Crown Publishers, 2006, $25.95
The man who almost invented the wireless telegraph settled for chasing ghosts instead. That is to say, Oliver Lodge, who demonstrated the active, electromagnetic function necessary for wireless somewhat ahead of Guglielmo Marconi, remained, despite this promising start, at least as caught up with mediums who could "provide" him the spirit of his late Aunt Anne, amongst other shenanigans.
This widespread and scientifically vaunted practice hardly made a loner of Lodge. Marconi, though, working to the south and east around Bologna, bore down hard and uncompromisingly.
A mediocre student, he nonetheless "possessed the power of continuous work," as one colleague admired. The inventor, half-Italian, half-Irish, struggled to make a bell ring across his laboratory using only waves from the ether.
A trick, simple in itself, that lined up nicely - though neither man knew it at first - with the "supernatural" displays of Lodge's beloved mediums.
Seattle author Larson's previous book, "The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America," found its fulcrum in building and tearing down. Daniel Burnham constructed the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, a.k.a. the World's Columbian Exhibition, from nested master plans, arms and armaments of architects and philanthropists raised into a spectacular tent pole. Herman Webster Mudgett, a.k.a. H.H. Holmes, dulled the edge of the teeming throng resultant. People checked into his hotel and found themselves reduced, collapsed, into bones and collateral. Holmes disposed of those bones, at least, at a good price to local doctors.
"Thunderstruck," another historical conflation of invention and murder (creation, demolition), winds its way through seeking and finding. As Marconi pored over remote ringing, Dr. Harvey Hawley Crippen, from London by way of Michigan, had a wife and hardly kept her. Ms. Belle Elmore (amongst other names) wanted fame as an opera singer, and settled for the comfort of English vaudeville performers. Crippen paid for each step (downward) on this lavish ladder, and at least pretended belief at her excuses for her men friends. Elmore disappeared one night in late January 1910. Police, alerted by an alarmed strongwoman, Kate "Vulcana" Williams, searched the Crippen residence four times before uncovering human remains. The suspicious doctor had by that point disappeared with his own lover, Ethel la Neve. It took a sharp-eyed ship captain, puzzling over the curious relationship between a "father" and his short-cropped "son" aboard the S.S. Montrose, and Marconi's new device, to track them down.
Yes, Marconi succeeded not only with his bells, but in binding the powerful to him and sending down the competition - a Belle Elmore in reverse. The telegraph key that gave away Crippen's position to Scotland Yard ("Thank God it's over," he gasped to arresting officer Walter Dew) zapped out a spark with a tiny thunder rumble every time it was pressed. In what was rapidly becoming the modern world, even such ghostly manifestations as wireless messages obeyed, in however minute a scale, the locked-down laws of physics.
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