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What it argues
Thunderstruck interweaves two narratives set in Edwardian England and the North Atlantic: the story of Guglielmo Marconi's obsessive drive to make wireless telegraphy work across the Atlantic Ocean, and the story of Hawley Harvey Crippen, a mild-mannered American doctor who murdered his wife in London in 1910 and fled with his mistress — only to be captured at sea because of a wireless telegraph message, the first criminal caught with the technology's help. Erik Larson constructs the dual narrative so that the two threads converge at the moment Crippen is identified on a ship.
The Marconi story is the more substantive of the two. Larson documents the years of failed experiments, skeptical investors, hostile competitors, and the peculiar technical problem of wireless transmission across the curve of the earth. Marconi was not primarily a theorist — he was a relentless empiricist who built transmitters, shipped equipment to remote headlands, and ran experiments until the physics cooperated. His eventual success in transmitting signals across the Atlantic in 1901 came before anyone fully understood why it was possible. The ionosphere was discovered later, as an explanation for something Marconi had already done.
What it gets right
- 1.
Marconi succeeded by being a relentless experimenter rather than a theorist. He crossed the Atlantic by wireless before anyone could explain why the signals could follow the earth's curve.
- 2.
The ionosphere — the atmospheric layer that makes long-distance radio transmission possible — was identified as a scientific explanation for what Marconi had already empirically demonstrated.
- 3.
Crippen's case became the first instance in history where wireless telegraphy was used to capture a fugitive, making it a pivot point in the relationship between communication technology and law enforcement.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Erik Larson is an American journalist and author known for narrative histories that interweave true crime, technology, and social history in dual-thread structures. His books include The Devil in the White City, Dead Wake, In the Garden of Beasts, and Isaac's Storm, all of which became bestsellers. Larson's method — exhaustive archival research combined with novelistic scene-building — has made him one of the most widely read popular historians in the United States. He lives in New York City.
