Summary of Erik Larson's Thunderstruck

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The story of the debate between Lodge and Einstein began at the Royal Institution in London in 1894. Lodge was a professor of physics at the new University College of Liverpool, and his laboratory was housed in a space that had been the padded cell of a lunatic asylum. He seemed the embodiment of established British science.
#2 The Royal Institution became a sacred place for Lodge, where he could put nature’s secrets on display. He was also asked to deliver Friday Evening Discourses, and he reveled in the opportunity to put theoretical science on display.
#3 One of Lodge’s greatest distractions was the world of the supernatural. He was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, which was dedicated to examining paranormal events without prejudice or prepossession.
#4 Lodge had a deep respect for Hertz, and he was convinced that if not for his fatal propensity for distraction, he might have beaten Hertz to the history books. He spoke about Hertz’s experiments at the Royal Institution, but instead of pursuing them to conclusion, he left for a vacation in Europe.

Sujets

• Général
• 20th century
• modern

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 19 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669354376
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Erik Larson's Thunderstruck
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The story of the debate between Lodge and Einstein began at the Royal Institution in London in 1894. Lodge was a professor of physics at the new University College of Liverpool, and his laboratory was housed in a space that had been the padded cell of a lunatic asylum. He seemed the embodiment of established British science.

#2

The Royal Institution became a sacred place for Lodge, where he could put nature’s secrets on display. He was also asked to deliver Friday Evening Discourses, and he reveled in the opportunity to put theoretical science on display.

#3

One of Lodge’s greatest distractions was the world of the supernatural. He was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, which was dedicated to examining paranormal events without prejudice or prepossession.

#4

Lodge had a deep respect for Hertz, and he was convinced that if not for his fatal propensity for distraction, he might have beaten Hertz to the history books. He spoke about Hertz’s experiments at the Royal Institution, but instead of pursuing them to conclusion, he left for a vacation in Europe.

#5

Marconi’s idea was to send messages over long distances through the air using Hertz’s invisible waves. He was young and unknown, and his mother disliked priests, but he had a pale complexion and blue eyes, which gave him a look of seriousness.

#6

Marconi grew up in Italy, near Bologna. He was a very curious and impulsive child, and his family lore held that along with his large ears, he would be able to hear the still, small voice of the air.

#7

Marconi was extremely talented at tinkering, but not at academics. His mother, who was extremely focused on education, tutored him or hired tutors for him, and allowed him to concentrate on physics and electricity.

#8

In the beginning, there was emptiness. electromagnetic energy traveled in the form of waves launched from the sun or by lightning or any random spark. When men first encountered sparks, they had no idea of their nature or cause, only that they arrived with a violence unlike anything else in the world.

#9

The study of electricity was greatly enhanced in 1745 with the invention of the Leyden jar, which could store and amplify static electricity. In 1873, James Clerk Maxwell proposed that these oscillations produced invisible electromagnetic waves, which he described in a series of famous equations.

#10

As of 1894, no means existed for communicating without wires over distances beyond the reach of sight. This made for lonely times in the many places where wires did not reach, but nowhere was this absence felt more acutely than on the open sea.

#11

Marconi’s mother realized that something had changed. His tinkering had attained focus. She saw that he needed a space dedicated to his experiments, so she convinced his father to allow him to turn a portion of the villa’s third-floor attic into a laboratory.

#12

Marconi’s obsession with distance deepened. He moved the bell to the next room and found how easily the waves passed through obstacles. He was afraid that someone else would achieve his goal first, and he understood that as research into electromagnetic waves advanced, some other scientist or inventor might suddenly envision what he had envisioned.

#13

The young woman who visited Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen in his office in Brooklyn, New York, was named Cora Turner. She was 17 years old, and Crippen was 30 years old, but the distance between them was not as great as it seemed because Cora had the demeanor and physical presence of a woman much older.

#14

Cora and Hawley Crippen were married in September 1892. They had met just a few months before when Cora was working as a nurse in Chicago. They had two children, but Cora’s true name was Kunigunde Mackamotzki. She kept calling herself Cora.

#15

Coldwater was a wealthy town, and its residents built houses to reflect this fact. Hawley Harvey Crippen grew up in a house at 66 North Monroe, one block north of Chicago Street, in an avenue columned with straight-trunked trees having canopies as dense and green as broccoli.

#16

Grandfather Philo was a man of strong opinion and Methodist belief, who exerted a force like gravity on the Crippen family. He would read the Bible aloud at home, with special emphasis on the gloomy fates that awaited sinners, in particular female sinners.

#17

Crippen enrolled in the University of Michigan’s School of Homeopathy in 1882, when homeopathy was a popular mode of medicine. He left without graduating, and in 1883 he sailed for London to continue his medical education. He brought with him skills and a knowledge of compounds that asylum officials saw as useful.

#18

Crippen was not a man’s man, but he was a cerebral type who seemed suited for medicine. He graduated from the Cleveland Homeopathic Hospital in 1884, and two years later he opened a homeopathic practice in Detroit. He later moved to New York to study ocular medicine at the New York Ophthalmic Hospital.

#19

Crippen and Cora moved to St. Louis, where Crippen became an eye doctor. They did not stay long in St. Louis, and soon after Cora paid a visit to her sister, Mrs. Teresa Hunn, at her home on Long Island, and showed her the scar.

#20

After her surgery, Cora threw herself into her singing lessons. Her husband, however, was unable to pay for them, and they were forced to move to less expensive rooms. They eventually had to move in with her stepfather, Fritz Mersinger.

#21

Cora’s impulsive, buoyant nature seemed charming at first, but it began to seem volatile and wearing to Crippen. He knew that others rarely saw her amiable and pleasant personality.

#22

The Ile Roubaud in the Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of France, had only two houses. The one occupied by a lighthouse keeper was occupied by a scientist named Charles Richet, who had coauthored a census of hallucinations called Phantasms of the Living in 1886.

#23

The men held tight. The room was dark and hot, and very still. As Palladino entered her trance, a spirit entity named John King took over the séance. Her control, not presuming to judge what John King really was, Lodge wrote, the phenomena were as if she were controlled by a big powerful man.

#24

The séance on the island was perplexing and frightening to many of the participants, but not to physicist and professor at University College of Liverpool, Sir Oliver Lodge. He believed that some element of the human mind was able to exist after the body had died.

#25

Marconi shrank the size of his coherer until the space containing the filings was little more than a slit between the two silver plugs.