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Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My

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Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And this

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Speaker 1: week we are going back in time. We were reaching

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Speaker 1: into the vault and retrieving the first of two episodes

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Speaker 1: that we did on the early days of electricity, How

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Speaker 1: people thought about electricity when it was a a new

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Speaker 1: discovery slash invention. You know, since these episodes came out,

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Speaker 1: we have read some interesting stuff about the language used

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Speaker 1: to describe electricity, especially about this sort of spiritual gendered

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Speaker 1: terms used to describe electrical power, that it was very

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Speaker 1: often associated with, this kind of like hidden female goddess.

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Speaker 1: I wish I had known about that at the time

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Speaker 1: we recorded this. But so when when did this first

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Speaker 1: episode come out? This would have been February nine. Okay,

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Speaker 1: so if you are ready, we're going to take a

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Speaker 1: journey into the vault for Early Days of Electricity, Part one.

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from How Stuff

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Speaker 1: Works dot Com. Now, therefore, you are hereby order, commanded

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Speaker 1: and required to execute the said sentence upon him, the

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Speaker 1: said William Kimmler, otherwise called John hort Upon some day

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Speaker 1: within the week, commencing on Monday, the twenty four day

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Speaker 1: of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand,

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Speaker 1: eight hundred and eighty nine, and within the walls of

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Speaker 1: Auburn State Prison, or within the yard or enclosure adjoining

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Speaker 1: there too by then, and they're causing to pass through

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Speaker 1: the body of him, the said William Kimmler, otherwise called

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Speaker 1: John Hort, a current of electricity of sufficient intensity to

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Speaker 1: cause death, and that the application of such current of

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Speaker 1: electricity be continued until he, the said William Kimmler, otherwise

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Speaker 1: called John Hort, be dead. Gentlemen, I wish you all

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Speaker 1: good luck. I believe I'm going to a good place,

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Speaker 1: and I'm ready to go. I only want to say

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Speaker 1: that a great deal has been said about me that

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Speaker 1: is untrue. I'm bad enough. It is cruel to make

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Speaker 1: me out worse. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.

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Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And

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Speaker 1: those were a couple of quotes concerning the death of

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Speaker 1: one William Kemmler, the first person in the world ever

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Speaker 1: to be legally executed by electric chair. That's right. This

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Speaker 1: was eight nine, and as will roll out in these

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Speaker 1: episodes this week on electricity, on the sort of the

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Speaker 1: weird history of electricity. Uh. This this episode, this electric

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Speaker 1: execution kind of serves as like the the final thrashing moment,

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Speaker 1: uh for the mysticism of electricity, the sort of supernatural

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Speaker 1: zeal that surrounded it for so long. I remember when

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Speaker 1: I was is growing up and I learned that the

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Speaker 1: Constitution of the United States prohibited cruel and unusual punishment

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Speaker 1: of criminals. And then I tried to reconcile that with

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Speaker 1: the fact that people were executed by electric chair. It

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Speaker 1: was just hard to think of a stranger way to

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Speaker 1: kill somebody on purpose. Yeah, And I think that will

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Speaker 1: I think that will become clear to everyone, especially in

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Speaker 1: the second episode when we get into the details of this,

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Speaker 1: about how how this came to be on the table,

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Speaker 1: how the argument was made that we should electrocute a prisoner,

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Speaker 1: why it was a good idea, and and why it

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Speaker 1: was the most modern and humane and hygienic thing to do. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: So this is going to be the first part of

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Speaker 1: a two part series on the Weird History of electricity,

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Speaker 1: as we've said, and we want to focus on a

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Speaker 1: different side of the story of electricity than you probably

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Speaker 1: learned about in school, So you've probably learned about things

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Speaker 1: like Benjamin frank some of Benjamin Franklin's experiments and uh,

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Speaker 1: and how the battery was invented and the voltaic pile

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Speaker 1: and eventually Thomas Edison and uh and maybe if your

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Speaker 1: teacher was pretty cool Nicola Tesla and the you know,

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Speaker 1: the current wars and and stuff like that. But what

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Speaker 1: we want to look at a different side of how

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Speaker 1: electricity came to be a fixture of of our society today,

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Speaker 1: and not just the technological journey, but the spiritual journey. Yeah, exactly. Now.

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Speaker 1: You know, if you want more on that technical journey,

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Speaker 1: do go to how stuff works dot com and check

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Speaker 1: out the article how electricity works. That's by Marshall Brain,

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Speaker 1: William Harris and uh and me to a very limited extent.

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Speaker 1: I think I touched up that article at one point,

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Speaker 1: but mostly it's it's Brain and Harriss. That could be

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Speaker 1: a thank for that article. But do you have to

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Speaker 1: add updates all the new things we've discovered about electricity

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Speaker 1: in the past period. Basically, did punch up on it

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Speaker 1: in the same way that you know a comedian might

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Speaker 1: punch up a script. I like went in there and uh,

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Speaker 1: made it a little more fun at the beginning and

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Speaker 1: updated the references, but otherwise left all the technical information

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Speaker 1: as is. But but but yeah, this is about sort of

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Speaker 1: This is the spiritual journey of of electricity, the cultural

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Speaker 1: journey of electricity from from the realm of the magical

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Speaker 1: to the realm of the mundane. And as I was

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Speaker 1: thinking about these episodes actually this morning in the shower

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Speaker 1: and on the drive into work, I kept thinking of

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Speaker 1: it in terms of a transformer. Okay, like like you see,

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Speaker 1: you know, on with high tension wires. So the times,

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Speaker 1: experiments and thoughts that we're going to present in this

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Speaker 1: pair of podcast that they serve as a sort of transformer.

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Speaker 1: So a transformer decreases the voltage of alternating current, turning

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Speaker 1: a dangerous high voltage current that's capable of traveling long

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Speaker 1: distances into a lower voltage current that's appropriate for just

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Speaker 1: mundane use in your home. So these events that we're

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Speaker 1: going to discuss are are the inner workings of the

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Speaker 1: cultural transformer that transformed electricity from a magical, holy, spiritual,

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Speaker 1: otherworldly energy into something that you can just completely take

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Speaker 1: for granted every day of your life. Okay, Well, let's

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Speaker 1: let's go back in time from the execution of William

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Speaker 1: Kimmler and go all the way back to the earliest

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Speaker 1: things we know about electricity, because before humans began to

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Speaker 1: recognize and test electromagnetism as a force of physics, we

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Speaker 1: were aware of it in several natural settings. For example,

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Speaker 1: lightning that's pretty obvious, the shocks of electric fishes, and

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Speaker 1: objects that naturally pulled toward one another through some invisible attractions.

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Speaker 1: So you might have a loadstone, or you know the

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Speaker 1: name for magnetite, or or you might find that friction.

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Speaker 1: You know, we're just rubbing one object against another could

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Speaker 1: cause attraction. And before we had even the slightest idea

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Speaker 1: what electricity was, its power found a way into our metaphors.

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Speaker 1: We naturally recognized that there was something very mysterious and

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Speaker 1: important going on in these invisible forces. So, for example,

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Speaker 1: in Plato's Mano dial log you know you remember this

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Speaker 1: one may know, he compares socrates style of argument to

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Speaker 1: a torpedo ray, which is it's a type of electric fish.

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Speaker 1: It's a genus of a ray that stuns prey and

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Speaker 1: enemies with jolts of electric charge issued through the water

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Speaker 1: and the point of the comparison is that Socrates stuns

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Speaker 1: his interlocutors into a state of just utter perplexity by

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Speaker 1: illuminating the aporia, the realization of an internal contradiction in

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Speaker 1: one's worldview. Okay, in other words, he's dropping truth bombs, exactly,

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Speaker 1: stunning you with his truth bombs. That that's a very

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Speaker 1: similar metaphor, I'd say, except they wouldn't say truth bombs

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Speaker 1: because they didn't have bombs, but they did have electric fish.

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Speaker 1: So so he's dropping truth torpedo fish. And just in

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Speaker 1: a side, there are there are numerous electric fish out there. Uh.

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Speaker 1: The the electric eel, which is more of an electric catfish,

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Speaker 1: tends to get most of the press because it is

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Speaker 1: the most electric fish. But they are varying levels of

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Speaker 1: elect trick fish out there, ranging from those that stunned

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Speaker 1: their prey to those that use it as more of

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Speaker 1: a communications sensory scenario. Yeah, and then there's a the

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Speaker 1: Lease of my Leads. So this is a Greek philosopher

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Speaker 1: known as one of the legendary Seven Wise Men, and

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Speaker 1: he may have been the first human to really study electricity,

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Speaker 1: and this would have been around a six hundred BC. Now,

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Speaker 1: he was the one who was doing friction experiments. He

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Speaker 1: would take amber, so you know, fossilized tree resin the

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Speaker 1: stuff from Jurassic Park. Yeah, well, hopefully there's an insect

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Speaker 1: in there, something that kind of you know, crippled and

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Speaker 1: and frozen in time. But he didn't come up with

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Speaker 1: the idea to get its DNA out. No, he wasn't

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Speaker 1: quite up to that level unless you want to view

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Speaker 1: the resulting spark here is like the soul of the

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Speaker 1: bug leaving the amber. So he'd rubbed the amber with fur,

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Speaker 1: and he was able to attract dust, feathers, and other

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Speaker 1: lightweight objects. And so these were the first experiments with electrostatics,

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Speaker 1: the study of of stationary electric charges or static electricity.

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Speaker 1: In fact, the word electricity comes from the Greek electron,

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Speaker 1: which means amber. Yeah, and what else the ancients knew

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Speaker 1: about electricity, It's it's hard to know. There. There is,

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Speaker 1: of course, the quite famous Baghdad battery, which I think

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Speaker 1: most archaeologists now think was not actually a battery, but

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Speaker 1: the idea there was that there was a clay jar

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Speaker 1: and then found near it were some metal elements that,

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Speaker 1: if arranged in the right way, perhaps could have accumulated

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Speaker 1: electric charge. I've read that archaeologist now just almost all

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Speaker 1: agree that it was just a normal, ordinary storage jar.

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Speaker 1: It was not actually a battery. But one could hope,

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Speaker 1: you know, you always, you always kind of think, wouldn't

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Speaker 1: it be cool if there was some ancient person who

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Speaker 1: who had knowledge way ahead of their time, and and

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Speaker 1: it was just lost to history because I don't know,

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Speaker 1: they didn't write it down or nobody would believe them.

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Speaker 1: But people recognized there was a force at work. There

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Speaker 1: was electromagnetic attraction, there was static discharge, shocks, sparks, arcs,

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Speaker 1: But what is it? People commonly spoke about it using

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Speaker 1: sort of familiar but vague or incorrect points of comparison,

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Speaker 1: Like Benjamin Franklin, in his letters and notes in the

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Speaker 1: mid seventeen hundreds, spoke of the electrical fire. This was

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Speaker 1: a common point of comparison. People would speak of the

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Speaker 1: fire that that carries the electrical fluid or in even

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Speaker 1: in eighteen eighty nine, so much later, Thomas Edison, who

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Speaker 1: worked with electricity in a technological sense, he could command

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Speaker 1: electricity to do his bidding, Yet when asked what it was,

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Speaker 1: he vaguely explained that electricity was a mode of motion.

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Speaker 1: A system of vibrations. Yeah. I love this quote because

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Speaker 1: apparently Edison was just out there pressing the flash. It

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Speaker 1: was like a formal engagement. I think he was having

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Speaker 1: lunch with somebody at the Eiffel Tower and then somebody

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Speaker 1: asked him, So, Edison, electricity is your thing, Tell me

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Speaker 1: what is it? This is all really come up with. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: And so even after people were performing experiments with electricity,

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Speaker 1: even creating some electrical technologies that they were using for

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Speaker 1: for purposes in uh in say, medicine, whether or not

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Speaker 1: those purposes were quite on the money in terms of

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Speaker 1: improving people's health. People were using electricity, but they they

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Speaker 1: didn't know what it was. Even in seventeen sixty seven,

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Speaker 1: after a lot of these famous experiments like Benjamin Franklin's experiments,

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Speaker 1: Joseph priestly described electricity as the youngest daughter of the sciences,

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Speaker 1: which I think is kind of a sweet thing to say.

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Speaker 1: But what was the invisible fire? The electrical fire? It

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Speaker 1: seemed it was a natural force of the world people understood,

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Speaker 1: and yet it commanded a sense of mystery because it

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Speaker 1: was invisible most of the time. It could act at

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Speaker 1: a distance like a ghostly force, almost you know, the

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Speaker 1: attraction between objects could be like a ghost reaching out

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Speaker 1: through the ether to pull things toward one another. It

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Speaker 1: could spark in the dark, and these were strange and

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Speaker 1: mysterious phenomena. Even when people began to be able to

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Speaker 1: control it, they didn't know what it was. So the

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Speaker 1: modern era of electrical research, I think is often traced

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Speaker 1: back to the add to the creation of the Leyden jar. Right, So,

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Speaker 1: the Leyden jar was a thing that was invented in

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Speaker 1: the seventeen forties, usually cited a seventeen forty five or

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Speaker 1: forty six, discovered independently by different people at different times.

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Speaker 1: But the laden jar was what was then known as

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Speaker 1: a condenser. But it's what we now call a capacitor.

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Speaker 1: So in simple terms, this is a device capable of

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Speaker 1: storing and quickly discharging a large amount of electricity. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I've read the laden jar, particularly the one that was

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Speaker 1: created by a Dutch instrument instrument makers Edwald von Kleist

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Speaker 1: and Peter van mussen Bruck. This was basically a glass

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Speaker 1: jar full of water and had a nail in it,

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Speaker 1: and this was this was able to They were able

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Speaker 1: to use this to store an electrical charge. Yeah, they

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Speaker 1: had the different metals on the inside it outside, and

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Speaker 1: the differential between them could allow electric charge to accumulate

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Speaker 1: and then you could discharge it. Yeah, and and pretty

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Speaker 1: massively like apparently the first time muschen Brock used the jar,

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Speaker 1: he basically shocked the hell out of himself. I mean

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Speaker 1: didn't die, but tremendous amount of shock coming out of

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Speaker 1: this jar of water and nail. Well, but once you

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Speaker 1: look at what this kind of jar is capable of

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Speaker 1: delivering a shock like that, obviously some applications could come

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Speaker 1: to mind, and they sure did come to some minds,

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Speaker 1: especially the mind of one Benjamin Franklin. So you might

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Speaker 1: know about some of Benjamin Franklin's experiments with electricity. Probably

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Speaker 1: the most famous story is one we only have second hand, actually,

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Speaker 1: and that's the story about Franklin flying a kite tied

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Speaker 1: to a key in a thunderstorm to demonstrate the electrical

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Speaker 1: nature of lightning. You know, we only have been in

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Speaker 1: me that Disney cartoon to really go by, I don't

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Speaker 1: know what that is. What is how they did a

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Speaker 1: whole cartoon about Benjamin Franklin and the kaite. But there's

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Speaker 1: this mouse that's really the brilliance behind Ben, and he's

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Speaker 1: constantly urging Ben on. I mean, just in the Ben

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Speaker 1: Franklin Actuly of it is that are acceptable for children

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Speaker 1: to watch? You know? I think this story was propaganda

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Speaker 1: invented by the kite maker's lobby. No, but seriously, so

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Speaker 1: we don't know if this story actually happened or not.

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Speaker 1: It probably did. We get the story from Franklin's friend

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Speaker 1: Joseph Priestley, who reported it later, so not from Franklin himself.

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Speaker 1: But Franklin certainly did do lots of experiments on electricity.

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Speaker 1: He invented the lightning rod, which is a rod mounted

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Speaker 1: on top of a building that's connected to a wire

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Speaker 1: leading down to a ground rod embedded in the earth.

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Speaker 1: And what this does is it gives the lightning a

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Speaker 1: an avenue of travel from the top of the building

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Speaker 1: to the ground, sort of a harmless path, rather than

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Speaker 1: it going through the building, starting fires, potentially damaging people

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Speaker 1: or structural elements. It's like the expressway going around a

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Speaker 1: major population center so that the traffic doesn't have to

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Speaker 1: go directly through town where it can cause all sorts

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Speaker 1: of havoc. Yeah, so you've probably heard about these things,

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Speaker 1: but you might not have heard about Franklin's experiments in

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Speaker 1: the electric slaughter of large fowl, a specifically the turkey,

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Speaker 1: which I do want to just throw in really quickly

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Speaker 1: that Franklin famously said that that he thought the turkey

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Speaker 1: should be the national bird. Yeah, a lot of thanks

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Speaker 1: he gives it. He's like, national bird, you will die. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: why I you would think he would maybe go out

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Speaker 1: and get shocked the eagle, since he saw the eagle

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Speaker 1: is this kind of horrible, moral, morally offensive bird as

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Speaker 1: opposed to that the noble, slightly vain and preposterous but

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Speaker 1: but courageous turkey. Yeah, well he what he did, see

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Speaker 1: the eagle as a thief and a scavenger, right, yeah. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: he's like, that's that's really not our in our spirit,

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Speaker 1: it should be the turkey. Well, I guess there's no

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Speaker 1: law that says don't kill what you believe is noble,

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Speaker 1: because he believed the turkey to be noable, but he

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Speaker 1: also wanted to roast it with electrical current and eat

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Speaker 1: its flesh. Well, I guess it's easier to obtain a

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Speaker 1: turkey than an eagle. That's true. The eagles fight back. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: So on April nine, Franklin wrote to the scientist Peter

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Speaker 1: Collinson a letter detailing the results of some recent experiments

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Speaker 1: he'd done in electricity, and he ended with a strange

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Speaker 1: proposal for a quote party of pleasure on the banks

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Speaker 1: of the Schookole the river. And so this is what

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Speaker 1: he said, quote a turkey is to be killed for

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Speaker 1: our dinners by the electric shock and roasted by the

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Speaker 1: electric jack before a fire kindled by the electric bottle,

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Speaker 1: when the healths of all the famous electricians in England,

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Speaker 1: France and Germany are to be drank in electrified bumpers

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Speaker 1: under the discharge of guns from the electric battery. Okay,

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Speaker 1: first of all, what's an electric bumper? This is great?

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Speaker 1: So Franklin explains this in a marginal note. He says,

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Speaker 1: an electrified bumper is a small, thin glass tumbler near

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Speaker 1: filled with wine and electrified. This, when brought to the lips,

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Speaker 1: gives a shock if the party be close shaved, and

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Speaker 1: does not breathe on the liquor. Was that not factoring

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Speaker 1: into modern exology that you think that would? I can

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Speaker 1: see that going over huge at trendy bars, right especially. Yeah, well,

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Speaker 1: it seems like it would really go with that you

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Speaker 1: know those trends in the nineteen I guess was at

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Speaker 1: the fifties where they'd have electric movie seats that would

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Speaker 1: shock you harm. Yeah, so they should have served drinks

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Speaker 1: that would shock you as well. So anyway, Franklin's attempt

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Speaker 1: to slaughter turkeys with the electric discharge of Leyden jars,

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Speaker 1: which is what he was using, the laden jars we

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Speaker 1: talked about earlier. Those were his electric bottles. This happened

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Speaker 1: in seventeen fifty, and it did not go so well.

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Speaker 1: According to a letter from one William Watson to the

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Speaker 1: Royal Society in London. Quote, he first made several attempts

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Speaker 1: on fouls and found that two large thin glass jars

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Speaker 1: guilt holding each about six gallons, and such as I

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Speaker 1: mentioned I had employed in the last paper I laid

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Speaker 1: before you upon this subject, were sufficient win fully charged

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Speaker 1: to kill common hens out right. But the turkeys, though

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Speaker 1: thrown into violent convulsions and then lying as dead for

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Speaker 1: some minutes, would recover in less than a quarter of

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Speaker 1: an hour. So they had turkeys coming back from the dead.

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Speaker 1: I mean, that's pretty messed up. Watson continues, however, having

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Speaker 1: added three other such to the former too, and he's

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Speaker 1: talking about the laden jars there, uh, though not fully charged.

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Speaker 1: He killed a turkey of about ten pounds weight and

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Speaker 1: believes they would have killed a much larger He conceded

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Speaker 1: as himself says that the birds killed in this manner

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Speaker 1: eat uncommonly tender. You know, that's that's one heck of

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Speaker 1: a yell p review. But but but I do appreciate

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Speaker 1: the spirit of the thing that the spirit of the

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Speaker 1: dinner was. We're just gonna have a completely electric dinner.

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Speaker 1: Everything from the death of the bird, to the cooking

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Speaker 1: of the bird, to the the curious way that the

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Speaker 1: drinks make your lips tinkle, everything is going to be

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Speaker 1: powered by this this this divine energy that we are

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Speaker 1: now harnessing with our modern science. Well, it almost sounds

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Speaker 1: like the scientific counterpart to those spirit parties people would

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Speaker 1: have where you know, where you'd have a seance and

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Speaker 1: you have people doing all kinds of spiritualist games and demonstrations.

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Speaker 1: Here it's the other side of the coin. But they're

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Speaker 1: using natural phenomena. So then again, how natural because all

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Speaker 1: these mysteries remained, what is the electrical fire? Like? Ultimately,

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00:19:19,840 --> 00:19:24,040
Speaker 1: they're playing with something that they don't completely understand. Um,

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Speaker 1: you know, now with that, I have to add the

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Speaker 1: caveat that had a lot of us today do not

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Speaker 1: really completely understand the electricity that we're we're employing, right,

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Speaker 1: We're we're fine to let it power our toaster ovens

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Speaker 1: and cook our ego waffles, but we don't really We

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Speaker 1: couldn't engineer electrical dynamos ourselves exactly, and of course that's

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Speaker 1: just part of modern life. And then it should also

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Speaker 1: be stressed as well that we haven't completely filled in

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Speaker 1: all the all the blanks, all the spaces in our

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Speaker 1: understanding of electricity itself, umo are, which is kind of

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Speaker 1: weird to imagine. Yeah, but back to the din Or party,

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Speaker 1: how did our host recover from this setback of reanimated turkeys? Well, yeah,

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Speaker 1: you might think that the turkeys coming back from the

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Speaker 1: dead would be enough to stun you into silence, But

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Speaker 1: but Franklin was in for another shock, because he actually

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Speaker 1: managed to shock himself so bad that he was knocked unconscious.

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Speaker 1: Watson writes later in this same letter that he says

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Speaker 1: from this experiment, maybe seen the danger even under the

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Speaker 1: greatest caution to the operator when making these experiments with

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Speaker 1: large jars for it is not to be doubted but

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Speaker 1: that several of these fully charged would as certainly by

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Speaker 1: increasing them in proportion to the size, kill a man,

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Speaker 1: as they before did the turkey. Alright, So here we

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Speaker 1: see the two sides of the coin. Like. On one hand,

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Speaker 1: electricity can be managed, It can be used, uh, it

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Speaker 1: can be played with. But it can also prove dangerous

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Speaker 1: uh in high enough quantities. Certainly, and indeed electricity experiments

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Speaker 1: could prove deadly if proper care was not taken. I

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Speaker 1: to look at one example, which is gae Org Wilhelm Rickman.

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Speaker 1: So he was a scientist, he was experimenting on electricity.

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Speaker 1: He was conducting an experiment involving an insulated lightning rod

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Speaker 1: during a storm in St. Petersburg in seventeen fifty three,

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Speaker 1: and Rickman got dead. He was struck dead in his

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Speaker 1: lab by what has been described as a burst of

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Speaker 1: ball lightning. I want to read out the account here,

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Speaker 1: which is bizarre and fascinating. So this is a letter

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Speaker 1: to the Pennsylvania Gazette from March seventeen fifty four explaining

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Speaker 1: what happened to Rickman. It says the place for the

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Speaker 1: experiment was a kind of gallery with its entrance toward

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Speaker 1: the north, and a window towards the south. Whether the

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00:21:41,440 --> 00:21:44,199
Speaker 1: window was open is not known. All that is certain

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00:21:44,359 --> 00:21:47,119
Speaker 1: is that near the window was a cupboard four ft long,

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Speaker 1: on which replaced the electrical needle, and a vessel of water,

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Speaker 1: partly filled with brass filings, over which came an iron

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Speaker 1: bar about an inch thick and a foot long, fastened

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Speaker 1: at the top to a wire which came down from

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Speaker 1: the roof of the house through the gallery door. So

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00:22:03,080 --> 00:22:06,080
Speaker 1: they were sort of playing with death here. They're saying, Okay,

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Speaker 1: we've got a lightning rod on the top of the house.

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Speaker 1: We've got it running down to an insulated wire in

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00:22:10,880 --> 00:22:15,000
Speaker 1: the room that suspended over this bowl, and so they continue.

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Speaker 1: The professor, judging from the needle that the tempest was

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Speaker 1: at a great distance, assured Mr soko Law that there

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00:22:21,680 --> 00:22:24,280
Speaker 1: was no danger, but there might be at the approach.

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Speaker 1: So they don't think the storm's hit yet. But Mr

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Speaker 1: Rickman stood about a foot from the bar, attentively observing

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Speaker 1: the needle. Soon after Mr Sokolow saw the machine being untouched,

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Speaker 1: a globe of blue and whitish fire about four inches

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Speaker 1: in diameter dart from the bar against Mr Rickman's forehead,

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Speaker 1: who fell backwards without the least outcry, which is a

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00:22:47,960 --> 00:22:51,600
Speaker 1: creepy way to die, right, You'd expect a person to scream. Instead,

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00:22:51,640 --> 00:22:54,679
Speaker 1: he just silently falls right, And this is important to

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00:22:54,720 --> 00:22:58,919
Speaker 1: keep in mind later. This sort of accidental electrical electrical

401
00:22:59,000 --> 00:23:05,879
Speaker 1: death they were is just instantaneous, seemingly seemingly which is

402
00:23:05,960 --> 00:23:08,920
Speaker 1: the scariest part based on what we finally found out

403
00:23:08,960 --> 00:23:11,760
Speaker 1: can happen. But also towards the end of the same letter,

404
00:23:12,160 --> 00:23:15,879
Speaker 1: what is the takeaway from this, Well, they learned some

405
00:23:16,000 --> 00:23:20,280
Speaker 1: interesting things. Quote. The new doctrine of lightning is however,

406
00:23:20,359 --> 00:23:24,240
Speaker 1: confirmed by this unhappy accident, and many lives may hereafter

407
00:23:24,280 --> 00:23:27,800
Speaker 1: be saved by the practice it teaches. Mr Rickman, being

408
00:23:28,200 --> 00:23:31,120
Speaker 1: about to make experiments in the matter of lightning, had

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00:23:31,119 --> 00:23:35,000
Speaker 1: supported his rod and wires with electrics per se, which

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00:23:35,040 --> 00:23:39,160
Speaker 1: cut off their communication with the earth, and himself standing

411
00:23:39,240 --> 00:23:43,080
Speaker 1: too near where the wire terminated, helped with his body

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Speaker 1: to complete that communication. So he formed the road. Instead

413
00:23:46,840 --> 00:23:50,040
Speaker 1: of Franklin's model where the electric current takes the freeway

414
00:23:50,080 --> 00:23:54,280
Speaker 1: bypass around the city, this went straight through the city

415
00:23:54,400 --> 00:23:57,760
Speaker 1: and through a dude to the other side, basically through

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Speaker 1: his living room. I so, so based on that, you

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00:24:01,520 --> 00:24:04,720
Speaker 1: might think, well, surely everyone's learning the lesson here. Electricity

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00:24:04,840 --> 00:24:08,320
Speaker 1: is dangerous. You should not employ it at your dinner parties,

419
00:24:08,359 --> 00:24:11,840
Speaker 1: you should not employ it in your parlor. And yet

420
00:24:12,840 --> 00:24:15,359
Speaker 1: we see the trend go in the opposite Yeah, exactly

421
00:24:15,400 --> 00:24:18,080
Speaker 1: the opposite way. So that was seventeen fifty three that

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00:24:18,080 --> 00:24:21,439
Speaker 1: that happened to Rickman and and at the same time,

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00:24:21,720 --> 00:24:26,119
Speaker 1: in the salons and galleries of Europe and North America,

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00:24:26,240 --> 00:24:31,680
Speaker 1: electricity was becoming the hottest bit of edutainment, uh, that

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00:24:32,200 --> 00:24:35,080
Speaker 1: there had ever been. So I want to draw now

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00:24:35,160 --> 00:24:38,920
Speaker 1: from mostly from a paper called Sparks in the Dark

427
00:24:39,080 --> 00:24:42,800
Speaker 1: The Attraction of Electricity in the eighteenth Century by Paula Bertucci.

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00:24:43,080 --> 00:24:45,040
Speaker 1: And she's been a really good source for us in

429
00:24:45,080 --> 00:24:48,240
Speaker 1: these episodes of Several of her papers have been big

430
00:24:48,240 --> 00:24:50,320
Speaker 1: sources of our research, and she's done a lot of

431
00:24:50,359 --> 00:24:53,040
Speaker 1: work on the history of electricity, and these papers are

432
00:24:53,080 --> 00:24:55,439
Speaker 1: great reads. Yeah, we'll make sure to link out to

433
00:24:55,520 --> 00:24:57,480
Speaker 1: some of her materials on the landing page for this

434
00:24:57,520 --> 00:24:59,640
Speaker 1: episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind dot Com, because yeah,

435
00:24:59,720 --> 00:25:02,439
Speaker 1: she's is to be one of the forefront researchers and

436
00:25:02,520 --> 00:25:06,200
Speaker 1: historians on the history of electricity. Yeah, So coming back

437
00:25:06,200 --> 00:25:10,960
Speaker 1: to these sparking salons, So, in the Enlightenment climate of

438
00:25:11,040 --> 00:25:15,520
Speaker 1: eighteenth century Europe, public demonstrations of electrical phenomenon experiments became

439
00:25:15,640 --> 00:25:20,399
Speaker 1: really popular forms of entertainment among the wealthy. So if

440
00:25:20,440 --> 00:25:23,800
Speaker 1: you walked into a Parisian salon in the mid seventeen hundreds,

441
00:25:23,840 --> 00:25:28,159
Speaker 1: you might find a horde of socialites sitting silent in

442
00:25:28,200 --> 00:25:32,159
Speaker 1: the dark, watching a lecturer on natural philosophy charge and

443
00:25:32,520 --> 00:25:36,439
Speaker 1: or hanging atop a spike until it glowed, or they

444
00:25:36,520 --> 00:25:40,440
Speaker 1: might give an audience member shocks of static electricity. And

445
00:25:40,600 --> 00:25:43,000
Speaker 1: another funny thing you might see would be Benjamin Franklin

446
00:25:43,040 --> 00:25:46,440
Speaker 1: sitting in the audience as this was his scene. This

447
00:25:46,560 --> 00:25:50,280
Speaker 1: was like, this was like the DC punk scene. But

448
00:25:50,880 --> 00:25:54,000
Speaker 1: the Paris electricity scene is that much a scene one

449
00:25:54,000 --> 00:25:58,600
Speaker 1: of the scenes that Franklin frequented, uh in the city. Okay,

450
00:25:58,600 --> 00:26:00,760
Speaker 1: But so it was during the seventy forties that the

451
00:26:00,920 --> 00:26:04,520
Speaker 1: educated audiences in Europe and North America really became familiar

452
00:26:04,960 --> 00:26:07,879
Speaker 1: with the power of the electric fire. And it wasn't

453
00:26:07,920 --> 00:26:10,720
Speaker 1: just Benjamin Franklin and his inner circle that we're showing off.

454
00:26:10,760 --> 00:26:14,600
Speaker 1: All the sparkling experiments. There was a whole generation of

455
00:26:14,680 --> 00:26:19,080
Speaker 1: what what Bertucci calls itinerant lecturers, which is great because

456
00:26:19,119 --> 00:26:22,600
Speaker 1: that makes me think of itinerant priests or itinerant evangelists

457
00:26:23,520 --> 00:26:26,960
Speaker 1: traveling around spreading the gospel message, except in this case,

458
00:26:27,040 --> 00:26:31,680
Speaker 1: this is the electricity gospel. So they would tour from

459
00:26:31,760 --> 00:26:36,119
Speaker 1: place to place giving demonstrations. Uh, in an early incarnation

460
00:26:36,200 --> 00:26:39,160
Speaker 1: of what we might call edutainment. I would say, they

461
00:26:39,200 --> 00:26:43,160
Speaker 1: would show off some sparks, show off some electromagnetic attraction,

462
00:26:43,200 --> 00:26:53,239
Speaker 1: and they'd say, are you not edutane? Well, what are

463
00:26:53,280 --> 00:26:55,240
Speaker 1: some examples of some of the demonstrations that they would

464
00:26:55,320 --> 00:26:59,760
Speaker 1: roll out for the for the entertainment hungry population. Right,

465
00:26:59,800 --> 00:27:02,920
Speaker 1: So one would be uh, having somebody touch in electrical

466
00:27:02,920 --> 00:27:05,919
Speaker 1: apparatus and then you'd see their hair rise up. Or

467
00:27:06,040 --> 00:27:09,040
Speaker 1: you could see somebody become electrically charged and then attract

468
00:27:09,119 --> 00:27:13,480
Speaker 1: small objects with one's hands. Or you could use electrostatic

469
00:27:13,520 --> 00:27:17,439
Speaker 1: induction to make objects move for example, maybe maybe making

470
00:27:17,520 --> 00:27:21,080
Speaker 1: bells ring or something. Or you could darken the room

471
00:27:21,440 --> 00:27:25,680
Speaker 1: and show sparks jumping between objects, or electro luminescent glowing

472
00:27:25,760 --> 00:27:28,639
Speaker 1: inside glass containers. Now the great thing about this I

473
00:27:28,680 --> 00:27:30,600
Speaker 1: meagine a lot of people are thinking this is and

474
00:27:30,680 --> 00:27:33,639
Speaker 1: from a modern perspective, you think of Mr Wizard, you

475
00:27:33,720 --> 00:27:39,160
Speaker 1: think of various various science shows. For me, I think Beakman. Yeah,

476
00:27:39,200 --> 00:27:42,119
Speaker 1: for me, I'm also reminded of the sort of street

477
00:27:42,160 --> 00:27:44,800
Speaker 1: festival they have for the World Science Festival in New

478
00:27:44,840 --> 00:27:47,560
Speaker 1: York City every year, where kids go around, they go

479
00:27:47,640 --> 00:27:51,400
Speaker 1: to different science booths and there's always at least one

480
00:27:51,640 --> 00:27:53,720
Speaker 1: where they have some sort of electrical experiment going on.

481
00:27:53,760 --> 00:27:58,240
Speaker 1: I mean it's electrical experiments lend themselves so well to

482
00:27:58,720 --> 00:28:01,360
Speaker 1: to public, like it was in public displays, and we're

483
00:28:01,400 --> 00:28:04,640
Speaker 1: still into them to this day. Yes, absolutely. I mean

484
00:28:04,920 --> 00:28:08,280
Speaker 1: it's important to notice how much of this was just spectacle.

485
00:28:09,000 --> 00:28:11,960
Speaker 1: I don't know how much the average person was learning

486
00:28:12,080 --> 00:28:15,480
Speaker 1: from these demonstrations and the salons, especially given how little

487
00:28:15,800 --> 00:28:19,120
Speaker 1: the people lecturing probably knew about electricity. Like we said,

488
00:28:19,280 --> 00:28:22,600
Speaker 1: they didn't know about electrons, yet, we didn't know what

489
00:28:22,640 --> 00:28:26,680
Speaker 1: the electrical fire was. There were a lot of suppositions,

490
00:28:26,720 --> 00:28:31,040
Speaker 1: you might say, But but it's funny to imagine the

491
00:28:31,440 --> 00:28:34,960
Speaker 1: level of confidence in the display and the spectacle of

492
00:28:35,000 --> 00:28:40,120
Speaker 1: it versus what was actually probably misinformation being communicated to people.

493
00:28:40,600 --> 00:28:43,520
Speaker 1: So the demonstrations really played to the senses. They had

494
00:28:43,520 --> 00:28:47,440
Speaker 1: flashes of light, crackling noises, smells even sometimes like a

495
00:28:47,480 --> 00:28:50,720
Speaker 1: sulfurous smell in the aftermath of things. A couple of

496
00:28:50,760 --> 00:28:54,640
Speaker 1: examples of people who would give these things. One was

497
00:28:55,440 --> 00:28:59,080
Speaker 1: Jean Antoine Melas, who was a French physicist and instrument maker,

498
00:28:59,400 --> 00:29:02,280
Speaker 1: and he would range experiments with chains of people holding

499
00:29:02,360 --> 00:29:05,760
Speaker 1: hands who would be shocked in unison as the person

500
00:29:05,840 --> 00:29:08,280
Speaker 1: at one end of the chain touched the rod or

501
00:29:08,360 --> 00:29:11,120
Speaker 1: the inner surface of the laden jar, and the person

502
00:29:11,160 --> 00:29:14,120
Speaker 1: at the other end touched the outer surface. And there's

503
00:29:14,160 --> 00:29:17,720
Speaker 1: something almost weirdly orgiastic about this, isn't there. Yeah, what

504
00:29:17,800 --> 00:29:21,280
Speaker 1: reminds me of these these scenes of seances taking place

505
00:29:21,480 --> 00:29:24,400
Speaker 1: more or less around the same pole, hands in a circle. Yeah, yeah,

506
00:29:24,440 --> 00:29:26,280
Speaker 1: and and and all. All of this also reminds me

507
00:29:26,320 --> 00:29:30,040
Speaker 1: of magic tricks, except in this case the magic is real,

508
00:29:30,160 --> 00:29:33,040
Speaker 1: and the magic is a is a natural phenomenon that

509
00:29:33,160 --> 00:29:35,040
Speaker 1: we don't have at this point, we don't have all

510
00:29:35,080 --> 00:29:37,840
Speaker 1: the answers for, and thus still retains a lot of

511
00:29:37,840 --> 00:29:40,760
Speaker 1: its magical qualities. Yeah. Yeah, So, as much as these

512
00:29:40,840 --> 00:29:45,840
Speaker 1: lecturers probably wanted to emphasize the scientific and natural nature

513
00:29:45,880 --> 00:29:50,520
Speaker 1: of the electrical phenomenon people were observing. There is undoubtedly

514
00:29:50,560 --> 00:29:54,880
Speaker 1: a very spiritual power to what people were experiencing at

515
00:29:54,920 --> 00:29:58,440
Speaker 1: these demonstrations, if you know what I mean. A couple

516
00:29:58,480 --> 00:30:00,400
Speaker 1: other things that might be showed off. One one thing

517
00:30:00,480 --> 00:30:03,400
Speaker 1: was medical electricity began to emerge in this period in

518
00:30:03,440 --> 00:30:06,760
Speaker 1: the mid seventeen hundreds as the sort of useful incarnation

519
00:30:06,880 --> 00:30:10,440
Speaker 1: of this force, which I mean, that's funny to imagine

520
00:30:10,480 --> 00:30:14,760
Speaker 1: back then. But though the medical utility of the electrical

521
00:30:14,800 --> 00:30:17,920
Speaker 1: fire was still debated, demonstrators began in this period to

522
00:30:18,000 --> 00:30:21,880
Speaker 1: definitely offer therapeutic electrical shocks to people who sought them

523
00:30:22,160 --> 00:30:26,000
Speaker 1: for I guess primarily conditions of the nerves. Yeah, I mean,

524
00:30:26,040 --> 00:30:29,480
Speaker 1: here's this electricity that has this kind of um, you know,

525
00:30:29,560 --> 00:30:32,800
Speaker 1: magical quality to it already, you're definitely gonna feel it.

526
00:30:33,160 --> 00:30:36,640
Speaker 1: So you wrap a little bit of healing hocus pocus

527
00:30:36,720 --> 00:30:40,480
Speaker 1: language around it, and you have yourselves potentially one heck

528
00:30:40,480 --> 00:30:43,320
Speaker 1: of a placebo there, right, Yeah. Yeah. And so there

529
00:30:43,360 --> 00:30:46,280
Speaker 1: were a couple other things that Bertucci mentions that were

530
00:30:46,280 --> 00:30:49,480
Speaker 1: often showed off. There were thunder houses and the the

531
00:30:49,520 --> 00:30:52,200
Speaker 1: Aurora flask. I love the idea of a thunder house.

532
00:30:52,280 --> 00:30:54,760
Speaker 1: This is it was basically a demonstration that was sort

533
00:30:54,800 --> 00:30:57,720
Speaker 1: of an ad for the lightning rod because it was

534
00:30:57,760 --> 00:31:00,680
Speaker 1: a model house. So imagine a dollhouse then with a

535
00:31:00,800 --> 00:31:03,040
Speaker 1: lightning rod sticking out the top of it. Then the

536
00:31:03,080 --> 00:31:06,600
Speaker 1: demonstrators would shock the house with electrical discharge, and if

537
00:31:06,600 --> 00:31:09,600
Speaker 1: the rod was properly grounded, nothing would happen, but if

538
00:31:09,640 --> 00:31:12,000
Speaker 1: the rod was ungrounded, a shock to the house would

539
00:31:12,000 --> 00:31:15,880
Speaker 1: ignite gunpowder planted inside the dollhouse and cause an explosion.

540
00:31:16,680 --> 00:31:19,440
Speaker 1: And then also there was a thing called the Aurora flask,

541
00:31:19,520 --> 00:31:23,440
Speaker 1: which was a pear shaped glass bulb designed to simulate

542
00:31:23,520 --> 00:31:27,280
Speaker 1: the luminous display of the Aurora borealis inside a container.

543
00:31:27,960 --> 00:31:29,560
Speaker 1: So that's a weird way that we could put this,

544
00:31:29,760 --> 00:31:35,520
Speaker 1: this amazingly beautiful, vast, uh natural display inside a bottle,

545
00:31:35,960 --> 00:31:38,760
Speaker 1: which is almost a metaphor for what these people were doing.

546
00:31:38,840 --> 00:31:42,080
Speaker 1: You know, they were taking the most powerful and mysterious,

547
00:31:42,840 --> 00:31:46,800
Speaker 1: huge grand forces of nature and capturing it and putting

548
00:31:46,840 --> 00:31:48,920
Speaker 1: it in a bottle that you could look into and

549
00:31:48,960 --> 00:31:51,560
Speaker 1: tap on the glass. Lightning in a bottle, And then

550
00:31:51,960 --> 00:31:53,720
Speaker 1: all the way to our modern time where what is

551
00:31:53,920 --> 00:31:56,360
Speaker 1: what is a light bulb but another form of lightning

552
00:31:56,360 --> 00:31:59,840
Speaker 1: in a bottle? And yet the most mundane thing imaginable. Yeah,

553
00:32:00,000 --> 00:32:02,760
Speaker 1: And I think because partly because of all these demonstrations,

554
00:32:02,800 --> 00:32:08,000
Speaker 1: people began to think of electricity as as sort of

555
00:32:08,040 --> 00:32:10,560
Speaker 1: the the embodiment of all the force of the cosmos.

556
00:32:10,960 --> 00:32:13,120
Speaker 1: So in the second half of the eighteenth century, people

557
00:32:13,160 --> 00:32:15,880
Speaker 1: were beginning to explain all kinds of natural forces through

558
00:32:15,960 --> 00:32:19,840
Speaker 1: the the electrical fire. So obviously lightning and thunder but

559
00:32:19,880 --> 00:32:24,480
Speaker 1: people started to say, well, earthquakes, that's probably electricity too, Tornadoes,

560
00:32:24,520 --> 00:32:29,800
Speaker 1: whirlpools is all electricity. And Bertucci says, quote such demonstrations

561
00:32:29,840 --> 00:32:36,000
Speaker 1: contributed to the construction of an electrical cosmos. Health, sickness, thunderstorm, earthquakes,

562
00:32:36,040 --> 00:32:39,880
Speaker 1: and Aurora borealis all resulted from the motions of the

563
00:32:39,920 --> 00:32:43,720
Speaker 1: electrical fire. Again taking on what sounds like kind of

564
00:32:43,720 --> 00:32:46,840
Speaker 1: a spiritual aspect, it's almost like the the you know,

565
00:32:46,920 --> 00:32:49,720
Speaker 1: the power and love of God that controls the motions

566
00:32:49,760 --> 00:32:52,600
Speaker 1: of all the spheres. Yeah, this sense that they're they're

567
00:32:52,760 --> 00:32:55,920
Speaker 1: tapping into this this hidden network of energy that underlies

568
00:32:55,960 --> 00:32:58,440
Speaker 1: all things. The kind of thing that I've seen, I've

569
00:32:58,480 --> 00:33:02,520
Speaker 1: seen discussed in various uh you know, a cult or

570
00:33:02,560 --> 00:33:06,160
Speaker 1: some sort of spiritual uh papers where they're talking about

571
00:33:06,200 --> 00:33:08,720
Speaker 1: saying like they're being a chaos matrix manith reality, and

572
00:33:08,720 --> 00:33:11,040
Speaker 1: if you can tap into that chaos matrix, then you

573
00:33:11,040 --> 00:33:14,840
Speaker 1: have chaos chaos magic at your disposal. Like this is.

574
00:33:14,920 --> 00:33:17,080
Speaker 1: This is as if one were suddenly saying, hey, we

575
00:33:17,200 --> 00:33:20,080
Speaker 1: found the chaos matrix and we can make the chaos

576
00:33:20,120 --> 00:33:23,400
Speaker 1: magic fly from the tips of our fingers. Now, what

577
00:33:23,600 --> 00:33:27,120
Speaker 1: is the D and D alignment of the electrical phantom?

578
00:33:27,240 --> 00:33:31,680
Speaker 1: Is it chaotic evil or chaotic neutral? I think chaotic neutral.

579
00:33:32,040 --> 00:33:36,480
Speaker 1: It's all, but it all depends on how you engage

580
00:33:36,480 --> 00:33:38,760
Speaker 1: with it. Okay, now we're gonna take a quick break,

581
00:33:38,760 --> 00:33:40,479
Speaker 1: but when we come back, we're gonna hear about one

582
00:33:40,520 --> 00:33:48,720
Speaker 1: of the weirdest demonstrations of the electrical fire. Hey, everybody,

583
00:33:48,720 --> 00:33:51,480
Speaker 1: you know the importance of having a quality, professional looking

584
00:33:51,520 --> 00:33:53,760
Speaker 1: website out there today. I mean, that's that's how you

585
00:33:53,800 --> 00:33:56,160
Speaker 1: represent yourself to everybody. And you want it to look sharp,

586
00:33:56,240 --> 00:33:57,800
Speaker 1: you want it to be easy to use. But you

587
00:33:57,880 --> 00:34:00,920
Speaker 1: also don't want to completely break your brain or have

588
00:34:01,040 --> 00:34:03,240
Speaker 1: to learn some sort of new code in order to

589
00:34:03,320 --> 00:34:05,320
Speaker 1: build the thing. Right If you if you just kind

590
00:34:05,320 --> 00:34:07,480
Speaker 1: of go out there into the wild and say I'm

591
00:34:07,480 --> 00:34:09,480
Speaker 1: gonna make my own personal website. You know what you're

592
00:34:09,480 --> 00:34:11,759
Speaker 1: gonna end up with, it's gonna look like it was

593
00:34:11,800 --> 00:34:13,719
Speaker 1: made by somebody who didn't know what they were doing.

594
00:34:14,040 --> 00:34:16,120
Speaker 1: And even even to get to that point, it's gonna

595
00:34:16,160 --> 00:34:19,239
Speaker 1: be a rough journey. But if you want to have

596
00:34:19,360 --> 00:34:21,560
Speaker 1: a website that looks like something that could have been

597
00:34:21,600 --> 00:34:25,080
Speaker 1: made by a professional web developer, even though you're not,

598
00:34:25,680 --> 00:34:28,160
Speaker 1: you might want to think about squarespace. That's right, there's

599
00:34:28,160 --> 00:34:31,120
Speaker 1: sides look professionally designed regardless of your skill level. You

600
00:34:31,160 --> 00:34:33,960
Speaker 1: don't need to learn any code. The tools are intuitive,

601
00:34:34,080 --> 00:34:36,360
Speaker 1: easy to use, and hey, you get a free domain

602
00:34:36,440 --> 00:34:38,399
Speaker 1: if you sign up for a year, so you can

603
00:34:38,440 --> 00:34:41,880
Speaker 1: start your free trial site today at squarespace dot com.

604
00:34:41,920 --> 00:34:44,399
Speaker 1: When you decide to sign up for squarespace, make sure

605
00:34:44,480 --> 00:34:48,640
Speaker 1: you use the offer code mind blown. That's our code

606
00:34:48,840 --> 00:34:51,560
Speaker 1: m I N d B l o w N to

607
00:34:51,680 --> 00:34:55,520
Speaker 1: get ten percent off your first purchase square Space. You

608
00:34:55,600 --> 00:35:04,000
Speaker 1: should alright, we're back, Yes, so we're going to discuss

609
00:35:04,000 --> 00:35:06,919
Speaker 1: here the work of one Stephen Gray. Now, Stephen Gray

610
00:35:06,960 --> 00:35:10,080
Speaker 1: did plenty of experiments in electricity, right, yes, yeah, he

611
00:35:10,120 --> 00:35:13,640
Speaker 1: was an English dier, the son of a dire Uh.

612
00:35:13,719 --> 00:35:18,640
Speaker 1: He was an astronomer and uh, indeed, an electrical conduction pioneer.

613
00:35:19,080 --> 00:35:22,000
Speaker 1: He's remembered for a number of discoveries and the various

614
00:35:22,040 --> 00:35:25,279
Speaker 1: he experiments he conducted, uh uh, you know, showed how

615
00:35:25,280 --> 00:35:29,640
Speaker 1: electricity moves. But the most notable of these is his

616
00:35:29,800 --> 00:35:35,440
Speaker 1: seventy one experiment, The Hanging Boy, which just a creepy

617
00:35:35,520 --> 00:35:37,840
Speaker 1: name it is. And you can we'll try to include

618
00:35:37,880 --> 00:35:39,600
Speaker 1: some links to some images of this, because there's some

619
00:35:39,600 --> 00:35:43,680
Speaker 1: wonderful um schematics for what this looked like, which don't

620
00:35:43,760 --> 00:35:47,560
Speaker 1: still don't capture the full majesty of what people saw,

621
00:35:48,360 --> 00:35:53,399
Speaker 1: because it's just it really resonates with occult dramatics. Yeah,

622
00:35:53,440 --> 00:35:54,799
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's like something out of a Kin

623
00:35:54,920 --> 00:35:59,000
Speaker 1: Russell movie. I love that you make that comparison, because

624
00:35:59,080 --> 00:36:02,080
Speaker 1: Ken Russell really captures this kind of sense of the

625
00:36:02,080 --> 00:36:06,560
Speaker 1: electrical demonstrations, right, this this bizarre intersection of the magical

626
00:36:06,640 --> 00:36:09,400
Speaker 1: and the scientific. Yeah, totally. So I'm going to try

627
00:36:09,440 --> 00:36:11,840
Speaker 1: and present it to you as if you were showing

628
00:36:11,960 --> 00:36:14,960
Speaker 1: up for a presentation of The Hanging Boy. Wait, so

629
00:36:15,040 --> 00:36:18,080
Speaker 1: you're you're you're saying I've accepted an invitation to come

630
00:36:18,160 --> 00:36:21,040
Speaker 1: view The Hanging Boy. Yes, yes, I'm that kind of

631
00:36:21,080 --> 00:36:23,080
Speaker 1: person you are. You know, you're you're one of the

632
00:36:23,080 --> 00:36:25,720
Speaker 1: local You're in the local science community. You're you're interested

633
00:36:25,719 --> 00:36:27,759
Speaker 1: in this kind of thing. There's something cool going on,

634
00:36:27,840 --> 00:36:29,640
Speaker 1: so you're gonna go check it out. So you enter

635
00:36:29,719 --> 00:36:32,400
Speaker 1: the private home of a of another upstanding member of

636
00:36:32,400 --> 00:36:34,920
Speaker 1: the scientific community, and you come and you find that

637
00:36:34,960 --> 00:36:38,120
Speaker 1: the furniture has been rearranged, the lighting has been dimmed,

638
00:36:38,520 --> 00:36:41,239
Speaker 1: and everyone is gathered in the largest room of the

639
00:36:41,239 --> 00:36:44,680
Speaker 1: house for this very peculiar experiment. So you've been looking

640
00:36:44,719 --> 00:36:46,840
Speaker 1: forward to it for weeks. You're making a lot of

641
00:36:46,880 --> 00:36:50,120
Speaker 1: assumptions about me and my feelings towards the hanging boy.

642
00:36:50,160 --> 00:36:52,160
Speaker 1: This is the biggest that this was a hit all

643
00:36:52,200 --> 00:36:54,480
Speaker 1: over Europe. This is like finally getting to see cats

644
00:36:54,600 --> 00:36:58,040
Speaker 1: or something, Right, what is it? Tell me? Okay, so

645
00:36:58,320 --> 00:37:01,720
Speaker 1: the main event here is that a nine year old boy.

646
00:37:01,840 --> 00:37:04,040
Speaker 1: Don't worry, it's just a local street urchin, and they've

647
00:37:04,040 --> 00:37:07,279
Speaker 1: paid him for his participation. Nine year old boys brought

648
00:37:07,320 --> 00:37:12,279
Speaker 1: in and swaddling clothes, you know, dressed essentially like Cupid. Right,

649
00:37:12,760 --> 00:37:18,719
Speaker 1: So so already we're we're engaging dramatic symbolic power here.

650
00:37:19,040 --> 00:37:23,719
Speaker 1: And then he is suspended from the ceiling by silk cords.

651
00:37:24,200 --> 00:37:26,960
Speaker 1: Oh they gotta be silk cords, of course. Oh yeah, yeah,

652
00:37:26,960 --> 00:37:29,759
Speaker 1: I mean, what what are to to suspend the boy

653
00:37:29,840 --> 00:37:32,520
Speaker 1: with just rope would be weird and just out of

654
00:37:32,600 --> 00:37:36,080
Speaker 1: keeping with the symbolic drama of the thing. Right now,

655
00:37:36,200 --> 00:37:39,600
Speaker 1: just below the boy's head. Uh, they've positioned a stand

656
00:37:40,160 --> 00:37:44,880
Speaker 1: on which they've they've play small light flakes of brass. Well, meanwhile,

657
00:37:44,880 --> 00:37:48,760
Speaker 1: our friend Mr Gray here uh comes over with a

658
00:37:48,880 --> 00:37:53,400
Speaker 1: charged glass to essentially a friction generator, and he's holding

659
00:37:53,440 --> 00:37:56,000
Speaker 1: this near the boy's feet. And I'll read you a

660
00:37:56,080 --> 00:37:58,759
Speaker 1: quote to let and this is from the letters sent

661
00:37:58,840 --> 00:38:03,040
Speaker 1: to from Stephen Gray to one Cromwell Mortimer. Upon the

662
00:38:03,120 --> 00:38:06,880
Speaker 1: tubes being rubbed and held near his feet without touching them,

663
00:38:06,920 --> 00:38:09,759
Speaker 1: the leaf brass was attracted to the boy's face with

664
00:38:09,880 --> 00:38:13,400
Speaker 1: so with much vigor, so as to rise to the

665
00:38:13,440 --> 00:38:17,719
Speaker 1: height of eight and sometimes ten inches. So hold on,

666
00:38:18,120 --> 00:38:22,440
Speaker 1: So they were drawing, uh, pieces of brass leaf to

667
00:38:22,640 --> 00:38:25,120
Speaker 1: his face. Yes, so the boys hanging there from the silk.

668
00:38:25,400 --> 00:38:28,200
Speaker 1: He touches this electric wand to the boy's feet, and

669
00:38:28,239 --> 00:38:31,759
Speaker 1: then all these flakes of metal began to to drift up,

670
00:38:32,080 --> 00:38:35,760
Speaker 1: fly up from the table through the air. Towards his face. Okay,

671
00:38:35,800 --> 00:38:38,040
Speaker 1: what else they got, Well, they would have the boy

672
00:38:38,120 --> 00:38:40,680
Speaker 1: reach out and turn the pages of a book without

673
00:38:40,760 --> 00:38:45,200
Speaker 1: physically touching it. Volunteers from the audience were invited to

674
00:38:45,200 --> 00:38:48,040
Speaker 1: touch the boy's hand, and in doing so, they were

675
00:38:48,080 --> 00:38:50,400
Speaker 1: able to turn the pages in the book with the

676
00:38:50,440 --> 00:38:54,040
Speaker 1: same electrical magic just by touching the boy's hand. And

677
00:38:54,440 --> 00:38:57,920
Speaker 1: finally the main event, the lights were dimmed and the

678
00:38:58,000 --> 00:39:01,080
Speaker 1: volunteer was asked to touch the boy his nose and

679
00:39:01,120 --> 00:39:05,680
Speaker 1: that's when crack, a visual spark flies between the flying

680
00:39:05,719 --> 00:39:10,600
Speaker 1: boy and the audience member. Wow. So this, I mean,

681
00:39:10,600 --> 00:39:13,000
Speaker 1: the whole thing is just fabulous because there's the sense

682
00:39:13,040 --> 00:39:16,040
Speaker 1: of the boy is an angel but also a child

683
00:39:16,160 --> 00:39:20,239
Speaker 1: sacrifice exactly. There's a sense of child sacrifice, and they

684
00:39:20,320 --> 00:39:23,680
Speaker 1: kind of make him the sort of a literal embodiment

685
00:39:23,719 --> 00:39:26,160
Speaker 1: of electricity as a is a is, A is a

686
00:39:26,239 --> 00:39:30,760
Speaker 1: virgin as this this this child that is without fault,

687
00:39:31,080 --> 00:39:33,560
Speaker 1: you know, a holy, blameless creature. Well, there you get

688
00:39:33,600 --> 00:39:35,200
Speaker 1: into something else that I think it's going to be

689
00:39:35,320 --> 00:39:38,080
Speaker 1: very important to talk about because there's this mysterium. There's

690
00:39:38,080 --> 00:39:41,680
Speaker 1: this great strange mystery about what the electrical fire is.

691
00:39:41,800 --> 00:39:45,239
Speaker 1: There's this spiritual element to it. But then there is

692
00:39:45,320 --> 00:39:51,680
Speaker 1: also a very clear emerging theme of sexuality to electricity,

693
00:39:51,719 --> 00:39:54,200
Speaker 1: because one of the notes that I got from Bertucci

694
00:39:54,239 --> 00:39:57,640
Speaker 1: about the hanging boy experiment was that sometimes you mentioned

695
00:39:57,640 --> 00:40:01,080
Speaker 1: that he would transfer the electric fire to somebody else

696
00:40:01,120 --> 00:40:03,680
Speaker 1: and they would be able to attract things. Well, she

697
00:40:03,719 --> 00:40:07,560
Speaker 1: mentions that sometimes the boy transmitted the electric fire to

698
00:40:07,680 --> 00:40:11,200
Speaker 1: a young girl who would attract light objects to herself.

699
00:40:11,320 --> 00:40:14,719
Speaker 1: So strangely sexual theme. There's like the passage of the

700
00:40:14,760 --> 00:40:17,719
Speaker 1: thing across the sex barrier. And this wasn't the only

701
00:40:17,760 --> 00:40:23,200
Speaker 1: case of sexual themes emerging in electrical demonstrations. For example,

702
00:40:23,440 --> 00:40:26,000
Speaker 1: Bertucci tells us in one of her papers that the

703
00:40:26,040 --> 00:40:29,800
Speaker 1: presence of women and the accentuation of sex differences became

704
00:40:29,840 --> 00:40:33,920
Speaker 1: a crucial part of these electrical demonstrations. In the eighteenth century,

705
00:40:33,960 --> 00:40:38,480
Speaker 1: for example, a really popular experiment was called the electrifying

706
00:40:38,760 --> 00:40:43,560
Speaker 1: venus yeah, also known as the electric kiss, which was

707
00:40:43,600 --> 00:40:47,239
Speaker 1: invented by the German professor Georg Matthias Boza. And it

708
00:40:47,280 --> 00:40:50,600
Speaker 1: goes like this, So you've got a beautiful lady standing

709
00:40:50,640 --> 00:40:55,839
Speaker 1: on an insulated stool and an electrical apparatus charges her

710
00:40:55,880 --> 00:40:58,239
Speaker 1: body with electricity. So this would probably be like a

711
00:40:58,239 --> 00:41:04,640
Speaker 1: friction generator. And after she's charged up, the demonstrator invites

712
00:41:04,719 --> 00:41:07,719
Speaker 1: gentlemen from the audience to come up and steal a

713
00:41:07,800 --> 00:41:12,520
Speaker 1: kiss from the electric venus. Unfortunately, for these amorous gentlemen,

714
00:41:12,880 --> 00:41:16,200
Speaker 1: as they approached the charged venus with their lips, they

715
00:41:16,200 --> 00:41:19,160
Speaker 1: would receive a spark to the mouth and that would

716
00:41:19,280 --> 00:41:23,640
Speaker 1: drive them back and discourage further attempts. Okay, so imagine

717
00:41:23,640 --> 00:41:25,640
Speaker 1: how exciting this must have been to, you know, a

718
00:41:25,680 --> 00:41:28,400
Speaker 1: court lady in the seventeen hundreds who was sick of

719
00:41:28,440 --> 00:41:31,799
Speaker 1: the advances and sexual harassment of the aristocratic men in

720
00:41:31,800 --> 00:41:33,920
Speaker 1: her circle. They even try to kiss her and they

721
00:41:34,000 --> 00:41:37,839
Speaker 1: get a shock. Right. So Bertucci goes on to notice,

722
00:41:37,880 --> 00:41:41,919
Speaker 1: like like the invisible fence, except for exact for horny aristocrats.

723
00:41:43,200 --> 00:41:45,880
Speaker 1: So Bertucci goes on to note that Boza even wrote

724
00:41:45,880 --> 00:41:49,520
Speaker 1: a poem about electricity. He was kind of a showman type.

725
00:41:49,840 --> 00:41:52,480
Speaker 1: He wrote a poem about electricity, which he dedicated to

726
00:41:52,520 --> 00:41:55,719
Speaker 1: the Princess of Gotha and the Duchess of Brutal Colorath,

727
00:41:56,440 --> 00:41:59,720
Speaker 1: who were attendees of his demonstrations. And there's a section

728
00:41:59,760 --> 00:42:03,840
Speaker 1: from poems she quotes it says once only what temerity.

729
00:42:03,880 --> 00:42:07,160
Speaker 1: I kissed venus standing on pitch. It pained me to

730
00:42:07,239 --> 00:42:11,160
Speaker 1: the quick. My lips trembled, my mouth quivered, my teeth

731
00:42:11,200 --> 00:42:17,240
Speaker 1: almost broke. That's intense stuff. So even the demonstrator himself,

732
00:42:17,320 --> 00:42:20,800
Speaker 1: knowing the risks, could not resist an attempt to kiss

733
00:42:20,840 --> 00:42:25,080
Speaker 1: the sparking venus, but to please the fellows of the

734
00:42:25,120 --> 00:42:28,359
Speaker 1: salons that they would not be entirely discouraged in their

735
00:42:28,400 --> 00:42:31,879
Speaker 1: feats of electrical manliness, because for their amusement they could

736
00:42:31,920 --> 00:42:35,960
Speaker 1: wield an electrified sword and use it to ignite small

737
00:42:36,040 --> 00:42:38,120
Speaker 1: quantities of liquor. All right, Well they had that, and

738
00:42:38,160 --> 00:42:40,359
Speaker 1: then to just sort of leave everybody on a good note,

739
00:42:40,440 --> 00:42:43,840
Speaker 1: right right, Yeah, So the the psycho sexual significance of

740
00:42:43,840 --> 00:42:47,439
Speaker 1: electricity didn't even in their boza. That same guy came

741
00:42:47,520 --> 00:42:50,760
Speaker 1: up with the theory of the sexology of electric fire,

742
00:42:51,280 --> 00:42:53,839
Speaker 1: and it's about as male chauvinist as you would guess.

743
00:42:53,880 --> 00:42:57,480
Speaker 1: I want a quote from Bertucci who writes characterizing it,

744
00:42:57,880 --> 00:43:01,319
Speaker 1: the male fire emitted by metal and animal bodies was

745
00:43:01,440 --> 00:43:06,000
Speaker 1: unsurprisingly strong and powerful. Sparks, with their crackling sound, were

746
00:43:06,080 --> 00:43:10,719
Speaker 1: visible manifestations of this kind of fire. The female fire, instead,

747
00:43:11,120 --> 00:43:14,200
Speaker 1: was a weak luminous emanation, the kind of light that

748
00:43:14,320 --> 00:43:18,279
Speaker 1: characterized the Aurora borealis. I love that because there he's

749
00:43:18,360 --> 00:43:23,680
Speaker 1: kind of using science to recreate Taoism in this case.

750
00:43:23,719 --> 00:43:26,840
Speaker 1: You know, the whole division of yin and yang energies

751
00:43:27,239 --> 00:43:31,040
Speaker 1: defining the universe. Oh does that have a male female element? Oh? Yeah, yeah,

752
00:43:31,080 --> 00:43:34,440
Speaker 1: one is like the male is is heat and power

753
00:43:34,560 --> 00:43:38,279
Speaker 1: and strength, and the female energy is is colder and

754
00:43:38,640 --> 00:43:42,200
Speaker 1: more subtle in their their opposites in the universe. H Well,

755
00:43:42,480 --> 00:43:53,000
Speaker 1: that's the cosmic electric spirituality yet again. So through the

756
00:43:53,000 --> 00:43:55,040
Speaker 1: second half of the eighteenth century, there there was a

757
00:43:55,080 --> 00:43:59,720
Speaker 1: lot of popular thinking that associated electricity with sex, virility,

758
00:44:00,040 --> 00:44:03,680
Speaker 1: and fertility. Electrical imagery showed up in erotic poetry all

759
00:44:03,680 --> 00:44:08,680
Speaker 1: the time. They'll be talks about sparks and friction and uh.

760
00:44:08,719 --> 00:44:12,520
Speaker 1: And medical experts even promoted sexual health cares. I should

761
00:44:12,520 --> 00:44:14,760
Speaker 1: have said experts. You couldn't hear me doing air quotes.

762
00:44:15,120 --> 00:44:19,120
Speaker 1: Medical quote experts promoted sexual health care is via the

763
00:44:19,160 --> 00:44:21,520
Speaker 1: electrical fire. And there will be more on that when

764
00:44:21,560 --> 00:44:23,759
Speaker 1: we talk about a guy named James Graham in the

765
00:44:23,800 --> 00:44:28,719
Speaker 1: next episode. But there's a weird paradox emerging here with

766
00:44:28,760 --> 00:44:34,719
Speaker 1: the relationship between electricity and virility and health. How come

767
00:44:34,920 --> 00:44:37,880
Speaker 1: the body seems to be able to be uh, I

768
00:44:37,880 --> 00:44:41,320
Speaker 1: don't know, sort of animated by electricity in one sense,

769
00:44:41,320 --> 00:44:44,640
Speaker 1: you could be sparked into action, and yet the discharge

770
00:44:44,640 --> 00:44:47,719
Speaker 1: of electricity from a laden jar might be enough to

771
00:44:47,880 --> 00:44:52,760
Speaker 1: kill you. That seems like a weird tension there, right, Yeah,

772
00:44:53,080 --> 00:44:55,440
Speaker 1: it kind of comes back to that, that that sort

773
00:44:55,480 --> 00:45:00,120
Speaker 1: of weird Dallastu interpretation of male and female energy us

774
00:45:00,160 --> 00:45:01,920
Speaker 1: to a certain extent. Yeah, And so later in the

775
00:45:01,960 --> 00:45:04,359
Speaker 1: seventeen hundreds this comes to a head, I think, in

776
00:45:04,480 --> 00:45:09,839
Speaker 1: the argument about the nature of animal electricity. So, like

777
00:45:09,880 --> 00:45:13,040
Speaker 1: we said, there were electric fishes and uh so there

778
00:45:13,120 --> 00:45:17,439
Speaker 1: was some knowledge about different types of bioelectricity. Uh But

779
00:45:17,440 --> 00:45:20,520
Speaker 1: but what happened in the in the seventeen eighties, Well,

780
00:45:20,760 --> 00:45:24,240
Speaker 1: we had a man by the name of Luigi Galvani. Alright,

781
00:45:24,239 --> 00:45:29,719
Speaker 1: he was mid seventeen eighties Italian physician, and he kind of,

782
00:45:29,880 --> 00:45:33,439
Speaker 1: you said, Italian with an Italian accent. Well, you can't

783
00:45:33,480 --> 00:45:37,279
Speaker 1: say Luigi Galvani without giving in to it a little bit, right,

784
00:45:37,960 --> 00:45:40,799
Speaker 1: So in one of his earlier experiments, he connected the

785
00:45:40,840 --> 00:45:43,720
Speaker 1: nerves of a recently dead frog to a long metal

786
00:45:43,760 --> 00:45:47,640
Speaker 1: wire and pointed towards the sky during a thunderstorm. Uh.

787
00:45:47,680 --> 00:45:51,000
Speaker 1: And then with each flash the dog the frog moved again,

788
00:45:51,480 --> 00:45:55,640
Speaker 1: as if with life, so the dead frog and and

789
00:45:55,760 --> 00:45:59,680
Speaker 1: this this suggests a kind of mechanical connection between the

790
00:45:59,680 --> 00:46:02,440
Speaker 1: parts of the body and the electrical fire. Right. Indeed,

791
00:46:02,480 --> 00:46:05,000
Speaker 1: I mean this is where we get the term galvanism from,

792
00:46:05,239 --> 00:46:08,879
Speaker 1: which refers to muscle contractions due to an electric current. Now,

793
00:46:08,920 --> 00:46:12,800
Speaker 1: at the time, Galvani referred to this as animal electricity,

794
00:46:13,320 --> 00:46:17,600
Speaker 1: thinking he discovered a unique form of electricity, something intrinsic

795
00:46:17,640 --> 00:46:22,799
Speaker 1: to the muscle tissue. So external electricity could galvanize, It's sure,

796
00:46:23,320 --> 00:46:25,880
Speaker 1: but his argument was that it also possessed its own

797
00:46:26,160 --> 00:46:28,719
Speaker 1: unique electricity as well. So he was saying these were

798
00:46:29,040 --> 00:46:33,440
Speaker 1: the bioelectricity and the external electricity were different types of

799
00:46:33,440 --> 00:46:36,719
Speaker 1: electricity exactly. Yeah, you bet you had two different species

800
00:46:36,719 --> 00:46:40,799
Speaker 1: of electricity to deal with here. Um, and this didn't

801
00:46:40,800 --> 00:46:44,719
Speaker 1: set well with everyone, particularly another name that resonates with

802
00:46:44,960 --> 00:46:50,759
Speaker 1: electrical history, um, Alessandro Volta. You can hear the electrical

803
00:46:50,880 --> 00:46:55,160
Speaker 1: terms in both of their last names, like galvanized and volta. Yeah,

804
00:46:55,160 --> 00:46:57,360
Speaker 1: so you know that this is this isn't just something

805
00:46:57,360 --> 00:47:01,160
Speaker 1: nobody entering the fray so volta he walks in, and

806
00:47:01,200 --> 00:47:04,160
Speaker 1: he's intent on disproving animal electricity. He doesn't buy it.

807
00:47:04,360 --> 00:47:08,359
Speaker 1: He asserts that the animals here in um in Galvani's

808
00:47:08,400 --> 00:47:13,000
Speaker 1: experiments reacted to electricity produced by two different metals used

809
00:47:13,120 --> 00:47:15,799
Speaker 1: to connect their nerves and muscles, and and that it's

810
00:47:15,840 --> 00:47:19,200
Speaker 1: not any kind of intrinsic special electricity, and this argument

811
00:47:19,239 --> 00:47:23,960
Speaker 1: eventually wins over the scientific community um Galvani conducted experiments

812
00:47:23,960 --> 00:47:26,400
Speaker 1: to counter the claim, but never got very far in

813
00:47:26,480 --> 00:47:30,040
Speaker 1: trying to convince anyone and eventually dies, but obviously showing

814
00:47:30,080 --> 00:47:33,000
Speaker 1: a connection between the workings of the human body, which

815
00:47:33,200 --> 00:47:37,200
Speaker 1: was still in many senses, were mysterious at the time

816
00:47:37,239 --> 00:47:42,319
Speaker 1: and and infused with spiritual and soul ish potential. With

817
00:47:42,520 --> 00:47:48,120
Speaker 1: this supposedly, I don't know, purely natural force like electricity

818
00:47:48,160 --> 00:47:52,879
Speaker 1: that had to cause some feelings of maybe aporia, right, yeah, yeah,

819
00:47:52,880 --> 00:47:54,319
Speaker 1: I mean, And certainly I don't want to imply that

820
00:47:54,360 --> 00:47:57,200
Speaker 1: Galvani wasn't onto something and wasn't himself, you know, a a

821
00:47:57,440 --> 00:48:00,400
Speaker 1: very intelligent guy that was making some break throughs in

822
00:48:00,440 --> 00:48:04,359
Speaker 1: our understanding electricity. But of course these bioelectricity beliefs led

823
00:48:04,400 --> 00:48:08,359
Speaker 1: to some pretty interesting and weird experiments, right, Yeah. Fast

824
00:48:08,400 --> 00:48:14,600
Speaker 1: forward to January eighth three, convicted murderer George Forster or Foster,

825
00:48:14,800 --> 00:48:18,319
Speaker 1: depending on which source you're looking at. He dies by

826
00:48:18,400 --> 00:48:22,480
Speaker 1: hanging at London's Newgate Prison and then attendance transport his

827
00:48:22,560 --> 00:48:25,720
Speaker 1: body to the Royal College of Surgeons, also in London,

828
00:48:26,200 --> 00:48:28,880
Speaker 1: so that this in itself wasn't an uncommon practice. You

829
00:48:28,880 --> 00:48:32,400
Speaker 1: have a fresh body, it's perfect for the exploration of

830
00:48:32,480 --> 00:48:35,719
Speaker 1: human anatomy. But then they roll the corpse into a

831
00:48:35,719 --> 00:48:41,360
Speaker 1: crowded operating theater where owaits Giovanni Aldini, the nephew of

832
00:48:41,400 --> 00:48:46,080
Speaker 1: the late louisgi Galvani. Yeah, and as you would imagine,

833
00:48:46,120 --> 00:48:49,360
Speaker 1: I've given up the podcast episode here. Uh, he's waiting

834
00:48:49,400 --> 00:48:53,319
Speaker 1: with a battery and some connecting rods, so you know

835
00:48:53,360 --> 00:48:55,480
Speaker 1: what he's going. So they've got a corpse coming in.

836
00:48:56,080 --> 00:48:59,239
Speaker 1: He's sitting there with this battery, is he is he

837
00:48:59,280 --> 00:49:02,680
Speaker 1: twirling his stash? I I should hope so. Um, maybe

838
00:49:02,719 --> 00:49:06,400
Speaker 1: even with electricity. But this is from the records. This

839
00:49:06,440 --> 00:49:09,520
Speaker 1: is what Aldeni had to say about the results. Here.

840
00:49:09,880 --> 00:49:13,040
Speaker 1: On the first application of the arcs, the jaw began

841
00:49:13,080 --> 00:49:16,960
Speaker 1: to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the

842
00:49:17,040 --> 00:49:21,360
Speaker 1: left i actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process,

843
00:49:21,560 --> 00:49:24,920
Speaker 1: the right hand was raised and clinched, and the legs

844
00:49:24,960 --> 00:49:28,200
Speaker 1: and thighs were set in motion. It appeared to the

845
00:49:28,280 --> 00:49:32,680
Speaker 1: uninformed part of the bystanders as if the wretched Man

846
00:49:33,040 --> 00:49:36,680
Speaker 1: was on the eve of being restored to life, you know.

847
00:49:36,840 --> 00:49:39,279
Speaker 1: And I bet for the people at the time, they

848
00:49:39,280 --> 00:49:43,239
Speaker 1: didn't necessarily know that wasn't going to happen. Yeah, I mean,

849
00:49:43,320 --> 00:49:45,920
Speaker 1: we we know now, but yeah, at the time of

850
00:49:46,200 --> 00:49:48,480
Speaker 1: we're still figuring out how electricity work, what it did

851
00:49:48,480 --> 00:49:50,920
Speaker 1: to the body, and so so, unlesson four members of

852
00:49:50,920 --> 00:49:53,360
Speaker 1: the audience, it seemed entirely possible that he might have

853
00:49:53,400 --> 00:49:56,080
Speaker 1: brought this character back to life in some form. If

854
00:49:56,120 --> 00:49:59,680
Speaker 1: it's conceivable that the electricity is the soul, is the

855
00:49:59,680 --> 00:50:03,320
Speaker 1: soul that animates the flesh and uh, and the death

856
00:50:03,360 --> 00:50:07,160
Speaker 1: causes that this electricity to evaporate, could you restore the

857
00:50:07,200 --> 00:50:10,080
Speaker 1: soul that animates the flesh to the body by charging

858
00:50:10,080 --> 00:50:12,520
Speaker 1: it back up. Yeah. And plus, if you're if you're

859
00:50:12,560 --> 00:50:17,760
Speaker 1: buying into a basic biomechanical understanding or certainly mechanical understanding

860
00:50:17,800 --> 00:50:21,759
Speaker 1: of the body. If electricity physically animates the body then,

861
00:50:21,840 --> 00:50:25,560
Speaker 1: why not the mind itself? Why not the soul? Why

862
00:50:25,600 --> 00:50:29,919
Speaker 1: not the person entire um? And of course a lot

863
00:50:29,920 --> 00:50:34,040
Speaker 1: of this probably instantly brings to mind images of Frankenstein,

864
00:50:34,120 --> 00:50:37,640
Speaker 1: of Dr Frankenstein bringing his creation to life. Now, funny,

865
00:50:37,680 --> 00:50:40,560
Speaker 1: I remember electricity being a big part of the movie.

866
00:50:40,760 --> 00:50:43,080
Speaker 1: But I and when I've read the book, I don't

867
00:50:43,080 --> 00:50:46,400
Speaker 1: remember much mentioning of electricity in it. There's not a

868
00:50:46,440 --> 00:50:49,719
Speaker 1: lot um but a couple of it. First of all,

869
00:50:49,800 --> 00:50:53,239
Speaker 1: like the timeline works perfectly for this. So Mary Shelley's

870
00:50:53,520 --> 00:50:56,759
Speaker 1: book comes out in eighteen eighteen, so that's, you know,

871
00:50:56,880 --> 00:50:58,640
Speaker 1: just just a couple of decades in the wake. I

872
00:50:58,680 --> 00:51:00,239
Speaker 1: think she would have been She would have been a

873
00:51:00,280 --> 00:51:03,960
Speaker 1: small child at the time of of the Georgia Forster

874
00:51:04,400 --> 00:51:10,680
Speaker 1: Foster reanimation experiment. But there's actually a portion of Frankenstein

875
00:51:10,760 --> 00:51:13,759
Speaker 1: that reads as follows. Before this, I was not unacquainted

876
00:51:13,960 --> 00:51:17,600
Speaker 1: with the more obvious laws of electricity. On this occasion,

877
00:51:17,680 --> 00:51:20,680
Speaker 1: a man of great research and natural philosophy was with us,

878
00:51:20,880 --> 00:51:25,040
Speaker 1: and excited by this catastrophe, he entered on the explanation

879
00:51:25,120 --> 00:51:27,400
Speaker 1: of a theory which he had formed on the subject

880
00:51:27,400 --> 00:51:31,480
Speaker 1: of electricity and galvinism. Which was at once new and

881
00:51:31,520 --> 00:51:37,320
Speaker 1: astonishing to me. Quote Dr Frankenstein well, as will mention

882
00:51:37,400 --> 00:51:39,920
Speaker 1: in the next episode, Mary Shelley had more than one

883
00:51:39,960 --> 00:51:44,520
Speaker 1: influence of mad Science on her life. Probably Oh, yes, yes, um,

884
00:51:44,560 --> 00:51:48,120
Speaker 1: because certainly, Uh, I think you can see in Frankenstein.

885
00:51:48,160 --> 00:51:49,759
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a lot to say about Frankenstein. We

886
00:51:49,760 --> 00:51:53,279
Speaker 1: could do a whole podcast about, uh, the cultural and

887
00:51:53,360 --> 00:51:57,799
Speaker 1: scientific underpinnings of that book. But but yeah, there's a

888
00:51:57,840 --> 00:52:01,200
Speaker 1: lot of the this new age of understanding and reason

889
00:52:01,920 --> 00:52:06,719
Speaker 1: of our attempt to to harness all these natural wonders

890
00:52:06,840 --> 00:52:10,400
Speaker 1: with our scientific understanding. You see that in these these

891
00:52:10,600 --> 00:52:13,600
Speaker 1: these electric experiments we've discussed. You see that in Frankenstein

892
00:52:13,640 --> 00:52:16,319
Speaker 1: as well. Okay, well, I think that's gonna have to

893
00:52:16,320 --> 00:52:18,839
Speaker 1: be it for our first episode, the first part of

894
00:52:18,840 --> 00:52:21,480
Speaker 1: this series. And we've we've made it from the mystery

895
00:52:21,520 --> 00:52:24,720
Speaker 1: of the ancients to the to the to the strange

896
00:52:24,760 --> 00:52:28,839
Speaker 1: obsession with electrical fire and the electrical cosmos of the

897
00:52:28,880 --> 00:52:32,240
Speaker 1: mid and late seventeen hundreds. But in the next episode,

898
00:52:32,280 --> 00:52:37,720
Speaker 1: we're going to chase that rabbit further down the circuit circuit. Yeah,

899
00:52:37,880 --> 00:52:39,840
Speaker 1: I think that'll be it. Yeah, Yeah, So yeah, in

900
00:52:39,880 --> 00:52:44,960
Speaker 1: the next episode, electric chairs, uh, electrical personal massage devices,

901
00:52:45,239 --> 00:52:48,560
Speaker 1: electric religion. Um, and you know there will be a

902
00:52:48,560 --> 00:52:51,120
Speaker 1: little bit of Frankenstein, but don't worry, we'll also fit

903
00:52:51,239 --> 00:52:54,719
Speaker 1: John Wesley in there as well. And of course the

904
00:52:54,880 --> 00:52:58,239
Speaker 1: striking conclusion to the story we opened with about the

905
00:52:58,320 --> 00:53:02,000
Speaker 1: first legal electric you shouldn't indeed, and until then, be

906
00:53:02,040 --> 00:53:03,719
Speaker 1: sure to check out Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

907
00:53:03,719 --> 00:53:05,279
Speaker 1: That's the mother ship. That's where we'll find all the

908
00:53:05,280 --> 00:53:08,640
Speaker 1: podcast episodes. You'll find blog posts, videos, links out to

909
00:53:08,640 --> 00:53:11,760
Speaker 1: our various social media accounts such as Facebook and Twitter.

910
00:53:12,160 --> 00:53:13,879
Speaker 1: Will blow the mind on both of those were Stuff

911
00:53:13,920 --> 00:53:16,400
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind on Tumbler. Follow us there and

912
00:53:16,480 --> 00:53:19,359
Speaker 1: wherever you listen to us, give us some quite some

913
00:53:19,360 --> 00:53:21,600
Speaker 1: positive feedback there, give us a positive review of the

914
00:53:21,640 --> 00:53:24,680
Speaker 1: platform allows it. We're of course talking iTunes, We're talking Stitcher,

915
00:53:24,760 --> 00:53:29,839
Speaker 1: We're talking Spotify. Uh. New platforms are constantly rolling out

916
00:53:30,239 --> 00:53:32,520
Speaker 1: and uh we're making an effort to be on all

917
00:53:32,560 --> 00:53:34,759
Speaker 1: of them. Yes, that is the easiest way for you

918
00:53:34,800 --> 00:53:36,359
Speaker 1: to help the show. And if you want to get

919
00:53:36,360 --> 00:53:38,960
Speaker 1: in touch with us with any feedback on this episode

920
00:53:39,040 --> 00:53:41,560
Speaker 1: or other recent episodes, you can email us at Blow

921
00:53:41,600 --> 00:53:53,120
Speaker 1: the Mind at how Stuff Works dot com for more

922
00:53:53,160 --> 00:53:55,480
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how

923
00:53:55,520 --> 00:54:04,319
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com? I don't know every The next day,

924
00:54:04,560 --> 00:54:08,439
Speaker 1: the SEM