Thunderstruck

"Larson’s books often bring two narratives together, say a crime story and a technical story. Thunderstruck is set just before the First World War. Larson combines a true-life murder mystery—a London doctor named Harvey Crippen murders his wife and buries her body in the basement—with the development of radio by the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi. It’s hard to see the connection between those two things and I’m not going to be a spoiler for people who want to read the book, but in the end he brings those two stories together. I chose this book because radio waves are a type of radiation, and I appreciate how Larson weaves technical information about radio waves into the story of Marconi’s life. He brings Marconi to life and helps readers to understand what his achievements were and why they were scientific breakthroughs. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Often Marconi ploughed ahead, just like Grubbe did, with some very inaccurate ideas about how radio waves work. For example, he kept increasing the power that he used to transmit radio waves, thinking that with more power he could send them further. He ended up using thousands and thousands of watts when he first transmitted messages across the Atlantic Ocean in 1901, but if he had changed the wavelength just a little he could have achieved the same thing without such massive amounts of power because the waves would have skipped around the inner atmosphere to the other side of the Atlantic. That’s how we do it now, without huge amounts of power. If you have ever used a short-wave radio, although those things tend to be antiques now, that’s how they work, they choose a wavelength that allows them to skip around the globe. Marconi had no understanding of that. In fact, physicists at the time told him his attempts at long-distance transmissions would never work, because it would be impossible for the radio waves to curve with the earth. But Marconi was getting results, so he just kept going. Scientists had predicted with mathematics that there should be such things as these long wavelength radio waves. So they’d been looking for them for years. The German physicist Heinrich Hertz finally discovered radio waves, and now we measure frequencies in Hertz units, to honor him. But at the time, radio waves were a scientific curiosity and people didn’t immediately realise that they could be used for communication. At the time, we had the telegraph, which was all by wires. People would demonstrate radio waves using a parlour game. If you had sparks you could produce radio waves, so they used sparks to affect the orientation of metal filings, which would then ring a bell across the room. But nobody thought about developing that into a type of communication. It was Marconi who grabbed that and saw the potential for wireless communication. He left the physicists in the dust. He won a Nobel Prize for his work while they didn’t, even though they understood the physics better. In fact, in winning the prize, he even admitted he didn’t understand why this was working. But nevertheless it was. Right, and I think that’s a theme you see a lot in science. Some of the people who make the great breakthroughs are the newbies or naïve people, who either don’t know the scientific dogma or don’t care about it, they just plough ahead and sometimes they are quite successful. Dogma is often ephemeral. Originally, of course, radio communication was via dots and dashes, just like the cable telegraph. But people quickly saw how they could change the signals into voice. Voice radio became a staple throughout the world. By the 1930s, everybody had radios in their homes. How could you imagine not having one? It was transformative."