From the Vault: Early Days Electric, Part 1

discovery slash invention. You know, since these episodes came out, we have read some interesting stuff about the language used to describe electricity, especially about this sort of spiritual gendered terms used to describe electrical power, that it was very often associated with, this kind of like hidden female goddess. I wish I had known about that at the time we recorded this. But so when when did this first

episode come out? This would have been February nine. Okay, so if you are ready, we're going to take a journey into the vault for Early Days of Electricity, Part one. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from How Stuff

Works dot Com. Now, therefore, you are hereby order, commanded and required to execute the said sentence upon him, the said William Kimmler, otherwise called John hort Upon some day within the week, commencing on Monday, the twenty four day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand, eight hundred and eighty nine, and within the walls of Auburn State Prison, or within the yard or enclosure adjoining there too by then, and they're causing to pass through

the body of him, the said William Kimmler, otherwise called John Hort, a current of electricity of sufficient intensity to cause death, and that the application of such current of electricity be continued until he, the said William Kimmler, otherwise called John Hort, be dead. Gentlemen, I wish you all good luck. I believe I'm going to a good place, and I'm ready to go. I only want to say that a great deal has been said about me that is untrue. I'm bad enough. It is cruel to make

me out worse. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And those were a couple of quotes concerning the death of one William Kemmler, the first person in the world ever to be legally executed by electric chair. That's right. This was eight nine, and as will roll out in these episodes this week on electricity, on the sort of the

weird history of electricity. Uh. This this episode, this electric execution kind of serves as like the the final thrashing moment, uh for the mysticism of electricity, the sort of supernatural zeal that surrounded it for so long. I remember when I was is growing up and I learned that the Constitution of the United States prohibited cruel and unusual punishment of criminals. And then I tried to reconcile that with

the fact that people were executed by electric chair. It was just hard to think of a stranger way to kill somebody on purpose. Yeah, And I think that will I think that will become clear to everyone, especially in the second episode when we get into the details of this, about how how this came to be on the table, how the argument was made that we should electrocute a prisoner, why it was a good idea, and and why it was the most modern and humane and hygienic thing to do. Yeah.

So this is going to be the first part of a two part series on the Weird History of electricity, as we've said, and we want to focus on a different side of the story of electricity than you probably learned about in school, So you've probably learned about things like Benjamin frank some of Benjamin Franklin's experiments and uh, and how the battery was invented and the voltaic pile and eventually Thomas Edison and uh and maybe if your teacher was pretty cool Nicola Tesla and the you know,

the current wars and and stuff like that. But what we want to look at a different side of how electricity came to be a fixture of of our society today, and not just the technological journey, but the spiritual journey. Yeah, exactly. Now. You know, if you want more on that technical journey, do go to how stuff works dot com and check out the article how electricity works. That's by Marshall Brain, William Harris and uh and me to a very limited extent.

I think I touched up that article at one point, but mostly it's it's Brain and Harriss. That could be a thank for that article. But do you have to add updates all the new things we've discovered about electricity in the past period. Basically, did punch up on it in the same way that you know a comedian might punch up a script. I like went in there and uh, made it a little more fun at the beginning and updated the references, but otherwise left all the technical information

as is. But but but yeah, this is about sort of This is the spiritual journey of of electricity, the cultural journey of electricity from from the realm of the magical to the realm of the mundane. And as I was thinking about these episodes actually this morning in the shower and on the drive into work, I kept thinking of it in terms of a transformer. Okay, like like you see,

you know, on with high tension wires. So the times, experiments and thoughts that we're going to present in this pair of podcast that they serve as a sort of transformer. So a transformer decreases the voltage of alternating current, turning a dangerous high voltage current that's capable of traveling long distances into a lower voltage current that's appropriate for just

mundane use in your home. So these events that we're going to discuss are are the inner workings of the cultural transformer that transformed electricity from a magical, holy, spiritual, otherworldly energy into something that you can just completely take

for granted every day of your life. Okay, Well, let's let's go back in time from the execution of William Kimmler and go all the way back to the earliest things we know about electricity, because before humans began to recognize and test electromagnetism as a force of physics, we were aware of it in several natural settings. For example, lightning that's pretty obvious, the shocks of electric fishes, and objects that naturally pulled toward one another through some invisible attractions.

So you might have a loadstone, or you know the name for magnetite, or or you might find that friction. You know, we're just rubbing one object against another could cause attraction. And before we had even the slightest idea what electricity was, its power found a way into our metaphors. We naturally recognized that there was something very mysterious and

important going on in these invisible forces. So, for example, in Plato's Mano dial log you know you remember this one may know, he compares socrates style of argument to a torpedo ray, which is it's a type of electric fish.

It's a genus of a ray that stuns prey and enemies with jolts of electric charge issued through the water and the point of the comparison is that Socrates stuns his interlocutors into a state of just utter perplexity by illuminating the aporia, the realization of an internal contradiction in one's worldview. Okay, in other words, he's dropping truth bombs, exactly,

stunning you with his truth bombs. That that's a very similar metaphor, I'd say, except they wouldn't say truth bombs because they didn't have bombs, but they did have electric fish. So so he's dropping truth torpedo fish. And just in a side, there are there are numerous electric fish out there. Uh. The the electric eel, which is more of an electric catfish, tends to get most of the press because it is

the most electric fish. But they are varying levels of elect trick fish out there, ranging from those that stunned their prey to those that use it as more of a communications sensory scenario. Yeah, and then there's a the Lease of my Leads. So this is a Greek philosopher known as one of the legendary Seven Wise Men, and he may have been the first human to really study electricity, and this would have been around a six hundred BC. Now,

he was the one who was doing friction experiments. He would take amber, so you know, fossilized tree resin the stuff from Jurassic Park. Yeah, well, hopefully there's an insect in there, something that kind of you know, crippled and and frozen in time. But he didn't come up with the idea to get its DNA out. No, he wasn't quite up to that level unless you want to view the resulting spark here is like the soul of the

bug leaving the amber. So he'd rubbed the amber with fur, and he was able to attract dust, feathers, and other lightweight objects. And so these were the first experiments with electrostatics, the study of of stationary electric charges or static electricity. In fact, the word electricity comes from the Greek electron, which means amber. Yeah, and what else the ancients knew

about electricity, It's it's hard to know. There. There is, of course, the quite famous Baghdad battery, which I think most archaeologists now think was not actually a battery, but the idea there was that there was a clay jar and then found near it were some metal elements that, if arranged in the right way, perhaps could have accumulated electric charge. I've read that archaeologist now just almost all agree that it was just a normal, ordinary storage jar.

It was not actually a battery. But one could hope, you know, you always, you always kind of think, wouldn't it be cool if there was some ancient person who who had knowledge way ahead of their time, and and it was just lost to history because I don't know, they didn't write it down or nobody would believe them. But people recognized there was a force at work. There was electromagnetic attraction, there was static discharge, shocks, sparks, arcs,

But what is it? People commonly spoke about it using sort of familiar but vague or incorrect points of comparison, Like Benjamin Franklin, in his letters and notes in the mid seventeen hundreds, spoke of the electrical fire. This was

a common point of comparison. People would speak of the fire that that carries the electrical fluid or in even in eighteen eighty nine, so much later, Thomas Edison, who worked with electricity in a technological sense, he could command electricity to do his bidding, Yet when asked what it was, he vaguely explained that electricity was a mode of motion. A system of vibrations. Yeah. I love this quote because apparently Edison was just out there pressing the flash. It

was like a formal engagement. I think he was having lunch with somebody at the Eiffel Tower and then somebody asked him, So, Edison, electricity is your thing, Tell me what is it? This is all really come up with. Yeah, And so even after people were performing experiments with electricity, even creating some electrical technologies that they were using for for purposes in uh in say, medicine, whether or not those purposes were quite on the money in terms of

improving people's health. People were using electricity, but they they didn't know what it was. Even in seventeen sixty seven, after a lot of these famous experiments like Benjamin Franklin's experiments, Joseph priestly described electricity as the youngest daughter of the sciences, which I think is kind of a sweet thing to say.

But what was the invisible fire? The electrical fire? It seemed it was a natural force of the world people understood, and yet it commanded a sense of mystery because it was invisible most of the time. It could act at a distance like a ghostly force, almost you know, the attraction between objects could be like a ghost reaching out through the ether to pull things toward one another. It could spark in the dark, and these were strange and mysterious phenomena. Even when people began to be able to

control it, they didn't know what it was. So the modern era of electrical research, I think is often traced back to the add to the creation of the Leyden jar. Right, So, the Leyden jar was a thing that was invented in the seventeen forties, usually cited a seventeen forty five or forty six, discovered independently by different people at different times. But the laden jar was what was then known as a condenser. But it's what we now call a capacitor.

So in simple terms, this is a device capable of storing and quickly discharging a large amount of electricity. Yeah, I've read the laden jar, particularly the one that was created by a Dutch instrument instrument makers Edwald von Kleist and Peter van mussen Bruck. This was basically a glass jar full of water and had a nail in it, and this was this was able to They were able

to use this to store an electrical charge. Yeah, they had the different metals on the inside it outside, and the differential between them could allow electric charge to accumulate and then you could discharge it. Yeah, and and pretty massively like apparently the first time muschen Brock used the jar, he basically shocked the hell out of himself. I mean didn't die, but tremendous amount of shock coming out of

this jar of water and nail. Well, but once you look at what this kind of jar is capable of delivering a shock like that, obviously some applications could come to mind, and they sure did come to some minds, especially the mind of one Benjamin Franklin. So you might

know about some of Benjamin Franklin's experiments with electricity. Probably the most famous story is one we only have second hand, actually, and that's the story about Franklin flying a kite tied to a key in a thunderstorm to demonstrate the electrical nature of lightning. You know, we only have been in me that Disney cartoon to really go by, I don't know what that is. What is how they did a

whole cartoon about Benjamin Franklin and the kaite. But there's this mouse that's really the brilliance behind Ben, and he's constantly urging Ben on. I mean, just in the Ben Franklin Actuly of it is that are acceptable for children to watch? You know? I think this story was propaganda invented by the kite maker's lobby. No, but seriously, so we don't know if this story actually happened or not.

It probably did. We get the story from Franklin's friend Joseph Priestley, who reported it later, so not from Franklin himself. But Franklin certainly did do lots of experiments on electricity. He invented the lightning rod, which is a rod mounted on top of a building that's connected to a wire leading down to a ground rod embedded in the earth.

And what this does is it gives the lightning a an avenue of travel from the top of the building to the ground, sort of a harmless path, rather than it going through the building, starting fires, potentially damaging people or structural elements. It's like the expressway going around a major population center so that the traffic doesn't have to go directly through town where it can cause all sorts

of havoc. Yeah, so you've probably heard about these things, but you might not have heard about Franklin's experiments in the electric slaughter of large fowl, a specifically the turkey, which I do want to just throw in really quickly that Franklin famously said that that he thought the turkey should be the national bird. Yeah, a lot of thanks

he gives it. He's like, national bird, you will die. Yeah, why I you would think he would maybe go out and get shocked the eagle, since he saw the eagle is this kind of horrible, moral, morally offensive bird as opposed to that the noble, slightly vain and preposterous but but courageous turkey. Yeah, well he what he did, see the eagle as a thief and a scavenger, right, yeah. Yeah, he's like, that's that's really not our in our spirit,

it should be the turkey. Well, I guess there's no law that says don't kill what you believe is noble, because he believed the turkey to be noable, but he also wanted to roast it with electrical current and eat its flesh. Well, I guess it's easier to obtain a turkey than an eagle. That's true. The eagles fight back. Yeah.

So on April nine, Franklin wrote to the scientist Peter Collinson a letter detailing the results of some recent experiments he'd done in electricity, and he ended with a strange proposal for a quote party of pleasure on the banks

of the Schookole the river. And so this is what he said, quote a turkey is to be killed for our dinners by the electric shock and roasted by the electric jack before a fire kindled by the electric bottle, when the healths of all the famous electricians in England, France and Germany are to be drank in electrified bumpers under the discharge of guns from the electric battery. Okay, first of all, what's an electric bumper? This is great?

So Franklin explains this in a marginal note. He says, an electrified bumper is a small, thin glass tumbler near filled with wine and electrified. This, when brought to the lips, gives a shock if the party be close shaved, and does not breathe on the liquor. Was that not factoring into modern exology that you think that would? I can

see that going over huge at trendy bars, right especially. Yeah, well, it seems like it would really go with that you know those trends in the nineteen I guess was at the fifties where they'd have electric movie seats that would shock you harm. Yeah, so they should have served drinks that would shock you as well. So anyway, Franklin's attempt to slaughter turkeys with the electric discharge of Leyden jars, which is what he was using, the laden jars we

talked about earlier. Those were his electric bottles. This happened in seventeen fifty, and it did not go so well. According to a letter from one William Watson to the Royal Society in London. Quote, he first made several attempts on fouls and found that two large thin glass jars guilt holding each about six gallons, and such as I mentioned I had employed in the last paper I laid before you upon this subject, were sufficient win fully charged

to kill common hens out right. But the turkeys, though thrown into violent convulsions and then lying as dead for some minutes, would recover in less than a quarter of an hour. So they had turkeys coming back from the dead. I mean, that's pretty messed up. Watson continues, however, having added three other such to the former too, and he's talking about the laden jars there, uh, though not fully charged.

He killed a turkey of about ten pounds weight and believes they would have killed a much larger He conceded as himself says that the birds killed in this manner eat uncommonly tender. You know, that's that's one heck of a yell p review. But but but I do appreciate the spirit of the thing that the spirit of the dinner was. We're just gonna have a completely electric dinner.

Everything from the death of the bird, to the cooking of the bird, to the the curious way that the drinks make your lips tinkle, everything is going to be powered by this this this divine energy that we are now harnessing with our modern science. Well, it almost sounds like the scientific counterpart to those spirit parties people would have where you know, where you'd have a seance and you have people doing all kinds of spiritualist games and demonstrations.

Here it's the other side of the coin. But they're using natural phenomena. So then again, how natural because all these mysteries remained, what is the electrical fire? Like? Ultimately,

they're playing with something that they don't completely understand. Um, you know, now with that, I have to add the caveat that had a lot of us today do not really completely understand the electricity that we're we're employing, right, We're we're fine to let it power our toaster ovens and cook our ego waffles, but we don't really We couldn't engineer electrical dynamos ourselves exactly, and of course that's

just part of modern life. And then it should also be stressed as well that we haven't completely filled in all the all the blanks, all the spaces in our understanding of electricity itself, umo are, which is kind of weird to imagine. Yeah, but back to the din Or party,

how did our host recover from this setback of reanimated turkeys? Well, yeah, you might think that the turkeys coming back from the dead would be enough to stun you into silence, But but Franklin was in for another shock, because he actually managed to shock himself so bad that he was knocked unconscious.

Watson writes later in this same letter that he says from this experiment, maybe seen the danger even under the greatest caution to the operator when making these experiments with large jars for it is not to be doubted but that several of these fully charged would as certainly by increasing them in proportion to the size, kill a man, as they before did the turkey. Alright, So here we see the two sides of the coin. Like. On one hand, electricity can be managed, It can be used, uh, it

can be played with. But it can also prove dangerous uh in high enough quantities. Certainly, and indeed electricity experiments could prove deadly if proper care was not taken. I to look at one example, which is gae Org Wilhelm Rickman. So he was a scientist, he was experimenting on electricity. He was conducting an experiment involving an insulated lightning rod during a storm in St. Petersburg in seventeen fifty three,

and Rickman got dead. He was struck dead in his lab by what has been described as a burst of ball lightning. I want to read out the account here, which is bizarre and fascinating. So this is a letter to the Pennsylvania Gazette from March seventeen fifty four explaining what happened to Rickman. It says the place for the experiment was a kind of gallery with its entrance toward the north, and a window towards the south. Whether the

window was open is not known. All that is certain is that near the window was a cupboard four ft long, on which replaced the electrical needle, and a vessel of water, partly filled with brass filings, over which came an iron bar about an inch thick and a foot long, fastened at the top to a wire which came down from the roof of the house through the gallery door. So they were sort of playing with death here. They're saying, Okay, we've got a lightning rod on the top of the house.

We've got it running down to an insulated wire in the room that suspended over this bowl, and so they continue. The professor, judging from the needle that the tempest was at a great distance, assured Mr soko Law that there was no danger, but there might be at the approach. So they don't think the storm's hit yet. But Mr Rickman stood about a foot from the bar, attentively observing

the needle. Soon after Mr Sokolow saw the machine being untouched, a globe of blue and whitish fire about four inches in diameter dart from the bar against Mr Rickman's forehead, who fell backwards without the least outcry, which is a creepy way to die, right, You'd expect a person to scream. Instead, he just silently falls right, And this is important to

keep in mind later. This sort of accidental electrical electrical death they were is just instantaneous, seemingly seemingly which is the scariest part based on what we finally found out can happen. But also towards the end of the same letter, what is the takeaway from this, Well, they learned some interesting things. Quote. The new doctrine of lightning is however, confirmed by this unhappy accident, and many lives may hereafter

be saved by the practice it teaches. Mr Rickman, being about to make experiments in the matter of lightning, had supported his rod and wires with electrics per se, which cut off their communication with the earth, and himself standing too near where the wire terminated, helped with his body

to complete that communication. So he formed the road. Instead of Franklin's model where the electric current takes the freeway bypass around the city, this went straight through the city and through a dude to the other side, basically through his living room. I so, so based on that, you might think, well, surely everyone's learning the lesson here. Electricity is dangerous. You should not employ it at your dinner parties,

you should not employ it in your parlor. And yet we see the trend go in the opposite Yeah, exactly the opposite way. So that was seventeen fifty three that that happened to Rickman and and at the same time, in the salons and galleries of Europe and North America, electricity was becoming the hottest bit of edutainment, uh, that there had ever been. So I want to draw now from mostly from a paper called Sparks in the Dark The Attraction of Electricity in the eighteenth Century by Paula Bertucci.

And she's been a really good source for us in these episodes of Several of her papers have been big sources of our research, and she's done a lot of work on the history of electricity, and these papers are great reads. Yeah, we'll make sure to link out to some of her materials on the landing page for this episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind dot Com, because yeah, she's is to be one of the forefront researchers and

historians on the history of electricity. Yeah, So coming back to these sparking salons, So, in the Enlightenment climate of eighteenth century Europe, public demonstrations of electrical phenomenon experiments became

really popular forms of entertainment among the wealthy. So if you walked into a Parisian salon in the mid seventeen hundreds, you might find a horde of socialites sitting silent in the dark, watching a lecturer on natural philosophy charge and or hanging atop a spike until it glowed, or they might give an audience member shocks of static electricity. And another funny thing you might see would be Benjamin Franklin sitting in the audience as this was his scene. This

was like, this was like the DC punk scene. But the Paris electricity scene is that much a scene one of the scenes that Franklin frequented, uh in the city. Okay, But so it was during the seventy forties that the educated audiences in Europe and North America really became familiar with the power of the electric fire. And it wasn't just Benjamin Franklin and his inner circle that we're showing off.

All the sparkling experiments. There was a whole generation of what what Bertucci calls itinerant lecturers, which is great because that makes me think of itinerant priests or itinerant evangelists traveling around spreading the gospel message, except in this case, this is the electricity gospel. So they would tour from place to place giving demonstrations. Uh, in an early incarnation

of what we might call edutainment. I would say, they would show off some sparks, show off some electromagnetic attraction, and they'd say, are you not edutane? Well, what are some examples of some of the demonstrations that they would roll out for the for the entertainment hungry population. Right, So one would be uh, having somebody touch in electrical apparatus and then you'd see their hair rise up. Or you could see somebody become electrically charged and then attract

small objects with one's hands. Or you could use electrostatic induction to make objects move for example, maybe maybe making bells ring or something. Or you could darken the room and show sparks jumping between objects, or electro luminescent glowing inside glass containers. Now the great thing about this I meagine a lot of people are thinking this is and from a modern perspective, you think of Mr Wizard, you

think of various various science shows. For me, I think Beakman. Yeah, for me, I'm also reminded of the sort of street festival they have for the World Science Festival in New York City every year, where kids go around, they go to different science booths and there's always at least one where they have some sort of electrical experiment going on. I mean it's electrical experiments lend themselves so well to to public, like it was in public displays, and we're

still into them to this day. Yes, absolutely. I mean it's important to notice how much of this was just spectacle. I don't know how much the average person was learning from these demonstrations and the salons, especially given how little the people lecturing probably knew about electricity. Like we said, they didn't know about electrons, yet, we didn't know what

the electrical fire was. There were a lot of suppositions, you might say, But but it's funny to imagine the level of confidence in the display and the spectacle of it versus what was actually probably misinformation being communicated to people. So the demonstrations really played to the senses. They had flashes of light, crackling noises, smells even sometimes like a sulfurous smell in the aftermath of things. A couple of

examples of people who would give these things. One was Jean Antoine Melas, who was a French physicist and instrument maker, and he would range experiments with chains of people holding hands who would be shocked in unison as the person at one end of the chain touched the rod or the inner surface of the laden jar, and the person at the other end touched the outer surface. And there's

something almost weirdly orgiastic about this, isn't there. Yeah, what reminds me of these these scenes of seances taking place more or less around the same pole, hands in a circle. Yeah, yeah, and and and all. All of this also reminds me of magic tricks, except in this case the magic is real, and the magic is a is a natural phenomenon that we don't have at this point, we don't have all the answers for, and thus still retains a lot of

its magical qualities. Yeah. Yeah, So, as much as these lecturers probably wanted to emphasize the scientific and natural nature of the electrical phenomenon people were observing. There is undoubtedly a very spiritual power to what people were experiencing at these demonstrations, if you know what I mean. A couple

other things that might be showed off. One one thing was medical electricity began to emerge in this period in the mid seventeen hundreds as the sort of useful incarnation of this force, which I mean, that's funny to imagine back then. But though the medical utility of the electrical fire was still debated, demonstrators began in this period to definitely offer therapeutic electrical shocks to people who sought them

for I guess primarily conditions of the nerves. Yeah, I mean, here's this electricity that has this kind of um, you know, magical quality to it already, you're definitely gonna feel it. So you wrap a little bit of healing hocus pocus language around it, and you have yourselves potentially one heck of a placebo there, right, Yeah. Yeah. And so there were a couple other things that Bertucci mentions that were often showed off. There were thunder houses and the the

Aurora flask. I love the idea of a thunder house. This is it was basically a demonstration that was sort of an ad for the lightning rod because it was a model house. So imagine a dollhouse then with a

lightning rod sticking out the top of it. Then the demonstrators would shock the house with electrical discharge, and if the rod was properly grounded, nothing would happen, but if the rod was ungrounded, a shock to the house would ignite gunpowder planted inside the dollhouse and cause an explosion. And then also there was a thing called the Aurora flask, which was a pear shaped glass bulb designed to simulate the luminous display of the Aurora borealis inside a container.

So that's a weird way that we could put this, this amazingly beautiful, vast, uh natural display inside a bottle, which is almost a metaphor for what these people were doing. You know, they were taking the most powerful and mysterious, huge grand forces of nature and capturing it and putting it in a bottle that you could look into and tap on the glass. Lightning in a bottle, And then all the way to our modern time where what is what is a light bulb but another form of lightning

in a bottle? And yet the most mundane thing imaginable. Yeah, And I think because partly because of all these demonstrations, people began to think of electricity as as sort of the the embodiment of all the force of the cosmos. So in the second half of the eighteenth century, people were beginning to explain all kinds of natural forces through the the electrical fire. So obviously lightning and thunder but people started to say, well, earthquakes, that's probably electricity too, Tornadoes,

whirlpools is all electricity. And Bertucci says, quote such demonstrations contributed to the construction of an electrical cosmos. Health, sickness, thunderstorm, earthquakes, and Aurora borealis all resulted from the motions of the electrical fire. Again taking on what sounds like kind of a spiritual aspect, it's almost like the the you know, the power and love of God that controls the motions

of all the spheres. Yeah, this sense that they're they're tapping into this this hidden network of energy that underlies all things. The kind of thing that I've seen, I've seen discussed in various uh you know, a cult or some sort of spiritual uh papers where they're talking about saying like they're being a chaos matrix manith reality, and if you can tap into that chaos matrix, then you have chaos chaos magic at your disposal. Like this is.

This is as if one were suddenly saying, hey, we found the chaos matrix and we can make the chaos magic fly from the tips of our fingers. Now, what is the D and D alignment of the electrical phantom? Is it chaotic evil or chaotic neutral? I think chaotic neutral. It's all, but it all depends on how you engage with it. Okay, now we're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, we're gonna hear about one

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get ten percent off your first purchase square Space. You should alright, we're back, Yes, so we're going to discuss here the work of one Stephen Gray. Now, Stephen Gray did plenty of experiments in electricity, right, yes, yeah, he was an English dier, the son of a dire Uh. He was an astronomer and uh, indeed, an electrical conduction pioneer. He's remembered for a number of discoveries and the various he experiments he conducted, uh uh, you know, showed how

electricity moves. But the most notable of these is his seventy one experiment, The Hanging Boy, which just a creepy name it is. And you can we'll try to include some links to some images of this, because there's some wonderful um schematics for what this looked like, which don't still don't capture the full majesty of what people saw, because it's just it really resonates with occult dramatics. Yeah, I mean, it's it's like something out of a Kin

Russell movie. I love that you make that comparison, because Ken Russell really captures this kind of sense of the electrical demonstrations, right, this this bizarre intersection of the magical and the scientific. Yeah, totally. So I'm going to try and present it to you as if you were showing up for a presentation of The Hanging Boy. Wait, so you're you're you're saying I've accepted an invitation to come view The Hanging Boy. Yes, yes, I'm that kind of

person you are. You know, you're you're one of the local You're in the local science community. You're you're interested in this kind of thing. There's something cool going on, so you're gonna go check it out. So you enter the private home of a of another upstanding member of the scientific community, and you come and you find that the furniture has been rearranged, the lighting has been dimmed, and everyone is gathered in the largest room of the

house for this very peculiar experiment. So you've been looking forward to it for weeks. You're making a lot of assumptions about me and my feelings towards the hanging boy. This is the biggest that this was a hit all over Europe. This is like finally getting to see cats or something, Right, what is it? Tell me? Okay, so the main event here is that a nine year old boy. Don't worry, it's just a local street urchin, and they've paid him for his participation. Nine year old boys brought

in and swaddling clothes, you know, dressed essentially like Cupid. Right, So so already we're we're engaging dramatic symbolic power here. And then he is suspended from the ceiling by silk cords. Oh they gotta be silk cords, of course. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, what what are to to suspend the boy with just rope would be weird and just out of keeping with the symbolic drama of the thing. Right now, just below the boy's head. Uh, they've positioned a stand

on which they've they've play small light flakes of brass. Well, meanwhile, our friend Mr Gray here uh comes over with a charged glass to essentially a friction generator, and he's holding this near the boy's feet. And I'll read you a quote to let and this is from the letters sent to from Stephen Gray to one Cromwell Mortimer. Upon the tubes being rubbed and held near his feet without touching them, the leaf brass was attracted to the boy's face with so with much vigor, so as to rise to the

height of eight and sometimes ten inches. So hold on, So they were drawing, uh, pieces of brass leaf to his face. Yes, so the boys hanging there from the silk. He touches this electric wand to the boy's feet, and then all these flakes of metal began to to drift up, fly up from the table through the air. Towards his face. Okay, what else they got, Well, they would have the boy reach out and turn the pages of a book without

physically touching it. Volunteers from the audience were invited to touch the boy's hand, and in doing so, they were able to turn the pages in the book with the same electrical magic just by touching the boy's hand. And finally the main event, the lights were dimmed and the volunteer was asked to touch the boy his nose and that's when crack, a visual spark flies between the flying

boy and the audience member. Wow. So this, I mean, the whole thing is just fabulous because there's the sense of the boy is an angel but also a child sacrifice exactly. There's a sense of child sacrifice, and they kind of make him the sort of a literal embodiment of electricity as a is a is, A is a virgin as this this this child that is without fault, you know, a holy, blameless creature. Well, there you get into something else that I think it's going to be

very important to talk about because there's this mysterium. There's this great strange mystery about what the electrical fire is. There's this spiritual element to it. But then there is also a very clear emerging theme of sexuality to electricity, because one of the notes that I got from Bertucci about the hanging boy experiment was that sometimes you mentioned that he would transfer the electric fire to somebody else

and they would be able to attract things. Well, she mentions that sometimes the boy transmitted the electric fire to a young girl who would attract light objects to herself. So strangely sexual theme. There's like the passage of the thing across the sex barrier. And this wasn't the only case of sexual themes emerging in electrical demonstrations. For example, Bertucci tells us in one of her papers that the presence of women and the accentuation of sex differences became

a crucial part of these electrical demonstrations. In the eighteenth century, for example, a really popular experiment was called the electrifying venus yeah, also known as the electric kiss, which was invented by the German professor Georg Matthias Boza. And it goes like this, So you've got a beautiful lady standing on an insulated stool and an electrical apparatus charges her body with electricity. So this would probably be like a

friction generator. And after she's charged up, the demonstrator invites gentlemen from the audience to come up and steal a kiss from the electric venus. Unfortunately, for these amorous gentlemen, as they approached the charged venus with their lips, they would receive a spark to the mouth and that would

drive them back and discourage further attempts. Okay, so imagine how exciting this must have been to, you know, a court lady in the seventeen hundreds who was sick of the advances and sexual harassment of the aristocratic men in her circle. They even try to kiss her and they get a shock. Right. So Bertucci goes on to notice, like like the invisible fence, except for exact for horny aristocrats. So Bertucci goes on to note that Boza even wrote

a poem about electricity. He was kind of a showman type. He wrote a poem about electricity, which he dedicated to the Princess of Gotha and the Duchess of Brutal Colorath, who were attendees of his demonstrations. And there's a section from poems she quotes it says once only what temerity. I kissed venus standing on pitch. It pained me to the quick. My lips trembled, my mouth quivered, my teeth

almost broke. That's intense stuff. So even the demonstrator himself, knowing the risks, could not resist an attempt to kiss the sparking venus, but to please the fellows of the salons that they would not be entirely discouraged in their feats of electrical manliness, because for their amusement they could wield an electrified sword and use it to ignite small

quantities of liquor. All right, Well they had that, and then to just sort of leave everybody on a good note, right right, Yeah, So the the psycho sexual significance of electricity didn't even in their boza. That same guy came up with the theory of the sexology of electric fire, and it's about as male chauvinist as you would guess. I want a quote from Bertucci who writes characterizing it, the male fire emitted by metal and animal bodies was

unsurprisingly strong and powerful. Sparks, with their crackling sound, were visible manifestations of this kind of fire. The female fire, instead, was a weak luminous emanation, the kind of light that characterized the Aurora borealis. I love that because there he's kind of using science to recreate Taoism in this case. You know, the whole division of yin and yang energies

defining the universe. Oh does that have a male female element? Oh? Yeah, yeah, one is like the male is is heat and power and strength, and the female energy is is colder and more subtle in their their opposites in the universe. H Well, that's the cosmic electric spirituality yet again. So through the second half of the eighteenth century, there there was a lot of popular thinking that associated electricity with sex, virility, and fertility. Electrical imagery showed up in erotic poetry all

the time. They'll be talks about sparks and friction and uh. And medical experts even promoted sexual health cares. I should have said experts. You couldn't hear me doing air quotes. Medical quote experts promoted sexual health care is via the electrical fire. And there will be more on that when we talk about a guy named James Graham in the next episode. But there's a weird paradox emerging here with

the relationship between electricity and virility and health. How come the body seems to be able to be uh, I don't know, sort of animated by electricity in one sense, you could be sparked into action, and yet the discharge of electricity from a laden jar might be enough to kill you. That seems like a weird tension there, right, Yeah, it kind of comes back to that, that that sort of weird Dallastu interpretation of male and female energy us

to a certain extent. Yeah, And so later in the seventeen hundreds this comes to a head, I think, in the argument about the nature of animal electricity. So, like we said, there were electric fishes and uh so there was some knowledge about different types of bioelectricity. Uh But but what happened in the in the seventeen eighties, Well, we had a man by the name of Luigi Galvani. Alright, he was mid seventeen eighties Italian physician, and he kind of,

you said, Italian with an Italian accent. Well, you can't say Luigi Galvani without giving in to it a little bit, right, So in one of his earlier experiments, he connected the nerves of a recently dead frog to a long metal wire and pointed towards the sky during a thunderstorm. Uh. And then with each flash the dog the frog moved again, as if with life, so the dead frog and and this this suggests a kind of mechanical connection between the

parts of the body and the electrical fire. Right. Indeed, I mean this is where we get the term galvanism from, which refers to muscle contractions due to an electric current. Now, at the time, Galvani referred to this as animal electricity, thinking he discovered a unique form of electricity, something intrinsic to the muscle tissue. So external electricity could galvanize, It's sure, but his argument was that it also possessed its own

unique electricity as well. So he was saying these were the bioelectricity and the external electricity were different types of electricity exactly. Yeah, you bet you had two different species of electricity to deal with here. Um, and this didn't set well with everyone, particularly another name that resonates with electrical history, um, Alessandro Volta. You can hear the electrical

terms in both of their last names, like galvanized and volta. Yeah, so you know that this is this isn't just something nobody entering the fray so volta he walks in, and he's intent on disproving animal electricity. He doesn't buy it.

He asserts that the animals here in um in Galvani's experiments reacted to electricity produced by two different metals used to connect their nerves and muscles, and and that it's not any kind of intrinsic special electricity, and this argument eventually wins over the scientific community um Galvani conducted experiments to counter the claim, but never got very far in trying to convince anyone and eventually dies, but obviously showing a connection between the workings of the human body, which

was still in many senses, were mysterious at the time and and infused with spiritual and soul ish potential. With this supposedly, I don't know, purely natural force like electricity that had to cause some feelings of maybe aporia, right, yeah, yeah, I mean, And certainly I don't want to imply that Galvani wasn't onto something and wasn't himself, you know, a a very intelligent guy that was making some break throughs in

our understanding electricity. But of course these bioelectricity beliefs led to some pretty interesting and weird experiments, right, Yeah. Fast forward to January eighth three, convicted murderer George Forster or Foster, depending on which source you're looking at. He dies by hanging at London's Newgate Prison and then attendance transport his body to the Royal College of Surgeons, also in London,

so that this in itself wasn't an uncommon practice. You have a fresh body, it's perfect for the exploration of human anatomy. But then they roll the corpse into a crowded operating theater where owaits Giovanni Aldini, the nephew of the late louisgi Galvani. Yeah, and as you would imagine, I've given up the podcast episode here. Uh, he's waiting with a battery and some connecting rods, so you know what he's going. So they've got a corpse coming in.

He's sitting there with this battery, is he is he twirling his stash? I I should hope so. Um, maybe even with electricity. But this is from the records. This is what Aldeni had to say about the results. Here. On the first application of the arcs, the jaw began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the left i actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process, the right hand was raised and clinched, and the legs

and thighs were set in motion. It appeared to the uninformed part of the bystanders as if the wretched Man was on the eve of being restored to life, you know. And I bet for the people at the time, they didn't necessarily know that wasn't going to happen. Yeah, I mean, we we know now, but yeah, at the time of we're still figuring out how electricity work, what it did to the body, and so so, unlesson four members of the audience, it seemed entirely possible that he might have

brought this character back to life in some form. If it's conceivable that the electricity is the soul, is the soul that animates the flesh and uh, and the death causes that this electricity to evaporate, could you restore the soul that animates the flesh to the body by charging it back up. Yeah. And plus, if you're if you're buying into a basic biomechanical understanding or certainly mechanical understanding of the body. If electricity physically animates the body then,

why not the mind itself? Why not the soul? Why not the person entire um? And of course a lot of this probably instantly brings to mind images of Frankenstein, of Dr Frankenstein bringing his creation to life. Now, funny, I remember electricity being a big part of the movie. But I and when I've read the book, I don't remember much mentioning of electricity in it. There's not a lot um but a couple of it. First of all,

like the timeline works perfectly for this. So Mary Shelley's book comes out in eighteen eighteen, so that's, you know, just just a couple of decades in the wake. I think she would have been She would have been a small child at the time of of the Georgia Forster Foster reanimation experiment. But there's actually a portion of Frankenstein that reads as follows. Before this, I was not unacquainted

with the more obvious laws of electricity. On this occasion, a man of great research and natural philosophy was with us, and excited by this catastrophe, he entered on the explanation of a theory which he had formed on the subject of electricity and galvinism. Which was at once new and astonishing to me. Quote Dr Frankenstein well, as will mention in the next episode, Mary Shelley had more than one

influence of mad Science on her life. Probably Oh, yes, yes, um, because certainly, Uh, I think you can see in Frankenstein. I mean, there's a lot to say about Frankenstein. We could do a whole podcast about, uh, the cultural and scientific underpinnings of that book. But but yeah, there's a lot of the this new age of understanding and reason of our attempt to to harness all these natural wonders with our scientific understanding. You see that in these these

these electric experiments we've discussed. You see that in Frankenstein as well. Okay, well, I think that's gonna have to be it for our first episode, the first part of this series. And we've we've made it from the mystery of the ancients to the to the to the strange obsession with electrical fire and the electrical cosmos of the mid and late seventeen hundreds. But in the next episode, we're going to chase that rabbit further down the circuit circuit. Yeah,

I think that'll be it. Yeah, Yeah, So yeah, in the next episode, electric chairs, uh, electrical personal massage devices, electric religion. Um, and you know there will be a little bit of Frankenstein, but don't worry, we'll also fit John Wesley in there as well. And of course the striking conclusion to the story we opened with about the first legal electric you shouldn't indeed, and until then, be sure to check out Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

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