Do you remember the dread of reading books “for school”? As a former high school English teacher, I remember feeling conflicted about book selections because I feared that the “for school” designation would automatically turn students off to a book they might like in other circumstances, no matter how hip and non-worksheet-y the accompanying assignments (Make a soundtrack for the book! Create a children’s book version of the same story with pictures and everything!).

I often find myself falling into the same trap with “for work” reading. I’m genuinely interested in reading about topics related to my job — Cynthia Selfe’s  “Multimodal Composition — Resources for Teachers” is a fantastic book, for example, but these aren’t the types of books I turn to for those 20 minutes of unwinding time before my head hits the pillow.

To my delight, though, my current “for fun” reading, Thunderstruck by Erik Larson, is striking the perfect balance of telling a compelling narrative and making connections to my professional life. I read Larson’s Devil in the White City soon after moving to Chicago. Thanks to Larson, I still get goosebumps when I go to my neighborhood yarn store, which is on the same block where H.H. Holmes lived before he started murdering unsuspecting World’s Fair attendees.

In Thunderstruck, Larson (in his typical fashion) is telling two histories that will eventually intersect. I’m finding professional connections with the story of Guglielmo Marconi, the man who created wireless telegraphy. I’m only halfway through the book, but at this point, there are two major themes that I’m finding resonant:

Theoretical Progress vs. Commercial Success: Marconi spends tireless days and nights at his family home in Italy experimenting with sending wireless telegraph messages. He makes progress only by volume of trial and error. Because he lacks formal scientific training, he doggedly tries any idea that might work, in any permutation he can come up with, and that’s how he’s able to finally reach a solution.

Marconi moved to London 1896 to find a market for his invention, and after a successful meeting with William Preece, the Chief Electrical Engineer of the British Post Office, he files a patent for his work.  This caused some friction with British scientists, including Oliver Lodge, who felt that Marconi’s work was based on their research and that it was classless to try to make money off of scientific progress.

This tension between “progress for the good of mankind” and “progress that we can get mankind to pay for” is echoed in the recent turns taken in the MOOC conversation: sometimes “free” isn’t the best model. People want to pay for something that will be of higher quality, and they’re likely to follow through on something they’ve fiscally invested in (Disney gets this — it’s nearly impossible to get a reservation at their new Be Our Guest restaurant, but if you make one and then no-show, your credit card will be charged $10).

This infographic speculates that the long-term plan to make money from MOOCs is in the extras — to get a certificate, or extra help, or additional resources, students would be asked to pay. I think it would be smarter for some of these institutions to follow something closer to Marconi’s model — he didn’t charge for individual messages sent across his system initially; instead, he sold equipment that could only communicate within a closed system. Udacity could set up a similar model: pay $500 up front, which gets you access to five high-quality classes that you can put together to earn a certification of some sort.

The Value of Formal Educational Training: If I had a nickel for every time Marconi’s lack of formal scientific education is mentioned, I’d have enough to offset the price of the book.

At what point does experience and a dogged willingness to work as hard as you can and try everything trump a college degree? This isn’t a new question, but again, with the rise of MOOCs and the opportunities for self-education that exist on the internet, it’s one that bears re-asking. If Guglielmo Marconi were alive today, I’d wager that he could have come up with an invention — not wireless telegraphy, but something in that field of interest — in one quarter of the time that he spent to send his first cross-Atlantic wireless telegram, just because of the amount of information he’d have at his disposal to educate himself.

The beauty of this book is that the Marconi story, while more intellectually stimulating for me, is the “boring” narrative — the other history that Larson presents is that of Dr. Hawley Crippen who, at this halfway point of the book, may have murdered his wife. When I can get Dateline and professionally interesting ideas all in one book, I’ll chalk that up as a win.