Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [185]
Certain published sources proved especially useful to me. On the Marconi side of the story, the most valuable was Degna Marconi’s memoir, My Father, Marconi, one of the few works that provides a glimpse of Marconi’s emotional life. Other works also proved useful, among them Richard Vyvyan’s memoir, Marconi and Wireless, and three secondary works, Hugh Aitken’s Syntony and Spark, Sungook Hong’s Wireless: From Marconi’s Black-Box to the Audion, and, most recent of the three, Gavin Weightman’s Signor Marconi’s Magic Box. In the special collections reading room of University College, London, I spent very pleasant days reading vitriolic back-chatter about Marconi and his claims, in letters that revealed that even the greatest intellects of the age were not above mean-spirited sniping. They just happened to be more articulate about it. Also valuable were the letters, reports, and so forth held in the archives of the Institute of Electrical Engineers, London; the Beaton Institute, Breton University, Nova Scotia; the Cape Cod National Seashore; and Archives Canada, in Ottawa.
I am grateful to Princess Elettra Marconi, Marconi’s daughter from his second marriage, for allowing me to interview her at her home on the Via Condotti in Rome, and to Marconi’s grandson—Degna Marconi’s son—Franceso Paresce, who spoke with me at his apartment in lovely and peaceful Munich, where he is a physicist with the European Southern Observatory. I owe thanks as well to Gabriele Falciasecca and Barbara Valotti at the Fondazione Guglielmo Marconi at Villa Griffone, where they showed me the foundation’s museum and the attic in which Marconi performed his earliest experiments.
For my retelling of the Crippen story, I found three memoirs particularly useful: Chief Inspector Dew’s I Caught Crippen; Ethel Le Neve’s Ethel Le Neve, published as Crippen awaited execution; and Sir Melville Macnaghten’s Days of My Years. A necessary work for anyone interested in Dr. Crippen is The Trial of Hawley Harvey Crippen, a more or less complete transcript of the trial published in book form as part of the Notable Trials Library. The files of the Branch County Library in Coldwater, Michigan, helped me piece together details of Crippen’s childhood and family. The best popular account of the Crippen story is Tom Cullen’s Crippen: The Mild Murderer.
Certain books gave me a good grounding in what life was like during the Edwardian era, a period typically defined as lasting from 1900 until the start of World War I, even though Edward VII died in 1910. Among the most useful: The Edwardian Turn of Mind, by Samuel Hynes; The Other World, by Janet Oppenheim, which explores Britain’s early obsession with the occult; The Edwardians, by J. B. Priestley; and The Edwardian Temperament, 1895–1919, by Jonathan Rose. In the bookstore of the Museum of London I acquired a reproduction of Baedeker’s London and Its Environs 1900, published by Old House Books, which in its more than four hundred pages provides a rich sense of London and its restaurants, hotels, subway lines, and institutions as perceived at the time. I also acquired Old House’s reproduction of Bacon’s Up to Date Map of London 1902, which gave me a good visual grasp of Edwardian London’s tangle of streets and crescents. A more recent collection of maps, London A–Z, proved indispensable in helping me locate various obscure locales.
Though I tend to be leery of information conveyed via the Internet, I did find several websites that were credible and useful. MarconiCalling provides an easy-to-use online archive with photographs, audio recordings, early film clips, and reproductions of letters and telegrams now held by Oxford University. The website of the Edwin C. Bolles Collection on the History of London, created by Tufts University,