Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday,
Speaker 1: so let's take a stroll through the old vault door.
Speaker 1: That's right, we're going back to February eleven, part two
Speaker 1: of our exploration of the early days of electricity, how
Speaker 1: people thought about electricity back when it was, you know,
Speaker 1: a new discovery and all these new technologies were first
Speaker 1: emerging to harness its power. I hope you enjoy this
Speaker 1: classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com.
Speaker 1: Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert row and I'm Joe McCormick. And this
Speaker 1: is going to be the second part of a two
Speaker 1: part series on the weird history of electricity. Different than
Speaker 1: the history of electricity you might have learned about in school,
Speaker 1: woll with the the invention of the various different technologies.
Speaker 1: Here we wanted to focus on the strange social and
Speaker 1: psychic undercurrents, if you will, of the of the development
Speaker 1: of electricity and human society and knowledge. Yeah, kind of
Speaker 1: the midlife crisis of human cultures. Uh, understanding and attitudes
Speaker 1: towards electricity as it goes from pure mystery to the mundane.
Speaker 1: So if you haven't heard part one before you listen
Speaker 1: to this episodes, you should probably go back and listen
Speaker 1: to part one. But if you don't care about coming
Speaker 1: in in the middle of a conversation then and you're here,
Speaker 1: then that's fine. Yeah. I mean, a lot of the stuff,
Speaker 1: a lot of the episodes that we discuss are gonna
Speaker 1: they can stand on their own, but we do highly
Speaker 1: encourage you to check out part one. Okay. So I'm
Speaker 1: gonna start in a kind of counterintuitive place for this
Speaker 1: journey of psychic electricity, and that's with the English writer
Speaker 1: and poet Thomas Hardy. So you probably remember him from
Speaker 1: from writing extremely depressing novels that you had to read
Speaker 1: in high school. You know, the Return of the Native
Speaker 1: Mayor of Castor Bridge. What did you have to read
Speaker 1: in high school? I guess it was castor Bridge. That's
Speaker 1: the one that I feel like I'm most familiar with. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or you might have write his poems like the Darkling Thrush,
Speaker 1: which is one of my favorites and it contains these lines,
Speaker 1: is one of the stanzas of the Darkling Thrush. The
Speaker 1: land's sharp features seemed to be the centuries corpse out linked,
Speaker 1: his crypt, the cloudy canopy, the wind, his death lament,
Speaker 1: the ancient pulse of germ and birth was shrunken, hard
Speaker 1: and dry, and every spirit upon the earth seemed fervorless.
Speaker 1: As I it's kind of bleak. Yeah, But so he's
Speaker 1: talking about something that happened in the past century. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think one of the early names of this poem,
Speaker 1: before it was called the Darkling Thrush, was something like
Speaker 1: the Corpse of the past century or something like that. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this was written around nine and that, you know,
Speaker 1: the end of the eighteen hundreds. So what happened? What
Speaker 1: happened to our fervor during the century he spoke of.
Speaker 1: I don't know exactly what dissipation of spirit Hardy was
Speaker 1: referring to, but here's a stab that that I'd like
Speaker 1: to think had something to do with it. It might
Speaker 1: have had something to do with electricity. So there's a
Speaker 1: great Thomas Hardy quote. That is, it's quoted in one
Speaker 1: of the papers were using as a source on this episode,
Speaker 1: which is Life, Death and Electricity by Nicholas Ruddick. And
Speaker 1: this was a great paper by the way. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: was really good and it's uh. I think this one
Speaker 1: was available out there for everyone to read. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it chronicles a lot about the developments of electricity in
Speaker 1: the late eighteen hundreds leading up to the execution of
Speaker 1: William Kimler, which we started the last episode with and
Speaker 1: we'll get to later in this one. But it tells
Speaker 1: the story of how hard He was quote attending an
Speaker 1: electrically lit evening church service in London in May and
Speaker 1: what was illuminated was the outdated nous of the old reliefs,
Speaker 1: and Hardy wrote about it, quote everything looks like the
Speaker 1: modern world. The electric light and the old theology seems
Speaker 1: strange companions. And the sermon was as if addressed to
Speaker 1: the native tribes of primitive simplicity and not to the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century English. Now putting aside the you know, racist
Speaker 1: and colonial assumptions of the metaphor hard He uses there,
Speaker 1: that is an interesting observation in line with what we
Speaker 1: observed in the techno religion for the Masses episode. There
Speaker 1: is something, uh, though though it has often been surmounted
Speaker 1: by various cults and people of varying theologies, there is
Speaker 1: an inherent tension for some reason between technology and religious belief. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because especially with an old religious belief, there's often that
Speaker 1: sense that it's set in stone, and and this is
Speaker 1: the you know that this is the truth that is
Speaker 1: buried in the earth for all future generations to live by.
Speaker 1: And what gives it its power is its ancient otherness.
Speaker 1: And then what you do when a new otherness enters
Speaker 1: the picture, when when suddenly we know more about the
Speaker 1: what was magic in the past, when we know we
Speaker 1: can explain electricity or at least harness it in ways
Speaker 1: that we had no ability to in the days that
Speaker 1: the tablets were here were carved. Yeah. And so an
Speaker 1: observation that Ruddick makes in his paper is that he's
Speaker 1: commenting that by the eighteen nineties, as electricity came more
Speaker 1: and more into our lives, you know, you you might
Speaker 1: have hundreds of different interactions with electrical appliances and services
Speaker 1: throughout the day, it was becoming increasingly difficult, he says,
Speaker 1: to talk about transcendental matters in electrical terms. But before
Speaker 1: we get to the sort of the death of the
Speaker 1: sacred ghost of electricity in the sort of mundane ravages
Speaker 1: of modern life. I want to go back to a
Speaker 1: period where there was still much weirdness and wonder to
Speaker 1: be had. Yeah, we're still um, we're still in the
Speaker 1: time period of the experiments discussed previously, where we're beginning
Speaker 1: to understand electric to do a little bit. We're exploring
Speaker 1: its properties. We're also exploring the you know, it's dramatic side,
Speaker 1: it's entertaining side, as well as it's it's dangerous and
Speaker 1: lethal side. Absolutely so uh. I want to talk about
Speaker 1: a scientist who has been largely forgotten despite the fact
Speaker 1: that he was one of the most famous and celebrated
Speaker 1: scientists of the entire world in his day, and his
Speaker 1: influence on modern scientific thought is just absolutely incalculable. And
Speaker 1: that that is the scientist Alexander von Humboldt. Now, I
Speaker 1: recently read a book about Alexander von Humboldt. It was
Speaker 1: The Invention of Nature Alexander von Humboldt's New World by
Speaker 1: Andrea Wolf. This is a great book, by the way,
Speaker 1: but it talks about this strange fact that he's been
Speaker 1: mostly forgotten about, despite the fact that he was responsible,
Speaker 1: for example, for the scientific concept of ecology, thinking about
Speaker 1: natural environments not as sort of a a god established
Speaker 1: domain of unchanging character, but as complex dynamic systems that
Speaker 1: vary with climate and resources and are subject to dramatic
Speaker 1: change even by altering a small variable, if it's a
Speaker 1: if it's sort of a keystone variable. But I want
Speaker 1: to communicate the spirit of how scientific experiments in animal
Speaker 1: electricity were continuing, uh in the in the late seventeen hundreds,
Speaker 1: in early eighteen hundreds, by looking at a couple of
Speaker 1: events in Alexander von Humboldt's life. So in the seventeen nineties,
Speaker 1: Alexander von humbold actually became friends with the rock star
Speaker 1: German poet Johann wolf King von Gerta. And Gerta was
Speaker 1: the poet who, in his version of Faust wrote, what
Speaker 1: dazzles for the moment spins its spirit? What's genuine shall
Speaker 1: posterity inherit? I always like that sentiment, and I think
Speaker 1: it also sort of applies to some of the showmanship
Speaker 1: about electricity that we oh yeah mentioned in the last episode. Yeah,
Speaker 1: very much so, because I mean, at this point, electricity
Speaker 1: has been a show and electricity has often involved uh
Speaker 1: dead animals, yeah, to varying to so so capt that
Speaker 1: in mind as we move forward. But Gota wasn't just
Speaker 1: a poet in his day. He was also a really
Speaker 1: dedicated scientist. And one year in the seventeen nineties, about
Speaker 1: three years after von Humboldt and and Gota had first visited,
Speaker 1: they spent time together in a city called Ugana to
Speaker 1: talk through scientific ideas and conduct this long series of
Speaker 1: experiments on animal electricity, which Humboldt was writing a book
Speaker 1: about at the time. So he was interested in that
Speaker 1: that that animal electricity, that that idea that there was
Speaker 1: a specific intrinsic electrical system to the body. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: as we discussed in the last episode, it was later
Speaker 1: proved not true that animal electricity is a different kind
Speaker 1: of electricity than the external electricity that's in lightning and
Speaker 1: everything else. But but he was still he was trying
Speaker 1: to suss it out. He was trying to figure out
Speaker 1: what was going on with the role of electricity in
Speaker 1: the bodies of animals. So I want to read a
Speaker 1: quote from a section of of Andrea Wolf's book where
Speaker 1: she says that Humboldt and got To had been hanging
Speaker 1: out when there there's a violent thunderstorm on this on
Speaker 1: this spring day and after the after humbold had been
Speaker 1: out taking in, you know, atmospheric readings while he was
Speaker 1: watching the lightning happened during the storm. The next day,
Speaker 1: he finds out that a farmer and his wife nearby
Speaker 1: had been killed by the lightning in the storm. So
Speaker 1: Wolf writes, he rushed over to obtain their corpses, to
Speaker 1: obtain exactly Yeah, he just obtained them, yeah, uh, she writes,
Speaker 1: laying out their bodies on the table in the round
Speaker 1: anatomy tower, he analyzed everything. The man's leg bones looked
Speaker 1: as if they had been pierced by shotgun pellets, Humboldt
Speaker 1: noted excitedly, but the worst damage was to the genitals.
Speaker 1: At first, he thought the pubic hare might have been
Speaker 1: ignited and caused the burns, but dismissed the idea when
Speaker 1: he saw the couple's unharmed armpits. Despite the increasingly putrid
Speaker 1: smell of death and burned flesh, humbold enjoyed every minute
Speaker 1: of this gruesome investigation. I cannot exist without experiments, he said. So.
Speaker 1: So Alexander von Homebolt just shows up on the doorstep
Speaker 1: following a tragic event and says, hey, I'm Alexander von Homebolt.
Speaker 1: I'm kind of a big deal. I need to see
Speaker 1: the gruesomely distorted bodies of the lightning strike victims. The
Speaker 1: funniest thing is this was before he was a really
Speaker 1: big deal. This is when he was an upcoming big deal.
Speaker 1: But yeah, he I need to examine the scorched genitals
Speaker 1: for science. But Wolf also writes about one of Humboldt's
Speaker 1: favorite experiments that he ever performed, which was when he
Speaker 1: and Gerta were together experimenting on frog legs. This is
Speaker 1: revisiting the themes of Luigi Galvani, right, who saw the
Speaker 1: frog legs dance when stimulated by the electricity of the lightning.
Speaker 1: Wolf writes, one morning, Humboldt placed a frog's leg on
Speaker 1: a glass plate and connected its nerves and several muscles
Speaker 1: two different metals in sequence two silver, gold, iron, zinc,
Speaker 1: and so on, but generated only a discouraging, gentle twitch
Speaker 1: in the leg. When he then leaned over the leg
Speaker 1: in order to check the connecting metals, it convulsed so
Speaker 1: violently that it leapt off the table. Both men were stunned,
Speaker 1: until Humble realized that it had been the moisture of
Speaker 1: his breath that had triggered the reaction. As the tiny
Speaker 1: droplets in his breath had touched the metals, they had
Speaker 1: created an electric current that had moved the frog's leg.
Speaker 1: It was the most magical experiment he'd ever carried out,
Speaker 1: Humboldt decided, because by exhaling onto the frog's leg, it
Speaker 1: was as if he were breathing life into it. It
Speaker 1: was the perfect metaphor for the emergence of the new
Speaker 1: life sciences. So again this strangely religious aspect coming into
Speaker 1: the relationship between between electricity and the body. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: like that the breath of life, even though the breath
Speaker 1: is actually just delivering moisture that helps to complete the circuit. Now,
Speaker 1: another funny thing is not being there and uh and
Speaker 1: knowing exactly what happened. It's hard to even determine if
Speaker 1: Humboldt's interpretation of what actually caused the twitching is correct. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it sounds sensible because it also plays into
Speaker 1: um and into the example we'll get to at the
Speaker 1: end of this podcast regarding the electric chair. Now, I
Speaker 1: want to mention one more example of electricity bioelectricity experiments
Speaker 1: carried out by Humboldt and this one was later when
Speaker 1: he was in South America doing experiments and traveling through
Speaker 1: the rainforest with with someone named i'm a baum Plant.
Speaker 1: Baum Plant was his his traveling and scientific companion. I
Speaker 1: believe he was a botanist. But anyway, there was an
Speaker 1: incident where Humboldt found out from some locals in part
Speaker 1: of Venezuela I believe town called Calaboso that there were
Speaker 1: a bunch of shallow pools in the area that were
Speaker 1: filled with electric eels. And he Humble got very excited
Speaker 1: about this because he was a little bit eel crazy,
Speaker 1: and and he'd heard that eels could deliver electric shocks
Speaker 1: of more than six hundred volts. Uh So, but then
Speaker 1: he's got a problem, right, So, if an eel can
Speaker 1: deliver a shock of more than six hundred volts, how
Speaker 1: to catch it? Especially since, as as Wolf notes, the
Speaker 1: eels in these pools were buried in the mud at
Speaker 1: the bottom of the pools, So how do you get
Speaker 1: them out? Well, some of the locals came up with
Speaker 1: an idea. They said, we'll round up a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of horses. And so they rounded up a bunch of
Speaker 1: wild horses from the nearby prairies, and they drove the
Speaker 1: herd into the pond. So they had these wild horses
Speaker 1: stomping in the mud that had electric eels in it.
Speaker 1: And I want to read another section from Wolf, she writes.
Speaker 1: As the horses hooves turned up the mud, the eels
Speaker 1: wriggled up to the surface, giving off enormous electric shocks.
Speaker 1: In tranced tumbled watched the gruesome spectacle. The horses screamed
Speaker 1: in pain, the eels thrashed beneath their bellies, and waters
Speaker 1: surface boiled with movement. Some horses fell and trampled by
Speaker 1: others drowned. Over time, the strength of the electric shocks diminished,
Speaker 1: and the weakened eels retreated into the mud, from where
Speaker 1: Humble pulled them with dry wooden sticks. But he hadn't
Speaker 1: waited long enough. When he and bond Plant dissected some
Speaker 1: of the animals, they endured violent shocks themselves. And then,
Speaker 1: as she goes on to describe how for hours after this,
Speaker 1: they were just doing experiments on the eels, touching an eel,
Speaker 1: touching an eel, standing on metal, touching a neil, standing
Speaker 1: on clay, touching a neil, and touching each other both
Speaker 1: touching eels and making out a little bit. It just
Speaker 1: it almost sounds like that's part of it. Again, there's
Speaker 1: this strangely sexual element to the union of of sharing
Speaker 1: the electrical kiss, you know, the kiss of Venus. But
Speaker 1: Wolf concludes the section of the book by talking about
Speaker 1: how Humble began to think about electrical forces. The forces
Speaker 1: that she writes variously created lightning bound metal to metal
Speaker 1: and move the needles of compasses, all flow forth from
Speaker 1: one source, and all melt together in an eternal, all
Speaker 1: encompassing power. M hmm. I like that. That's a very
Speaker 1: poetic and and kind of supernatural but scientifically grounded, if
Speaker 1: you will, a view of electricity. Yeah, and I get
Speaker 1: the impression from this book that Humboldt was not a
Speaker 1: very religious guy. Yet here's this. I mean, he's not
Speaker 1: invoking supernatural entities or God's but he is talking about
Speaker 1: it in this kind of vaulted spiritual language. So again
Speaker 1: it's blurring these lines. Yeah, I mean, because they're standing
Speaker 1: on the edge of the unknown, right, and they're they're
Speaker 1: contemplating an unknown, allowing themselves to be shocked by the unknown.
Speaker 1: It's like like any given astronomer you could have the
Speaker 1: most most atheistic astronomer possible. But if they're they're engaging
Speaker 1: with the night sky and viewing up at the cosmos,
Speaker 1: they're gonna be likely overcome by the wonder of the
Speaker 1: cosmos in some form or another. Oh yeah, uh, you
Speaker 1: know this whole story about the electric eels that reminds
Speaker 1: me of my favorite Marlon Brandos story. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know if you've heard this. I believe this one
Speaker 1: has been This has been told by Ed Bagley Jr.
Speaker 1: Is this a scene that was cut from on the Waterfront? Um,
Speaker 1: It's it's a little older Brando that we're dealing with here.
Speaker 1: This is very much like the larger, um, crazier, reclusive
Speaker 1: brand though so Um according to at Bagley Jr. Uh,
Speaker 1: he gets he gets a call to come over to
Speaker 1: to the Brando household. Uh, you don't know what it's
Speaker 1: going to be about it. He drives over, presumably in
Speaker 1: like an electric car, right and uh he comes inside
Speaker 1: and Brando asked him and says, hey, could I get
Speaker 1: a bunch of electric eels and power the house? And uh,
Speaker 1: you know, and so Ed Begley Jr. He's the he's
Speaker 1: the bicycle to power your water heater kind of guy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, he's you know, he's versed in alternative
Speaker 1: energy to a certain accident, and it's kind of a
Speaker 1: you know, you know, has often lent his voice to
Speaker 1: some of those causes. So yeah, Brando figured he was
Speaker 1: the guy to ask, and so Bagley has kind of
Speaker 1: taken aback. But he says, you know, I don't think
Speaker 1: that would be possible. I don't think it would work.
Speaker 1: And indeed, it's difficult to try and empower anything with
Speaker 1: an electric eel because for one thing, they well, for
Speaker 1: a number of reasons, but you know, you'll see aquariums
Speaker 1: where they have like a little Christmas tree, and the
Speaker 1: electric eel will cause the treat a light up periodically,
Speaker 1: but the eel does not admit, you know, a continuous
Speaker 1: amount of voltage. It's just you know, quick shocks here
Speaker 1: and there. So it would be it would be one
Speaker 1: of those things where if you try to engineer a
Speaker 1: system that uses the electric eels, you quickly out engineer
Speaker 1: yourself and realize you're better off using some other form.
Speaker 1: But but anyway, so vaguely says, I don't think that
Speaker 1: is gonna work, and Brando just kind of gets grumpy
Speaker 1: and says, it's always no with you. So I love
Speaker 1: I love that story because it's, uh, it's just it's
Speaker 1: just a great Brando story and a great electric eel story.
Speaker 1: Did he point a gun at him? I tell me true?
Speaker 1: Maybe I don't know, but at any rate, it was
Speaker 1: like the the audience was over at that point. It's like,
Speaker 1: all right, vaguely, you've turned me down here on this
Speaker 1: electric eel business that I had a lot of hope
Speaker 1: built up for. So just go, just go. Don't tell
Speaker 1: me not to any more of my disappointed the King
Speaker 1: of Spain or something. Well. So, as you as you
Speaker 1: can see from the stuff we've been talking about, experiments
Speaker 1: about electricity didn't stop in the mid seventeen hundreds, where
Speaker 1: we were talking about a bunch of the experiments in
Speaker 1: the last episode. They continued into the turn of the century,
Speaker 1: the early eighteen hundreds, and uh, and it wasn't It
Speaker 1: also wasn't just the known scientists of the age who
Speaker 1: experimented with electricity. One of the weirdest stories I came
Speaker 1: across as a story about Percy Shelley, Old P. B. Shelley,
Speaker 1: the poet, you know, the author of what might you
Speaker 1: best know him from? Maybe Ozymandias. Yeah, I would imagine
Speaker 1: that's probably the most famous look on my works, you
Speaker 1: mighty in despair. But actually you might know him best
Speaker 1: for being the husband of Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein.
Speaker 1: And we talked in the last episode about the the
Speaker 1: the impression made on Mary Shelley by the lecturers in
Speaker 1: electricity and how that might have led to ideas in Frankenstein.
Speaker 1: But but her own husband might have also inspired some
Speaker 1: of these scientific terrors, because there is a story that
Speaker 1: when he was young, Percy Shelley was learned about electricity
Speaker 1: during his schooling and his tutoring, and he wanted to experiment.
Speaker 1: He wanted to do some electrical experiments, and he ended
Speaker 1: up just mainly these experiments were shocking his sisters, and
Speaker 1: so his sister Helen wrote, quote, when my brother commenced
Speaker 1: his studies in chemistry and practiced electricity on us, I
Speaker 1: confessed my pleasure, and it was entirely negatived by terror
Speaker 1: at its effects. Whenever he came to me with his
Speaker 1: piece of folded brown packing paper under his arm and
Speaker 1: a bit of wire and a bottle, my heart would
Speaker 1: sink with fear at his approach, but shame kept me silent,
Speaker 1: and with as many others as he could collect, we
Speaker 1: replaced hand in hand round the nursery table to be electrified.
Speaker 1: But when a suggestion was made that chilblains were to
Speaker 1: be cured by this means, my terror overwhelmed all other feelings,
Speaker 1: and the expression of it released me from all future annoyance.
Speaker 1: It sounds a little bit like a young monster there. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he kind of does, or at least a mad scientist.
Speaker 1: But again it kind of this is still the age
Speaker 1: of the the sort of gentleman science, the scientist, you know,
Speaker 1: the idea that any individual of means might take up
Speaker 1: science as a as a pastime and would engage in
Speaker 1: various experiments about natural phenomenon, right, or to to impress
Speaker 1: people or get his yah yas out. Yeah. But the
Speaker 1: pretense here that that the electricity and the shocks could
Speaker 1: be used to treat chilblains does sort of tie into
Speaker 1: something that we should talk about, which is the role
Speaker 1: of electricity in supposed medical practices and even magical beliefs
Speaker 1: about healing. Yeah, this is a fascinating area because I mean,
Speaker 1: on one hand, there there's the obvious role that electricity
Speaker 1: plays in modern medicine, and in the advent of modern medicine,
Speaker 1: you think you might think about defibrillation, yeah, or even
Speaker 1: some stuff is simple as being able to use electric
Speaker 1: lighting during a surgical procedure, or electrical coudorization tools during surgery,
Speaker 1: and stuff of that nature. Like it really ends up
Speaker 1: playing a role in so many different facets of modern medicine.
Speaker 1: But yet the idea that electricity in and of itself
Speaker 1: has a healing property to it um this ends up
Speaker 1: carrying a great deal of cultural weight during the time. Sure, well,
Speaker 1: you don't have to invoke medical principles to make the
Speaker 1: assumption that there's some kind of power in the electrical
Speaker 1: fire that has has healing potential over the body. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's always been the idea of forces of nature like
Speaker 1: light and fire as cleansing agent, and I think for
Speaker 1: many people electricity took on some of these same elements.
Speaker 1: There was one claim I read in a book called Witchcraft,
Speaker 1: Confessions and Accusations edited by Mary Douglas. And according to
Speaker 1: a claim in this book, in one case, uh the
Speaker 1: Bongwa people of Cameroon took a child who was believed
Speaker 1: to be a witch and what they did to cure
Speaker 1: the child's witchcraft was sent the child into an electrified
Speaker 1: region of the country in the south, under the reasoning
Speaker 1: that a few months months of exposure to electricity would
Speaker 1: cure the child's witchcraft. Okay, well it seems seems plausible.
Speaker 1: I mean because because as we've touched on before, like
Speaker 1: throughout history, humans have been encountering electricity on one form,
Speaker 1: in one form or the other. If not lightning on
Speaker 1: the hillside, then presumably just the static discharge that occurs
Speaker 1: when you shock somebody. Uh, And this was something that
Speaker 1: that interested me. I can't help but wonder why we
Speaker 1: don't see more examples, uh, particularly related to this interpersonal
Speaker 1: discharge of static electricity at least is a way to
Speaker 1: explain certain folk beliefs and magical superstitious beliefs, you know,
Speaker 1: because at heart, that's a very I mean, it's the
Speaker 1: same principle as uh as as two individuals touching each
Speaker 1: other while dissecting an electric fish. Right, I mean you're
Speaker 1: there's this spark, sometimes visible spark between two people. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: that is it's the literal embodiment in reality of a
Speaker 1: thing that's often imagined in magical thinking. In magical thinking,
Speaker 1: there's often this sense of of supernatural contagion, where you
Speaker 1: can pass the properties of one thing onto another thing
Speaker 1: by touching, and that that's generally not true. It's not
Speaker 1: true that you can gain the virility of a bore
Speaker 1: by touching the boar's tusk to your head or something.
Speaker 1: But you can confer electric charge by touching. And this
Speaker 1: is demonstrated over and over in these public lectures we
Speaker 1: talked about in the last episode. Yeah, you know, it's
Speaker 1: also interesting. I want to mention that the according to
Speaker 1: the Electrostatic Society of America, um, that's the thing. And
Speaker 1: this was actually mentioned in a blog post at in
Speaker 1: probable dot com in Probable Research the Ignoble Prize organizing
Speaker 1: body Okay, yeah, they pointed out that the quote this
Speaker 1: is from the electro Sex Society of America quote. Electrostatics
Speaker 1: is an exciting area of science, as its most basic
Speaker 1: scientific questions remain unknown and highly controversial. What yeah, and
Speaker 1: yet its consequences are widespread. For example, the uh the
Speaker 1: identity of the species transferred to generate charge when materials
Speaker 1: rub is being hotly debated in the leading scientific journals.
Speaker 1: Some researchers argue that it is electrons, others that it
Speaker 1: is ions, and yet others that it is bits of material.
Speaker 1: What so that's crazy. I had no idea. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: that's just a little footnote to remind everyone that that again,
Speaker 1: even in our modern time there, when we take all
Speaker 1: the electricity around us for granted, we still haven't solved
Speaker 1: some basic questions such as why my child shocks me
Speaker 1: when he comes down a slide on a on a
Speaker 1: chilly afternoon of the playground. Fascinating. But of course, the
Speaker 1: treatment of witchcraft I mentioned and earlier is not the
Speaker 1: only spiritually significant use of electricity as a healing agent, right,
Speaker 1: that's right. Um. We have a few different examples to
Speaker 1: cover here, but one of the more interesting is that
Speaker 1: of John Wesley. Okay Wesley, the founder of Methodism, founder
Speaker 1: of Methodism, Christian theologian. If you visit, um, I believe, yes,
Speaker 1: Savannah here in our own native state of Georgia, there
Speaker 1: is a statute of of John Wesley there. Huh yeah,
Speaker 1: it kind of looks like snap, why in Savannah? What
Speaker 1: did he do in Savannah? He visited there for a while? Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: he was he was in Georgia for a little bit,
Speaker 1: then he went back. Okay, so it's kind of like
Speaker 1: how in Montrose, Switzerland, there's a statue of Freddie Mercury.
Speaker 1: Oh there is, Yeah, there is which which version of
Speaker 1: Freddie Mercury? Uh? He's doing a great dancing post. It's
Speaker 1: great statue. I highly recommended if you're in Switzerland. Okay,
Speaker 1: all right, So you're probably wondering, Okay, why John Wesley?
Speaker 1: Why did John Wesley? Uh? Why why is this guy
Speaker 1: interested in electric has never heard of him having anything
Speaker 1: to do with electricity or science in general. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: prior prior to this, aside from knowing that is the
Speaker 1: founder of Methodism, Like, the only other real touchdone for
Speaker 1: me was that in seventeen sixty eight he argued that
Speaker 1: quote giving up of witchcraft is in effect the giving
Speaker 1: up of the Bible. Getting down to this playing into
Speaker 1: this idea that a lot of witchcraft persecution and the
Speaker 1: horrible links we went to to obtain witchcraft confessions from
Speaker 1: accused witches, that a lot of that amounted to this
Speaker 1: need to provide expert testimony of the physical existence of
Speaker 1: a demonic afterlife and therefore the implied physical existence of
Speaker 1: of God. Oh yeah, well, I mean, the Bible acknowledges
Speaker 1: the existence of witchcraft and all kinds of folk magic beliefs.
Speaker 1: So if to to sort of say, we believe in
Speaker 1: the Bible, but we don't believe in all the folk magic,
Speaker 1: seems inconsistent. There's an aporia there, right, as so Socceres
Speaker 1: might point out. Indeed, so yeah, it's it's weird to
Speaker 1: think here's this guy who who sees witchcraft as a
Speaker 1: reality that cannot be denied, and yet he's also caught
Speaker 1: up in uh this uh, this this curiosity about electricity
Speaker 1: of all things. And apparently he became interested in electricity
Speaker 1: in the late seventeen forties. So this is right after
Speaker 1: the Laden Jar. Yeah, very much in the wake of
Speaker 1: mainstream fascination with electrical demonstrations and the supposed therapeutic applications
Speaker 1: of electricity, like the medical electricity we were mentioned earlier. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: the idea that oh here, here's a shock that'll cure
Speaker 1: what ails you. Uh, it's appealed though at this point
Speaker 1: had reached even the lower levels of society, and these
Speaker 1: are the very people that Wesley sought to reach with methodism.
Speaker 1: And uh, this whole uh interconnectivity of of Wesley's you know,
Speaker 1: spiritual purpose if you will, and his interest in electricity.
Speaker 1: It's apparently an area that historians have only recently begun
Speaker 1: really dig into. Huh. And that's according to again electrical
Speaker 1: historian um extraordinaire Pala Bertucci, who wrote a wonderful article
Speaker 1: titled Revealing Sparks, John Wesley and the Religious Utility of
Speaker 1: Electrical Healing. Bertuccia describes him as an electrical supporter who
Speaker 1: combined moral instruction and natural philosophy. And of course he
Speaker 1: wasn't the only person to do this at the time,
Speaker 1: but but Wesley demonstrated the healing power of electricity to
Speaker 1: further methodism, not electricity, not science, certainly right, So this
Speaker 1: was yet another religious technology technology and service of religious
Speaker 1: or spiritual goals exactly like it plays right into our
Speaker 1: into some of the issues we discussed in the Techno
Speaker 1: Religion episodes. He used electricity itself as a demonstration of
Speaker 1: God's power both as a benevolent force and is a
Speaker 1: damning force, you know, so both sides of the of
Speaker 1: the of the God coin right, the wrathful God and
Speaker 1: the benevolent God. Yeah, she right? Quote as signs of
Speaker 1: God's wrath, electric manifestations gave humans a glimpse of the
Speaker 1: terrifying prospect of eternal punishment. At the same time, it
Speaker 1: was because of divine benevolence that the power of the
Speaker 1: electric fire was available to humankind as a healing agent.
Speaker 1: It's the it's the magical carrot and the magical stick
Speaker 1: combined in this natural phenomenon. Yeah, yeah, she says, sparks
Speaker 1: revealed the divinity. And and this really interests me in
Speaker 1: light of that quote I read earlier about witchcraft because
Speaker 1: Wesley supported the persecution of witchcraft for much the same
Speaker 1: reason as he's as he's interested and demonstrating the power
Speaker 1: of electricity the confessed, which revealed the demonic, which in
Speaker 1: turn revealed the divine. And here he is revealing the
Speaker 1: powers of electricity in order to reveal the divine to
Speaker 1: the onlooker. Demon in one hand, spark of electricity in
Speaker 1: the other. That's great, that's great. You know. I also
Speaker 1: can't help but think of the touch the screen era
Speaker 1: of T the evangelism. I don't know what you're talking about,
Speaker 1: and I've watched my share of TV evangelists. The idea
Speaker 1: that you would you would physically touch the screen in
Speaker 1: order to interact with the healing powers that were being
Speaker 1: demonstrated by the TV, uh the evangelists, and and in
Speaker 1: doing so, you're gonna feel, you know, some of that
Speaker 1: static discharge on the screen, right, So to what extent
Speaker 1: is that playing into you know, religious electricity in a
Speaker 1: more modern sense. That's interesting. I almost that makes me
Speaker 1: wonder if that's scene in Poultergeist is parodying the spiritual
Speaker 1: power transferred through the screen by touching. Maybe so, maybe so.
Speaker 1: I've actually never seen these, uh, these TV preachings, but
Speaker 1: it makes me think about a principle that often gets
Speaker 1: brought up on another podcast. Do you ever listen to
Speaker 1: the podcast Sawbones. No, I'm not familiar with it. Oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're great there there it's a it's a husband
Speaker 1: and wife team who who are really fun and they
Speaker 1: talk about basically some of the worst parts of medical history,
Speaker 1: So all all the bad cure alls and treatments that
Speaker 1: have been used throughout the years that didn't really help
Speaker 1: people very much at all. And one of the things
Speaker 1: they often talk about is the is that it did
Speaker 1: something principle um so a a fake treatment that doesn't
Speaker 1: actually treat people is more likely to be accepted as
Speaker 1: effective if it at least causes some kind of noticeable effect,
Speaker 1: even if it doesn't cure you, even if it's discomfort, right,
Speaker 1: and then you feel like, oh, it's it's doing something.
Speaker 1: I feel it. I feel the shock. Yeah, exactly, And
Speaker 1: that's what that's what I'm thinking about with the shock here.
Speaker 1: If somebody can charge up a friction generator and and
Speaker 1: give you a shock of static electricity from it, Uh,
Speaker 1: you'll feel it. And even if you don't know exactly
Speaker 1: what's going on, how exactly it's supposed to work, what
Speaker 1: is the method of action inside your body, you at
Speaker 1: least felt something happened that was real and it was
Speaker 1: powerful and pain sort of in our minds, I think
Speaker 1: pain equals reality. We accept when something painful happens that
Speaker 1: that something im has happened. And so I can easily
Speaker 1: see this kind of principle acting on the use of
Speaker 1: medical medical electricity in the seventeen hundreds. Even if it
Speaker 1: wasn't really working to cure a lot of things, it
Speaker 1: was it was doing something. Yeah, and hey, if you
Speaker 1: can if you can combine pleasure and pain into the
Speaker 1: same package. Then you have a product that can likely
Speaker 1: uh really resonate with the with with the with the
Speaker 1: people out there. Oh and that certainly ties into another
Speaker 1: aspect of the electrical treatments of the time, which would
Speaker 1: be electrical quackery, very often having to do with sex.
Speaker 1: There was a guy we mentioned in the last episode.
Speaker 1: We're coming back to him now, one James Graham, who
Speaker 1: was a Scottish believe he was born in Edinburgh. He
Speaker 1: was a Scottish quack doctor essentially, who was He called
Speaker 1: himself a hygienist I think, and a and a sex
Speaker 1: therapist in some way, who offered various vaguely defined electrical
Speaker 1: treatment on on how to get people's sex lives going again.
Speaker 1: He had some famous institutions. One is called the Temple
Speaker 1: of Health, another one is called the Temple of Hymen,
Speaker 1: And oh god, what was the deal with these things? Okay, So,
Speaker 1: first of all, he would he would apparently often travel
Speaker 1: around and promote all this stuff, accompanied by the beautiful
Speaker 1: young Goddess of Health. Oh yeah, he had he had
Speaker 1: like a train of attractive ladies to help him promote
Speaker 1: his message of medical well being. Yeah, and you know,
Speaker 1: like any good salesman. He has to have products he
Speaker 1: can sell on the spot as well as um more
Speaker 1: expensive products that are selled on location. He sold exposure
Speaker 1: to electrical ether as well as a special ointment that
Speaker 1: you could rub on your body. And what was the ointment?
Speaker 1: It was nervous ethereal balsam. Oh good, Yeah, keep some
Speaker 1: of that around. It's like bag bomb, except for you know,
Speaker 1: sexual purposes. Yeah. But he also sold access to his
Speaker 1: special electrically powered sex bed. Right have you visited the
Speaker 1: Temple of Hymen? Would you open? Uh? Couples with marital
Speaker 1: or sexual problems could test out the celestial bed for
Speaker 1: a mere fifty pounds a night. Okay, so we're talking
Speaker 1: about a twelve by nine foot bed. It has a
Speaker 1: colored glass columns, mirrors of course, um, erotic paintings, flashing
Speaker 1: electrical lights, organ music, and perfume. Uh yeah, it it
Speaker 1: reminds me a little bit. My wife wants shot some
Speaker 1: pictures of the inside of Kenny Rogers house when we
Speaker 1: lived up I think in around Athens, Georgie had he
Speaker 1: had bought this this antique bed from James Graham. No,
Speaker 1: but he he did have apparently a lot of mirrors
Speaker 1: in the bedroom. Um, like a disturbing amount of mirrors
Speaker 1: in the bedroom. Uh and and that's the kind of
Speaker 1: thing that you would get out of the celestial bed. Well,
Speaker 1: you know what they say in the Gambler, the best
Speaker 1: you can hope for is to die in your sleep.
Speaker 1: So yeah, well there you go. And if you're gonna
Speaker 1: dine your sleep, there might as well be a lot
Speaker 1: of electrically powered flashing lights. Uh there as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you got to know when to hold him. Yeah. One
Speaker 1: more interesting comment on Graham from from Bertucci. Actually she
Speaker 1: writes that, uh he he didn't now in contrast to
Speaker 1: some of these other electrical healers, which would shock you
Speaker 1: for for health, Graham quote exploited the fashion enjoyed by
Speaker 1: electricity as a further extravaganza for his healing center. The
Speaker 1: largest electrical apparatus in the world, he called it was
Speaker 1: on display rather than in use in the temple, where
Speaker 1: electrical vapors wrapped up the patients. And this is a
Speaker 1: quote from his materials, gently pervading the whole system with
Speaker 1: a copious tide of that celestial fire, fully impregnated with
Speaker 1: the purest, most subtle, and balmiest parts of medicines. Which
Speaker 1: are extracted by and flows softly into the blood and
Speaker 1: nervous system with the electric fluid or restorative ethereal essences.
Speaker 1: I don't know to what extent he was using any
Speaker 1: kind of electrical technology. He was given this some electrical
Speaker 1: vay birds aside from using electrical lights on the guest
Speaker 1: celestial bed. I don't think you've organ music organ music, yeah,
Speaker 1: but otherwise he has to be the biggest scam artist
Speaker 1: by far that we've encountered in these episodes. Now, again,
Speaker 1: that was around one. We'd have to wait a good
Speaker 1: century though, for the electric vibrator to become a reality
Speaker 1: and actual use of of electricity to directly deliver uh
Speaker 1: sexual pleasure. H And we got it finally thanks to
Speaker 1: Dr J. Mortimer Granville. Now, previously one had to rely
Speaker 1: on George Taylor's eighteen sixty nine steam powered manipulator or
Speaker 1: the hand cranked Macura's blood circulator, all in the name
Speaker 1: of treating supposed bouts of hysteria with a healthy dose
Speaker 1: of orgasm. Yeah, and these are not products that you
Speaker 1: would necessarily go to the store and buy to use
Speaker 1: at your own leisure in the product, in the privacy
Speaker 1: of your own home, but more something that would kind
Speaker 1: of be prescribed for you by your doctor, which sounds
Speaker 1: like it takes some of the happiness out of it. Yes,
Speaker 1: I would think. So. Okay, So now we we've talked
Speaker 1: about electricity in the body strange healing characteristics, but also
Speaker 1: we need to talk about electricity the occult, the esoteric,
Speaker 1: and the spiritual in the sense of spiritualism, because John
Speaker 1: Murray Spear also was into some electricity some science. Yes,
Speaker 1: listeners to our techno religion may remember him as the
Speaker 1: as the individual who whose followers built the electric Messiah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he was a progressive radical of the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: He was an abolitionist. He was for a lot of
Speaker 1: progressive political causes, but he turned in the middle of
Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds into a spiritualist leader, meaning he was
Speaker 1: a guy who claimed to get messages from the spirit
Speaker 1: world and they they detailed lots of plans for him
Speaker 1: for sort of ungainly projects that he got his followers
Speaker 1: to carry out on his behalf, including the construction of
Speaker 1: the new motor. That's the thing we talked about. There
Speaker 1: was a there was a vaguely described machine Messiah to
Speaker 1: Harold the dawn of a new age by being a
Speaker 1: perpetual motion machine and changing the human of of the
Speaker 1: past into the new man. Yeah, I think we described
Speaker 1: it before. Is looking like a like the like the
Speaker 1: of a of a dalek and a coffee table bread
Speaker 1: and produced offspring. This would be. That's pretty much it.
Speaker 1: But he also had some interesting interactions with the science
Speaker 1: of electricity, and this would have been later than what
Speaker 1: we were talking about before, almost a century later, so
Speaker 1: that this would be in the eighteen fifties. In the
Speaker 1: Remarkable Life of John Murray, Spear Agitator for the Spirit Land,
Speaker 1: the author John Benedict Bauscher mentioned several cases where the
Speaker 1: beliefs of the mid nineteenth century spiritualists in America included
Speaker 1: spiritual significance of electricity. So one one associate of spirits,
Speaker 1: who was a medium and spiritual healer named Elizabeth French,
Speaker 1: had been quote an electrical experiment or ever since she
Speaker 1: was young, trying to revive victims of lightning strikes and
Speaker 1: drowning by the action of certain rude batteries in the
Speaker 1: construction of which I, even then a child endowed with
Speaker 1: strong tendencies in that direction, was myself the mechanic. That
Speaker 1: was Elizabeth French speaking there at the end. Uh and
Speaker 1: she she later on partnered with So. Yeah, so she's
Speaker 1: trying to use batteries to bring people back from the dead.
Speaker 1: Pretty good. She partners with Spear for electrical experiments in
Speaker 1: augmenting spiritual potential, So communicating with the spirit world. They're saying,
Speaker 1: maybe we can use electricity to amp up somebody's ability
Speaker 1: to communicate with the spirits. And this included Spear trying
Speaker 1: to control and influence the spirits with the aid of
Speaker 1: a suit of armor made out of copper and zinc batteries. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we were talking about this. We're not sure this
Speaker 1: is the exactly the same outfit or a different one.
Speaker 1: But the book also mentions that Spears had one Isaac Hedges,
Speaker 1: who was a saint. The Lewis Magnetic Spiritualist had him
Speaker 1: craft quote a wizard suit from minerals, metals, and stones,
Speaker 1: which he wore during his experiments, and the suit itself
Speaker 1: connected to a battery which supposedly boosted his personal electro
Speaker 1: magnetic field. That's crazy, I mean, a battery of a
Speaker 1: wizard suit made out of batteries. It's too good and spirits.
Speaker 1: He didn't stop there. He also proposed creating telepathic towers.
Speaker 1: I can't remember if we mentioned this in the other episode,
Speaker 1: but he wanted to create a worldwide network of telepathic towers,
Speaker 1: which would each quote constitute a grand focus of magnetic
Speaker 1: and electric influences, and this would enable a sort of
Speaker 1: broadband spirit medium channeling UH and worldwide communication. So they'd
Speaker 1: have operators who were spirit mediums who'd use the electricity
Speaker 1: generated by the towers to channel the voices of the
Speaker 1: spirits back and forth between each they're around the world,
Speaker 1: and it would be faster than the telegraph. You know,
Speaker 1: what's what's fascinating about this point in the timeline we're
Speaker 1: exploring is that we're really looking at the just at
Speaker 1: the enthusiastic supernatural employ of of of current electrical knowledge.
Speaker 1: So on one hand, you have this push towards the mundane,
Speaker 1: and this is really this is really the area of
Speaker 1: like the midlife crisis I feel, with the with the
Speaker 1: supernatural qualities of electricity, where you see the the portions
Speaker 1: of of of the populace going into just a really
Speaker 1: extreme magical direction with it, which is crazy because even
Speaker 1: at this point in history we're starting to get a
Speaker 1: much better understanding of how to harness electricity for utterly
Speaker 1: mondaye and purposes, just how to make the machines that
Speaker 1: make our lives more convenient. Yeah, Like, I feel like
Speaker 1: we're at the point in a Scooby Doo cartoon where
Speaker 1: the villain and the ghost costume is apprehended and they're
Speaker 1: about to pull the map scoff. Meanwhile, John Murray Spear
Speaker 1: and some of the other individuals were discussing here. They
Speaker 1: are pointing at at the culprit and saying, no, that
Speaker 1: is really again, right, it is not old man Bulvovsky, right,
Speaker 1: But speaking of people named Blevatsky. That gives us a
Speaker 1: good transition to one last thing about spirituality and electricity,
Speaker 1: which is the theology of electricity that came through in
Speaker 1: various forms of Western esso terrorism. Yeah, there's a great
Speaker 1: paper on this that's out there titled The Esoteric Uses
Speaker 1: of Electricity by Nicholas Goodrick Clark, which highly remanda recommend
Speaker 1: looking at if you one a little more on this
Speaker 1: particular area. This again, this last sort of last thrust
Speaker 1: of electrical spiritism. So what does Goodrick Clark have to
Speaker 1: say about the electric theology. Well, he discusses a few
Speaker 1: different individuals. He discusses leading up theosophy proponent Madam Helena Blavatsky,
Speaker 1: whose belief in electric who believed in electricity as quote
Speaker 1: an animating soul like force or fluid. We've seen that
Speaker 1: kind of idea before. And of course she also preached
Speaker 1: the power of the third eye and the piney ole
Speaker 1: glands role in modern man is an atrophy, the vestige
Speaker 1: of this organ of spiritual vision. So just to give
Speaker 1: that's just to give you a brief idea about the
Speaker 1: the about theosophy and what kind of worldview she was
Speaker 1: immersed in. Yeah, if you're not familiar with esotericism, these
Speaker 1: are I don't know what you might call them. They're
Speaker 1: sort of alternative religions in in the history of Western culture. Yeah,
Speaker 1: new religious movements for sure, but Theosophy one that maybe
Speaker 1: help didn't hold on as well as some of the
Speaker 1: others that that cropped up. Um he good good At.
Speaker 1: Clark also points to a scholar Ernst Dens as having
Speaker 1: identified the quote theology of electricity amongst a group of
Speaker 1: eighteenth century Swabian theosophers. He claimed that the quote discovery
Speaker 1: of electricity and the simultaneous discovery of magnetic and galvanic
Speaker 1: phenomena were accompanied by a most significant change in the
Speaker 1: image of God and that it led to a quote
Speaker 1: completely new understanding of the relation of body and soul,
Speaker 1: of spirit and matter. Now, how does that play out?
Speaker 1: What does that look like? Basically it means I mean,
Speaker 1: basically what we're looking at is all this new information
Speaker 1: about electricity is coming out, and and there are individuals
Speaker 1: who are instead of saying I wonder how that casts
Speaker 1: new light of my understanding, or they're thinking, oh, well,
Speaker 1: that's something that exists separately from a religious understanding of
Speaker 1: the world, They're like, no, this is the path. Let's
Speaker 1: pour all of our our spiritual gusto into this new
Speaker 1: electrical format. So if the if the electricity is the
Speaker 1: frontier of future science, this could be the kind of
Speaker 1: religious thing king that says, no, we're not going to
Speaker 1: ground our religious ideas in the past, We're going to
Speaker 1: ground them in the future. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's
Speaker 1: it's kind of I mean, this is a time of
Speaker 1: a huge change, and what do you do when the
Speaker 1: world changes and you have either an old set of
Speaker 1: beliefs or you sort of cling to that mode of
Speaker 1: belief like you have to. You either have to say no,
Speaker 1: that's bs, keep that away from me and keep it
Speaker 1: out of the school books, or you say, yes, bring
Speaker 1: it here, let me incorporate it. Um. You know, And
Speaker 1: we've looked at some plenty of examples where religion's ability
Speaker 1: to incorporate new scientific understanding it is certainly a healthy thing.
Speaker 1: It doesn't always um lead to sort of fringe belief systems. Well,
Speaker 1: it's funny now that we think about electricity as just
Speaker 1: utterly uncontroversial religiously, right. I mean, there are so many
Speaker 1: scientific ideas that do come into conflict with with religious ideas.
Speaker 1: Ideas about, for example, I don't know, cosmology and the
Speaker 1: origins the universe, ideas about biological evolution, ideas of geology,
Speaker 1: conflicting with the literal reading of some holy books. Uh,
Speaker 1: you see these pretty often. But electricity seems just utterly
Speaker 1: theologically neutral. But that hasn't always been the case. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's in the same way that it's difficult
Speaker 1: for us to imagine this this time when electricity was
Speaker 1: new and exciting. It's hard to imagine it's it's newness
Speaker 1: and it's and it's excitingness up, you know, having an
Speaker 1: impact on modes of religious belief. Another example that Nicholas
Speaker 1: Goodrick Clark draws on is that of Austrian occultist, racial
Speaker 1: political theorist, former monk and also the founder of Ariosophy
Speaker 1: as well as a pretty notable anti Semite. Uh. This
Speaker 1: is Lens van Levenfells lived eighteen seventy four to nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty four, and he saw electricity as quote a measure
Speaker 1: of spiritual evolution unquote that was ranted only to arians,
Speaker 1: Christ and other spiritual intermediaries. That's pretty nasty. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: was not a decent guy. Like, this is a guy
Speaker 1: that when when Hitler rose to power, he was just
Speaker 1: kissing up immediately apparently, and Hitler just didn't really have
Speaker 1: time for him. But but yeah, so yeah he was.
Speaker 1: He was not a pleasant guy. So as far as
Speaker 1: we know, Hitler didn't buy into his electrical theological position.
Speaker 1: Now he seemed from based on what I was reading here,
Speaker 1: he really had no interest in it. But but but
Speaker 1: Lan's was one of these guys who was like, yes,
Speaker 1: what you're preaching is it's perfectly with with what I'm selling. Uh,
Speaker 1: and and what I take it all to mean is
Speaker 1: that the simultaneous advancement of supernatural belief and scientific understanding
Speaker 1: just can result in some some very weird, seemingly to
Speaker 1: the outsider weird modes of belief, but also maybe exciting
Speaker 1: modes of belief. Okay, but here I think it's time
Speaker 1: to arrive at at the final stage of the transformer
Speaker 1: stepped down of the spiritual power of electricity, the metaphor
Speaker 1: you mentioned in the last episode, because something starts to happen,
Speaker 1: especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, we
Speaker 1: might say where electricity is losing a lot of its psychic,
Speaker 1: spiritual and symbolic power. It's becoming less and less incorporated
Speaker 1: into I don't know, transcendental language and metaphor. It's becoming
Speaker 1: less a source of mystery and wonder and more something
Speaker 1: that resonates with what Thomas Hardy said, the quote we
Speaker 1: talked about at the beginning of the episode. It highlights
Speaker 1: something very natural and mundane in contrast to that classical
Speaker 1: sense of holy otherness. Yeah, it's two am at the nightclub.
Speaker 1: Lawns and Spear are both still dancing desperately to keep
Speaker 1: the party going, while other individuals are are going home. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so I want to use just one I think
Speaker 1: pretty perfect example of this. So you it's December twenty
Speaker 1: seven nine, and you have just received your copy of
Speaker 1: the Scientific Americans Supplement and you're leafing through it, and
Speaker 1: it features on one page an invention by one M. Defoy,
Speaker 1: which was an electric horse bit. Oh, so, the bit
Speaker 1: being the part that goes in the horse's mouth. It
Speaker 1: was a carriage armed with an electromagnetic apparatus that could
Speaker 1: send electric current through metal wires embedded in the reins,
Speaker 1: and if it opened the circuit to the current, it
Speaker 1: would travel down the reins and through the bit in
Speaker 1: the horse's mouth, giving the horse an electric shock through
Speaker 1: its mouth and teeth. So, according to this article it
Speaker 1: was the invention was considered a success because it managed
Speaker 1: to calm down several quote vicious and stubborn horses so
Speaker 1: that they's long enough that they could be shod. They
Speaker 1: were trying to, you know, get some shoes on these horses.
Speaker 1: They wouldn't cooperate, so zap him in the mouth. The
Speaker 1: superintendent of the Parisian cab company M. Camille wrote, quote
Speaker 1: one horse that was to be shod went so far
Speaker 1: as to lie down and roll over and over on
Speaker 1: the ground, all the while struggling, defending himself and fighting
Speaker 1: against everything. Nothing could subdue him. I then had recourse
Speaker 1: to m Defoy's apparatus, and on the first trial, much
Speaker 1: to my surprise, the feet of the intractable horse were
Speaker 1: lifted without any great difficulty. And on the second trial
Speaker 1: it was as easy to shoot him as if he
Speaker 1: had never made the least resistance. The animal was conquered.
Speaker 1: So we've reduced the noble spark to something that you
Speaker 1: just uh torment a horsewhip, essentially just a bullwhip. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: and that actually comes in because m defoy went on
Speaker 1: to create another appliance along the same lines, the electric
Speaker 1: riding whip, which sounds more or less like a taser
Speaker 1: for horses. And if you're thinking, like what horror, nobody
Speaker 1: would ever do anything like that today. I mean, we
Speaker 1: have electric fences for livestock. Today, there are shock collars
Speaker 1: for animals. So I mean using electricity to control and
Speaker 1: tame wild animal instincts is something that is now a
Speaker 1: grand tradition. It's not a very pretty one. We don't
Speaker 1: like to think about it. It doesn't seem like a
Speaker 1: nice thing to do, but it's a thing we do
Speaker 1: with the electric fire that used to be such a
Speaker 1: cosmic mystery. Yeah, and you know, also when it comes
Speaker 1: to taming horses, you know, not not every method is that,
Speaker 1: you know, lovable and horse whispery. But this begins to
Speaker 1: get at something that that really comes through in an
Speaker 1: essay we mentioned in the last episode and we're going
Speaker 1: to refer to again now by a Nicholas Ruddick called
Speaker 1: Life and Death by Electricity in eighteen ninety the Transfiguration
Speaker 1: of William Kimmler. Like we mentioned in the last episode,
Speaker 1: this is a really great paper. It's worth reading. It's
Speaker 1: a very interesting history of what was happening with the
Speaker 1: power of electricity in the late eighteen hundreds. Well, he
Speaker 1: points to an eighteen nineties Scientific American article that it
Speaker 1: does a great job of just laying out just how
Speaker 1: much electricity is in the average person's life. It wakes
Speaker 1: him up in the morning, it cooks their breakfast, it's
Speaker 1: on their right into work, it's all over work. When
Speaker 1: they go to church, their electric bells, there's an electric oregon,
Speaker 1: and on up into your death. When you die, an
Speaker 1: electric apparatus is used to carve your name into a tombstone.
Speaker 1: So it we we give this enormous power over our lives. Right,
Speaker 1: it's used in medicine, it can kill, it can it
Speaker 1: can be a communication technology. And yet at the same
Speaker 1: time it has lost its spiritual and symbolic luster, hasn't it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like the poetry is seeping out of it, you know.
Speaker 1: And uh and and a lot of it just has
Speaker 1: to do with the fact that maybe all the poetic
Speaker 1: things that can be said about it have been said,
Speaker 1: Like the language that we used to describe it is
Speaker 1: getting a bit dull, even even if it seems exciting
Speaker 1: to re explore it from a modern perspective. And then yeah,
Speaker 1: it's also just everywhere, like how mystical can it be?
Speaker 1: If it cooks your toast, how mystical can it be? Uh? Um,
Speaker 1: you know, if it's if it's just lighting a light
Speaker 1: bulb while you read something, and I think to put
Speaker 1: a cherry on this. Uh. This transformation into an utterly
Speaker 1: mundane and dirty, down in the mud kind of force
Speaker 1: of nature was when it was finally used in illegal execution. Yes,
Speaker 1: which again brings us back to William Kimler, first man
Speaker 1: executed by electricity under the world's first electrical execution law,
Speaker 1: New York State, January one, eighteen eighty nine. And like
Speaker 1: the history of this is really interesting. For instance, just
Speaker 1: how how did we come to the point where that
Speaker 1: was even on the table? Well? Why, why why use electricity? Well,
Speaker 1: apparently the key arguments for this were coming from prominent
Speaker 1: supporters in Buffalo, New York. And that's because Buffalo was
Speaker 1: really close to Niagara Falls and there was a lot
Speaker 1: of hydroelectric work going on there. The damn they began
Speaker 1: the damn there in six and so they considered themselves
Speaker 1: to be on the cutting edge of technology. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: it's like the Silicon Valley of the day. And uh
Speaker 1: and and so in particular, you have one Dr Albert
Speaker 1: Southwick who is lobbying, um with with New York state
Speaker 1: representatives for electrical execution. Why with the states sen It's crazy, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll be I mean yeah, I mean it sounds like,
Speaker 1: for instance, if Silicon Valley big shots were lobbying for
Speaker 1: execution by virtual reality or maybe streaming video today, right, Like,
Speaker 1: can you imagine when they're saying, hey, we got this technology,
Speaker 1: why aren't we using it to kill people? Right? Death
Speaker 1: by social media. Yeah so, but they had some core
Speaker 1: arguments for it. They said that, all right, this is
Speaker 1: a humanitarian advancement. Forget hanging. Hanging. You know, hanging has
Speaker 1: all of these horrible associations with the past, particularly with
Speaker 1: America's past. Let's move beyond it. Let's use something new
Speaker 1: and exciting to kill people that has less weight to it.
Speaker 1: I think there was inherently some sense that low tech
Speaker 1: things were less desirable. Like it wasn't It didn't even
Speaker 1: have to be that it caused less pain. It was
Speaker 1: just more dignified to be killed by this apparatus of
Speaker 1: science and technology rather than the creepy, low fi image
Speaker 1: of a hangman's noose. And they also added that hey,
Speaker 1: if you're if you're gonna hang somebody, you might something
Speaker 1: might go wrong. You have an accidental beheading that takes place,
Speaker 1: or if you're actually doing a beheading, there's could be
Speaker 1: an arterial spray. This is hygienically sound. It is very
Speaker 1: signed to the electric chairs. The electric chair is the hygienic,
Speaker 1: scientifically sound way to go. And since electricity had been
Speaker 1: observed to kill rapidly and seemingly painlessly, it seemed like
Speaker 1: like another perfect way to avoid any messy accidents during
Speaker 1: an execution. Don't worry about the you know, something going
Speaker 1: wrong with the way you've you've presented the gallows. This way,
Speaker 1: you just turn. It's basically the off switch for life.
Speaker 1: Do you think they believed these arguments they were making
Speaker 1: or is this just completely mercenary trying to get I
Speaker 1: don't know. I get the sense that they believed it
Speaker 1: in the sense that you know, there was data supported.
Speaker 1: I mean, even just reading over what I what I
Speaker 1: just heard. It's like, if you're if you're already on
Speaker 1: board with the idea that criminals must be executed, then
Speaker 1: the most humane argument within that mindset is, well, let's
Speaker 1: make it painless, Let's make it quick, let's make it hygienic,
Speaker 1: Let's do all of those things that makes it less
Speaker 1: less horrible. You know, Well, was anybody at this point
Speaker 1: still trying to hang on to the sacredness of electricity?
Speaker 1: They actually were, and that and that, and this is
Speaker 1: interesting because yeah, there were there were others who were
Speaker 1: saying that this was a degrading use of miraculous energy.
Speaker 1: Kind of I guess, kind of like the last vestige
Speaker 1: of that earlier enthusiasm for it. There her people think, oh,
Speaker 1: you're gonna kill people with it. Now, that's too far.
Speaker 1: Now you've just really taken it into an unfortunate area.
Speaker 1: Even Edison was against it. The man who executed you know,
Speaker 1: numerous animals during the War of currents. Uh, they'ugh not
Speaker 1: Topsy the elephant, apparently, despite some popular coverage to the
Speaker 1: to the contrary. Huh. Yeah. So anyway, it was a
Speaker 1: year before the conviction um of Kimbler was finally upheld.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Kimmler had a lot of litigation and appeals, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean this was a kind of a big case.
Speaker 1: It went all the way to the U. S. Supreme
Speaker 1: Court in eighteen ninety and a lot of the litigation
Speaker 1: was presumed to come from Westinghouse Electric Company. Is they
Speaker 1: were displeased to know that their A C. Dynamos would
Speaker 1: be used in the execution, having been obtained by three
Speaker 1: prisons in New York State. So they were afraid of
Speaker 1: bad press for their electricity, and they paid this guy's
Speaker 1: legal bills to try to prevent it from from being
Speaker 1: used to kill him. Yeah. I mean it's kind of
Speaker 1: like we create this product, this podcast, what have we
Speaker 1: found out that prisons had subscribed to the podcast in
Speaker 1: order to use it in some sort of sonic death
Speaker 1: device for execution, or to take in another direct. And uh,
Speaker 1: you know, you have musicians such as Trent Resner who
Speaker 1: were outraged when they found out that their music might
Speaker 1: be used by interrogators in certain situations, or rock musicians
Speaker 1: who have politicians they don't like using their music at
Speaker 1: campaign rallies. Exactly, you've created this thing for one purpose,
Speaker 1: and here someone's gonna use it for this this this
Speaker 1: rather despicable purpose over here. And then there's this No
Speaker 1: one knew exactly how electricity would kill him? What a
Speaker 1: crazy controversy. Yeah, they didn't know what electricity did they
Speaker 1: due to the body to cause death. They knew it
Speaker 1: could cause death, right, but what did it do? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, we knew that, we observed it happened.
Speaker 1: We knew that happened. But but experts were split on
Speaker 1: exactly what would happen um to kimler Um. Doctors knew
Speaker 1: that the body uti utilized electricity in the nervous system.
Speaker 1: Some physicians even employed it again as a curative measure,
Speaker 1: as we've discussed, some even taking the view that the
Speaker 1: body was like a battery that needed regular recharging. That
Speaker 1: goes back to the medical electricity talked about shock me
Speaker 1: make me better. Yeah so, and then other experiments had
Speaker 1: proven electricity's ability to revive dying dogs uh and and
Speaker 1: as well as some of these uh these experiences would
Speaker 1: just saw that like the animation of tissue. Uh so,
Speaker 1: perhaps he would enter into a state of what they
Speaker 1: referred to as electrical asphyxia, where he would be rolled
Speaker 1: out to the morgue while still alive and presumably like
Speaker 1: screaming inwardly. Um. They weren't sure if if he would dive,
Speaker 1: destroyed vital organs, if he would asphyxiate, And then they
Speaker 1: didn't know if they should use a C or d C.
Speaker 1: At first, they ended up going with the former, as
Speaker 1: it was considered more dangerous a wasp that would strike
Speaker 1: multiple times rather than a beasting. So they constructed the
Speaker 1: A C dynamo at Auburn prison uh in order so
Speaker 1: that it would deliver a maximum of six and eight volts.
Speaker 1: They killed a horse with it. They killed a cow
Speaker 1: with it to test it out. Thousand volts would kill
Speaker 1: a horse, five hundred would kill a dog. So surely
Speaker 1: the full uh eight would kill a man without any difficulty. Okay,
Speaker 1: So what actually happened when it came time for the execution?
Speaker 1: All right, so they turned it on. They gave him
Speaker 1: seventeen seconds of current, and he was pronounced dead. And
Speaker 1: they think, all right, we've done it. That was that
Speaker 1: sounds that seems perfectly reasonable. Seventeen quick seconds of powerful
Speaker 1: current kills him dead. But then then a witness protests,
Speaker 1: stands up and says, he is alive. I see him breathing,
Speaker 1: and indeed his chest was moving. He was still alive.
Speaker 1: So they panicked and they had to turn it back
Speaker 1: on man, and this is where things start getting horrible.
Speaker 1: Blood pours from the ruptured capillaries in his face, an
Speaker 1: unpleasant smell builds up, like I think it was described
Speaker 1: as worse than unpleasant. Yeah, yeah, And we'll read some
Speaker 1: of the quotes from from individuals who witnessed this. Yes,
Speaker 1: like a stinch of singed hair and flesh and all told.
Speaker 1: At the end of it, Kimla received eight minutes of current,
Speaker 1: and they later realized that the electrodes didn't make full contact,
Speaker 1: so he didn't receive the full power of the current.
Speaker 1: It so they were just shocking him at a lower voltage. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh yeah, I think back to the breathing on
Speaker 1: the frog. Remember breathing that the moisture of one's breath
Speaker 1: under the frog, and it was a uh enabled you know,
Speaker 1: full contact to be made with the electrodes on the frog.
Speaker 1: Similar here, they say if Kimmeler had sweated more, or
Speaker 1: if they had greased him up or something beforehand, that
Speaker 1: would have made the difference. But instead they just end
Speaker 1: up roasting him at a slower rate with with a
Speaker 1: lower voltage. So yet again this sounds kind of like
Speaker 1: the definition of cruel and unusual punishment. Yeah, exactly the
Speaker 1: opposite of everything they'd preached about a swift, hygienic death.
Speaker 1: In fact, we have a few quotes from it. What
Speaker 1: we're gonna read from me now, and this is from
Speaker 1: Kimmeler's death by torture. That's the headline, New York Herald,
Speaker 1: August seven. Men accustomed to every form of suffering, grew
Speaker 1: faint as the awful spectacle was unfolded before their eyes.
Speaker 1: Those who stood the site were filled with awes. They
Speaker 1: saw the effects of this most potent of fluids, which
Speaker 1: is only partly understood by those who have studied it
Speaker 1: most faithfully, as it slowly disintegrated the fiber and tissues
Speaker 1: of the body through which it passed. The heaving of
Speaker 1: a chest, which had it had been promised, would be
Speaker 1: stilled in an instant piece as soon as the circuit
Speaker 1: was completed, the foaming of the mouth, the bloody sweat,
Speaker 1: the writhing shoulders, and all the other signs of life.
Speaker 1: Horrible as these were, they were made infinitely more horrible
Speaker 1: by the premature removal of the electrodes and the subsequent
Speaker 1: replacing of them for not seconds, but minutes, until the
Speaker 1: room was filled with the odor of burning flesh, and
Speaker 1: strong men fainted and fell like logs upon the floor.
Speaker 1: And all this done in the name of science. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the quite a spectacle, um and again quite the opposite
Speaker 1: of what everyone was promised with this. And then of
Speaker 1: course they ended up doing an autopsy. They found that
Speaker 1: the small blood vessels between the brain and the skull,
Speaker 1: that that all the blood was like charcoil, charcoal, but
Speaker 1: not burned ash, but the fluid had been evaporated in
Speaker 1: the skull itself been badly burned. So yeah, all these
Speaker 1: gory details made it out into the press, and uh,
Speaker 1: it was kind of a pr nightmare for for the
Speaker 1: electric chairs first entry into the modern world. And I
Speaker 1: think Nicholas Reddick is making the point in his paper
Speaker 1: that this is sort of this is the death blow
Speaker 1: to the to the sacred spirituality of electricity, all of
Speaker 1: the mystery, all of the metaphorical sense in which it embodied, virility, fertility, spirituality,
Speaker 1: the great unknown, the power of the universe, the power
Speaker 1: of God. Whatever it was that you thought was imbued
Speaker 1: in this force, it was kind of all gone by
Speaker 1: this point. Yeah, we've taken this divine energy and we've
Speaker 1: imperfectly tamed it. We've tamed it, but then in trying
Speaker 1: to utilize it, utilize it poorly and just the most
Speaker 1: base purposes. Yeah, and and again needlessly. It's not like
Speaker 1: we didn't know how to execute people beforehand. I mean, again,
Speaker 1: you can certainly give credence to these cases that we
Speaker 1: needed more modern, hygienic uh and dependable means of of
Speaker 1: carrying out these sentences, but it's it's hard to argue
Speaker 1: that too much in the face of of the results
Speaker 1: there those those those minutes and minutes of roasting electrocution, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it also, Reddick points out, wasn't just the this use,
Speaker 1: this barbaric use of electricity. It was also something about
Speaker 1: the familiarity, you know. He comments that by the eighteen nineties,
Speaker 1: as electricity came more and more into our lives, he says, quote,
Speaker 1: it was becoming increasingly difficult to talk about transcendental matters
Speaker 1: in electrical terms. And I think that's really saying something
Speaker 1: to me that suggests that there's something, uh, we we
Speaker 1: sort of alluded to this earlier, but about holiness itself.
Speaker 1: The concept of holiness and mystery. Uh, that is the
Speaker 1: same as strangeness and otherness and familiarity with the thing
Speaker 1: is death to a sense of the holy and the
Speaker 1: sacred about it. Yeah. Again, if it's cooking your toast,
Speaker 1: it's hard to find the divine in it. Of course,
Speaker 1: then again, I often think about how that's a lot
Speaker 1: of what we do on this podcast is exactly challenging
Speaker 1: that impulse discovering the divine Exactly. I often want to
Speaker 1: take a thing that's familiar and make it strange again,
Speaker 1: to revisit something that we we might think of as
Speaker 1: being utterly mundane and rediscover what's fascinating and very unsettling
Speaker 1: and weird about it. Absolutely so, maybe in these episodes
Speaker 1: we've helped you find something strange and fascinating about that
Speaker 1: very force that cooks your Reggo waffles. Hopefully so this
Speaker 1: episode not paid for by EGO. Yeah, so there you
Speaker 1: have it. Um, the role of the transformer is complete. Um,
Speaker 1: the spiritual has become the mundane. And if you want
Speaker 1: to check out more about this topic, be sure to
Speaker 1: check out the landing paid for this episode of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind dot Com will include links to
Speaker 1: related content, links out to that how stuff Works article
Speaker 1: about electricity, to some of the sources we've used in
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