WEBVTT - From the Vault: Early Days Electric, Part 2 0:00:05.760 --> 0:00:07.760 Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name 0:00:07.760 --> 0:00:10.520 is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday, 0:00:10.600 --> 0:00:13.200 so let's take a stroll through the old vault door. 0:00:13.440 --> 0:00:17.760 That's right, we're going back to February eleven, part two 0:00:18.239 --> 0:00:22.200 of our exploration of the early days of electricity, how 0:00:22.239 --> 0:00:25.640 people thought about electricity back when it was, you know, 0:00:25.680 --> 0:00:28.200 a new discovery and all these new technologies were first 0:00:28.240 --> 0:00:30.880 emerging to harness its power. I hope you enjoy this 0:00:30.960 --> 0:00:37.159 classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Welcome to 0:00:37.479 --> 0:00:47.360 Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. 0:00:47.360 --> 0:00:49.239 Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My 0:00:49.320 --> 0:00:51.519 name is Robert row and I'm Joe McCormick. And this 0:00:51.600 --> 0:00:53.400 is going to be the second part of a two 0:00:53.440 --> 0:00:57.520 part series on the weird history of electricity. Different than 0:00:57.560 --> 0:01:00.000 the history of electricity you might have learned about in school, 0:01:00.000 --> 0:01:03.320 woll with the the invention of the various different technologies. 0:01:03.600 --> 0:01:06.720 Here we wanted to focus on the strange social and 0:01:06.840 --> 0:01:10.840 psychic undercurrents, if you will, of the of the development 0:01:10.840 --> 0:01:13.880 of electricity and human society and knowledge. Yeah, kind of 0:01:13.920 --> 0:01:20.000 the midlife crisis of human cultures. Uh, understanding and attitudes 0:01:20.080 --> 0:01:24.440 towards electricity as it goes from pure mystery to the mundane. 0:01:24.800 --> 0:01:28.080 So if you haven't heard part one before you listen 0:01:28.120 --> 0:01:30.039 to this episodes, you should probably go back and listen 0:01:30.080 --> 0:01:33.679 to part one. But if you don't care about coming 0:01:33.680 --> 0:01:36.399 in in the middle of a conversation then and you're here, 0:01:36.520 --> 0:01:38.960 then that's fine. Yeah. I mean, a lot of the stuff, 0:01:39.000 --> 0:01:41.160 a lot of the episodes that we discuss are gonna 0:01:41.440 --> 0:01:43.319 they can stand on their own, but we do highly 0:01:43.360 --> 0:01:45.840 encourage you to check out part one. Okay. So I'm 0:01:45.840 --> 0:01:48.560 gonna start in a kind of counterintuitive place for this 0:01:48.880 --> 0:01:53.280 journey of psychic electricity, and that's with the English writer 0:01:53.400 --> 0:01:57.440 and poet Thomas Hardy. So you probably remember him from 0:01:57.440 --> 0:02:00.200 from writing extremely depressing novels that you had to read 0:02:00.200 --> 0:02:02.120 in high school. You know, the Return of the Native 0:02:02.200 --> 0:02:04.400 Mayor of Castor Bridge. What did you have to read 0:02:04.400 --> 0:02:07.520 in high school? I guess it was castor Bridge. That's 0:02:07.560 --> 0:02:10.600 the one that I feel like I'm most familiar with. Yeah, 0:02:10.960 --> 0:02:13.880 or you might have write his poems like the Darkling Thrush, 0:02:13.919 --> 0:02:16.919 which is one of my favorites and it contains these lines, 0:02:17.080 --> 0:02:20.120 is one of the stanzas of the Darkling Thrush. The 0:02:20.200 --> 0:02:25.200 land's sharp features seemed to be the centuries corpse out linked, 0:02:25.520 --> 0:02:29.480 his crypt, the cloudy canopy, the wind, his death lament, 0:02:30.280 --> 0:02:34.040 the ancient pulse of germ and birth was shrunken, hard 0:02:34.080 --> 0:02:38.600 and dry, and every spirit upon the earth seemed fervorless. 0:02:38.720 --> 0:02:43.720 As I it's kind of bleak. Yeah, But so he's 0:02:43.720 --> 0:02:47.120 talking about something that happened in the past century. Yeah. 0:02:47.160 --> 0:02:49.080 I think one of the early names of this poem, 0:02:49.120 --> 0:02:51.480 before it was called the Darkling Thrush, was something like 0:02:51.480 --> 0:02:55.000 the Corpse of the past century or something like that. Uh. 0:02:55.000 --> 0:02:58.200 And this was written around nine and that, you know, 0:02:58.320 --> 0:03:01.160 the end of the eighteen hundreds. So what happened? What 0:03:01.240 --> 0:03:04.160 happened to our fervor during the century he spoke of. 0:03:04.800 --> 0:03:08.360 I don't know exactly what dissipation of spirit Hardy was 0:03:08.400 --> 0:03:12.200 referring to, but here's a stab that that I'd like 0:03:12.320 --> 0:03:15.200 to think had something to do with it. It might 0:03:15.200 --> 0:03:18.960 have had something to do with electricity. So there's a 0:03:18.960 --> 0:03:21.760 great Thomas Hardy quote. That is, it's quoted in one 0:03:21.760 --> 0:03:24.240 of the papers were using as a source on this episode, 0:03:24.600 --> 0:03:29.120 which is Life, Death and Electricity by Nicholas Ruddick. And 0:03:29.320 --> 0:03:31.000 this was a great paper by the way. Yeah, this 0:03:31.040 --> 0:03:32.720 was really good and it's uh. I think this one 0:03:32.760 --> 0:03:35.000 was available out there for everyone to read. Yeah, and 0:03:35.360 --> 0:03:39.400 it chronicles a lot about the developments of electricity in 0:03:39.400 --> 0:03:42.480 the late eighteen hundreds leading up to the execution of 0:03:42.480 --> 0:03:44.920 William Kimler, which we started the last episode with and 0:03:44.920 --> 0:03:47.440 we'll get to later in this one. But it tells 0:03:47.440 --> 0:03:50.080 the story of how hard He was quote attending an 0:03:50.080 --> 0:03:56.400 electrically lit evening church service in London in May and 0:03:56.640 --> 0:04:00.400 what was illuminated was the outdated nous of the old reliefs, 0:04:00.520 --> 0:04:04.160 and Hardy wrote about it, quote everything looks like the 0:04:04.200 --> 0:04:08.040 modern world. The electric light and the old theology seems 0:04:08.080 --> 0:04:12.080 strange companions. And the sermon was as if addressed to 0:04:12.160 --> 0:04:15.720 the native tribes of primitive simplicity and not to the 0:04:15.800 --> 0:04:20.360 nineteenth century English. Now putting aside the you know, racist 0:04:20.400 --> 0:04:23.279 and colonial assumptions of the metaphor hard He uses there, 0:04:23.279 --> 0:04:27.280 that is an interesting observation in line with what we 0:04:27.360 --> 0:04:30.640 observed in the techno religion for the Masses episode. There 0:04:30.720 --> 0:04:34.040 is something, uh, though though it has often been surmounted 0:04:34.080 --> 0:04:37.560 by various cults and people of varying theologies, there is 0:04:37.600 --> 0:04:43.719 an inherent tension for some reason between technology and religious belief. Yeah, 0:04:43.760 --> 0:04:46.719 because especially with an old religious belief, there's often that 0:04:46.760 --> 0:04:49.800 sense that it's set in stone, and and this is 0:04:49.880 --> 0:04:52.160 the you know that this is the truth that is 0:04:52.200 --> 0:04:55.360 buried in the earth for all future generations to live by. 0:04:55.520 --> 0:04:58.560 And what gives it its power is its ancient otherness. 0:04:59.480 --> 0:05:01.440 And then what you do when a new otherness enters 0:05:01.480 --> 0:05:05.080 the picture, when when suddenly we know more about the 0:05:05.200 --> 0:05:07.040 what was magic in the past, when we know we 0:05:07.080 --> 0:05:09.960 can explain electricity or at least harness it in ways 0:05:10.200 --> 0:05:13.039 that we had no ability to in the days that 0:05:13.160 --> 0:05:16.520 the tablets were here were carved. Yeah. And so an 0:05:16.560 --> 0:05:19.279 observation that Ruddick makes in his paper is that he's 0:05:19.320 --> 0:05:23.200 commenting that by the eighteen nineties, as electricity came more 0:05:23.240 --> 0:05:25.360 and more into our lives, you know, you you might 0:05:25.400 --> 0:05:29.480 have hundreds of different interactions with electrical appliances and services 0:05:29.480 --> 0:05:33.080 throughout the day, it was becoming increasingly difficult, he says, 0:05:33.320 --> 0:05:37.920 to talk about transcendental matters in electrical terms. But before 0:05:37.960 --> 0:05:39.839 we get to the sort of the death of the 0:05:39.960 --> 0:05:45.279 sacred ghost of electricity in the sort of mundane ravages 0:05:45.360 --> 0:05:48.000 of modern life. I want to go back to a 0:05:48.040 --> 0:05:51.919 period where there was still much weirdness and wonder to 0:05:52.000 --> 0:05:54.760 be had. Yeah, we're still um, we're still in the 0:05:54.800 --> 0:05:58.920 time period of the experiments discussed previously, where we're beginning 0:05:58.920 --> 0:06:01.400 to understand electric to do a little bit. We're exploring 0:06:01.400 --> 0:06:05.680 its properties. We're also exploring the you know, it's dramatic side, 0:06:05.760 --> 0:06:08.919 it's entertaining side, as well as it's it's dangerous and 0:06:09.040 --> 0:06:13.080 lethal side. Absolutely so uh. I want to talk about 0:06:13.200 --> 0:06:17.800 a scientist who has been largely forgotten despite the fact 0:06:17.880 --> 0:06:20.120 that he was one of the most famous and celebrated 0:06:20.120 --> 0:06:23.159 scientists of the entire world in his day, and his 0:06:23.279 --> 0:06:27.440 influence on modern scientific thought is just absolutely incalculable. And 0:06:27.520 --> 0:06:30.839 that that is the scientist Alexander von Humboldt. Now, I 0:06:30.920 --> 0:06:33.800 recently read a book about Alexander von Humboldt. It was 0:06:34.080 --> 0:06:37.360 The Invention of Nature Alexander von Humboldt's New World by 0:06:37.400 --> 0:06:40.239 Andrea Wolf. This is a great book, by the way, 0:06:40.480 --> 0:06:43.520 but it talks about this strange fact that he's been 0:06:43.560 --> 0:06:46.760 mostly forgotten about, despite the fact that he was responsible, 0:06:46.800 --> 0:06:50.640 for example, for the scientific concept of ecology, thinking about 0:06:50.760 --> 0:06:55.080 natural environments not as sort of a a god established 0:06:55.240 --> 0:06:59.880 domain of unchanging character, but as complex dynamic systems that 0:07:00.160 --> 0:07:03.800 vary with climate and resources and are subject to dramatic 0:07:03.880 --> 0:07:06.800 change even by altering a small variable, if it's a 0:07:06.880 --> 0:07:09.600 if it's sort of a keystone variable. But I want 0:07:09.600 --> 0:07:13.880 to communicate the spirit of how scientific experiments in animal 0:07:13.960 --> 0:07:18.480 electricity were continuing, uh in the in the late seventeen hundreds, 0:07:18.480 --> 0:07:20.640 in early eighteen hundreds, by looking at a couple of 0:07:20.640 --> 0:07:24.880 events in Alexander von Humboldt's life. So in the seventeen nineties, 0:07:24.880 --> 0:07:28.280 Alexander von humbold actually became friends with the rock star 0:07:28.400 --> 0:07:32.400 German poet Johann wolf King von Gerta. And Gerta was 0:07:32.440 --> 0:07:35.400 the poet who, in his version of Faust wrote, what 0:07:35.480 --> 0:07:39.440 dazzles for the moment spins its spirit? What's genuine shall 0:07:39.520 --> 0:07:42.840 posterity inherit? I always like that sentiment, and I think 0:07:42.880 --> 0:07:46.360 it also sort of applies to some of the showmanship 0:07:46.400 --> 0:07:50.120 about electricity that we oh yeah mentioned in the last episode. Yeah, 0:07:50.200 --> 0:07:53.640 very much so, because I mean, at this point, electricity 0:07:53.680 --> 0:07:56.720 has been a show and electricity has often involved uh 0:07:57.360 --> 0:08:01.000 dead animals, yeah, to varying to so so capt that 0:08:01.040 --> 0:08:03.640 in mind as we move forward. But Gota wasn't just 0:08:03.680 --> 0:08:05.920 a poet in his day. He was also a really 0:08:06.040 --> 0:08:10.400 dedicated scientist. And one year in the seventeen nineties, about 0:08:10.440 --> 0:08:14.520 three years after von Humboldt and and Gota had first visited, 0:08:14.720 --> 0:08:17.240 they spent time together in a city called Ugana to 0:08:17.360 --> 0:08:20.760 talk through scientific ideas and conduct this long series of 0:08:20.800 --> 0:08:24.520 experiments on animal electricity, which Humboldt was writing a book 0:08:24.520 --> 0:08:26.320 about at the time. So he was interested in that 0:08:26.640 --> 0:08:29.320 that that animal electricity, that that idea that there was 0:08:29.680 --> 0:08:33.680 a specific intrinsic electrical system to the body. Yeah, and 0:08:34.040 --> 0:08:36.240 as we discussed in the last episode, it was later 0:08:36.320 --> 0:08:39.400 proved not true that animal electricity is a different kind 0:08:39.440 --> 0:08:43.360 of electricity than the external electricity that's in lightning and 0:08:43.400 --> 0:08:45.800 everything else. But but he was still he was trying 0:08:45.840 --> 0:08:48.000 to suss it out. He was trying to figure out 0:08:48.200 --> 0:08:50.880 what was going on with the role of electricity in 0:08:50.960 --> 0:08:53.280 the bodies of animals. So I want to read a 0:08:53.400 --> 0:08:57.520 quote from a section of of Andrea Wolf's book where 0:08:58.080 --> 0:09:00.840 she says that Humboldt and got To had been hanging 0:09:00.840 --> 0:09:04.160 out when there there's a violent thunderstorm on this on 0:09:04.240 --> 0:09:08.040 this spring day and after the after humbold had been 0:09:08.040 --> 0:09:10.840 out taking in, you know, atmospheric readings while he was 0:09:10.840 --> 0:09:13.720 watching the lightning happened during the storm. The next day, 0:09:13.720 --> 0:09:16.160 he finds out that a farmer and his wife nearby 0:09:16.280 --> 0:09:19.080 had been killed by the lightning in the storm. So 0:09:19.160 --> 0:09:22.360 Wolf writes, he rushed over to obtain their corpses, to 0:09:22.440 --> 0:09:27.160 obtain exactly Yeah, he just obtained them, yeah, uh, she writes, 0:09:27.559 --> 0:09:29.560 laying out their bodies on the table in the round 0:09:29.640 --> 0:09:33.520 anatomy tower, he analyzed everything. The man's leg bones looked 0:09:33.520 --> 0:09:36.360 as if they had been pierced by shotgun pellets, Humboldt 0:09:36.440 --> 0:09:40.360 noted excitedly, but the worst damage was to the genitals. 0:09:40.400 --> 0:09:42.520 At first, he thought the pubic hare might have been 0:09:42.559 --> 0:09:45.719 ignited and caused the burns, but dismissed the idea when 0:09:45.720 --> 0:09:49.960 he saw the couple's unharmed armpits. Despite the increasingly putrid 0:09:50.040 --> 0:09:53.800 smell of death and burned flesh, humbold enjoyed every minute 0:09:53.800 --> 0:09:59.840 of this gruesome investigation. I cannot exist without experiments, he said. So. 0:10:00.200 --> 0:10:03.280 So Alexander von Homebolt just shows up on the doorstep 0:10:03.520 --> 0:10:06.760 following a tragic event and says, hey, I'm Alexander von Homebolt. 0:10:06.800 --> 0:10:08.800 I'm kind of a big deal. I need to see 0:10:09.040 --> 0:10:13.000 the gruesomely distorted bodies of the lightning strike victims. The 0:10:13.000 --> 0:10:15.200 funniest thing is this was before he was a really 0:10:15.200 --> 0:10:18.040 big deal. This is when he was an upcoming big deal. 0:10:18.679 --> 0:10:21.319 But yeah, he I need to examine the scorched genitals 0:10:21.360 --> 0:10:25.640 for science. But Wolf also writes about one of Humboldt's 0:10:25.760 --> 0:10:28.360 favorite experiments that he ever performed, which was when he 0:10:28.440 --> 0:10:32.680 and Gerta were together experimenting on frog legs. This is 0:10:33.240 --> 0:10:36.880 revisiting the themes of Luigi Galvani, right, who saw the 0:10:36.880 --> 0:10:40.320 frog legs dance when stimulated by the electricity of the lightning. 0:10:40.840 --> 0:10:44.079 Wolf writes, one morning, Humboldt placed a frog's leg on 0:10:44.120 --> 0:10:47.200 a glass plate and connected its nerves and several muscles 0:10:47.200 --> 0:10:51.559 two different metals in sequence two silver, gold, iron, zinc, 0:10:51.640 --> 0:10:55.240 and so on, but generated only a discouraging, gentle twitch 0:10:55.280 --> 0:10:57.680 in the leg. When he then leaned over the leg 0:10:57.720 --> 0:11:00.839 in order to check the connecting metals, it convulsed so 0:11:00.920 --> 0:11:04.439 violently that it leapt off the table. Both men were stunned, 0:11:04.520 --> 0:11:07.240 until Humble realized that it had been the moisture of 0:11:07.360 --> 0:11:10.560 his breath that had triggered the reaction. As the tiny 0:11:10.640 --> 0:11:13.120 droplets in his breath had touched the metals, they had 0:11:13.160 --> 0:11:16.160 created an electric current that had moved the frog's leg. 0:11:16.679 --> 0:11:19.400 It was the most magical experiment he'd ever carried out, 0:11:19.679 --> 0:11:23.640 Humboldt decided, because by exhaling onto the frog's leg, it 0:11:23.760 --> 0:11:26.560 was as if he were breathing life into it. It 0:11:26.600 --> 0:11:29.160 was the perfect metaphor for the emergence of the new 0:11:29.240 --> 0:11:33.920 life sciences. So again this strangely religious aspect coming into 0:11:34.040 --> 0:11:38.280 the relationship between between electricity and the body. Yeah, I 0:11:38.360 --> 0:11:40.839 like that the breath of life, even though the breath 0:11:40.920 --> 0:11:46.080 is actually just delivering moisture that helps to complete the circuit. Now, 0:11:46.080 --> 0:11:49.080 another funny thing is not being there and uh and 0:11:49.160 --> 0:11:51.880 knowing exactly what happened. It's hard to even determine if 0:11:52.000 --> 0:11:57.679 Humboldt's interpretation of what actually caused the twitching is correct. Yeah, 0:11:57.800 --> 0:12:00.880 I mean it sounds sensible because it also plays into 0:12:01.240 --> 0:12:03.440 um and into the example we'll get to at the 0:12:03.480 --> 0:12:06.800 end of this podcast regarding the electric chair. Now, I 0:12:06.800 --> 0:12:12.000 want to mention one more example of electricity bioelectricity experiments 0:12:12.040 --> 0:12:15.040 carried out by Humboldt and this one was later when 0:12:15.080 --> 0:12:19.200 he was in South America doing experiments and traveling through 0:12:19.240 --> 0:12:22.760 the rainforest with with someone named i'm a baum Plant. 0:12:23.520 --> 0:12:26.360 Baum Plant was his his traveling and scientific companion. I 0:12:26.400 --> 0:12:30.320 believe he was a botanist. But anyway, there was an 0:12:30.320 --> 0:12:34.000 incident where Humboldt found out from some locals in part 0:12:34.080 --> 0:12:38.040 of Venezuela I believe town called Calaboso that there were 0:12:38.160 --> 0:12:40.680 a bunch of shallow pools in the area that were 0:12:40.840 --> 0:12:45.160 filled with electric eels. And he Humble got very excited 0:12:45.200 --> 0:12:47.160 about this because he was a little bit eel crazy, 0:12:48.000 --> 0:12:51.080 and and he'd heard that eels could deliver electric shocks 0:12:51.400 --> 0:12:55.120 of more than six hundred volts. Uh So, but then 0:12:55.440 --> 0:12:57.679 he's got a problem, right, So, if an eel can 0:12:57.760 --> 0:12:59.960 deliver a shock of more than six hundred volts, how 0:13:00.000 --> 0:13:04.079 to catch it? Especially since, as as Wolf notes, the 0:13:04.200 --> 0:13:07.200 eels in these pools were buried in the mud at 0:13:07.240 --> 0:13:09.439 the bottom of the pools, So how do you get 0:13:09.480 --> 0:13:11.640 them out? Well, some of the locals came up with 0:13:11.760 --> 0:13:14.720 an idea. They said, we'll round up a whole bunch 0:13:14.760 --> 0:13:17.199 of horses. And so they rounded up a bunch of 0:13:17.320 --> 0:13:20.599 wild horses from the nearby prairies, and they drove the 0:13:20.720 --> 0:13:24.400 herd into the pond. So they had these wild horses 0:13:24.480 --> 0:13:27.120 stomping in the mud that had electric eels in it. 0:13:27.559 --> 0:13:30.240 And I want to read another section from Wolf, she writes. 0:13:30.720 --> 0:13:33.080 As the horses hooves turned up the mud, the eels 0:13:33.120 --> 0:13:36.360 wriggled up to the surface, giving off enormous electric shocks. 0:13:36.800 --> 0:13:40.760 In tranced tumbled watched the gruesome spectacle. The horses screamed 0:13:40.800 --> 0:13:44.160 in pain, the eels thrashed beneath their bellies, and waters 0:13:44.200 --> 0:13:48.160 surface boiled with movement. Some horses fell and trampled by 0:13:48.200 --> 0:13:52.000 others drowned. Over time, the strength of the electric shocks diminished, 0:13:52.080 --> 0:13:54.720 and the weakened eels retreated into the mud, from where 0:13:54.800 --> 0:13:58.199 Humble pulled them with dry wooden sticks. But he hadn't 0:13:58.240 --> 0:14:01.400 waited long enough. When he and bond Plant dissected some 0:14:01.520 --> 0:14:05.160 of the animals, they endured violent shocks themselves. And then, 0:14:05.320 --> 0:14:07.640 as she goes on to describe how for hours after this, 0:14:07.760 --> 0:14:10.920 they were just doing experiments on the eels, touching an eel, 0:14:11.080 --> 0:14:13.800 touching an eel, standing on metal, touching a neil, standing 0:14:13.880 --> 0:14:16.520 on clay, touching a neil, and touching each other both 0:14:16.640 --> 0:14:19.520 touching eels and making out a little bit. It just 0:14:20.160 --> 0:14:22.200 it almost sounds like that's part of it. Again, there's 0:14:22.280 --> 0:14:26.680 this strangely sexual element to the union of of sharing 0:14:26.800 --> 0:14:29.960 the electrical kiss, you know, the kiss of Venus. But 0:14:30.080 --> 0:14:32.760 Wolf concludes the section of the book by talking about 0:14:32.760 --> 0:14:37.720 how Humble began to think about electrical forces. The forces 0:14:37.840 --> 0:14:41.360 that she writes variously created lightning bound metal to metal 0:14:41.600 --> 0:14:45.000 and move the needles of compasses, all flow forth from 0:14:45.120 --> 0:14:48.600 one source, and all melt together in an eternal, all 0:14:48.800 --> 0:14:52.000 encompassing power. M hmm. I like that. That's a very 0:14:52.040 --> 0:14:57.720 poetic and and kind of supernatural but scientifically grounded, if 0:14:57.760 --> 0:15:00.680 you will, a view of electricity. Yeah, and I get 0:15:00.720 --> 0:15:03.000 the impression from this book that Humboldt was not a 0:15:03.120 --> 0:15:05.720 very religious guy. Yet here's this. I mean, he's not 0:15:05.840 --> 0:15:09.720 invoking supernatural entities or God's but he is talking about 0:15:09.760 --> 0:15:12.720 it in this kind of vaulted spiritual language. So again 0:15:12.800 --> 0:15:16.040 it's blurring these lines. Yeah, I mean, because they're standing 0:15:16.160 --> 0:15:18.840 on the edge of the unknown, right, and they're they're 0:15:18.880 --> 0:15:22.440 contemplating an unknown, allowing themselves to be shocked by the unknown. 0:15:22.560 --> 0:15:25.480 It's like like any given astronomer you could have the 0:15:25.560 --> 0:15:30.400 most most atheistic astronomer possible. But if they're they're engaging 0:15:30.480 --> 0:15:32.680 with the night sky and viewing up at the cosmos, 0:15:33.280 --> 0:15:36.040 they're gonna be likely overcome by the wonder of the 0:15:36.080 --> 0:15:39.560 cosmos in some form or another. Oh yeah, uh, you 0:15:39.600 --> 0:15:41.840 know this whole story about the electric eels that reminds 0:15:41.880 --> 0:15:45.360 me of my favorite Marlon Brandos story. But yeah, I 0:15:45.360 --> 0:15:47.200 don't know if you've heard this. I believe this one 0:15:47.280 --> 0:15:49.920 has been This has been told by Ed Bagley Jr. 0:15:50.200 --> 0:15:52.840 Is this a scene that was cut from on the Waterfront? Um, 0:15:53.160 --> 0:15:55.440 It's it's a little older Brando that we're dealing with here. 0:15:55.480 --> 0:15:59.440 This is very much like the larger, um, crazier, reclusive 0:15:59.680 --> 0:16:03.680 brand though so Um according to at Bagley Jr. Uh, 0:16:03.760 --> 0:16:05.640 he gets he gets a call to come over to 0:16:06.200 --> 0:16:09.600 to the Brando household. Uh, you don't know what it's 0:16:09.600 --> 0:16:11.840 going to be about it. He drives over, presumably in 0:16:12.000 --> 0:16:15.240 like an electric car, right and uh he comes inside 0:16:15.320 --> 0:16:18.080 and Brando asked him and says, hey, could I get 0:16:18.120 --> 0:16:22.120 a bunch of electric eels and power the house? And uh, 0:16:22.760 --> 0:16:25.480 you know, and so Ed Begley Jr. He's the he's 0:16:25.480 --> 0:16:28.440 the bicycle to power your water heater kind of guy. Yeah, 0:16:28.480 --> 0:16:31.400 you know, yeah, he's you know, he's versed in alternative 0:16:31.520 --> 0:16:33.200 energy to a certain accident, and it's kind of a 0:16:33.640 --> 0:16:37.240 you know, you know, has often lent his voice to 0:16:37.320 --> 0:16:39.240 some of those causes. So yeah, Brando figured he was 0:16:39.280 --> 0:16:41.360 the guy to ask, and so Bagley has kind of 0:16:41.480 --> 0:16:43.520 taken aback. But he says, you know, I don't think 0:16:43.600 --> 0:16:45.560 that would be possible. I don't think it would work. 0:16:45.600 --> 0:16:49.240 And indeed, it's difficult to try and empower anything with 0:16:49.480 --> 0:16:53.520 an electric eel because for one thing, they well, for 0:16:53.640 --> 0:16:56.280 a number of reasons, but you know, you'll see aquariums 0:16:56.280 --> 0:16:58.600 where they have like a little Christmas tree, and the 0:16:58.640 --> 0:17:01.640 electric eel will cause the treat a light up periodically, 0:17:01.880 --> 0:17:05.200 but the eel does not admit, you know, a continuous 0:17:06.359 --> 0:17:08.600 amount of voltage. It's just you know, quick shocks here 0:17:08.640 --> 0:17:11.080 and there. So it would be it would be one 0:17:11.119 --> 0:17:12.560 of those things where if you try to engineer a 0:17:12.600 --> 0:17:15.680 system that uses the electric eels, you quickly out engineer 0:17:15.760 --> 0:17:19.440 yourself and realize you're better off using some other form. 0:17:20.200 --> 0:17:23.200 But but anyway, so vaguely says, I don't think that 0:17:23.400 --> 0:17:26.199 is gonna work, and Brando just kind of gets grumpy 0:17:26.240 --> 0:17:31.439 and says, it's always no with you. So I love 0:17:31.520 --> 0:17:34.520 I love that story because it's, uh, it's just it's 0:17:34.560 --> 0:17:37.600 just a great Brando story and a great electric eel story. 0:17:37.680 --> 0:17:40.680 Did he point a gun at him? I tell me true? 0:17:41.640 --> 0:17:43.680 Maybe I don't know, but at any rate, it was 0:17:43.760 --> 0:17:46.440 like the the audience was over at that point. It's like, 0:17:46.480 --> 0:17:49.480 all right, vaguely, you've turned me down here on this 0:17:49.560 --> 0:17:51.400 electric eel business that I had a lot of hope 0:17:51.400 --> 0:17:54.200 built up for. So just go, just go. Don't tell 0:17:54.240 --> 0:17:56.879 me not to any more of my disappointed the King 0:17:56.960 --> 0:17:59.879 of Spain or something. Well. So, as you as you 0:18:00.040 --> 0:18:02.560 can see from the stuff we've been talking about, experiments 0:18:02.600 --> 0:18:05.520 about electricity didn't stop in the mid seventeen hundreds, where 0:18:05.520 --> 0:18:07.760 we were talking about a bunch of the experiments in 0:18:07.800 --> 0:18:11.760 the last episode. They continued into the turn of the century, 0:18:11.840 --> 0:18:14.359 the early eighteen hundreds, and uh, and it wasn't It 0:18:14.440 --> 0:18:18.040 also wasn't just the known scientists of the age who 0:18:18.119 --> 0:18:21.440 experimented with electricity. One of the weirdest stories I came 0:18:21.480 --> 0:18:26.119 across as a story about Percy Shelley, Old P. B. Shelley, 0:18:26.200 --> 0:18:28.520 the poet, you know, the author of what might you 0:18:28.640 --> 0:18:31.480 best know him from? Maybe Ozymandias. Yeah, I would imagine 0:18:31.520 --> 0:18:34.159 that's probably the most famous look on my works, you 0:18:34.359 --> 0:18:37.600 mighty in despair. But actually you might know him best 0:18:37.680 --> 0:18:40.840 for being the husband of Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein. 0:18:41.560 --> 0:18:43.800 And we talked in the last episode about the the 0:18:44.000 --> 0:18:47.399 the impression made on Mary Shelley by the lecturers in 0:18:47.480 --> 0:18:50.800 electricity and how that might have led to ideas in Frankenstein. 0:18:50.920 --> 0:18:54.119 But but her own husband might have also inspired some 0:18:54.240 --> 0:18:57.000 of these scientific terrors, because there is a story that 0:18:57.280 --> 0:19:01.080 when he was young, Percy Shelley was learned about electricity 0:19:01.200 --> 0:19:05.440 during his schooling and his tutoring, and he wanted to experiment. 0:19:05.520 --> 0:19:08.800 He wanted to do some electrical experiments, and he ended 0:19:08.880 --> 0:19:13.119 up just mainly these experiments were shocking his sisters, and 0:19:13.320 --> 0:19:16.800 so his sister Helen wrote, quote, when my brother commenced 0:19:16.880 --> 0:19:20.639 his studies in chemistry and practiced electricity on us, I 0:19:20.760 --> 0:19:24.080 confessed my pleasure, and it was entirely negatived by terror 0:19:24.160 --> 0:19:26.840 at its effects. Whenever he came to me with his 0:19:26.920 --> 0:19:30.040 piece of folded brown packing paper under his arm and 0:19:30.119 --> 0:19:32.920 a bit of wire and a bottle, my heart would 0:19:33.000 --> 0:19:36.600 sink with fear at his approach, but shame kept me silent, 0:19:36.840 --> 0:19:39.280 and with as many others as he could collect, we 0:19:39.400 --> 0:19:43.280 replaced hand in hand round the nursery table to be electrified. 0:19:43.760 --> 0:19:46.480 But when a suggestion was made that chilblains were to 0:19:46.560 --> 0:19:50.400 be cured by this means, my terror overwhelmed all other feelings, 0:19:50.760 --> 0:19:54.040 and the expression of it released me from all future annoyance. 0:19:54.760 --> 0:19:58.640 It sounds a little bit like a young monster there. Yeah, yeah, 0:19:58.680 --> 0:20:01.320 he kind of does, or at least a mad scientist. 0:20:01.480 --> 0:20:03.280 But again it kind of this is still the age 0:20:03.320 --> 0:20:07.040 of the the sort of gentleman science, the scientist, you know, 0:20:07.160 --> 0:20:10.239 the idea that any individual of means might take up 0:20:10.359 --> 0:20:13.520 science as a as a pastime and would engage in 0:20:13.640 --> 0:20:17.720 various experiments about natural phenomenon, right, or to to impress 0:20:17.760 --> 0:20:20.560 people or get his yah yas out. Yeah. But the 0:20:20.680 --> 0:20:24.960 pretense here that that the electricity and the shocks could 0:20:25.000 --> 0:20:28.760 be used to treat chilblains does sort of tie into 0:20:28.880 --> 0:20:31.080 something that we should talk about, which is the role 0:20:31.240 --> 0:20:37.159 of electricity in supposed medical practices and even magical beliefs 0:20:37.160 --> 0:20:40.600 about healing. Yeah, this is a fascinating area because I mean, 0:20:40.760 --> 0:20:44.199 on one hand, there there's the obvious role that electricity 0:20:44.640 --> 0:20:48.120 plays in modern medicine, and in the advent of modern medicine, 0:20:48.320 --> 0:20:51.600 you think you might think about defibrillation, yeah, or even 0:20:51.680 --> 0:20:54.399 some stuff is simple as being able to use electric 0:20:54.480 --> 0:20:59.720 lighting during a surgical procedure, or electrical coudorization tools during surgery, 0:21:00.040 --> 0:21:02.040 and stuff of that nature. Like it really ends up 0:21:02.280 --> 0:21:05.880 playing a role in so many different facets of modern medicine. 0:21:06.920 --> 0:21:09.720 But yet the idea that electricity in and of itself 0:21:10.320 --> 0:21:13.719 has a healing property to it um this ends up 0:21:14.080 --> 0:21:16.800 carrying a great deal of cultural weight during the time. Sure, well, 0:21:16.960 --> 0:21:20.440 you don't have to invoke medical principles to make the 0:21:20.520 --> 0:21:23.800 assumption that there's some kind of power in the electrical 0:21:23.960 --> 0:21:28.040 fire that has has healing potential over the body. I mean, 0:21:28.359 --> 0:21:32.399 there's always been the idea of forces of nature like 0:21:32.600 --> 0:21:35.119 light and fire as cleansing agent, and I think for 0:21:35.200 --> 0:21:38.480 many people electricity took on some of these same elements. 0:21:39.000 --> 0:21:42.000 There was one claim I read in a book called Witchcraft, 0:21:42.160 --> 0:21:46.600 Confessions and Accusations edited by Mary Douglas. And according to 0:21:46.680 --> 0:21:49.440 a claim in this book, in one case, uh the 0:21:49.960 --> 0:21:54.879 Bongwa people of Cameroon took a child who was believed 0:21:54.920 --> 0:21:57.520 to be a witch and what they did to cure 0:21:57.600 --> 0:22:01.360 the child's witchcraft was sent the child into an electrified 0:22:01.480 --> 0:22:04.640 region of the country in the south, under the reasoning 0:22:04.680 --> 0:22:07.840 that a few months months of exposure to electricity would 0:22:07.880 --> 0:22:12.280 cure the child's witchcraft. Okay, well it seems seems plausible. 0:22:13.200 --> 0:22:16.600 I mean because because as we've touched on before, like 0:22:16.800 --> 0:22:21.640 throughout history, humans have been encountering electricity on one form, 0:22:21.680 --> 0:22:23.960 in one form or the other. If not lightning on 0:22:24.040 --> 0:22:29.800 the hillside, then presumably just the static discharge that occurs 0:22:29.840 --> 0:22:32.800 when you shock somebody. Uh, And this was something that 0:22:33.000 --> 0:22:35.560 that interested me. I can't help but wonder why we 0:22:35.640 --> 0:22:40.320 don't see more examples, uh, particularly related to this interpersonal 0:22:40.400 --> 0:22:43.040 discharge of static electricity at least is a way to 0:22:43.119 --> 0:22:47.879