternation and regret.
 T h e G r e at H u s h

P
I t w a s n o t p r e c i s e l y a v i s i o n , like some sighting of the
Madonna in a tree trunk, but rather a certainty, a declarative sentence
that entered his brain. Unlike other lightning-strike ideas, this one did
not fade and blur but retained its surety and concrete quality. Later Mar-
coni would say there was a divine aspect to it, as though he had been
chosen over all others to receive the idea. At first it perplexed him—the
question, why him, why not Oliver Lodge, or for that matter Thomas
Edison?
The idea arrived in the most prosaic of ways. In that summer of
1894, when he was twenty years old, his parents resolved to escape the
extraordinary heat that had settled over Europe by moving to higher and
cooler ground. They fled Bologna for the town of Biella in the Italian
Alps, just below the Santuario di Oropa, a complex of sacred buildings
devoted to the legend of the Black Madonna. During the family’s stay, he
happened to acquire a copy of a journal called Il Nuovo Cimento, in
which he read an obituary of Heinrich Hertz written by Augusto Righi,
a neighbor and a physics professor at the University of Bologna. Some-
thing in the article produced the intellectual equivalent of a spark and in
that moment caused his thoughts to realign, like the filings in a Lodge
coherer.
“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,” he said later. “In fact Oliver Lodge had, but he had
missed the correct answer by a fraction. The idea was so real to me that
I did not realize that to others the theory might appear quite fantastic.”

15
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