Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [165]
“A little better”: Ibid.
The manifest: Kendall Statement, August 4, 1910, 1. In NA-MEPO 3/198.
While on display: Read, Urban Democracy, 412.
“brilliant but disgusting”: Ibid., 490.
Shortly before: Kendall Statement, August 4, 1910, 1. In NA-MEPO 3/198.
“strange and unnatural”: Ibid., 2.
“I did not do anything”: Ibid., 2.
PART I: GHOSTS AND GUNFIRE
DISTRACTION
“street orderlies”: Macqueen-Pope, Goodbye Piccadilly, 100.
“diffusion of knowledge”: Bolles Collection. Thomas Allen, The History and Antiquities of London, Westminster, Southwark and Parts Adjacent (Vol. 4). Cowie and Strange, 1827, 363.
“the great head”: Hill, Letters, 50.
A young woman: Haynes, Psychical Research, 184.
Combs Rectory: Jolly, Lodge, 18.
“Whatever faults”: Lodge, Past Years, 29. Lodge learned later in life that during one phase of his career his children were, as he put it, “somewhat afraid of me.” One incident stood out. He came back late from work, tired and irritable. With his children in bed under strict instructions to keep quiet, he began marking a “thick batch” of examination papers. Suddenly, a stream of water poured onto his windowsill from the children’s room above. He became furious. “I rushed upstairs. They had just got back to bed, and said they had been watering a plant outside on their window-sill. I learned too late that it was one they had been trying to cultivate and were fond of. God forgive me, I flung it out of the window.” The pot smashed on the ground. Later, he heard quiet sobbing coming from the room. He regretted the incident forever afterward (Lodge, Past Years, 252).
“I have walked”: Ibid., 78.
“a sort of sacred place”: Ibid., 75.
“practicians”: For one reference to the term “practician,” see The Electrician, vol. 39, no. 7 (June 11, 1897), 1.
“inappropriate and repulsive”: Aitken, Syntony, 126.
“As it is”: Ibid., 112.
“I became afflicted”: Ibid., 112.
“to examine”: Haynes, Psychical Research, 6. At times, surely, it must have been difficult to set aside prejudice and prepossession, as when considering the feats of three sisters known widely as “The Three Miss Macdonalds.” They held séances during which the table would tilt for yes and no and tap out the letters of the alphabet, a tedious process in which communicating just the word zoo would have required fifty-eight distinct taps. A times their tables engaged in high-velocity thumping, so much so, according to one historian of the SPR, “that one of them had to jump on it, crinoline and all, and sit there till it slowed down and stopped at last.” One Macdonald sister later had a son named Rudyard, whose Jungle Book became one of the most beloved books of all time (Haynes, Psychical Research, 61).
“physical forces”: Ibid., xiv.
Committee on Haunted Houses: Ibid., 25.
In Boston William James: James’s encounter with Mrs. Piper prompted him to write: “If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black you must not seek to show that no crows are, it is enough if you prove the single crow to be white. My own white crow is Mrs. Piper. In the trances of this medium I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits.” (Haynes, Psychical Research, 83).
“This,” he wrote: Ibid., 277.
“thoroughly convinced”: Ibid., 279.
In his memoir: Ibid., 184.
“Well, now you can”: Lodge, Past Years, 113. Lodge’s biographer, W. P. Jolly, wrote of Lodge: “He was of the light cavalry of Physics, scouting ahead and reporting back, rather than the infantry of Engineering, who take and consolidate the ground for permanent useful occupation” (Jolly, Lodge, 113).
THE GREAT HUSH
“My chief trouble”: Marconi, My Father, 23. This needs a bit of qualification, for the idea of harnessing electromagnetic waves for telegraphy without wires had been proposed before, in an 1892 article in the Fortnightly Review, written by William Crookes,