Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stop
Speaker 1: works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: By names Robert Brown 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
Speaker 1: school 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. So,
Speaker 1: if you haven't heard part one before you listen to
Speaker 1: this episodes, you should probably go back and listen to
Speaker 1: part one. But if you don't care about coming in
Speaker 1: the middle of a conversation then and you're here, then
Speaker 1: that's fine. Yeah, I mean a lot of this stuff,
Speaker 1: A lot of the episodes that we discuss are gonna
Speaker 1: you know, they can stand on their own, but we
Speaker 1: do highly encourage you to check out part one. Okay,
Speaker 1: So I'm going to start in a kind of counterintuitive
Speaker 1: place for this journey of psychic electricity, and that's with
Speaker 1: the English writer and poet Thomas Hardy. So you probably
Speaker 1: remember him from from writing extremely depressing novels that you
Speaker 1: had to read in high school, you know, the Return
Speaker 1: of the Native Mayor of castor Bridge. What did you
Speaker 1: have to read in high school? I guess it was
Speaker 1: castor Bridge. That's the one that I feel like I'm
Speaker 1: most familiar with. Yeah, or you might have write his
Speaker 1: poems like The Darkling Thrush, which is one of my favorites,
Speaker 1: and it contains these lines as one of the stanzas
Speaker 1: of the Darkling Thrush. The land's sharp features seemed to
Speaker 1: be the centuries corpse out linked his crypt, the cloudy canopy,
Speaker 1: the wind, his death lament, the ancient pulse of germ
Speaker 1: and birth was shrunk and hard and dry, and every
Speaker 1: spirit upon the earth seemed fervorless. As I it's kind
Speaker 1: of bleak, Yeah, But so he's talking about something that
Speaker 1: happened in the past century. Yeah. I think one of
Speaker 1: the early names of this poem, before it was called
Speaker 1: The Darkling Thrush, was something like the Corpse of the
Speaker 1: Past century. Or something like that. Uh. And this was
Speaker 1: written around nine and that, you know, the end of
Speaker 1: the eight hundred, So so what happened what happened to
Speaker 1: our fervor during the century he spoke of. I don't
Speaker 1: know exactly what dissipation of spirit Hardy was referring to,
Speaker 1: but here's a stab that that I'd like to think
Speaker 1: had something to do with it. It might have had
Speaker 1: something to do with electricity. And so there's a great
Speaker 1: Thomas Hardy quote that is it's quoted in one of
Speaker 1: 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. What
Speaker 1: was illuminated was the outdated nous of the old beliefs,
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. Uh. Now, putting aside the you know,
Speaker 1: racist and colonial assumptions of the metaphor hard he uses
Speaker 1: there that is an interesting observation in line with what
Speaker 1: we observed in the techno religion for the Masses episode.
Speaker 1: There is something, uh, though though it has often been
Speaker 1: sur mounted by various cults and people of varying theologies,
Speaker 1: there is an inherent tension for some reason between technology
Speaker 1: and religious belief. Yeah, because especially with an old religious belief,
Speaker 1: there's often that sense that it's set in stone and
Speaker 1: and this is the uh. You know, that this is
Speaker 1: the truth that is buried in the earth for all
Speaker 1: future generations to live by. And what gives it its
Speaker 1: power is its ancient otherness. Right? And then what do
Speaker 1: you do when a new otherness centers the picture? When
Speaker 1: when suddenly we we know more about the what was
Speaker 1: magic in the past, when we know we can explain
Speaker 1: electricity or at least harness it in ways that we
Speaker 1: had no ability to in the days that the tablets
Speaker 1: were here were carved. Yeah, and so an observation that
Speaker 1: Ruddick makes in his paper is that he's commenting that
Speaker 1: by the eighteen nineties, as electricity came more and more
Speaker 1: into our lives, you know, you you might have hundreds
Speaker 1: of different interactions with electrical appliances and services throughout the day,
Speaker 1: it was becoming increasingly difficult, he says, to talk about
Speaker 1: transcendental matters in electrical terms. But before we get to
Speaker 1: the sort of the death of the sacred ghost of
Speaker 1: electricity in the the sort of mundane ravages of modern life,
Speaker 1: I want to go back to a period where there
Speaker 1: was still much weirdness and wonder to be had. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're still we're still in the time period of the
Speaker 1: the experiments discussed previously where we're beginning to understand electricity
Speaker 1: a little bit. We're exploring its properties, we're also exploring
Speaker 1: the you know, it's dramatic side, it's entertaining side, as
Speaker 1: well as it's it's dangerous and lethal side. Absolutely. So, uh,
Speaker 1: I want to talk about a scientist who has been
Speaker 1: largely forgotten despite the fact that he was one of
Speaker 1: the most famous and celebrated scientists of the entire world
Speaker 1: in his day, and his influence on modern scientific thought
Speaker 1: is just absolutely incalculable. And that that is the scientist
Speaker 1: Alexander von Humboldt. Now, I recently read a book about
Speaker 1: Alexander von Humboldt. It was the Invention of Nature Alexander
Speaker 1: von Humboldt's New World by Andrea Wolf. This is a
Speaker 1: great book, by the way, but it talks about this
Speaker 1: strange fact that he's been mostly forgotten about, despite the
Speaker 1: fact that he was responsible, for example, for the scientific
Speaker 1: concept of ecology, thinking about natural environments not as sort
Speaker 1: of a god established domain of unchanging character, but as
Speaker 1: complex dynamic systems that vary with climate and resources and
Speaker 1: are subject to dramatic change even by altering a small variable.
Speaker 1: If it's a if it's sort of a keystone variable.
Speaker 1: But I want to communicate the spirit of how scientific
Speaker 1: experiments in animal electricity were continuing uh in the in
Speaker 1: the late seventeen hundreds in early eighteen hundreds by looking
Speaker 1: at a couple of events in Alexander von Humboldt's life.
Speaker 1: So in the seventeen nineties, Alexander von humbold actually became
Speaker 1: friends with the rock star German poet Johann wolf King
Speaker 1: Von Guta and Gerta was the poet who, in his
Speaker 1: version of Faust wrote, what dazzles for the moment spends
Speaker 1: its spirit? What's genuine shall posterity inherit? I always like
Speaker 1: that cinnamon, and I think it also sort of applies
Speaker 1: to some of the showmanship about electricity that we oh
Speaker 1: yeah mentioned in the last episode. Yeah, very much so,
Speaker 1: because I mean, at this point electricity has been a
Speaker 1: show and electricity has often involved uh, dead animals, Yeah,
Speaker 1: to varying degrees. So so caten in mind as we
Speaker 1: move forward. But Gota wasn't just a poet in his day.
Speaker 1: He was also a really dedicated scientist, and one year
Speaker 1: in the seventeen nineties, about three years after von Humboldt
Speaker 1: and and Gota had first visited, they spent time together
Speaker 1: in a city called Yugana to talk through scientific ideas
Speaker 1: and conduct this long series of experiments on animal electricity,
Speaker 1: which Humboldt was writing a book about at the time.
Speaker 1: So he was interested in that that that animal electricity,
Speaker 1: that that idea that there was a specific intrinsic electrical
Speaker 1: system to the body. Yeah, and as we discussed in
Speaker 1: the last episode, it was later proved not true that
Speaker 1: animal electricity is a different kind of electricity than the
Speaker 1: external electricity that's in lightning and everything else. But but
Speaker 1: he was still he was trying to suss it out.
Speaker 1: He was trying to figure out what was going on
Speaker 1: with the role of electricity in the bodies of animals.
Speaker 1: So I want to read a quote from a section
Speaker 1: of of Andrea Wolf's book where she says that Humboldt
Speaker 1: and go To had been hanging out when there there's
Speaker 1: a violent thunderstorm on this on this spring day, and
Speaker 1: after the after humbold had been out taking in, you know,
Speaker 1: atmospheric readings while he was watching the lightning happened during
Speaker 1: the storm. The next day, he finds out that a
Speaker 1: farmer and his wife nearby had been killed by the
Speaker 1: lightning in the storm. So Wolf writes, he rushed over
Speaker 1: to obtain their corpses, to obtain exactly Yeah, he just
Speaker 1: obtained them, yeah, uh, she writes, laying out their bodies
Speaker 1: on the table in the round anatomy tower. He analyzed
Speaker 1: everything the man's leg bones looked as if they had
Speaker 1: been pierced by shotgun pellets, Humboldt noted excitedly, but the
Speaker 1: worst damage was to the genitals. At first, he thought
Speaker 1: the pubic hare might have been ignited and caused the burns,
Speaker 1: but dismissed the idea when he saw the couple's unharmed armpits.
Speaker 1: Despite the increasingly putrid smell of death and burned flesh,
Speaker 1: Humboldt enjoyed every minute of this gruesome investigation. I cannot
Speaker 1: exist without experiments, he said. So, so Alexander von Homeboldt
Speaker 1: just shows up on the doorstep following the tragic event
Speaker 1: and says, Hey, I'm Alexander von Homeboldt. I'm kind of
Speaker 1: a big deal. I need to see the gruesomely distorted
Speaker 1: bodies of the lightning strike victims. The funniest thing is
Speaker 1: this was before he was a really big deal. This
Speaker 1: is when he was an upcoming big deal. But yeah,
Speaker 1: he I need to examine the scorched genitals for science.
Speaker 1: But Wolf also writes about one of Humboldt's favorite experiments
Speaker 1: that he ever performed, which was when he and Gerta
Speaker 1: were together experimenting on frog legs. This is uh reve
Speaker 1: visitting the themes of Luigi Galvani right, who saw the
Speaker 1: frog legs dance when stimulated by the electricity of the
Speaker 1: lightning Wolf writes. One morning, Humbldt placed a frog's leg
Speaker 1: on a glass plate and connected its nerves and several
Speaker 1: muscles 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. But the breath of life, even though the
Speaker 1: breath is actually just delivering moisture that helps to complete
Speaker 1: the circuit. Now, another funny thing is not being there
Speaker 1: and uh and knowing exactly what happened. It's hard to
Speaker 1: even determine if Humboldt's interpretation of what actually caused the
Speaker 1: twitching is correct. Yeah, I mean it sounds sensible because
Speaker 1: it also plays into into the example we'll get to
Speaker 1: at the end of this podcast regarding the electric chair. Now,
Speaker 1: I want to mention one more example of electricity bioelectricity
Speaker 1: experiments carried out by Humboldt, and this one was later
Speaker 1: when he was in South America doing experiments and traveling
Speaker 1: through the rainforest with with someone named I'm a boon Plan.
Speaker 1: Bon 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 a town called Calaboso, that there
Speaker 1: were a bunch of shallow pools in the area that
Speaker 1: were filled with electric eels, and he Humble got very
Speaker 1: excited 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: do you catch it? Especially since, as as Wolf notes,
Speaker 1: the eels in these pools were buried in the mud
Speaker 1: at the bottom of the pools. So how do you
Speaker 1: get them out? Well, some of the locals came up
Speaker 1: with an idea. They said, we'll round up a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of horses. And so they rounded up a bunch
Speaker 1: of wild horses from the nearby prairies, and they drove
Speaker 1: the herd into the pond. So they had these wild
Speaker 1: horses 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 bon Plant dissected some
Speaker 1: of the animals, they endured violent shocks themselves. And then
Speaker 1: 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 an eel, standing
Speaker 1: on clay, touching an eel, 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, of view of electricity. Yeah, and I get
Speaker 1: the impression from this book that Humblet 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 Brando 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 Bigley 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 Brando.
Speaker 1: So Um. According to Ed Bigley Jr. Uh, he gets
Speaker 1: he gets a call to come over to h to
Speaker 1: the Brando household. Uh, you didn't know what it's going
Speaker 1: to be about it. He drives over, presumably in an
Speaker 1: electric car, right and uh he comes inside and Brando
Speaker 1: asked him and says, hey, could I get a bunch
Speaker 1: of electric eels and power the house? And uh, you know,
Speaker 1: And so Ed Begley Jr. He's the he's the bicycle
Speaker 1: to power your water heater kind of guy. Yeah, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's you know, he's versed in alternative energy to a
Speaker 1: certain extent, and it's kind of a you know, you
Speaker 1: know it has often lent his voice to some of
Speaker 1: those causes. So, yeah, Brando figured he was the guy
Speaker 1: to ask, and so Bagley has kind of taken aback.
Speaker 1: But he says, you know, I don't think that would
Speaker 1: be possible. I don't think it would work. And indeed,
Speaker 1: it's difficult to try and empower anything with an electric
Speaker 1: eel because for one thing, they well, for a number
Speaker 1: of reasons. But you know, you'll see aquariums where they
Speaker 1: have like a little Christmas tree, and the electric eel
Speaker 1: will cause the tree to light up periodically. But the
Speaker 1: eel does not admit, you know, a continuous amount of voltage.
Speaker 1: It's just you know, quick shocks here and there. So
Speaker 1: it would be it would be one of those things
Speaker 1: where if you try to engineer a system that uses
Speaker 1: the electric eels, you quickly out engineer yourself and realize
Speaker 1: you're better off using some other form. But but anyway,
Speaker 1: so Baguley says, I don't think that is gonna work,
Speaker 1: and Brando just kind of gets grumpy and says, it's
Speaker 1: always no with you. So I love I love that
Speaker 1: story because it's it's just it's just a great brand
Speaker 1: of story and a great electric eel story. Did he
Speaker 1: point a gun at him? I tell me true. Maybe
Speaker 1: I don't know, But at any rate, it was like
Speaker 1: the audience was over at that point. It's like, all right, Bagley,
Speaker 1: you've turned me down here on this electric eel business
Speaker 1: that I had a lot of hope built up for.
Speaker 1: So just go, just go, don't tell me not to
Speaker 1: any more of my disappointed the King of Spain or something. Well, so,
Speaker 1: as as you can see from the stuff we've been
Speaker 1: talking about, experiments about electricity didn't stop in the mid
Speaker 1: seventeen hundreds, where we were talking about a bunch of
Speaker 1: the experiments in the last episode. They continued into the
Speaker 1: turn of the century, the early eighteen hundreds, and uh,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't It also wasn't just the known scientists
Speaker 1: of the age who experimented with electricity. One of the
Speaker 1: weirdest stories I came across as a story about Percy
Speaker 1: Shelly Old P. B. Shelley, the poet, you know, the
Speaker 1: author of what might you best know him from? Maybe Ozymandias? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would imagine that's probably the most famous look on
Speaker 1: my work, Seeing Mighty and Despair. But actually you might
Speaker 1: know him best for being the husband of Mary Shelley,
Speaker 1: who wrote Frankenstein. And we talked in the last episode
Speaker 1: about the the the impression made on Mary Shelley by
Speaker 1: the lecturers in electricity and how that might have led
Speaker 1: to ideas in Frankenstein. But but her own husband might
Speaker 1: have also inspired some of these scientific terrors, because there
Speaker 1: is a story that when he was young, Percy Shelley
Speaker 1: was learning about electricity during his schooling and his tutoring,
Speaker 1: and he wanted to experiment. He wanted to do some
Speaker 1: electrical experiments, and he ended up just mainly. These experiments
Speaker 1: were shocking his sisters, and so his sister Helen wrote, quote,
Speaker 1: when my brother commenced his studies in chemistry and practiced
Speaker 1: electricity on us, I confessed my pleasure, and it was
Speaker 1: entirely negatived by terror at its effects. Whenever he came
Speaker 1: to me with his piece of folded brown packing paper
Speaker 1: under his arm and a bit of wire and a bottle,
Speaker 1: my heart would sink with fear at his approach, but
Speaker 1: shame kept me silent, and with as many others as
Speaker 1: he could collect, we replaced hand in hand round the
Speaker 1: nursery table to be electrified. But when a suggestion was
Speaker 1: made that chillblaines were to be cured by this means,
Speaker 1: my terror overwhelmed all other feelings, and the expression of
Speaker 1: it released me from all future annoyance. It sounds a
Speaker 1: little bit like a young monster there, YEA, yeah, it
Speaker 1: kind of does, or at least a mad scientist. But
Speaker 1: again it kind of this is still the age of
Speaker 1: 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 yaz out. Yeah. But the
Speaker 1: pretense here that that the electricity and the shocks could
Speaker 1: be used to treat Chillblaines does sort of tie into
Speaker 1: something that we should talk about, which is the role
Speaker 1: of electricity in supposed uh medical practices and even magical
Speaker 1: beliefs about healing. Yeah, this is a fascinating area because
Speaker 1: I mean, on one hand, there there's the obvious role
Speaker 1: that electricity plays in modern medicine and in the advent
Speaker 1: of modern medicine that you think you might think about defibrillation, yeah,
Speaker 1: or even so stuff is simple as being able to
Speaker 1: use electric lighting during a surgical procedure, or electrical coudroization
Speaker 1: tools during surgery and stuff of that nature. Like, it
Speaker 1: really ends up playing a role in so many different
Speaker 1: thoughtts of modern medicine. But yet the idea that electricity
Speaker 1: in and of itself has a healing property to it um,
Speaker 1: this ends up carrying a great deal of cultural weight
Speaker 1: during the time. Sure, well, you don't have to invoke
Speaker 1: medical principles to make the assumption that there's some kind
Speaker 1: of power in the electrical fire that has has healing
Speaker 1: potential over the body. I mean, there's always been the
Speaker 1: idea of forces of nature like light and fire as
Speaker 1: cleansing agent, and I think for many people electricity took
Speaker 1: on some of these same elements. There was one claim
Speaker 1: I read in a book called Witchcraft, Confessions and Accusations
Speaker 1: edited by Mary Douglas. And according to a claim in
Speaker 1: this book, in one case, uh the Bongwa people of
Speaker 1: Cameroon took a child who was believed to be a witch,
Speaker 1: and what they did to cure the child's witchcraft was
Speaker 1: sent the child into an electrified region of the country
Speaker 1: in the south, under the reasoning that a few months
Speaker 1: months of exposure to electricity would cure the child's witchcraft. Well,
Speaker 1: it seems seems plausible. I mean because because as we've
Speaker 1: touched on before, like throughout history, humans have been encountering
Speaker 1: electricity on one form, in one form or the other.
Speaker 1: If not lightning on the hillside, then presumably just the
Speaker 1: static discharge that occurs when you shock somebody. Uh, And
Speaker 1: this was something that that interest at me. I cannot
Speaker 1: but wonder why we don't see more examples, uh, particularly
Speaker 1: related to this interpersonal discharge of static electricity at least
Speaker 1: is a way to explain certain folk beliefs and magical
Speaker 1: superstitious beliefs, you know, because at heart, that's a very
Speaker 1: I mean, it's the same principle as uh, as as
Speaker 1: two individuals touching each other while dissecting an electric fish. Right,
Speaker 1: I mean you're there's this spark, sometimes visible spark between
Speaker 1: two people. Well, yeah, that is. It's the literal embodiment
Speaker 1: in reality of a thing that's often imagined in magical thinking.
Speaker 1: In magical thinking, there's often this sense of of supernatural
Speaker 1: contagion where you can pass the properties of one thing
Speaker 1: onto another thing by touching, and that that's generally not true.
Speaker 1: It's not true that you can gain the virility of
Speaker 1: a bore by touching the boar's tusk to your head
Speaker 1: or something. But you can confer electric charge by touching,
Speaker 1: and this is demonstrated over and over in these public
Speaker 1: lectures we talked about in the last episode. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: it's also interesting. I want to mention that the according
Speaker 1: to the Electrostatic Society of America. Um, that's the thing.
Speaker 1: And this was actually mentioned in a blog post at
Speaker 1: in probable dot com U in Probable research the Ignoble
Speaker 1: Prize organizing body. Yeah. They they pointed out that the
Speaker 1: quote this is from the electro Sex Society of America quote.
Speaker 1: Electro Statics is an exciting area of science as its
Speaker 1: most basic scientific questions remain unknown and highly controversial. What yeah,
Speaker 1: And yet its consequences are widespread. For example, the uh
Speaker 1: the identity of the species transferred to generate charge when
Speaker 1: materials 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 chilly afternoon
Speaker 1: of the playground. Fascinating but of course, the treatment of
Speaker 1: witchcraft I mentioned earlier is not the only spiritually significant
Speaker 1: use of electricity as a healing agent, right, that's right. Um.
Speaker 1: We have a few different examples to cover here, but
Speaker 1: one of the more interesting is that of John Wesley. Okay, Wesley,
Speaker 1: the founder of Methodism, founder of Methodism, Christian theologian. If
Speaker 1: you visit, um, I believe, yes, Savannah, here in our
Speaker 1: own native state of Georgia, there is a statue of
Speaker 1: of John Wesley there. Huh yeah, it kind of looks like, snap,
Speaker 1: why in Savannah? What did he do in Savannah? He
Speaker 1: visited there for a while. Okay, yeah he was. He
Speaker 1: was in Georgia for a little bit, then he went back. Okay,
Speaker 1: So it's kind of like how in Montrose, Switzerland, there's
Speaker 1: the statue of Freddie murk Cury. Oh there is? Yeah,
Speaker 1: there is? Which which version of Freddie Mercury. He's doing
Speaker 1: a great dancing post. It's great statue. I highly recommended
Speaker 1: if you're in Switzerland. Okay, all right, So you're probably wondering, Okay,
Speaker 1: why John Wesley? Why did John Wesley? Uh? Why why
Speaker 1: is this guy interested in electric has never heard of
Speaker 1: him having anything to do with electricity or science in general. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because prior prior to this, aside from knowing that there
Speaker 1: is the founder of Methodism, like, the only other real
Speaker 1: touchstone for me was that in seventeen sixty eight he
Speaker 1: argued that quote giving up of witchcraft is in effect
Speaker 1: the giving up of the Bible. Getting down to this
Speaker 1: playing into this idea that a lot of witchcraft persecution
Speaker 1: and the horrible links we went to to obtain witchcraft
Speaker 1: confessions from accused witches, that a lot of that amounted
Speaker 1: to this need to provide expert testimony of the physical
Speaker 1: existence of a demonic afterlife and therefore the implied physical
Speaker 1: existence of of God. Oh yeah, well, I mean, the
Speaker 1: Bible acknowledges the existence of witchcraft and all kinds of
Speaker 1: folk magic beliefs. So if to to sort of say,
Speaker 1: we believe in the Bible, but we don't believe in
Speaker 1: all the folk magic seems inconsistent. There's an aporia there, right,
Speaker 1: as so Socrates might point out. Indeed, So yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's weird to think here's this guy who who sees
Speaker 1: witchcraft as a reality that cannot be denied, and yet
Speaker 1: he's also caught up in uh. This uh, this this
Speaker 1: curiosity about electricity of all things. And apparently he became
Speaker 1: interested in electricity in the late seventeen forties. Okay, so
Speaker 1: this is right after the Laden Jar. Yeah, very much,
Speaker 1: in the wake of mainstream fascination with electrical demonstrations and
Speaker 1: the supposed therapeutic applications of electricity, like the medical electricity
Speaker 1: we were we mentioned earlier. Yeah, exactly, the idea that oh, here,
Speaker 1: here's a shock that'll cure what else you Uh, it's appealed,
Speaker 1: though the point had reached even the lower levels of society,
Speaker 1: and these are the very people that Wesley sought to
Speaker 1: reach with methodism. And uh. This whole uh interconnectivity of
Speaker 1: of Wesley's you know, spiritual purpose if you will, and
Speaker 1: his interest in electricity. It's apparently an area that historians
Speaker 1: have only recently begun to really dig into. Uh. And
Speaker 1: that's according to again electrical historian Um extraordinaire Pala Bertucci,
Speaker 1: who wrote a wonderful article titled Revealing Sparks John Wesley
Speaker 1: and the Religious Utility of Electrical Healing. Bertuccia describes him
Speaker 1: as an electrical supporter who combined moral instruction and natural philosophy,
Speaker 1: and of course he wasn't the only person to do
Speaker 1: this at the time, but but Wesley demonstrated the healing
Speaker 1: power of electricity to further methodism, not electricity, not science, certainly, right,
Speaker 1: So this was yet another religious technology technology and service
Speaker 1: of religious or spiritual goals exactly like it plays right
Speaker 1: into our into some of the issues we discussed in
Speaker 1: the Techno Religion episodes. He used electricity itself as a
Speaker 1: demonstration of God's power both as a benevolent force and
Speaker 1: is a damning force, you know, so both sides of
Speaker 1: the of the God coin right, the wrathful God and
Speaker 1: the benevolent God. Yeah, she writes 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. Uh, the confessed, which revealed the demonic, which
Speaker 1: in turn revealed the divine. And here he is revealing
Speaker 1: the powers of electricity in order to reveal the divine
Speaker 1: to the onlooker. Demon in one hand, spark of electricity
Speaker 1: in the other. That's great, that's great, you know. I
Speaker 1: also can't help but think of the touch the screen
Speaker 1: era of TV 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 evangelists, and and in doing so,
Speaker 1: you're gonna feel, you know, some of that static discharge
Speaker 1: on the screen. Right. So, to what extent is that
Speaker 1: playing into uh, you know, religious electricity in a more
Speaker 1: modern sense. That's interesting, I almost that makes me wonder
Speaker 1: if that scene in Poultergeist is parodying the spiritual power
Speaker 1: 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: the it makes me think about a principle that often
Speaker 1: gets brought up on another podcast. Do you ever listen
Speaker 1: to 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 something. Principle,
Speaker 1: um so a a fake treatment that doesn't actually treat
Speaker 1: people is more likely to be accepted as effective if
Speaker 1: it at least causes some kind of noticeable effect, even
Speaker 1: if it doesn't cure you, even if it's discomfort, right
Speaker 1: then you feel like, oh, it's it's doing something. I
Speaker 1: feel it. I feel the shock, Yeah, exactly, And that's
Speaker 1: 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 happen that was real and it was
Speaker 1: powerful and pain sort of in our minds, I think
Speaker 1: pain equals reality. We except when something painful happens that
Speaker 1: that something important 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: where we're coming back to him now, one James Graham,
Speaker 1: who was a Scottish believe he was born in Edinburgh.
Speaker 1: He was a Scottish quack doctor essentially who was he
Speaker 1: called himself a hygienist I think, and a and a
Speaker 1: sex therapist in some way, who offered various vaguely defined
Speaker 1: electrical treatments on on how to get people's sex lives
Speaker 1: going again. He had some famous institutions. One's called the
Speaker 1: Temple of Health, another one is called the Temple of Hymen,
Speaker 1: And oh god, what was the deal with these things? Okay,
Speaker 1: so first of all, he would he would apparently often
Speaker 1: travel around and promote all this stuff, accompanied by the
Speaker 1: beautiful young Goddess of health. Oh yeah, he had he
Speaker 1: had like a train of attractive ladies to help him
Speaker 1: promote 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 uh, more
Speaker 1: expensive products that are sell 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 wait, what was
Speaker 1: the ointment? It was nervous ethereal Balsamo. 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. Hyeah. It it reminds
Speaker 1: me a little bit. My wife once shot some pictures
Speaker 1: of the inside of Kenny Rogers house when you lived
Speaker 1: up I think in around Athens, Georgie. He had a
Speaker 1: house he 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 in
Speaker 1: the bedroom. Uh. And and that's the kind of thing
Speaker 1: you would get out of the celestial bed. Well, you
Speaker 1: know what they say in the Gambler, The best you
Speaker 1: can hope for is to die in your sleep. So yeah,
Speaker 1: but there you go. And if you're gonna dine your sleep,
Speaker 1: you might as well be a lot of electrically powered
Speaker 1: flashing lights. Uh there as well. Yeah, you gotta know
Speaker 1: when to hold them. Yeah. One more interesting comment on
Speaker 1: Graham from from Bertucci actually she writes that, uh he
Speaker 1: he didn't. Now, in contrast to some of these other
Speaker 1: electrical healers, which would shock you for for health, Graham
Speaker 1: quote exploited the fashion enjoyed by electricity as a further
Speaker 1: extravaganza for his healing center. The largest electrical apparatus in
Speaker 1: the world, he called it was on display rather than
Speaker 1: in use in the temple, where electrical vapors wrapped up
Speaker 1: the patients. And this is a quote from his materials,
Speaker 1: gently pervading the whole system with a copious tide of
Speaker 1: that celestial fire, fully impregnated with the purest, most subtle,
Speaker 1: and balmiest parts of medicines which are extracted by and
Speaker 1: flows softly into the blood and nervous system with the
Speaker 1: electric fluid or restorative ethereal essences. I don't know to
Speaker 1: what extent he was using any kind of electrical technology.
Speaker 1: He was given them some electrical vapors, aside from using
Speaker 1: electrical lights on the guestlestial bed. I don't think you've
Speaker 1: organ music organ music, yeah, but otherwise he has to
Speaker 1: be the biggest scam artist by far that we've encountered
Speaker 1: in these episodes. Now, again, that was around one we'd
Speaker 1: have to wait a good century though, for the electric
Speaker 1: vibrator to become reality and actual use of electricity to
Speaker 1: directly deliver uh sexual pleasure. And we got it finally
Speaker 1: thanks to Dr J. Mortimer Granville. Now, previously one had
Speaker 1: to rely on George Taylor's eighteen sixty nine steam powered
Speaker 1: manipulator or are the hand cranked Macua's blood circulator, all
Speaker 1: in the name of treating supposed bouts of hysteria with
Speaker 1: a healthy dose of orgasm. Yeah, and these are not
Speaker 1: products that you would necessarily go to the store and
Speaker 1: buy to use at your own leisure in the product
Speaker 1: in the privacy of your own home, but more something
Speaker 1: that would kind of be prescribed for you by your doctor,
Speaker 1: which sounds like it takes some of the happiness out
Speaker 1: of it. Yes, I would think. So. Okay, So now
Speaker 1: we we've talked about electricity in the body strange healing characteristics,
Speaker 1: but also we need to talk about electricity the occult,
Speaker 1: the esoteric, and the spiritual in the sense of spiritualism,
Speaker 1: because John 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 world.
Speaker 1: And they detailed lots of plans for him for sort
Speaker 1: of ungainly projects that he got his followers to carry
Speaker 1: out on his half, including the construction of the new motor.
Speaker 1: That's the thing we talked about. There was a there
Speaker 1: was a vaguely described machine Messiah to harold the dawn
Speaker 1: of a new age by being a perpetual motion machine
Speaker 1: and changing the human of of the past into the
Speaker 1: new man. Yeah. I think we described it before. Is
Speaker 1: looking like a like the like the a of a
Speaker 1: dalek and a coffee table bread and produced offspring. This
Speaker 1: would be. That's pretty much it. But he also had
Speaker 1: some interesting interactions with the science of electricity, and this
Speaker 1: would have been later than what we were talking about before,
Speaker 1: almost a century later, so that this would be in
Speaker 1: the eighteen fifties. In the Remarkable Life of John Murray
Speaker 1: Spear agitator for the spirit land. The author John Benedict
Speaker 1: Bauscher mentioned several cases where the beliefs of the mid
Speaker 1: nineteenth century spiritualists in America included spiritual significance of electricity.
Speaker 1: So one one associate of spirits, who was a medium
Speaker 1: and spiritual healer named Elizabeth French, had been quote an
Speaker 1: electrical experiment or ever since she was young, trying to
Speaker 1: revive victims of lightning strikes and drowning by the action
Speaker 1: of certain rude batteries in the construction of which I
Speaker 1: even then a child endowed with strong tendencies in that direction,
Speaker 1: was myself the mechanic. That was Elizabeth French speaking there
Speaker 1: at the end. Uh And she she later on partnered
Speaker 1: with So yeah, so she's trying to use batteries to
Speaker 1: bring people back from the dead. Pretty good. She partners
Speaker 1: with Spear for electrical experiments in augmenting spiritual potential. So
Speaker 1: communicating with the spirit world. They're saying, maybe we can
Speaker 1: use electricity to amp up somebody's ability to communicate with
Speaker 1: the spirits. And this included Spear trying to control and
Speaker 1: influence the spirits with the aid of a suit of
Speaker 1: armor made out of copper and zinc batteries. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: we were talking about this. We're not sure if this
Speaker 1: is the exactly the same UM 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. A battery of a wizard suit
Speaker 1: made out of batteries. It's too good and spirits. He
Speaker 1: didn't stop there. He also proposed creating telepathic towers. I
Speaker 1: can't remember if we mentioned this in the other episode,
Speaker 1: but he wanted to create a worldwide network of telepathic
Speaker 1: towers which would each quote constitute a and focus of
Speaker 1: magnetic and electric influences. And this would enable a sort
Speaker 1: of broadband spirit medium channeling UH and worldwide communication. So
Speaker 1: they'd have operators who are spirit mediums who'd use the
Speaker 1: electricity generated by the towers to channel the voices of
Speaker 1: the spirits back and forth between each other 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 is
Speaker 1: even at this point in history, we're starting to get
Speaker 1: a much better understanding of how to harness electricity for
Speaker 1: utterly monday and purposes, just how to make the machines
Speaker 1: that make our lives more convenient. Yeah, Like I feel
Speaker 1: like we're 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 mask off. 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 a good right, It is not old man Bulvovsky, right,
Speaker 1: But speaking of people named Blevotsky. 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 want a little more on this
Speaker 1: particular area. This again, this last sort of last thrust
Speaker 1: of electrical spirit is m So what does good Rick
Speaker 1: Clarke have to say about the electric theology, Well, he
Speaker 1: discusses a few different individuals. He discusses leading up theosophy
Speaker 1: proponent Madam Helena Blavatsky, whose belief in electrics, who believed
Speaker 1: in electricity as quote an animating soul like force or fluid.
Speaker 1: Now we've seen that kind of idea before, and of
Speaker 1: course she also preached the power of the third eye
Speaker 1: and the piney ole glands role in modern man is
Speaker 1: an atrophy, the vestige of this organ of spiritual vision.
Speaker 1: So just to give that's just to give you a
Speaker 1: brief idea about the the about theosophy and what kind
Speaker 1: of worldview she was immersed in. Yeah, if you're not
Speaker 1: familiar with esotericism, these are I don't know what you
Speaker 1: might call them. They're sort of alternative religions in in
Speaker 1: the history of Western culture. Yeah, new religious movements for sure,
Speaker 1: but theosophy one that maybe help didn't hold on as
Speaker 1: well as some of the others that that cropped up.
Speaker 1: Um he good Goodrick Clark also points to a scholar,
Speaker 1: Ernst dens as H, having identified the quote theology of
Speaker 1: electricity amongst a group of eighteenth century Swabian theosophers. He
Speaker 1: claimed that the quote discovery of electricity and the simultaneous
Speaker 1: discovery of magnetic and galvanic phenomena were accompanied by a
Speaker 1: most significant change in the image of God, and that
Speaker 1: it led to a quote completely new understanding of the
Speaker 1: relation of body and soul, of spirit and matter. Now,
Speaker 1: how does that play out? What does that look like?
Speaker 1: Basically it means, I mean, basically what we're looking at
Speaker 1: is all this new information about electricity is coming out,
Speaker 1: and and there are individuals who are instead of saying,
Speaker 1: I wonder how that casts new line of my understanding,
Speaker 1: or they're thinking, oh, well, that's something that exists separately
Speaker 1: from the religious understanding of the world. They're like, no,
Speaker 1: this is the path. Let's pour all of our our
Speaker 1: spiritual gusto into this new electrical format. So if the
Speaker 1: if the electricity is the frontier of future science, this
Speaker 1: could be the kind of religious thinking that says, no,
Speaker 1: we're not going to ground our religious ideas in the past,
Speaker 1: We're going to ground them in the future. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's kind of I mean, this is
Speaker 1: the time of a huge change. And what do you
Speaker 1: do when the world changes and you have either an
Speaker 1: old set of beliefs or you sort of cling to
Speaker 1: that mode of belief like you have to. You either
Speaker 1: have to say no, that's bs, keep that away from
Speaker 1: me and keep it out of the school books, or
Speaker 1: you say, yes, bring it here, let me incorporate it. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, and we've looked at some plenty of examples
Speaker 1: where religion's ability to incorporate new scientific understanding it is
Speaker 1: certainly a healthy thing. It doesn't always um lead to
Speaker 1: sort of fringe belief systems. Well, it's funny now that
Speaker 1: we think about electricity as just utterly uncontroversial religiously right,
Speaker 1: I mean, there are so many scientific ideas that do
Speaker 1: come into conflict with with religious ideas. Ideas about, for example,
Speaker 1: I don't know, cosmology and the origins the universe, ideas
Speaker 1: about biological evolution, ideas of geology conflicting with the literal
Speaker 1: reading of some holy books. Uh, you see these pretty often.
Speaker 1: But electricity seems just utterly theologically neutral. But that hasn't
Speaker 1: always been the case. Yeah, I mean it's in the
Speaker 1: same way that it's difficult for us to imagine this
Speaker 1: this time when electricity was new and exciting. It's hard
Speaker 1: to imagine it's it's newness and it's and its excitingness, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, having an impact on modes of religious belief.
Speaker 1: Another example that Nicholas Goodrick Clark draws on is that
Speaker 1: of Austrian occultist, racial political theorist, former monk and also
Speaker 1: the founder of ariosophy as well as a pretty notable
Speaker 1: anti might. Uh. This is Lens van Levenfells lived seventy
Speaker 1: four to nineteen fifty four, and he saw electricity as
Speaker 1: quote a measure of spiritual evolution unquote that was granted
Speaker 1: only to arians, Christ and other spiritual intermediaries. That's pretty
Speaker 1: nasty yeah, he was not a decent guy. Like, this
Speaker 1: is a guy that when when Hitler rose to power,
Speaker 1: he was just kissing up immediately apparently and m Hitler
Speaker 1: just didn't really have time for him. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah he was it was not a pleasant guy.
Speaker 1: So as far as we know, Hitler didn't buy into
Speaker 1: his electrical theological position. Now, he seemed from based on
Speaker 1: what I was reading here, he really had no interest
Speaker 1: in it. But but but LANs was one of these
Speaker 1: guys who was like, yes, what you're preaching is fits
Speaker 1: perfectly with with what I'm selling. Uh, And And what
Speaker 1: I take it all to mean is that the simultaneous
Speaker 1: advancement of supernatural belief and scientific understanding can result in
Speaker 1: some some very weird, seemingly to the outsider weird modes
Speaker 1: of belief, but also maybe exciting modes of belief. Okay,
Speaker 1: but here I think it's time to arrive at at
Speaker 1: the final stage of the transformer stepped down of the
Speaker 1: spiritual power of electricity, the metaphor you mentioned in the
Speaker 1: last episode, because something starts to happen, especially in the
Speaker 1: second half of the nineteenth century, we might say where
Speaker 1: electricity is losing a lot of its psychic, spiritual and
Speaker 1: symbolic power. It's becoming less and less incorporated into I
Speaker 1: don't know, transcendental language and metaphor. It's becoming less a
Speaker 1: source of mystery and wonder and more something that resonates
Speaker 1: with what Thomas Hardy said the quote we talked about
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the episode. It highlights something very
Speaker 1: natural and mundane in contrast to that classical sense of
Speaker 1: holy otherness. Yeah, it's two am at the nightclub. Lawns
Speaker 1: and Spear are both still dancing desperately to keep the
Speaker 1: 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 seventy nine,
Speaker 1: and you have just received your copy of the Scientific
Speaker 1: Americans Supplement, and you're leafing through it, and it features
Speaker 1: on one page an invention by one M. Defoy, which
Speaker 1: was an electric horse bit. Oh, so, the bit being
Speaker 1: the part that goes in the horse's mouth. It was
Speaker 1: a carriage armed with an electromagnetic apparatus that could send
Speaker 1: electric current through metal wires embedded in the reins, and
Speaker 1: if it opened the circuit to the current, it would
Speaker 1: travel down the reins and through the bit in the
Speaker 1: horse's mouth, giving the horse an electric shock through its
Speaker 1: mouth and teeth. So, according to this article, it was
Speaker 1: the invention was considered a success because it managed to
Speaker 1: calm down several quote vicious and stubborn horses. Is uh
Speaker 1: so that they's long enough that they could be shod.
Speaker 1: They were trying to, you know, get some shoes on
Speaker 1: these horses. They wouldn't cooperate, So zap him in the mouth.
Speaker 1: The superintendent of the Parisian cab company, M. Camille wrote,
Speaker 1: quote one horse that was to be shod went so
Speaker 1: far as to lie down and roll over and over
Speaker 1: on the ground, all the while struggling, defending himself and
Speaker 1: fighting against everything. Nothing could subdue him. I then had
Speaker 1: recourse to m. Defoy's apparatus, and on the first trial,
Speaker 1: much to my surprise, the feet of the intractable horse
Speaker 1: were lifted without any great difficulty. And on the second
Speaker 1: trial it was as easy to shoot him as if
Speaker 1: he 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 is 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. Uh, there are shock
Speaker 1: collars for animals. So I mean using electricity to control
Speaker 1: and tame wild animal instincts is something that is now
Speaker 1: a grand tradition. It's not a very pretty one. We
Speaker 1: don't like to think about it. It It doesn't seem like
Speaker 1: a nice thing to do, but it's a thing we
Speaker 1: do with the electric fire that used to be such
Speaker 1: a cosmic mystery. Yeah. And you know, also when it
Speaker 1: comes to taming horses, you know, not not every method
Speaker 1: is that uh you know, lovable and horse whispery. But
Speaker 1: this begins to get at something that that really comes
Speaker 1: through in an essay we mentioned in the last episode
Speaker 1: and we're going to refer to again now by a
Speaker 1: Nicholas Ruddick called Life and Death by Electricity in eighteen ninety,
Speaker 1: the transfiguration of William Kimmler, Like we mentioned, in the
Speaker 1: last episode. This is a really great paper. It's worth reading.
Speaker 1: It's a very interesting history of what was happening with
Speaker 1: the power of electricity in the late eighteen hundreds. Well,
Speaker 1: he points to an eighteen nineties Scientific American article that
Speaker 1: it does a great job of just laying out just
Speaker 1: how much electricity is in the average person's life. It
Speaker 1: wakes him up in the morning, it cooks their breakfast.
Speaker 1: It's on their right into work. It's all over work
Speaker 1: when they go to church, their electric bells or an
Speaker 1: electric oregon, and on up into your death. When you die,
Speaker 1: an electric apparatus is used to carve your name into
Speaker 1: a tombstone. So it we we give this enormous power
Speaker 1: over our lives. Right, It's used in medicine. It can kill,
Speaker 1: it can it can be a communication technology. And yet
Speaker 1: at the same time it has lost its spiritual and
Speaker 1: symbolic luster, hasn't it. Yeah, Like the poetry is seeping
Speaker 1: out of it, you know, and uh, and and a
Speaker 1: lot of it just has to do with the fact
Speaker 1: that maybe all the poetic things that can be said
Speaker 1: about it have been said. Like the language that we
Speaker 1: used to describe it as getting a bit dull, even
Speaker 1: even if it seems exciting to re explore it from
Speaker 1: a modern perspective. And then yeah, it's also just everywhere,
Speaker 1: Like how mystical can it be? If it cooks your toast,
Speaker 1: how mystical can it be? Um, you know if it's
Speaker 1: if it's just lighting a light bulb while you read something,
Speaker 1: and I think to put a cherry on this. Uh.
Speaker 1: This transformation into an utterly mundane and dirty, down in
Speaker 1: the mud kind of force of nature was when it
Speaker 1: was finally used in illegal execution. Yes, which again brings
Speaker 1: us back to William Kimler, first man executed by electricity
Speaker 1: under the world's first electrical execution law, New York State,
Speaker 1: January one, eighteen eighty nine. And like, the history of
Speaker 1: this is really interesting. For instance, just how how did
Speaker 1: we come to the point where that was even on
Speaker 1: the table? Well? Why why why use electricity? Well, apparently
Speaker 1: the key arguments for this were coming from prominent supporters
Speaker 1: in Buffalo, New York. And that's because Buffalo was really
Speaker 1: close to Niagara Falls, and there was a lot of
Speaker 1: hydroelectric work going on there. The damn that 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 was lobbying, um with with New York state
Speaker 1: representatives for electrical execution. Why with the state sent 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 where they're saying, Hey, we got this technology,
Speaker 1: why aren't we you going it to kill people? Right?
Speaker 1: Death by social media? Yeah. So, but they had some
Speaker 1: core arguments for it. They said that, all right, this
Speaker 1: is a humanitarian advancement. Forget hanging. Hanging. You know, hanging
Speaker 1: has all of these horrible associations with the past, particularly
Speaker 1: with America's pass. Let's move beyond it. Let's use something
Speaker 1: new and exciting to kill people that has less weight
Speaker 1: to it. I think there was inherently some sense that
Speaker 1: low tech things were less desirable, Like it wasn't it
Speaker 1: didn't even have to be that it caused less pain.
Speaker 1: It was just more dignified to be killed by this
Speaker 1: apparatus of science and technology, rather than the creepy, low
Speaker 1: fi image of a hangman's news. Yea. And they also
Speaker 1: added that, hey, if you're if you're gonna hang somebody,
Speaker 1: you might something might go wrong. You have an accidental
Speaker 1: beheading that takes place, or if you're actually doing a beheading,
Speaker 1: there's could be an arterial spray. This is hygienically sound.
Speaker 1: It is very signed to the electric chair. The electric
Speaker 1: chair is the hygienic, scientifically sound way to go. And
Speaker 1: since electricity had been observed to kill rapidly and seemingly painlessly,
Speaker 1: it seemed like like another perfect way to avoid any
Speaker 1: messy accidents during an execution. Don't worry about the you know,
Speaker 1: something going wrong with the way you've you've you've presented
Speaker 1: the gallows. This way you just turn. It's basically the
Speaker 1: off switch for life. Do you think they believed these
Speaker 1: arguments they were making or is this just completely mercenary
Speaker 1: trying to get I don't know. I get the sense
Speaker 1: that they believed it in the sense that you know,
Speaker 1: there was data supported. I mean even just reading over
Speaker 1: what I what I just heard. It's like if you're
Speaker 1: if you're already on board with the idea that criminals
Speaker 1: must be executed, then the most humane argument within that
Speaker 1: mindset is, well, let's make it painless, let's make it quick,
Speaker 1: let's make it hygienic, Let's do all of those things
Speaker 1: that makes it less less horrible. You know, Well, was
Speaker 1: anybody at this point still trying to hang on to
Speaker 1: the sacredness of electricity? They actually were, and that and that,
Speaker 1: and this is interesting because yeah, there were there were
Speaker 1: others who were saying that this was a degrading use
Speaker 1: of miraculous energy. Kind of I guess kind of like
Speaker 1: the last of message of that earlier enthusiasm for it
Speaker 1: that her people think, oh, you're gonna kill people with it. Now,
Speaker 1: that's too far. Now, you've just really taken it into
Speaker 1: an unfortunate area. Even Edison was against it. The man
Speaker 1: who electrocuted, you know, numerous animals during the War of currents. Uh,
Speaker 1: they're not topsy the elephant, apparently, despite some popular coverage
Speaker 1: to the to the contrary. Huh. Yeah. So anyway, it
Speaker 1: was a year before the conviction um of Kimbler was
Speaker 1: finally upheld. Oh yeah, Kimmler had a lot of Litigation
Speaker 1: and Appeals, Right, yeah, yeah, I mean this was a
Speaker 1: kind of a big case. It went all the way
Speaker 1: to the U. S. Supreme Court in eighteen ninety and
Speaker 1: a lot of the litigation was presumed to come from
Speaker 1: Westinghouse Electric Company. Is they were displeased to know that
Speaker 1: their A C. Dynamos would be used in the execution,
Speaker 1: having been obtained by three prisons in New York State.
Speaker 1: So they were afraid of bad press for their electricity,
Speaker 1: and they paid this guy's legal bills to try to
Speaker 1: prevent it from from being used to kill him. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's kind of like, we create this product,
Speaker 1: this podcast, what have we found out that prisons had
Speaker 1: subscribed to the podcast in order to use it in
Speaker 1: some sort of sonic death device for execution, or to
Speaker 1: take in another direction. You know, we have musicians such
Speaker 1: as Trent Resner who were outraged when they found out
Speaker 1: that their music might be used by interrogators in certain situations,
Speaker 1: or rock musicians who have politicians they don't like using
Speaker 1: their music at campaign rallies. Exactly, You've created this thing
Speaker 1: for one purpose, and here someone's gonna use it for
Speaker 1: this this this rather despicable purpose. Over here, and then
Speaker 1: there's this No one knew exactly how electricity would kill him.
Speaker 1: Oh what a crazy controversy. Yeah, they didn't know what
Speaker 1: electricity did the due to the body to cause death.
Speaker 1: They knew it could cause death, right, but what did
Speaker 1: it do? Yeah? I mean yeah, we knew that, we
Speaker 1: observed it happened. We knew that happened. But but experts
Speaker 1: were split on exactly what would happen um to kimmeler Um.
Speaker 1: Doctors and knew that the body uti utilized electricity in
Speaker 1: the nervous system. Some physicians even employed it again as
Speaker 1: a curative measure, as we've discussed, some even taking the
Speaker 1: view that the body was like a battery that needed
Speaker 1: regular recharging. That goes back to the medical electricity we
Speaker 1: talked about, Shock me, make me better. Yeah. So, and
Speaker 1: then other experiments had proven electricity's ability to revive dying dogs.
Speaker 1: Uh and and as well as some of these uh
Speaker 1: these experiments we just solve that like the animation of tissue.
Speaker 1: Uh So, perhaps he would enter into a state of
Speaker 1: what they referred to as electrical asphyxia, where he would
Speaker 1: be rolled out to the morgue while still alive and
Speaker 1: presumably like screaming inwardly. Um. They weren't sure if if
Speaker 1: he would die destroyed vital organs, if he would asphyxiate,
Speaker 1: And then they didn't know if they should use a
Speaker 1: C or DC. At first, they ended up going with
Speaker 1: the former, as it was considered more dangerous a wasp
Speaker 1: that would strike multiple times rather than a beasting. So
Speaker 1: they constructed the A C dynamo at Auburn Prison UH
Speaker 1: in order so that it would deliver a maximum of
Speaker 1: six hundred and eighty volts. They killed a horse with it.
Speaker 1: They killed a cow with it to test it out.
Speaker 1: Thousand volts would kill a horse, five hundred would kill
Speaker 1: a dog, so surely the full UH eighty would kill
Speaker 1: a man without any difficulty. Okay, So what actually happened
Speaker 1: when it came time for the execution? All right, So
Speaker 1: they turned it on. They gave him seventeen seconds of
Speaker 1: current and he was pronounced dead. And they think, all right,
Speaker 1: we've done it. That was that sounds that seems perfectly reasonable.
Speaker 1: Seventeen quick seconds of powerful current kills him dead. But
Speaker 1: then a witness protests, stands up and says, he is alive.
Speaker 1: I see him breathing and indeed his chest was moving.
Speaker 1: He was still alive, so they panicked and they had
Speaker 1: to turn it back on. And this is where things
Speaker 1: started getting horrible. Blood pours from the ruptured capillaries in
Speaker 1: his face, an unpleasant smell builds up, like I think
Speaker 1: it was described as worse than unpleasant. Yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: we'll read some of the quotes from from individuals who
Speaker 1: witness this. Yes, like a stench of singed hair and
Speaker 1: flesh and all told. At the end of it, Kimler
Speaker 1: received eight minutes of current, and they later realized that
Speaker 1: the electrodes didn't make full contact, so he didn't receive
Speaker 1: the full power of the current, so they were just
Speaker 1: shocking him at a lower voltage. Yeah, and uh yeah,
Speaker 1: I think back to the breathing on the frog. Remember
Speaker 1: breathing that the moisture of one's breath under the frog,
Speaker 1: and it was enabled, you know, full contact to be
Speaker 1: made with the electrodes on the frog. Similar here, they
Speaker 1: say if Kimmeler had sweated more, or if they had
Speaker 1: greased him up or something beforehand, that would have made
Speaker 1: the difference. But instead they just end up roasting him
Speaker 1: at a slower rate with with a lower voltage. So
Speaker 1: yet again, this sounds kind of like the definition of
Speaker 1: cruel and unusual punishment. Yeah, exactly the opposite of everything
Speaker 1: they preached about. A swift, hygienic death. In fact, we
Speaker 1: have a few quotes from it. We're gonna read from
Speaker 1: me now, and this is from Kimmeler's Death by torture.
Speaker 1: That's the headline, New York, Harold August out of eight nine,
Speaker 1: men accustomed to every form of suffering, grew faint as
Speaker 1: the awful spectacle was unfolded before their eyes. Those who
Speaker 1: stood the site were filled with awe as they saw
Speaker 1: the effects of this most potent of fluids, which is
Speaker 1: only partly understood by those who have studied it most faithfully,
Speaker 1: as it slowly disintegrated the fiber and tissues of the
Speaker 1: body through which it passed. The heaving of a chest, which,
Speaker 1: had it had been promised, would be stilled in an
Speaker 1: instant piece as soon as the circuit was completed, the
Speaker 1: foaming of the mouth, the bloody sweat, the wriothing shoulders,
Speaker 1: and all the other signs of life. Horrible as these were,
Speaker 1: they were made infinitely more horrible by the premature removal
Speaker 1: of the electrodes and the subsequent replacing of them for
Speaker 1: not seconds but minutes, until the room was filled with
Speaker 1: the odor of burning flesh, and strong men fainted and
Speaker 1: fell like logs upon the floor. And all this done
Speaker 1: in the name of science. Yes, quite a spectacle and
Speaker 1: again quite the opposite of what everyone was promised with this.
Speaker 1: And then of course they ended up doing an autopsy.
Speaker 1: They found that the small blood vessels between the brain
Speaker 1: and the skull, that that all the blood was like charcoil, charcoal,
Speaker 1: but not burned ash, but the fluid had been evaporated,
Speaker 1: and the skull itself been badly burned. So yeah, all
Speaker 1: these 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
Speaker 1: embodied virility, fertility, spirituality, the great unknown, the power of
Speaker 1: the universe, the power of God, whatever it was that
Speaker 1: you thought was imbued in this force. It was kind
Speaker 1: of all gone by this point. Yeah, we've taken this
Speaker 1: divine energy and we've like imperfectly tamed it. We've tamed it,
Speaker 1: but then in trying to utilize it, utilize it poorly
Speaker 1: and our just the most base purposes. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: again needlessly. It's not like we didn't know how to
Speaker 1: execute people beforehand. I mean again, you can certainly give
Speaker 1: credence to these cases that we needed more modern, hygienic
Speaker 1: uh and dependable means of of carrying out these sentences.
Speaker 1: But it's it's hard to argue that too much in
Speaker 1: the face of of the results there, those those those
Speaker 1: minutes and minutes of roasting electrocution. Yeah, but it also,
Speaker 1: Reddick points out, wasn't just the this use, this barbaric
Speaker 1: use of electricity. It was also something about the familiarity,
Speaker 1: you know. He comments that by the eighteen nineties, as
Speaker 1: 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 early, 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 at 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 Paige 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 house Stufforth article about electricity,
Speaker 1: to some of the sources we've used in researching the
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Speaker 1: any feedback about this episode or other recent episodes, or
Speaker 1: give us your favorite story or anecdote from the weird
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