Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And this
Speaker 1: week we are going back in time. We were reaching
Speaker 1: into the vault and retrieving the first of two episodes
Speaker 1: that we did on the early days of electricity, How
Speaker 1: people thought about electricity when it was a a new
Speaker 1: discovery slash invention. You know, since these episodes came out,
Speaker 1: we have read some interesting stuff about the language used
Speaker 1: to describe electricity, especially about this sort of spiritual gendered
Speaker 1: terms used to describe electrical power, that it was very
Speaker 1: often associated with, this kind of like hidden female goddess.
Speaker 1: I wish I had known about that at the time
Speaker 1: we recorded this. But so when when did this first
Speaker 1: episode come out? This would have been February nine. Okay,
Speaker 1: so if you are ready, we're going to take a
Speaker 1: journey into the vault for Early Days of Electricity, Part one.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from How Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot Com. Now, therefore, you are hereby order, commanded
Speaker 1: and required to execute the said sentence upon him, the
Speaker 1: said William Kimmler, otherwise called John hort Upon some day
Speaker 1: within the week, commencing on Monday, the twenty four day
Speaker 1: of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand,
Speaker 1: eight hundred and eighty nine, and within the walls of
Speaker 1: Auburn State Prison, or within the yard or enclosure adjoining
Speaker 1: there too by then, and they're causing to pass through
Speaker 1: the body of him, the said William Kimmler, otherwise called
Speaker 1: John Hort, a current of electricity of sufficient intensity to
Speaker 1: cause death, and that the application of such current of
Speaker 1: electricity be continued until he, the said William Kimmler, otherwise
Speaker 1: called John Hort, be dead. Gentlemen, I wish you all
Speaker 1: good luck. I believe I'm going to a good place,
Speaker 1: and I'm ready to go. I only want to say
Speaker 1: that a great deal has been said about me that
Speaker 1: is untrue. I'm bad enough. It is cruel to make
Speaker 1: me out worse. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
Speaker 1: those were a couple of quotes concerning the death of
Speaker 1: one William Kemmler, the first person in the world ever
Speaker 1: to be legally executed by electric chair. That's right. This
Speaker 1: was eight nine, and as will roll out in these
Speaker 1: episodes this week on electricity, on the sort of the
Speaker 1: weird history of electricity. Uh. This this episode, this electric
Speaker 1: execution kind of serves as like the the final thrashing moment,
Speaker 1: uh for the mysticism of electricity, the sort of supernatural
Speaker 1: zeal that surrounded it for so long. I remember when
Speaker 1: I was is growing up and I learned that the
Speaker 1: Constitution of the United States prohibited cruel and unusual punishment
Speaker 1: of criminals. And then I tried to reconcile that with
Speaker 1: the fact that people were executed by electric chair. It
Speaker 1: was just hard to think of a stranger way to
Speaker 1: kill somebody on purpose. Yeah, And I think that will
Speaker 1: I think that will become clear to everyone, especially in
Speaker 1: the second episode when we get into the details of this,
Speaker 1: about how how this came to be on the table,
Speaker 1: how the argument was made that we should electrocute a prisoner,
Speaker 1: why it was a good idea, and and why it
Speaker 1: was the most modern and humane and hygienic thing to do. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this is going to be the first part of
Speaker 1: a two part series on the Weird History of electricity,
Speaker 1: as we've said, and we want to focus on a
Speaker 1: different side of the story of electricity than you probably
Speaker 1: learned about in school, So you've probably learned about things
Speaker 1: like Benjamin frank some of Benjamin Franklin's experiments and uh,
Speaker 1: and how the battery was invented and the voltaic pile
Speaker 1: and eventually Thomas Edison and uh and maybe if your
Speaker 1: teacher was pretty cool Nicola Tesla and the you know,
Speaker 1: the current wars and and stuff like that. But what
Speaker 1: we want to look at a different side of how
Speaker 1: electricity came to be a fixture of of our society today,
Speaker 1: and not just the technological journey, but the spiritual journey. Yeah, exactly. Now.
Speaker 1: You know, if you want more on that technical journey,
Speaker 1: do go to how stuff works dot com and check
Speaker 1: out the article how electricity works. That's by Marshall Brain,
Speaker 1: William Harris and uh and me to a very limited extent.
Speaker 1: I think I touched up that article at one point,
Speaker 1: but mostly it's it's Brain and Harriss. That could be
Speaker 1: a thank for that article. But do you have to
Speaker 1: add updates all the new things we've discovered about electricity
Speaker 1: in the past period. Basically, did punch up on it
Speaker 1: in the same way that you know a comedian might
Speaker 1: punch up a script. I like went in there and uh,
Speaker 1: made it a little more fun at the beginning and
Speaker 1: updated the references, but otherwise left all the technical information
Speaker 1: as is. But but but yeah, this is about sort of
Speaker 1: This is the spiritual journey of of electricity, the cultural
Speaker 1: journey of electricity from from the realm of the magical
Speaker 1: to the realm of the mundane. And as I was
Speaker 1: thinking about these episodes actually this morning in the shower
Speaker 1: and on the drive into work, I kept thinking of
Speaker 1: it in terms of a transformer. Okay, like like you see,
Speaker 1: you know, on with high tension wires. So the times,
Speaker 1: experiments and thoughts that we're going to present in this
Speaker 1: pair of podcast that they serve as a sort of transformer.
Speaker 1: So a transformer decreases the voltage of alternating current, turning
Speaker 1: a dangerous high voltage current that's capable of traveling long
Speaker 1: distances into a lower voltage current that's appropriate for just
Speaker 1: mundane use in your home. So these events that we're
Speaker 1: going to discuss are are the inner workings of the
Speaker 1: cultural transformer that transformed electricity from a magical, holy, spiritual,
Speaker 1: otherworldly energy into something that you can just completely take
Speaker 1: for granted every day of your life. Okay, Well, let's
Speaker 1: let's go back in time from the execution of William
Speaker 1: Kimmler and go all the way back to the earliest
Speaker 1: things we know about electricity, because before humans began to
Speaker 1: recognize and test electromagnetism as a force of physics, we
Speaker 1: were aware of it in several natural settings. For example,
Speaker 1: lightning that's pretty obvious, the shocks of electric fishes, and
Speaker 1: objects that naturally pulled toward one another through some invisible attractions.
Speaker 1: So you might have a loadstone, or you know the
Speaker 1: name for magnetite, or or you might find that friction.
Speaker 1: You know, we're just rubbing one object against another could
Speaker 1: cause attraction. And before we had even the slightest idea
Speaker 1: what electricity was, its power found a way into our metaphors.
Speaker 1: We naturally recognized that there was something very mysterious and
Speaker 1: important going on in these invisible forces. So, for example,
Speaker 1: in Plato's Mano dial log you know you remember this
Speaker 1: one may know, he compares socrates style of argument to
Speaker 1: a torpedo ray, which is it's a type of electric fish.
Speaker 1: It's a genus of a ray that stuns prey and
Speaker 1: enemies with jolts of electric charge issued through the water
Speaker 1: and the point of the comparison is that Socrates stuns
Speaker 1: his interlocutors into a state of just utter perplexity by
Speaker 1: illuminating the aporia, the realization of an internal contradiction in
Speaker 1: one's worldview. Okay, in other words, he's dropping truth bombs, exactly,
Speaker 1: stunning you with his truth bombs. That that's a very
Speaker 1: similar metaphor, I'd say, except they wouldn't say truth bombs
Speaker 1: because they didn't have bombs, but they did have electric fish.
Speaker 1: So so he's dropping truth torpedo fish. And just in
Speaker 1: a side, there are there are numerous electric fish out there. Uh.
Speaker 1: The the electric eel, which is more of an electric catfish,
Speaker 1: tends to get most of the press because it is
Speaker 1: the most electric fish. But they are varying levels of
Speaker 1: elect trick fish out there, ranging from those that stunned
Speaker 1: their prey to those that use it as more of
Speaker 1: a communications sensory scenario. Yeah, and then there's a the
Speaker 1: Lease of my Leads. So this is a Greek philosopher
Speaker 1: known as one of the legendary Seven Wise Men, and
Speaker 1: he may have been the first human to really study electricity,
Speaker 1: and this would have been around a six hundred BC. Now,
Speaker 1: he was the one who was doing friction experiments. He
Speaker 1: would take amber, so you know, fossilized tree resin the
Speaker 1: stuff from Jurassic Park. Yeah, well, hopefully there's an insect
Speaker 1: in there, something that kind of you know, crippled and
Speaker 1: and frozen in time. But he didn't come up with
Speaker 1: the idea to get its DNA out. No, he wasn't
Speaker 1: quite up to that level unless you want to view
Speaker 1: the resulting spark here is like the soul of the
Speaker 1: bug leaving the amber. So he'd rubbed the amber with fur,
Speaker 1: and he was able to attract dust, feathers, and other
Speaker 1: lightweight objects. And so these were the first experiments with electrostatics,
Speaker 1: the study of of stationary electric charges or static electricity.
Speaker 1: In fact, the word electricity comes from the Greek electron,
Speaker 1: which means amber. Yeah, and what else the ancients knew
Speaker 1: about electricity, It's it's hard to know. There. There is,
Speaker 1: of course, the quite famous Baghdad battery, which I think
Speaker 1: most archaeologists now think was not actually a battery, but
Speaker 1: the idea there was that there was a clay jar
Speaker 1: and then found near it were some metal elements that,
Speaker 1: if arranged in the right way, perhaps could have accumulated
Speaker 1: electric charge. I've read that archaeologist now just almost all
Speaker 1: agree that it was just a normal, ordinary storage jar.
Speaker 1: It was not actually a battery. But one could hope,
Speaker 1: you know, you always, you always kind of think, wouldn't
Speaker 1: it be cool if there was some ancient person who
Speaker 1: who had knowledge way ahead of their time, and and
Speaker 1: it was just lost to history because I don't know,
Speaker 1: they didn't write it down or nobody would believe them.
Speaker 1: But people recognized there was a force at work. There
Speaker 1: was electromagnetic attraction, there was static discharge, shocks, sparks, arcs,
Speaker 1: But what is it? People commonly spoke about it using
Speaker 1: sort of familiar but vague or incorrect points of comparison,
Speaker 1: Like Benjamin Franklin, in his letters and notes in the
Speaker 1: mid seventeen hundreds, spoke of the electrical fire. This was
Speaker 1: a common point of comparison. People would speak of the
Speaker 1: fire that that carries the electrical fluid or in even
Speaker 1: in eighteen eighty nine, so much later, Thomas Edison, who
Speaker 1: worked with electricity in a technological sense, he could command
Speaker 1: electricity to do his bidding, Yet when asked what it was,
Speaker 1: he vaguely explained that electricity was a mode of motion.
Speaker 1: A system of vibrations. Yeah. I love this quote because
Speaker 1: apparently Edison was just out there pressing the flash. It
Speaker 1: was like a formal engagement. I think he was having
Speaker 1: lunch with somebody at the Eiffel Tower and then somebody
Speaker 1: asked him, So, Edison, electricity is your thing, Tell me
Speaker 1: what is it? This is all really come up with. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so even after people were performing experiments with electricity,
Speaker 1: even creating some electrical technologies that they were using for
Speaker 1: for purposes in uh in say, medicine, whether or not
Speaker 1: those purposes were quite on the money in terms of
Speaker 1: improving people's health. People were using electricity, but they they
Speaker 1: didn't know what it was. Even in seventeen sixty seven,
Speaker 1: after a lot of these famous experiments like Benjamin Franklin's experiments,
Speaker 1: Joseph priestly described electricity as the youngest daughter of the sciences,
Speaker 1: which I think is kind of a sweet thing to say.
Speaker 1: But what was the invisible fire? The electrical fire? It
Speaker 1: seemed it was a natural force of the world people understood,
Speaker 1: and yet it commanded a sense of mystery because it
Speaker 1: was invisible most of the time. It could act at
Speaker 1: a distance like a ghostly force, almost you know, the
Speaker 1: attraction between objects could be like a ghost reaching out
Speaker 1: through the ether to pull things toward one another. It
Speaker 1: could spark in the dark, and these were strange and
Speaker 1: mysterious phenomena. Even when people began to be able to
Speaker 1: control it, they didn't know what it was. So the
Speaker 1: modern era of electrical research, I think is often traced
Speaker 1: back to the add to the creation of the Leyden jar. Right, So,
Speaker 1: the Leyden jar was a thing that was invented in
Speaker 1: the seventeen forties, usually cited a seventeen forty five or
Speaker 1: forty six, discovered independently by different people at different times.
Speaker 1: But the laden jar was what was then known as
Speaker 1: a condenser. But it's what we now call a capacitor.
Speaker 1: So in simple terms, this is a device capable of
Speaker 1: storing and quickly discharging a large amount of electricity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've read the laden jar, particularly the one that was
Speaker 1: created by a Dutch instrument instrument makers Edwald von Kleist
Speaker 1: and Peter van mussen Bruck. This was basically a glass
Speaker 1: jar full of water and had a nail in it,
Speaker 1: and this was this was able to They were able
Speaker 1: to use this to store an electrical charge. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: had the different metals on the inside it outside, and
Speaker 1: the differential between them could allow electric charge to accumulate
Speaker 1: and then you could discharge it. Yeah, and and pretty
Speaker 1: massively like apparently the first time muschen Brock used the jar,
Speaker 1: he basically shocked the hell out of himself. I mean
Speaker 1: didn't die, but tremendous amount of shock coming out of
Speaker 1: this jar of water and nail. Well, but once you
Speaker 1: look at what this kind of jar is capable of
Speaker 1: delivering a shock like that, obviously some applications could come
Speaker 1: to mind, and they sure did come to some minds,
Speaker 1: especially the mind of one Benjamin Franklin. So you might
Speaker 1: know about some of Benjamin Franklin's experiments with electricity. Probably
Speaker 1: the most famous story is one we only have second hand, actually,
Speaker 1: and that's the story about Franklin flying a kite tied
Speaker 1: to a key in a thunderstorm to demonstrate the electrical
Speaker 1: nature of lightning. You know, we only have been in
Speaker 1: me that Disney cartoon to really go by, I don't
Speaker 1: know what that is. What is how they did a
Speaker 1: whole cartoon about Benjamin Franklin and the kaite. But there's
Speaker 1: this mouse that's really the brilliance behind Ben, and he's
Speaker 1: constantly urging Ben on. I mean, just in the Ben
Speaker 1: Franklin Actuly of it is that are acceptable for children
Speaker 1: to watch? You know? I think this story was propaganda
Speaker 1: invented by the kite maker's lobby. No, but seriously, so
Speaker 1: we don't know if this story actually happened or not.
Speaker 1: It probably did. We get the story from Franklin's friend
Speaker 1: Joseph Priestley, who reported it later, so not from Franklin himself.
Speaker 1: But Franklin certainly did do lots of experiments on electricity.
Speaker 1: He invented the lightning rod, which is a rod mounted
Speaker 1: on top of a building that's connected to a wire
Speaker 1: leading down to a ground rod embedded in the earth.
Speaker 1: And what this does is it gives the lightning a
Speaker 1: an avenue of travel from the top of the building
Speaker 1: to the ground, sort of a harmless path, rather than
Speaker 1: it going through the building, starting fires, potentially damaging people
Speaker 1: or structural elements. It's like the expressway going around a
Speaker 1: major population center so that the traffic doesn't have to
Speaker 1: go directly through town where it can cause all sorts
Speaker 1: of havoc. Yeah, so you've probably heard about these things,
Speaker 1: but you might not have heard about Franklin's experiments in
Speaker 1: the electric slaughter of large fowl, a specifically the turkey,
Speaker 1: which I do want to just throw in really quickly
Speaker 1: that Franklin famously said that that he thought the turkey
Speaker 1: should be the national bird. Yeah, a lot of thanks
Speaker 1: he gives it. He's like, national bird, you will die. Yeah,
Speaker 1: why I you would think he would maybe go out
Speaker 1: and get shocked the eagle, since he saw the eagle
Speaker 1: is this kind of horrible, moral, morally offensive bird as
Speaker 1: opposed to that the noble, slightly vain and preposterous but
Speaker 1: but courageous turkey. Yeah, well he what he did, see
Speaker 1: the eagle as a thief and a scavenger, right, yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's like, that's that's really not our in our spirit,
Speaker 1: it should be the turkey. Well, I guess there's no
Speaker 1: law that says don't kill what you believe is noble,
Speaker 1: because he believed the turkey to be noable, but he
Speaker 1: also wanted to roast it with electrical current and eat
Speaker 1: its flesh. Well, I guess it's easier to obtain a
Speaker 1: turkey than an eagle. That's true. The eagles fight back. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So on April nine, Franklin wrote to the scientist Peter
Speaker 1: Collinson a letter detailing the results of some recent experiments
Speaker 1: he'd done in electricity, and he ended with a strange
Speaker 1: proposal for a quote party of pleasure on the banks
Speaker 1: of the Schookole the river. And so this is what
Speaker 1: he said, quote a turkey is to be killed for
Speaker 1: our dinners by the electric shock and roasted by the
Speaker 1: electric jack before a fire kindled by the electric bottle,
Speaker 1: when the healths of all the famous electricians in England,
Speaker 1: France and Germany are to be drank in electrified bumpers
Speaker 1: under the discharge of guns from the electric battery. Okay,
Speaker 1: first of all, what's an electric bumper? This is great?
Speaker 1: So Franklin explains this in a marginal note. He says,
Speaker 1: an electrified bumper is a small, thin glass tumbler near
Speaker 1: filled with wine and electrified. This, when brought to the lips,
Speaker 1: gives a shock if the party be close shaved, and
Speaker 1: does not breathe on the liquor. Was that not factoring
Speaker 1: into modern exology that you think that would? I can
Speaker 1: see that going over huge at trendy bars, right especially. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: it seems like it would really go with that you
Speaker 1: know those trends in the nineteen I guess was at
Speaker 1: the fifties where they'd have electric movie seats that would
Speaker 1: shock you harm. Yeah, so they should have served drinks
Speaker 1: that would shock you as well. So anyway, Franklin's attempt
Speaker 1: to slaughter turkeys with the electric discharge of Leyden jars,
Speaker 1: which is what he was using, the laden jars we
Speaker 1: talked about earlier. Those were his electric bottles. This happened
Speaker 1: in seventeen fifty, and it did not go so well.
Speaker 1: According to a letter from one William Watson to the
Speaker 1: Royal Society in London. Quote, he first made several attempts
Speaker 1: on fouls and found that two large thin glass jars
Speaker 1: guilt holding each about six gallons, and such as I
Speaker 1: mentioned I had employed in the last paper I laid
Speaker 1: before you upon this subject, were sufficient win fully charged
Speaker 1: to kill common hens out right. But the turkeys, though
Speaker 1: thrown into violent convulsions and then lying as dead for
Speaker 1: some minutes, would recover in less than a quarter of
Speaker 1: an hour. So they had turkeys coming back from the dead.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's pretty messed up. Watson continues, however, having
Speaker 1: added three other such to the former too, and he's
Speaker 1: talking about the laden jars there, uh, though not fully charged.
Speaker 1: He killed a turkey of about ten pounds weight and
Speaker 1: believes they would have killed a much larger He conceded
Speaker 1: as himself says that the birds killed in this manner
Speaker 1: eat uncommonly tender. You know, that's that's one heck of
Speaker 1: a yell p review. But but but I do appreciate
Speaker 1: the spirit of the thing that the spirit of the
Speaker 1: dinner was. We're just gonna have a completely electric dinner.
Speaker 1: Everything from the death of the bird, to the cooking
Speaker 1: of the bird, to the the curious way that the
Speaker 1: drinks make your lips tinkle, everything is going to be
Speaker 1: powered by this this this divine energy that we are
Speaker 1: now harnessing with our modern science. Well, it almost sounds
Speaker 1: like the scientific counterpart to those spirit parties people would
Speaker 1: have where you know, where you'd have a seance and
Speaker 1: you have people doing all kinds of spiritualist games and demonstrations.
Speaker 1: Here it's the other side of the coin. But they're
Speaker 1: using natural phenomena. So then again, how natural because all
Speaker 1: these mysteries remained, what is the electrical fire? Like? Ultimately,
Speaker 1: they're playing with something that they don't completely understand. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, now with that, I have to add the
Speaker 1: caveat that had a lot of us today do not
Speaker 1: really completely understand the electricity that we're we're employing, right,
Speaker 1: We're we're fine to let it power our toaster ovens
Speaker 1: and cook our ego waffles, but we don't really We
Speaker 1: couldn't engineer electrical dynamos ourselves exactly, and of course that's
Speaker 1: just part of modern life. And then it should also
Speaker 1: be stressed as well that we haven't completely filled in
Speaker 1: all the all the blanks, all the spaces in our
Speaker 1: understanding of electricity itself, umo are, which is kind of
Speaker 1: weird to imagine. Yeah, but back to the din Or party,
Speaker 1: how did our host recover from this setback of reanimated turkeys? Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: you might think that the turkeys coming back from the
Speaker 1: dead would be enough to stun you into silence, But
Speaker 1: but Franklin was in for another shock, because he actually
Speaker 1: managed to shock himself so bad that he was knocked unconscious.
Speaker 1: Watson writes later in this same letter that he says
Speaker 1: from this experiment, maybe seen the danger even under the
Speaker 1: greatest caution to the operator when making these experiments with
Speaker 1: large jars for it is not to be doubted but
Speaker 1: that several of these fully charged would as certainly by
Speaker 1: increasing them in proportion to the size, kill a man,
Speaker 1: as they before did the turkey. Alright, So here we
Speaker 1: see the two sides of the coin. Like. On one hand,
Speaker 1: electricity can be managed, It can be used, uh, it
Speaker 1: can be played with. But it can also prove dangerous
Speaker 1: uh in high enough quantities. Certainly, and indeed electricity experiments
Speaker 1: could prove deadly if proper care was not taken. I
Speaker 1: to look at one example, which is gae Org Wilhelm Rickman.
Speaker 1: So he was a scientist, he was experimenting on electricity.
Speaker 1: He was conducting an experiment involving an insulated lightning rod
Speaker 1: during a storm in St. Petersburg in seventeen fifty three,
Speaker 1: and Rickman got dead. He was struck dead in his
Speaker 1: lab by what has been described as a burst of
Speaker 1: ball lightning. I want to read out the account here,
Speaker 1: which is bizarre and fascinating. So this is a letter
Speaker 1: to the Pennsylvania Gazette from March seventeen fifty four explaining
Speaker 1: what happened to Rickman. It says the place for the
Speaker 1: experiment was a kind of gallery with its entrance toward
Speaker 1: the north, and a window towards the south. Whether the
Speaker 1: window was open is not known. All that is certain
Speaker 1: is that near the window was a cupboard four ft long,
Speaker 1: on which replaced the electrical needle, and a vessel of water,
Speaker 1: partly filled with brass filings, over which came an iron
Speaker 1: bar about an inch thick and a foot long, fastened
Speaker 1: at the top to a wire which came down from
Speaker 1: the roof of the house through the gallery door. So
Speaker 1: they were sort of playing with death here. They're saying, Okay,
Speaker 1: we've got a lightning rod on the top of the house.
Speaker 1: We've got it running down to an insulated wire in
Speaker 1: the room that suspended over this bowl, and so they continue.
Speaker 1: The professor, judging from the needle that the tempest was
Speaker 1: at a great distance, assured Mr soko Law that there
Speaker 1: was no danger, but there might be at the approach.
Speaker 1: So they don't think the storm's hit yet. But Mr
Speaker 1: Rickman stood about a foot from the bar, attentively observing
Speaker 1: the needle. Soon after Mr Sokolow saw the machine being untouched,
Speaker 1: a globe of blue and whitish fire about four inches
Speaker 1: in diameter dart from the bar against Mr Rickman's forehead,
Speaker 1: who fell backwards without the least outcry, which is a
Speaker 1: creepy way to die, right, You'd expect a person to scream. Instead,
Speaker 1: he just silently falls right, And this is important to
Speaker 1: keep in mind later. This sort of accidental electrical electrical
Speaker 1: death they were is just instantaneous, seemingly seemingly which is
Speaker 1: the scariest part based on what we finally found out
Speaker 1: can happen. But also towards the end of the same letter,
Speaker 1: what is the takeaway from this, Well, they learned some
Speaker 1: interesting things. Quote. The new doctrine of lightning is however,
Speaker 1: confirmed by this unhappy accident, and many lives may hereafter
Speaker 1: be saved by the practice it teaches. Mr Rickman, being
Speaker 1: about to make experiments in the matter of lightning, had
Speaker 1: supported his rod and wires with electrics per se, which
Speaker 1: cut off their communication with the earth, and himself standing
Speaker 1: too near where the wire terminated, helped with his body
Speaker 1: to complete that communication. So he formed the road. Instead
Speaker 1: of Franklin's model where the electric current takes the freeway
Speaker 1: bypass around the city, this went straight through the city
Speaker 1: and through a dude to the other side, basically through
Speaker 1: his living room. I so, so based on that, you
Speaker 1: might think, well, surely everyone's learning the lesson here. Electricity
Speaker 1: is dangerous. You should not employ it at your dinner parties,
Speaker 1: you should not employ it in your parlor. And yet
Speaker 1: we see the trend go in the opposite Yeah, exactly
Speaker 1: the opposite way. So that was seventeen fifty three that
Speaker 1: that happened to Rickman and and at the same time,
Speaker 1: in the salons and galleries of Europe and North America,
Speaker 1: electricity was becoming the hottest bit of edutainment, uh, that
Speaker 1: there had ever been. So I want to draw now
Speaker 1: from mostly from a paper called Sparks in the Dark
Speaker 1: The Attraction of Electricity in the eighteenth Century by Paula Bertucci.
Speaker 1: And she's been a really good source for us in
Speaker 1: these episodes of Several of her papers have been big
Speaker 1: sources of our research, and she's done a lot of
Speaker 1: work on the history of electricity, and these papers are
Speaker 1: great reads. Yeah, we'll make sure to link out to
Speaker 1: some of her materials on the landing page for this
Speaker 1: episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind dot Com, because yeah,
Speaker 1: she's is to be one of the forefront researchers and
Speaker 1: historians on the history of electricity. Yeah, So coming back
Speaker 1: to these sparking salons, So, in the Enlightenment climate of
Speaker 1: eighteenth century Europe, public demonstrations of electrical phenomenon experiments became
Speaker 1: really popular forms of entertainment among the wealthy. So if
Speaker 1: you walked into a Parisian salon in the mid seventeen hundreds,
Speaker 1: you might find a horde of socialites sitting silent in
Speaker 1: the dark, watching a lecturer on natural philosophy charge and
Speaker 1: or hanging atop a spike until it glowed, or they
Speaker 1: might give an audience member shocks of static electricity. And
Speaker 1: another funny thing you might see would be Benjamin Franklin
Speaker 1: sitting in the audience as this was his scene. This
Speaker 1: was like, this was like the DC punk scene. But
Speaker 1: the Paris electricity scene is that much a scene one
Speaker 1: of the scenes that Franklin frequented, uh in the city. Okay,
Speaker 1: But so it was during the seventy forties that the
Speaker 1: educated audiences in Europe and North America really became familiar
Speaker 1: with the power of the electric fire. And it wasn't
Speaker 1: just Benjamin Franklin and his inner circle that we're showing off.
Speaker 1: All the sparkling experiments. There was a whole generation of
Speaker 1: what what Bertucci calls itinerant lecturers, which is great because
Speaker 1: that makes me think of itinerant priests or itinerant evangelists
Speaker 1: traveling around spreading the gospel message, except in this case,
Speaker 1: this is the electricity gospel. So they would tour from
Speaker 1: place to place giving demonstrations. Uh, in an early incarnation
Speaker 1: of what we might call edutainment. I would say, they
Speaker 1: would show off some sparks, show off some electromagnetic attraction,
Speaker 1: and they'd say, are you not edutane? Well, what are
Speaker 1: some examples of some of the demonstrations that they would
Speaker 1: roll out for the for the entertainment hungry population. Right,
Speaker 1: So one would be uh, having somebody touch in electrical
Speaker 1: apparatus and then you'd see their hair rise up. Or
Speaker 1: you could see somebody become electrically charged and then attract
Speaker 1: small objects with one's hands. Or you could use electrostatic
Speaker 1: induction to make objects move for example, maybe maybe making
Speaker 1: bells ring or something. Or you could darken the room
Speaker 1: and show sparks jumping between objects, or electro luminescent glowing
Speaker 1: inside glass containers. Now the great thing about this I
Speaker 1: meagine a lot of people are thinking this is and
Speaker 1: from a modern perspective, you think of Mr Wizard, you
Speaker 1: think of various various science shows. For me, I think Beakman. Yeah,
Speaker 1: for me, I'm also reminded of the sort of street
Speaker 1: festival they have for the World Science Festival in New
Speaker 1: York City every year, where kids go around, they go
Speaker 1: to different science booths and there's always at least one
Speaker 1: where they have some sort of electrical experiment going on.
Speaker 1: I mean it's electrical experiments lend themselves so well to
Speaker 1: to public, like it was in public displays, and we're
Speaker 1: still into them to this day. Yes, absolutely. I mean
Speaker 1: it's important to notice how much of this was just spectacle.
Speaker 1: I don't know how much the average person was learning
Speaker 1: from these demonstrations and the salons, especially given how little
Speaker 1: the people lecturing probably knew about electricity. Like we said,
Speaker 1: they didn't know about electrons, yet, we didn't know what
Speaker 1: the electrical fire was. There were a lot of suppositions,
Speaker 1: you might say, But but it's funny to imagine the
Speaker 1: level of confidence in the display and the spectacle of
Speaker 1: it versus what was actually probably misinformation being communicated to people.
Speaker 1: So the demonstrations really played to the senses. They had
Speaker 1: flashes of light, crackling noises, smells even sometimes like a
Speaker 1: sulfurous smell in the aftermath of things. A couple of
Speaker 1: examples of people who would give these things. One was
Speaker 1: Jean Antoine Melas, who was a French physicist and instrument maker,
Speaker 1: and he would range experiments with chains of people holding
Speaker 1: hands who would be shocked in unison as the person
Speaker 1: at one end of the chain touched the rod or
Speaker 1: the inner surface of the laden jar, and the person
Speaker 1: at the other end touched the outer surface. And there's
Speaker 1: something almost weirdly orgiastic about this, isn't there. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: reminds me of these these scenes of seances taking place
Speaker 1: more or less around the same pole, hands in a circle. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and and and all. All of this also reminds me
Speaker 1: of magic tricks, except in this case the magic is real,
Speaker 1: and the magic is a is a natural phenomenon that
Speaker 1: we don't have at this point, we don't have all
Speaker 1: the answers for, and thus still retains a lot of
Speaker 1: its magical qualities. Yeah. Yeah, So, as much as these
Speaker 1: lecturers probably wanted to emphasize the scientific and natural nature
Speaker 1: of the electrical phenomenon people were observing. There is undoubtedly
Speaker 1: a very spiritual power to what people were experiencing at
Speaker 1: these demonstrations, if you know what I mean. A couple
Speaker 1: other things that might be showed off. One one thing
Speaker 1: was medical electricity began to emerge in this period in
Speaker 1: the mid seventeen hundreds as the sort of useful incarnation
Speaker 1: of this force, which I mean, that's funny to imagine
Speaker 1: back then. But though the medical utility of the electrical
Speaker 1: fire was still debated, demonstrators began in this period to
Speaker 1: definitely offer therapeutic electrical shocks to people who sought them
Speaker 1: for I guess primarily conditions of the nerves. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: here's this electricity that has this kind of um, you know,
Speaker 1: magical quality to it already, you're definitely gonna feel it.
Speaker 1: So you wrap a little bit of healing hocus pocus
Speaker 1: language around it, and you have yourselves potentially one heck
Speaker 1: of a placebo there, right, Yeah. Yeah. And so there
Speaker 1: were a couple other things that Bertucci mentions that were
Speaker 1: often showed off. There were thunder houses and the the
Speaker 1: Aurora flask. I love the idea of a thunder house.
Speaker 1: This is it was basically a demonstration that was sort
Speaker 1: of an ad for the lightning rod because it was
Speaker 1: a model house. So imagine a dollhouse then with a
Speaker 1: lightning rod sticking out the top of it. Then the
Speaker 1: demonstrators would shock the house with electrical discharge, and if
Speaker 1: the rod was properly grounded, nothing would happen, but if
Speaker 1: the rod was ungrounded, a shock to the house would
Speaker 1: ignite gunpowder planted inside the dollhouse and cause an explosion.
Speaker 1: And then also there was a thing called the Aurora flask,
Speaker 1: which was a pear shaped glass bulb designed to simulate
Speaker 1: the luminous display of the Aurora borealis inside a container.
Speaker 1: So that's a weird way that we could put this,
Speaker 1: this amazingly beautiful, vast, uh natural display inside a bottle,
Speaker 1: which is almost a metaphor for what these people were doing.
Speaker 1: You know, they were taking the most powerful and mysterious,
Speaker 1: huge grand forces of nature and capturing it and putting
Speaker 1: it in a bottle that you could look into and
Speaker 1: tap on the glass. Lightning in a bottle, And then
Speaker 1: all the way to our modern time where what is
Speaker 1: what is a light bulb but another form of lightning
Speaker 1: in a bottle? And yet the most mundane thing imaginable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think because partly because of all these demonstrations,
Speaker 1: people began to think of electricity as as sort of
Speaker 1: the the embodiment of all the force of the cosmos.
Speaker 1: So in the second half of the eighteenth century, people
Speaker 1: were beginning to explain all kinds of natural forces through
Speaker 1: the the electrical fire. So obviously lightning and thunder but
Speaker 1: people started to say, well, earthquakes, that's probably electricity too, Tornadoes,
Speaker 1: whirlpools is all electricity. And Bertucci says, quote such demonstrations
Speaker 1: contributed to the construction of an electrical cosmos. Health, sickness, thunderstorm, earthquakes,
Speaker 1: and Aurora borealis all resulted from the motions of the
Speaker 1: electrical fire. Again taking on what sounds like kind of
Speaker 1: a spiritual aspect, it's almost like the the you know,
Speaker 1: the power and love of God that controls the motions
Speaker 1: of all the spheres. Yeah, this sense that they're they're
Speaker 1: tapping into this this hidden network of energy that underlies
Speaker 1: all things. The kind of thing that I've seen, I've
Speaker 1: seen discussed in various uh you know, a cult or
Speaker 1: some sort of spiritual uh papers where they're talking about
Speaker 1: saying like they're being a chaos matrix manith reality, and
Speaker 1: if you can tap into that chaos matrix, then you
Speaker 1: have chaos chaos magic at your disposal. Like this is.
Speaker 1: This is as if one were suddenly saying, hey, we
Speaker 1: found the chaos matrix and we can make the chaos
Speaker 1: magic fly from the tips of our fingers. Now, what
Speaker 1: is the D and D alignment of the electrical phantom?
Speaker 1: Is it chaotic evil or chaotic neutral? I think chaotic neutral.
Speaker 1: It's all, but it all depends on how you engage
Speaker 1: with it. Okay, now we're gonna take a quick break,
Speaker 1: but when we come back, we're gonna hear about one
Speaker 1: of the weirdest demonstrations of the electrical fire. Hey, everybody,
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Speaker 1: should alright, we're back, Yes, so we're going to discuss
Speaker 1: here the work of one Stephen Gray. Now, Stephen Gray
Speaker 1: did plenty of experiments in electricity, right, yes, yeah, he
Speaker 1: was an English dier, the son of a dire Uh.
Speaker 1: He was an astronomer and uh, indeed, an electrical conduction pioneer.
Speaker 1: He's remembered for a number of discoveries and the various
Speaker 1: he experiments he conducted, uh uh, you know, showed how
Speaker 1: electricity moves. But the most notable of these is his
Speaker 1: seventy one experiment, The Hanging Boy, which just a creepy
Speaker 1: name it is. And you can we'll try to include
Speaker 1: some links to some images of this, because there's some
Speaker 1: wonderful um schematics for what this looked like, which don't
Speaker 1: still don't capture the full majesty of what people saw,
Speaker 1: because it's just it really resonates with occult dramatics. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's like something out of a Kin
Speaker 1: Russell movie. I love that you make that comparison, because
Speaker 1: Ken Russell really captures this kind of sense of the
Speaker 1: electrical demonstrations, right, this this bizarre intersection of the magical
Speaker 1: and the scientific. Yeah, totally. So I'm going to try
Speaker 1: and present it to you as if you were showing
Speaker 1: up for a presentation of The Hanging Boy. Wait, so
Speaker 1: you're you're you're saying I've accepted an invitation to come
Speaker 1: view The Hanging Boy. Yes, yes, I'm that kind of
Speaker 1: person you are. You know, you're you're one of the
Speaker 1: local You're in the local science community. You're you're interested
Speaker 1: in this kind of thing. There's something cool going on,
Speaker 1: so you're gonna go check it out. So you enter
Speaker 1: the private home of a of another upstanding member of
Speaker 1: the scientific community, and you come and you find that
Speaker 1: the furniture has been rearranged, the lighting has been dimmed,
Speaker 1: and everyone is gathered in the largest room of the
Speaker 1: house for this very peculiar experiment. So you've been looking
Speaker 1: forward to it for weeks. You're making a lot of
Speaker 1: assumptions about me and my feelings towards the hanging boy.
Speaker 1: This is the biggest that this was a hit all
Speaker 1: over Europe. This is like finally getting to see cats
Speaker 1: or something, Right, what is it? Tell me? Okay, so
Speaker 1: the main event here is that a nine year old boy.
Speaker 1: Don't worry, it's just a local street urchin, and they've
Speaker 1: paid him for his participation. Nine year old boys brought
Speaker 1: in and swaddling clothes, you know, dressed essentially like Cupid. Right,
Speaker 1: So so already we're we're engaging dramatic symbolic power here.
Speaker 1: And then he is suspended from the ceiling by silk cords.
Speaker 1: Oh they gotta be silk cords, of course. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, what what are to to suspend the boy
Speaker 1: with just rope would be weird and just out of
Speaker 1: keeping with the symbolic drama of the thing. Right now,
Speaker 1: just below the boy's head. Uh, they've positioned a stand
Speaker 1: on which they've they've play small light flakes of brass. Well, meanwhile,
Speaker 1: our friend Mr Gray here uh comes over with a
Speaker 1: charged glass to essentially a friction generator, and he's holding
Speaker 1: this near the boy's feet. And I'll read you a
Speaker 1: quote to let and this is from the letters sent
Speaker 1: to from Stephen Gray to one Cromwell Mortimer. Upon the
Speaker 1: tubes being rubbed and held near his feet without touching them,
Speaker 1: the leaf brass was attracted to the boy's face with
Speaker 1: so with much vigor, so as to rise to the
Speaker 1: height of eight and sometimes ten inches. So hold on,
Speaker 1: So they were drawing, uh, pieces of brass leaf to
Speaker 1: his face. Yes, so the boys hanging there from the silk.
Speaker 1: He touches this electric wand to the boy's feet, and
Speaker 1: then all these flakes of metal began to to drift up,
Speaker 1: fly up from the table through the air. Towards his face. Okay,
Speaker 1: what else they got, Well, they would have the boy
Speaker 1: reach out and turn the pages of a book without
Speaker 1: physically touching it. Volunteers from the audience were invited to
Speaker 1: touch the boy's hand, and in doing so, they were
Speaker 1: able to turn the pages in the book with the
Speaker 1: same electrical magic just by touching the boy's hand. And
Speaker 1: finally the main event, the lights were dimmed and the
Speaker 1: volunteer was asked to touch the boy his nose and
Speaker 1: that's when crack, a visual spark flies between the flying
Speaker 1: boy and the audience member. Wow. So this, I mean,
Speaker 1: the whole thing is just fabulous because there's the sense
Speaker 1: of the boy is an angel but also a child
Speaker 1: sacrifice exactly. There's a sense of child sacrifice, and they
Speaker 1: kind of make him the sort of a literal embodiment
Speaker 1: of electricity as a is a is, A is a
Speaker 1: virgin as this this this child that is without fault,
Speaker 1: you know, a holy, blameless creature. Well, there you get
Speaker 1: into something else that I think it's going to be
Speaker 1: very important to talk about because there's this mysterium. There's
Speaker 1: this great strange mystery about what the electrical fire is.
Speaker 1: There's this spiritual element to it. But then there is
Speaker 1: also a very clear emerging theme of sexuality to electricity,
Speaker 1: because one of the notes that I got from Bertucci
Speaker 1: about the hanging boy experiment was that sometimes you mentioned
Speaker 1: that he would transfer the electric fire to somebody else
Speaker 1: and they would be able to attract things. Well, she
Speaker 1: mentions that sometimes the boy transmitted the electric fire to
Speaker 1: a young girl who would attract light objects to herself.
Speaker 1: So strangely sexual theme. There's like the passage of the
Speaker 1: thing across the sex barrier. And this wasn't the only
Speaker 1: case of sexual themes emerging in electrical demonstrations. For example,
Speaker 1: Bertucci tells us in one of her papers that the
Speaker 1: presence of women and the accentuation of sex differences became
Speaker 1: a crucial part of these electrical demonstrations. In the eighteenth century,
Speaker 1: for example, a really popular experiment was called the electrifying
Speaker 1: venus yeah, also known as the electric kiss, which was
Speaker 1: invented by the German professor Georg Matthias Boza. And it
Speaker 1: goes like this, So you've got a beautiful lady standing
Speaker 1: on an insulated stool and an electrical apparatus charges her
Speaker 1: body with electricity. So this would probably be like a
Speaker 1: friction generator. And after she's charged up, the demonstrator invites
Speaker 1: gentlemen from the audience to come up and steal a
Speaker 1: kiss from the electric venus. Unfortunately, for these amorous gentlemen,
Speaker 1: as they approached the charged venus with their lips, they
Speaker 1: would receive a spark to the mouth and that would
Speaker 1: drive them back and discourage further attempts. Okay, so imagine
Speaker 1: how exciting this must have been to, you know, a
Speaker 1: court lady in the seventeen hundreds who was sick of
Speaker 1: the advances and sexual harassment of the aristocratic men in
Speaker 1: her circle. They even try to kiss her and they
Speaker 1: get a shock. Right. So Bertucci goes on to notice,
Speaker 1: like like the invisible fence, except for exact for horny aristocrats.
Speaker 1: So Bertucci goes on to note that Boza even wrote
Speaker 1: a poem about electricity. He was kind of a showman type.
Speaker 1: He wrote a poem about electricity, which he dedicated to
Speaker 1: the Princess of Gotha and the Duchess of Brutal Colorath,
Speaker 1: who were attendees of his demonstrations. And there's a section
Speaker 1: from poems she quotes it says once only what temerity.
Speaker 1: I kissed venus standing on pitch. It pained me to
Speaker 1: the quick. My lips trembled, my mouth quivered, my teeth
Speaker 1: almost broke. That's intense stuff. So even the demonstrator himself,
Speaker 1: knowing the risks, could not resist an attempt to kiss
Speaker 1: the sparking venus, but to please the fellows of the
Speaker 1: salons that they would not be entirely discouraged in their
Speaker 1: feats of electrical manliness, because for their amusement they could
Speaker 1: wield an electrified sword and use it to ignite small
Speaker 1: quantities of liquor. All right, Well they had that, and
Speaker 1: then to just sort of leave everybody on a good note,
Speaker 1: right right, Yeah, So the the psycho sexual significance of
Speaker 1: electricity didn't even in their boza. That same guy came
Speaker 1: up with the theory of the sexology of electric fire,
Speaker 1: and it's about as male chauvinist as you would guess.
Speaker 1: I want a quote from Bertucci who writes characterizing it,
Speaker 1: the male fire emitted by metal and animal bodies was
Speaker 1: unsurprisingly strong and powerful. Sparks, with their crackling sound, were
Speaker 1: visible manifestations of this kind of fire. The female fire, instead,
Speaker 1: was a weak luminous emanation, the kind of light that
Speaker 1: characterized the Aurora borealis. I love that because there he's
Speaker 1: kind of using science to recreate Taoism in this case.
Speaker 1: You know, the whole division of yin and yang energies
Speaker 1: defining the universe. Oh does that have a male female element? Oh? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: one is like the male is is heat and power
Speaker 1: and strength, and the female energy is is colder and
Speaker 1: more subtle in their their opposites in the universe. H Well,
Speaker 1: that's the cosmic electric spirituality yet again. So through the
Speaker 1: second half of the eighteenth century, there there was a
Speaker 1: lot of popular thinking that associated electricity with sex, virility,
Speaker 1: and fertility. Electrical imagery showed up in erotic poetry all
Speaker 1: the time. They'll be talks about sparks and friction and uh.
Speaker 1: And medical experts even promoted sexual health cares. I should
Speaker 1: have said experts. You couldn't hear me doing air quotes.
Speaker 1: Medical quote experts promoted sexual health care is via the
Speaker 1: electrical fire. And there will be more on that when
Speaker 1: we talk about a guy named James Graham in the
Speaker 1: next episode. But there's a weird paradox emerging here with
Speaker 1: the relationship between electricity and virility and health. How come
Speaker 1: the body seems to be able to be uh, I
Speaker 1: don't know, sort of animated by electricity in one sense,
Speaker 1: you could be sparked into action, and yet the discharge
Speaker 1: of electricity from a laden jar might be enough to
Speaker 1: kill you. That seems like a weird tension there, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it kind of comes back to that, that that sort
Speaker 1: of weird Dallastu interpretation of male and female energy us
Speaker 1: to a certain extent. Yeah, And so later in the
Speaker 1: seventeen hundreds this comes to a head, I think, in
Speaker 1: the argument about the nature of animal electricity. So, like
Speaker 1: we said, there were electric fishes and uh so there
Speaker 1: was some knowledge about different types of bioelectricity. Uh But
Speaker 1: but what happened in the in the seventeen eighties, Well,
Speaker 1: we had a man by the name of Luigi Galvani. Alright,
Speaker 1: he was mid seventeen eighties Italian physician, and he kind of,
Speaker 1: you said, Italian with an Italian accent. Well, you can't
Speaker 1: say Luigi Galvani without giving in to it a little bit, right,
Speaker 1: So in one of his earlier experiments, he connected the
Speaker 1: nerves of a recently dead frog to a long metal
Speaker 1: wire and pointed towards the sky during a thunderstorm. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then with each flash the dog the frog moved again,
Speaker 1: as if with life, so the dead frog and and
Speaker 1: this this suggests a kind of mechanical connection between the
Speaker 1: parts of the body and the electrical fire. Right. Indeed,
Speaker 1: I mean this is where we get the term galvanism from,
Speaker 1: which refers to muscle contractions due to an electric current. Now,
Speaker 1: at the time, Galvani referred to this as animal electricity,
Speaker 1: thinking he discovered a unique form of electricity, something intrinsic
Speaker 1: to the muscle tissue. So external electricity could galvanize, It's sure,
Speaker 1: but his argument was that it also possessed its own
Speaker 1: unique electricity as well. So he was saying these were
Speaker 1: the bioelectricity and the external electricity were different types of
Speaker 1: electricity exactly. Yeah, you bet you had two different species
Speaker 1: of electricity to deal with here. Um, and this didn't
Speaker 1: set well with everyone, particularly another name that resonates with
Speaker 1: electrical history, um, Alessandro Volta. You can hear the electrical
Speaker 1: terms in both of their last names, like galvanized and volta. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know that this is this isn't just something
Speaker 1: nobody entering the fray so volta he walks in, and
Speaker 1: he's intent on disproving animal electricity. He doesn't buy it.
Speaker 1: He asserts that the animals here in um in Galvani's
Speaker 1: experiments reacted to electricity produced by two different metals used
Speaker 1: to connect their nerves and muscles, and and that it's
Speaker 1: not any kind of intrinsic special electricity, and this argument
Speaker 1: eventually wins over the scientific community um Galvani conducted experiments
Speaker 1: to counter the claim, but never got very far in
Speaker 1: trying to convince anyone and eventually dies, but obviously showing
Speaker 1: a connection between the workings of the human body, which
Speaker 1: was still in many senses, were mysterious at the time
Speaker 1: and and infused with spiritual and soul ish potential. With
Speaker 1: this supposedly, I don't know, purely natural force like electricity
Speaker 1: that had to cause some feelings of maybe aporia, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, And certainly I don't want to imply that
Speaker 1: Galvani wasn't onto something and wasn't himself, you know, a a
Speaker 1: very intelligent guy that was making some break throughs in
Speaker 1: our understanding electricity. But of course these bioelectricity beliefs led
Speaker 1: to some pretty interesting and weird experiments, right, Yeah. Fast
Speaker 1: forward to January eighth three, convicted murderer George Forster or Foster,
Speaker 1: depending on which source you're looking at. He dies by
Speaker 1: hanging at London's Newgate Prison and then attendance transport his
Speaker 1: body to the Royal College of Surgeons, also in London,
Speaker 1: so that this in itself wasn't an uncommon practice. You
Speaker 1: have a fresh body, it's perfect for the exploration of
Speaker 1: human anatomy. But then they roll the corpse into a
Speaker 1: crowded operating theater where owaits Giovanni Aldini, the nephew of
Speaker 1: the late louisgi Galvani. Yeah, and as you would imagine,
Speaker 1: I've given up the podcast episode here. Uh, he's waiting
Speaker 1: with a battery and some connecting rods, so you know
Speaker 1: what he's going. So they've got a corpse coming in.
Speaker 1: He's sitting there with this battery, is he is he
Speaker 1: twirling his stash? I I should hope so. Um, maybe
Speaker 1: even with electricity. But this is from the records. This
Speaker 1: is what Aldeni had to say about the results. Here.
Speaker 1: On the first application of the arcs, the jaw began
Speaker 1: to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the
Speaker 1: left i actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process,
Speaker 1: the right hand was raised and clinched, and the legs
Speaker 1: and thighs were set in motion. It appeared to the
Speaker 1: uninformed part of the bystanders as if the wretched Man
Speaker 1: was on the eve of being restored to life, you know.
Speaker 1: And I bet for the people at the time, they
Speaker 1: didn't necessarily know that wasn't going to happen. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: we we know now, but yeah, at the time of
Speaker 1: we're still figuring out how electricity work, what it did
Speaker 1: to the body, and so so, unlesson four members of
Speaker 1: the audience, it seemed entirely possible that he might have
Speaker 1: brought this character back to life in some form. If
Speaker 1: it's conceivable that the electricity is the soul, is the
Speaker 1: soul that animates the flesh and uh, and the death
Speaker 1: causes that this electricity to evaporate, could you restore the
Speaker 1: soul that animates the flesh to the body by charging
Speaker 1: it back up. Yeah. And plus, if you're if you're
Speaker 1: buying into a basic biomechanical understanding or certainly mechanical understanding
Speaker 1: of the body. If electricity physically animates the body then,
Speaker 1: why not the mind itself? Why not the soul? Why
Speaker 1: not the person entire um? And of course a lot
Speaker 1: of this probably instantly brings to mind images of Frankenstein,
Speaker 1: of Dr Frankenstein bringing his creation to life. Now, funny,
Speaker 1: I remember electricity being a big part of the movie.
Speaker 1: But I and when I've read the book, I don't
Speaker 1: remember much mentioning of electricity in it. There's not a
Speaker 1: lot um but a couple of it. First of all,
Speaker 1: like the timeline works perfectly for this. So Mary Shelley's
Speaker 1: book comes out in eighteen eighteen, so that's, you know,
Speaker 1: just just a couple of decades in the wake. I
Speaker 1: think she would have been She would have been a
Speaker 1: small child at the time of of the Georgia Forster
Speaker 1: Foster reanimation experiment. But there's actually a portion of Frankenstein
Speaker 1: that reads as follows. Before this, I was not unacquainted
Speaker 1: with the more obvious laws of electricity. On this occasion,
Speaker 1: a man of great research and natural philosophy was with us,
Speaker 1: and excited by this catastrophe, he entered on the explanation
Speaker 1: of a theory which he had formed on the subject
Speaker 1: of electricity and galvinism. Which was at once new and
Speaker 1: astonishing to me. Quote Dr Frankenstein well, as will mention
Speaker 1: in the next episode, Mary Shelley had more than one
Speaker 1: influence of mad Science on her life. Probably Oh, yes, yes, um,
Speaker 1: because certainly, Uh, I think you can see in Frankenstein.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a lot to say about Frankenstein. We
Speaker 1: could do a whole podcast about, uh, the cultural and
Speaker 1: scientific underpinnings of that book. But but yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of the this new age of understanding and reason
Speaker 1: of our attempt to to harness all these natural wonders
Speaker 1: with our scientific understanding. You see that in these these
Speaker 1: these electric experiments we've discussed. You see that in Frankenstein
Speaker 1: as well. Okay, well, I think that's gonna have to
Speaker 1: be it for our first episode, the first part of
Speaker 1: this series. And we've we've made it from the mystery
Speaker 1: of the ancients to the to the to the strange
Speaker 1: obsession with electrical fire and the electrical cosmos of the
Speaker 1: mid and late seventeen hundreds. But in the next episode,
Speaker 1: we're going to chase that rabbit further down the circuit circuit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that'll be it. Yeah, Yeah, So yeah, in
Speaker 1: the next episode, electric chairs, uh, electrical personal massage devices,
Speaker 1: electric religion. Um, and you know there will be a
Speaker 1: little bit of Frankenstein, but don't worry, we'll also fit
Speaker 1: John Wesley in there as well. And of course the
Speaker 1: striking conclusion to the story we opened with about the
Speaker 1: first legal electric you shouldn't indeed, and until then, be
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