What is Thunderstruck about?

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.

The Crippen case reads more like a true-crime procedural. Crippen was an unremarkable figure — deferential, soft-spoken, devoted to his mistress Ethel Le Neve — who killed his overbearing wife and buried her beneath the cellar floor. His flight to Canada with Le Neve disguised as a boy triggered a transatlantic pursuit that gripped both British and American newspapers. The Scotland Yard inspector who identified him on the ship Montrose used wireless telegraphy to alert authorities in Canada, who met the ship when it docked.

Larson's dual-narrative structure works better in his Devil in the White City than here — the Marconi and Crippen threads are thematically connected but never dramatically intertwined until the very end. Readers who come for the crime story may find the technology chapters slow. Readers who come for the technology may find the murder chapters thin. But as a portrait of Edwardian anxiety about modernity — the telegraph as invisible presence, the newspaper as instrument of mass attention — the book has real intelligence.