Part I, Ghosts and Gunfire Summary and Analysis

Part I is made up of seven chapters. The reader meets several of the book's most significant characters, such as Guglielmo Marconi, Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, and Cora/Belle Elmore. The section offers a preliminary look at the study of electricity, and sketches the lives of Marconi and Crippen before they each arrive separately in London in the late 1890s.

In June 1894, Oliver Lodge, a noted professor of physics, gives a lecture at the Royal Institution in London about the work of Heinrich Hertz, who has died recently. Hertz was the first to demonstrate the existence of electromagnetic waves, although Lodge's work has been on a close parallel. During the lecture, Lodge uses a "coherer" filled with metal filings to send electromagnetic waves racing through the lecture hall. Their passage is marked by...