From the Vault: Early Days Electric, Part 2

classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert row and I'm Joe McCormick. And this is going to be the second part of a two part series on the weird history of electricity. Different than the history of electricity you might have learned about in school, woll with the the invention of the various different technologies.

Here we wanted to focus on the strange social and psychic undercurrents, if you will, of the of the development of electricity and human society and knowledge. Yeah, kind of the midlife crisis of human cultures. Uh, understanding and attitudes towards electricity as it goes from pure mystery to the mundane. So if you haven't heard part one before you listen to this episodes, you should probably go back and listen

to part one. But if you don't care about coming in in the middle of a conversation then and you're here, then that's fine. Yeah. I mean, a lot of the stuff, a lot of the episodes that we discuss are gonna they can stand on their own, but we do highly encourage you to check out part one. Okay. So I'm gonna start in a kind of counterintuitive place for this journey of psychic electricity, and that's with the English writer

and poet Thomas Hardy. So you probably remember him from from writing extremely depressing novels that you had to read in high school. You know, the Return of the Native Mayor of Castor Bridge. What did you have to read in high school? I guess it was castor Bridge. That's the one that I feel like I'm most familiar with. Yeah, or you might have write his poems like the Darkling Thrush, which is one of my favorites and it contains these lines,

is one of the stanzas of the Darkling Thrush. The land's sharp features seemed to be the centuries corpse out linked, his crypt, the cloudy canopy, the wind, his death lament, the ancient pulse of germ and birth was shrunken, hard and dry, and every spirit upon the earth seemed fervorless. As I it's kind of bleak. Yeah, But so he's talking about something that happened in the past century. Yeah.

I think one of the early names of this poem, before it was called the Darkling Thrush, was something like the Corpse of the past century or something like that. Uh. And this was written around nine and that, you know, the end of the eighteen hundreds. So what happened? What happened to our fervor during the century he spoke of. I don't know exactly what dissipation of spirit Hardy was referring to, but here's a stab that that I'd like to think had something to do with it. It might

have had something to do with electricity. So there's a great Thomas Hardy quote. That is, it's quoted in one of the papers were using as a source on this episode, which is Life, Death and Electricity by Nicholas Ruddick. And this was a great paper by the way. Yeah, this was really good and it's uh. I think this one

was available out there for everyone to read. Yeah, and it chronicles a lot about the developments of electricity in the late eighteen hundreds leading up to the execution of William Kimler, which we started the last episode with and

we'll get to later in this one. But it tells the story of how hard He was quote attending an electrically lit evening church service in London in May and what was illuminated was the outdated nous of the old reliefs, and Hardy wrote about it, quote everything looks like the modern world. The electric light and the old theology seems strange companions. And the sermon was as if addressed to the native tribes of primitive simplicity and not to the

nineteenth century English. Now putting aside the you know, racist and colonial assumptions of the metaphor hard He uses there, that is an interesting observation in line with what we observed in the techno religion for the Masses episode. There is something, uh, though though it has often been surmounted by various cults and people of varying theologies, there is

an inherent tension for some reason between technology and religious belief. Yeah, because especially with an old religious belief, there's often that sense that it's set in stone, and and this is the you know that this is the truth that is buried in the earth for all future generations to live by. And what gives it its power is its ancient otherness.

And then what you do when a new otherness enters the picture, when when suddenly we know more about the what was magic in the past, when we know we can explain electricity or at least harness it in ways that we had no ability to in the days that

the tablets were here were carved. Yeah. And so an observation that Ruddick makes in his paper is that he's commenting that by the eighteen nineties, as electricity came more and more into our lives, you know, you you might have hundreds of different interactions with electrical appliances and services throughout the day, it was becoming increasingly difficult, he says,

to talk about transcendental matters in electrical terms. But before we get to the sort of the death of the sacred ghost of electricity in the sort of mundane ravages of modern life. I want to go back to a period where there was still much weirdness and wonder to be had. Yeah, we're still um, we're still in the time period of the experiments discussed previously, where we're beginning to understand electric to do a little bit. We're exploring

its properties. We're also exploring the you know, it's dramatic side, it's entertaining side, as well as it's it's dangerous and lethal side. Absolutely so uh. I want to talk about a scientist who has been largely forgotten despite the fact that he was one of the most famous and celebrated scientists of the entire world in his day, and his influence on modern scientific thought is just absolutely incalculable. And that that is the scientist Alexander von Humboldt. Now, I

recently read a book about Alexander von Humboldt. It was The Invention of Nature Alexander von Humboldt's New World by

Andrea Wolf. This is a great book, by the way, but it talks about this strange fact that he's been mostly forgotten about, despite the fact that he was responsible, for example, for the scientific concept of ecology, thinking about natural environments not as sort of a a god established domain of unchanging character, but as complex dynamic systems that vary with climate and resources and are subject to dramatic change even by altering a small variable, if it's a

if it's sort of a keystone variable. But I want to communicate the spirit of how scientific experiments in animal electricity were continuing, uh in the in the late seventeen hundreds, in early eighteen hundreds, by looking at a couple of events in Alexander von Humboldt's life. So in the seventeen nineties, Alexander von humbold actually became friends with the rock star German poet Johann wolf King von Gerta. And Gerta was the poet who, in his version of Faust wrote, what

dazzles for the moment spins its spirit? What's genuine shall posterity inherit? I always like that sentiment, and I think it also sort of applies to some of the showmanship about electricity that we oh yeah mentioned in the last episode. Yeah, very much so, because I mean, at this point, electricity has been a show and electricity has often involved uh dead animals, yeah, to varying to so so capt that in mind as we move forward. But Gota wasn't just a poet in his day. He was also a really

dedicated scientist. And one year in the seventeen nineties, about three years after von Humboldt and and Gota had first visited, they spent time together in a city called Ugana to talk through scientific ideas and conduct this long series of experiments on animal electricity, which Humboldt was writing a book about at the time. So he was interested in that that that animal electricity, that that idea that there was

a specific intrinsic electrical system to the body. Yeah, and as we discussed in the last episode, it was later proved not true that animal electricity is a different kind of electricity than the external electricity that's in lightning and everything else. But but he was still he was trying to suss it out. He was trying to figure out what was going on with the role of electricity in

the bodies of animals. So I want to read a quote from a section of of Andrea Wolf's book where she says that Humboldt and got To had been hanging out when there there's a violent thunderstorm on this on this spring day and after the after humbold had been out taking in, you know, atmospheric readings while he was watching the lightning happened during the storm. The next day, he finds out that a farmer and his wife nearby

had been killed by the lightning in the storm. So Wolf writes, he rushed over to obtain their corpses, to obtain exactly Yeah, he just obtained them, yeah, uh, she writes, laying out their bodies on the table in the round anatomy tower, he analyzed everything. The man's leg bones looked as if they had been pierced by shotgun pellets, Humboldt noted excitedly, but the worst damage was to the genitals.

At first, he thought the pubic hare might have been ignited and caused the burns, but dismissed the idea when he saw the couple's unharmed armpits. Despite the increasingly putrid smell of death and burned flesh, humbold enjoyed every minute of this gruesome investigation. I cannot exist without experiments, he said. So. So Alexander von Homebolt just shows up on the doorstep following a tragic event and says, hey, I'm Alexander von Homebolt. I'm kind of a big deal. I need to see

the gruesomely distorted bodies of the lightning strike victims. The funniest thing is this was before he was a really big deal. This is when he was an upcoming big deal. But yeah, he I need to examine the scorched genitals for science. But Wolf also writes about one of Humboldt's favorite experiments that he ever performed, which was when he

and Gerta were together experimenting on frog legs. This is revisiting the themes of Luigi Galvani, right, who saw the frog legs dance when stimulated by the electricity of the lightning. Wolf writes, one morning, Humboldt placed a frog's leg on a glass plate and connected its nerves and several muscles two different metals in sequence two silver, gold, iron, zinc, and so on, but generated only a discouraging, gentle twitch

in the leg. When he then leaned over the leg in order to check the connecting metals, it convulsed so violently that it leapt off the table. Both men were stunned, until Humble realized that it had been the moisture of his breath that had triggered the reaction. As the tiny droplets in his breath had touched the metals, they had created an electric current that had moved the frog's leg.

It was the most magical experiment he'd ever carried out, Humboldt decided, because by exhaling onto the frog's leg, it was as if he were breathing life into it. It was the perfect metaphor for the emergence of the new life sciences. So again this strangely religious aspect coming into the relationship between between electricity and the body. Yeah, I like that the breath of life, even though the breath

is actually just delivering moisture that helps to complete the circuit. Now, another funny thing is not being there and uh and knowing exactly what happened. It's hard to even determine if Humboldt's interpretation of what actually caused the twitching is correct. Yeah, I mean it sounds sensible because it also plays into um and into the example we'll get to at the

end of this podcast regarding the electric chair. Now, I want to mention one more example of electricity bioelectricity experiments carried out by Humboldt and this one was later when he was in South America doing experiments and traveling through the rainforest with with someone named i'm a baum Plant. Baum Plant was his his traveling and scientific companion. I

believe he was a botanist. But anyway, there was an incident where Humboldt found out from some locals in part of Venezuela I believe town called Calaboso that there were a bunch of shallow pools in the area that were filled with electric eels. And he Humble got very excited about this because he was a little bit eel crazy, and and he'd heard that eels could deliver electric shocks

of more than six hundred volts. Uh So, but then he's got a problem, right, So, if an eel can deliver a shock of more than six hundred volts, how to catch it? Especially since, as as Wolf notes, the eels in these pools were buried in the mud at the bottom of the pools, So how do you get them out? Well, some of the locals came up with an idea. They said, we'll round up a whole bunch of horses. And so they rounded up a bunch of wild horses from the nearby prairies, and they drove the

herd into the pond. So they had these wild horses stomping in the mud that had electric eels in it. And I want to read another section from Wolf, she writes. As the horses hooves turned up the mud, the eels wriggled up to the surface, giving off enormous electric shocks. In tranced tumbled watched the gruesome spectacle. The horses screamed in pain, the eels thrashed beneath their bellies, and waters surface boiled with movement. Some horses fell and trampled by

others drowned. Over time, the strength of the electric shocks diminished, and the weakened eels retreated into the mud, from where Humble pulled them with dry wooden sticks. But he hadn't waited long enough. When he and bond Plant dissected some

of the animals, they endured violent shocks themselves. And then, as she goes on to describe how for hours after this, they were just doing experiments on the eels, touching an eel, touching an eel, standing on metal, touching a neil, standing on clay, touching a neil, and touching each other both touching eels and making out a little bit. It just it almost sounds like that's part of it. Again, there's this strangely sexual element to the union of of sharing

the electrical kiss, you know, the kiss of Venus. But Wolf concludes the section of the book by talking about how Humble began to think about electrical forces. The forces that she writes variously created lightning bound metal to metal and move the needles of compasses, all flow forth from one source, and all melt together in an eternal, all encompassing power. M hmm. I like that. That's a very poetic and and kind of supernatural but scientifically grounded, if

you will, a view of electricity. Yeah, and I get the impression from this book that Humboldt was not a very religious guy. Yet here's this. I mean, he's not invoking supernatural entities or God's but he is talking about it in this kind of vaulted spiritual language. So again it's blurring these lines. Yeah, I mean, because they're standing on the edge of the unknown, right, and they're they're contemplating an unknown, allowing themselves to be shocked by the unknown.

It's like like any given astronomer you could have the most most atheistic astronomer possible. But if they're they're engaging with the night sky and viewing up at the cosmos, they're gonna be likely overcome by the wonder of the cosmos in some form or another. Oh yeah, uh, you know this whole story about the electric eels that reminds me of my favorite Marlon Brandos story. But yeah, I don't know if you've heard this. I believe this one has been This has been told by Ed Bagley Jr.

Is this a scene that was cut from on the Waterfront? Um, It's it's a little older Brando that we're dealing with here. This is very much like the larger, um, crazier, reclusive brand though so Um according to at Bagley Jr. Uh, he gets he gets a call to come over to to the Brando household. Uh, you don't know what it's going to be about it. He drives over, presumably in like an electric car, right and uh he comes inside and Brando asked him and says, hey, could I get

a bunch of electric eels and power the house? And uh, you know, and so Ed Begley Jr. He's the he's the bicycle to power your water heater kind of guy. Yeah, you know, yeah, he's you know, he's versed in alternative energy to a certain accident, and it's kind of a you know, you know, has often lent his voice to some of those causes. So yeah, Brando figured he was the guy to ask, and so Bagley has kind of taken aback. But he says, you know, I don't think

that would be possible. I don't think it would work. And indeed, it's difficult to try and empower anything with an electric eel because for one thing, they well, for a number of reasons, but you know, you'll see aquariums where they have like a little Christmas tree, and the electric eel will cause the treat a light up periodically, but the eel does not admit, you know, a continuous amount of voltage. It's just you know, quick shocks here

and there. So it would be it would be one of those things where if you try to engineer a system that uses the electric eels, you quickly out engineer yourself and realize you're better off using some other form. But but anyway, so vaguely says, I don't think that is gonna work, and Brando just kind of gets grumpy and says, it's always no with you. So I love I love that story because it's, uh, it's just it's just a great Brando story and a great electric eel story.

Did he point a gun at him? I tell me true? Maybe I don't know, but at any rate, it was like the the audience was over at that point. It's like, all right, vaguely, you've turned me down here on this electric eel business that I had a lot of hope built up for. So just go, just go. Don't tell me not to any more of my disappointed the King

of Spain or something. Well. So, as you as you can see from the stuff we've been talking about, experiments about electricity didn't stop in the mid seventeen hundreds, where we were talking about a bunch of the experiments in the last episode. They continued into the turn of the century, the early eighteen hundreds, and uh, and it wasn't It also wasn't just the known scientists of the age who

experimented with electricity. One of the weirdest stories I came across as a story about Percy Shelley, Old P. B. Shelley, the poet, you know, the author of what might you best know him from? Maybe Ozymandias. Yeah, I would imagine that's probably the most famous look on my works, you mighty in despair. But actually you might know him best for being the husband of Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein.

And we talked in the last episode about the the the impression made on Mary Shelley by the lecturers in electricity and how that might have led to ideas in Frankenstein. But but her own husband might have also inspired some of these scientific terrors, because there is a story that when he was young, Percy Shelley was learned about electricity during his schooling and his tutoring, and he wanted to experiment.

He wanted to do some electrical experiments, and he ended up just mainly these experiments were shocking his sisters, and so his sister Helen wrote, quote, when my brother commenced his studies in chemistry and practiced electricity on us, I confessed my pleasure, and it was entirely negatived by terror

at its effects. Whenever he came to me with his piece of folded brown packing paper under his arm and a bit of wire and a bottle, my heart would sink with fear at his approach, but shame kept me silent, and with as many others as he could collect, we replaced hand in hand round the nursery table to be electrified. But when a suggestion was made that chilblains were to be cured by this means, my terror overwhelmed all other feelings, and the expression of it released me from all future annoyance.

It sounds a little bit like a young monster there. Yeah, yeah, he kind of does, or at least a mad scientist. But again it kind of this is still the age of the the sort of gentleman science, the scientist, you know, the idea that any individual of means might take up science as a as a pastime and would engage in various experiments about natural phenomenon, right, or to to impress

people or get his yah yas out. Yeah. But the pretense here that that the electricity and the shocks could be used to treat chilblains does sort of tie into something that we should talk about, which is the role of electricity in supposed medical practices and even magical beliefs

about healing. Yeah, this is a fascinating area because I mean, on one hand, there there's the obvious role that electricity plays in modern medicine, and in the advent of modern medicine, you think you might think about defibrillation, yeah, or even some stuff is simple as being able to use electric lighting during a surgical procedure, or electrical coudorization tools during surgery,

and stuff of that nature. Like it really ends up playing a role in so many different facets of modern medicine. But yet the idea that electricity in and of itself has a healing property to it um this ends up carrying a great deal of cultural weight during the time. Sure, well, you don't have to invoke medical principles to make the assumption that there's some kind of power in the electrical

fire that has has healing potential over the body. I mean, there's always been the idea of forces of nature like light and fire as cleansing agent, and I think for many people electricity took on some of these same elements. There was one claim I read in a book called Witchcraft,

Confessions and Accusations edited by Mary Douglas. And according to a claim in this book, in one case, uh the Bongwa people of Cameroon took a child who was believed to be a witch and what they did to cure the child's witchcraft was sent the child into an electrified region of the country in the south, under the reasoning that a few months months of exposure to electricity would cure the child's witchcraft. Okay, well it seems seems plausible.

I mean because because as we've touched on before, like throughout history, humans have been encountering electricity on one form, in one form or the other. If not lightning on the hillside, then presumably just the static discharge that occurs when you shock somebody. Uh, And this was something that

that interested me. I can't help but wonder why we don't see more examples, uh, particularly related to this interpersonal discharge of static electricity at least is a way to explain certain folk beliefs and magical superstitious beliefs, you know, because at heart, that's a very I mean, it's the same principle as uh as as two individuals touching each other while dissecting an electric fish. Right, I mean you're

there's this spark, sometimes visible spark between two people. Well, yeah, that is it's the literal embodiment in reality of a thing that's often imagined in magical thinking. In magical thinking, there's often this sense of of supernatural contagion, where you can pass the properties of one thing onto another thing by touching, and that that's generally not true. It's not true that you can gain the virility of a bore by touching the boar's tusk to your head or something.

But you can confer electric charge by touching. And this is demonstrated over and over in these public lectures we talked about in the last episode. Yeah, you know, it's also interesting. I want to mention that the according to the Electrostatic Society of America, um, that's the thing. And this was actually mentioned in a blog post at in probable dot com in Probable Research the Ignoble Prize organizing body Okay, yeah, they pointed out that the quote this

is from the electro Sex Society of America quote. Electrostatics is an exciting area of science, as its most basic scientific questions remain unknown and highly controversial. What yeah, and yet its consequences are widespread. For example, the uh the identity of the species transferred to generate charge when materials rub is being hotly debated in the leading scientific journals. Some researchers argue that it is electrons, others that it is ions, and yet others that it is bits of material.

What so that's crazy. I had no idea. Yeah, so that's just a little footnote to remind everyone that that again, even in our modern time there, when we take all the electricity around us for granted, we still haven't solved some basic questions such as why my child shocks me when he comes down a slide on a on a

chilly afternoon of the playground. Fascinating. But of course, the treatment of witchcraft I mentioned and earlier is not the only spiritually significant use of electricity as a healing agent, right, that's right. Um. We have a few different examples to cover here, but one of the more interesting is that of John Wesley. Okay Wesley, the founder of Methodism, founder of Methodism, Christian theologian. If you visit, um, I believe, yes, Savannah here in our own native state of Georgia, there

is a statute of of John Wesley there. Huh yeah, it kind of looks like snap, why in Savannah? What did he do in Savannah? He visited there for a while? Okay, yeah, he was he was in Georgia for a little bit, then he went back. Okay, so it's kind of like how in Montrose, Switzerland, there's a statue of Freddie Mercury. Oh there is, Yeah, there is which which version of Freddie Mercury? Uh? He's doing a great dancing post. It's

great statue. I highly recommended if you're in Switzerland. Okay, all right, So you're probably wondering, Okay, why John Wesley? Why did John Wesley? Uh? Why why is this guy interested in electric has never heard of him having anything

to do with electricity or science in general. Yeah, because prior prior to this, aside from knowing that is the founder of Methodism, Like, the only other real touchdone for me was that in seventeen sixty eight he argued that quote giving up of witchcraft is in effect the giving

up of the Bible. Getting down to this playing into this idea that a lot of witchcraft persecution and the horrible links we went to to obtain witchcraft confessions from accused witches, that a lot of that amounted to this need to provide expert testimony of the physical existence of a demonic afterlife and therefore the implied physical existence of of God. Oh yeah, well, I mean, the Bible acknowledges the existence of witchcraft and all kinds of folk magic beliefs.

So if to to sort of say, we believe in the Bible, but we don't believe in all the folk magic, seems inconsistent. There's an aporia there, right, as so Socceres might point out. Indeed, so yeah, it's it's weird to think here's this guy who who sees witchcraft as a reality that cannot be denied, and yet he's also caught up in uh this uh, this this curiosity about electricity of all things. And apparently he became interested in electricity in the late seventeen forties. So this is right after

the Laden Jar. Yeah, very much in the wake of mainstream fascination with electrical demonstrations and the supposed therapeutic applications of electricity, like the medical electricity we were mentioned earlier. Yeah, exactly, the idea that oh here, here's a shock that'll cure what ails you. Uh, it's appealed though at this point had reached even the lower levels of society, and these are the very people that Wesley sought to reach with methodism.

And uh, this whole uh interconnectivity of of Wesley's you know, spiritual purpose if you will, and his interest in electricity. It's apparently an area that historians have only recently begun really dig into. Huh. And that's according to again electrical historian um extraordinaire Pala Bertucci, who wrote a wonderful article titled Revealing Sparks, John Wesley and the Religious Utility of Electrical Healing. Bertuccia describes him as an electrical supporter who

combined moral instruction and natural philosophy. And of course he wasn't the only person to do this at the time, but but Wesley demonstrated the healing power of electricity to further methodism, not electricity, not science, certainly right, So this was yet another religious technology technology and service of religious or spiritual goals exactly like it plays right into our into some of the issues we discussed in the Techno

Religion episodes. He used electricity itself as a demonstration of God's power both as a benevolent force and is a damning force, you know, so both sides of the of the of the God coin right, the wrathful God and the benevolent God. Yeah, she right? Quote as signs of God's wrath, electric manifestations gave humans a glimpse of the

terrifying prospect of eternal punishment. At the same time, it was because of divine benevolence that the power of the electric fire was available to humankind as a healing agent. It's the it's the magical carrot and the magical stick combined in this natural phenomenon. Yeah, yeah, she says, sparks

revealed the divinity. And and this really interests me in light of that quote I read earlier about witchcraft because Wesley supported the persecution of witchcraft for much the same reason as he's as he's interested and demonstrating the power of electricity the confessed, which revealed the demonic, which in turn revealed the divine. And here he is revealing the powers of electricity in order to reveal the divine to the onlooker. Demon in one hand, spark of electricity in

the other. That's great, that's great. You know. I also can't help but think of the touch the screen era of T the evangelism. I don't know what you're talking about,

and I've watched my share of TV evangelists. The idea that you would you would physically touch the screen in order to interact with the healing powers that were being demonstrated by the TV, uh the evangelists, and and in doing so, you're gonna feel, you know, some of that static discharge on the screen, right, So to what extent is that playing into you know, religious electricity in a

more modern sense. That's interesting. I almost that makes me wonder if that's scene in Poultergeist is parodying the spiritual power transferred through the screen by touching. Maybe so, maybe so. I've actually never seen these, uh, these TV preachings, but it makes me think about a principle that often gets brought up on another podcast. Do you ever listen to

the podcast Sawbones. No, I'm not familiar with it. Oh, yeah, they're they're great there there it's a it's a husband and wife team who who are really fun and they talk about basically some of the worst parts of medical history, So all all the bad cure alls and treatments that have been used throughout the years that didn't really help

people very much at all. And one of the things they often talk about is the is that it did something principle um so a a fake treatment that doesn't actually treat people is more likely to be accepted as effective if it at least causes some kind of noticeable effect, even if it doesn't cure you, even if it's discomfort, right, and then you feel like, oh, it's it's doing something. I feel it. I feel the shock. Yeah, exactly, And that's what that's what I'm thinking about with the shock here.

If somebody can charge up a friction generator and and give you a shock of static electricity from it, Uh, you'll feel it. And even if you don't know exactly what's going on, how exactly it's supposed to work, what is the method of action inside your body, you at least felt something happened that was real and it was powerful and pain sort of in our minds, I think pain equals reality. We accept when something painful happens that

that something im has happened. And so I can easily see this kind of principle acting on the use of medical medical electricity in the seventeen hundreds. Even if it wasn't really working to cure a lot of things, it was it was doing something. Yeah, and hey, if you can if you can combine pleasure and pain into the same package. Then you have a product that can likely uh really resonate with the with with the with the

people out there. Oh and that certainly ties into another aspect of the electrical treatments of the time, which would be electrical quackery, very often having to do with sex. There was a guy we mentioned in the last episode. We're coming back to him now, one James Graham, who

was a Scottish believe he was born in Edinburgh. He was a Scottish quack doctor essentially, who was He called himself a hygienist I think, and a and a sex therapist in some way, who offered various vaguely defined electrical treatment on on how to get people's sex lives going again. He had some famous institutions. One is called the Temple of Health, another one is called the Temple of Hymen,

And oh god, what was the deal with these things? Okay, So, first of all, he would he would apparently often travel around and promote all this stuff, accompanied by the beautiful young Goddess of Health. Oh yeah, he had he had like a train of attractive ladies to help him promote his message of medical well being. Yeah, and you know, like any good salesman. He has to have products he can sell on the spot as well as um more

expensive products that are selled on location. He sold exposure to electrical ether as well as a special ointment that you could rub on your body. And what was the ointment? It was nervous ethereal balsam. Oh good, Yeah, keep some of that around. It's like bag bomb, except for you know, sexual purposes. Yeah. But he also sold access to his special electrically powered sex bed. Right have you visited the

Temple of Hymen? Would you open? Uh? Couples with marital or sexual problems could test out the celestial bed for a mere fifty pounds a night. Okay, so we're talking about a twelve by nine foot bed. It has a colored glass columns, mirrors of course, um, erotic paintings, flashing electrical lights, organ music, and perfume. Uh yeah, it it reminds me a little bit. My wife wants shot some pictures of the inside of Kenny Rogers house when we lived up I think in around Athens, Georgie had he

had bought this this antique bed from James Graham. No, but he he did have apparently a lot of mirrors in the bedroom. Um, like a disturbing amount of mirrors in the bedroom. Uh and and that's the kind of thing that you would get out of the celestial bed. Well, you know what they say in the Gambler, the best you can hope for is to die in your sleep. So yeah, well there you go. And if you're gonna dine your sleep, there might as well be a lot

of electrically powered flashing lights. Uh there as well. Yeah, you got to know when to hold him. Yeah. One more interesting comment on Graham from from Bertucci. Actually she writes that, uh he he didn't now in contrast to some of these other electrical healers, which would shock you for for health, Graham quote exploited the fashion enjoyed by

electricity as a further extravaganza for his healing center. The largest electrical apparatus in the world, he called it was on display rather than in use in the temple, where electrical vapors wrapped up the patients. And this is a quote from his materials, gently pervading the whole system with a copious tide of that celestial fire, fully impregnated with

the purest, most subtle, and balmiest parts of medicines. Which are extracted by and flows softly into the blood and nervous system with the electric fluid or restorative ethereal essences. I don't know to what extent he was using any kind of electrical technology. He was given this some electrical vay birds aside from using electrical lights on the guest celestial bed. I don't think you've organ music organ music, yeah, but otherwise he has to be the biggest scam artist

by far that we've encountered in these episodes. Now, again, that was around one. We'd have to wait a good century though, for the electric vibrator to become a reality and actual use of of electricity to directly deliver uh sexual pleasure. H And we got it finally thanks to

Dr J. Mortimer Granville. Now, previously one had to rely on George Taylor's eighteen sixty nine steam powered manipulator or the hand cranked Macura's blood circulator, all in the name of treating supposed bouts of hysteria with a healthy dose

of orgasm. Yeah, and these are not products that you would necessarily go to the store and buy to use at your own leisure in the product, in the privacy of your own home, but more something that would kind of be prescribed for you by your doctor, which sounds like it takes some of the happiness out of it. Yes,

I would think. So. Okay, So now we we've talked about electricity in the body strange healing characteristics, but also we need to talk about electricity the occult, the esoteric, and the spiritual in the sense of spiritualism, because John Murray Spear also was into some electricity some science. Yes, listeners to our techno religion may remember him as the as the individual who whose followers built the electric Messiah. Yeah. So he was a progressive radical of the eighteen hundreds.

He was an abolitionist. He was for a lot of progressive political causes, but he turned in the middle of the eighteen hundreds into a spiritualist leader, meaning he was a guy who claimed to get messages from the spirit world and they they detailed lots of plans for him for sort of ungainly projects that he got his followers to carry out on his behalf, including the construction of

the new motor. That's the thing we talked about. There was a there was a vaguely described machine Messiah to Harold the dawn of a new age by being a perpetual motion machine and changing the human of of the past into the new man. Yeah, I think we described it before. Is looking like a like the like the of a of a dalek and a coffee table bread and produced offspring. This would be. That's pretty much it.

But he also had some interesting interactions with the science of electricity, and this would have been later than what we were talking about before, almost a century later, so that this would be in the eighteen fifties. In the Remarkable Life of John Murray, Spear Agitator for the Spirit Land, the author John Benedict Bauscher mentioned several cases where the beliefs of the mid nineteenth century spiritualists in America included

spiritual significance of electricity. So one one associate of spirits, who was a medium and spiritual healer named Elizabeth French, had been quote an electrical experiment or ever since she was young, trying to revive victims of lightning strikes and drowning by the action of certain rude batteries in the construction of which I, even then a child endowed with strong tendencies in that direction, was myself the mechanic. That was Elizabeth French speaking there at the end. Uh and

she she later on partnered with So. Yeah, so she's trying to use batteries to bring people back from the dead. Pretty good. She partners with Spear for electrical experiments in augmenting spiritual potential, So communicating with the spirit world. They're saying, maybe we can use electricity to amp up somebody's ability to communicate with the spirits. And this included Spear trying to control and influence the spirits with the aid of

a suit of armor made out of copper and zinc batteries. Yeah, and we were talking about this. We're not sure this is the exactly the same outfit or a different one. But the book also mentions that Spears had one Isaac Hedges, who was a saint. The Lewis Magnetic Spiritualist had him craft quote a wizard suit from minerals, metals, and stones, which he wore during his experiments, and the suit itself connected to a battery which supposedly boosted his personal electro

magnetic field. That's crazy, I mean, a battery of a wizard suit made out of batteries. It's too good and spirits. He didn't stop there. He also proposed creating telepathic towers. I can't remember if we mentioned this in the other episode, but he wanted to create a worldwide network of telepathic towers, which would each quote constitute a grand focus of magnetic and electric influences, and this would enable a sort of

broadband spirit medium channeling UH and worldwide communication. So they'd have operators who were spirit mediums who'd use the electricity generated by the towers to channel the voices of the spirits back and forth between each they're around the world,

and it would be faster than the telegraph. You know, what's what's fascinating about this point in the timeline we're exploring is that we're really looking at the just at the enthusiastic supernatural employ of of of current electrical knowledge.

So on one hand, you have this push towards the mundane, and this is really this is really the area of like the midlife crisis I feel, with the with the supernatural qualities of electricity, where you see the the portions of of of the populace going into just a really extreme magical direction with it, which is crazy because even at this point in history we're starting to get a much better understanding of how to harness electricity for utterly

mondaye and purposes, just how to make the machines that make our lives more convenient. Yeah, Like, I feel like we're at the point in a Scooby Doo cartoon where the villain and the ghost costume is apprehended and they're about to pull the map scoff. Meanwhile, John Murray Spear and some of the other individuals were discussing here. They are pointing at at the culprit and saying, no, that is really again, right, it is not old man Bulvovsky, right,

But speaking of people named Blevatsky. That gives us a good transition to one last thing about spirituality and electricity, which is the theology of electricity that came through in various forms of Western esso terrorism. Yeah, there's a great paper on this that's out there titled The Esoteric Uses of Electricity by Nicholas Goodrick Clark, which highly remanda recommend looking at if you one a little more on this particular area. This again, this last sort of last thrust

of electrical spiritism. So what does Goodrick Clark have to say about the electric theology. Well, he discusses a few different individuals. He discusses leading up theosophy proponent Madam Helena Blavatsky, whose belief in electric who believed in electricity as quote an animating soul like force or fluid. We've seen that kind of idea before. And of course she also preached the power of the third eye and the piney ole glands role in modern man is an atrophy, the vestige

of this organ of spiritual vision. So just to give that's just to give you a brief idea about the the about theosophy and what kind of worldview she was immersed in. Yeah, if you're not familiar with esotericism, these are I don't know what you might call them. They're sort of alternative religions in in the history of Western culture. Yeah, new religious movements for sure, but Theosophy one that maybe help didn't hold on as well as some of the others that that cropped up. Um he good good At.

Clark also points to a scholar Ernst Dens as having identified the quote theology of electricity amongst a group of eighteenth century Swabian theosophers. He claimed that the quote discovery of electricity and the simultaneous discovery of magnetic and galvanic phenomena were accompanied by a most significant change in the image of God and that it led to a quote completely new understanding of the relation of body and soul, of spirit and matter. Now, how does that play out?

What does that look like? Basically it means I mean, basically what we're looking at is all this new information about electricity is coming out, and and there are individuals who are instead of saying I wonder how that casts new light of my understanding, or they're thinking, oh, well, that's something that exists separately from a religious understanding of the world, They're like, no, this is the path. Let's pour all of our our spiritual gusto into this new

electrical format. So if the if the electricity is the frontier of future science, this could be the kind of religious thing king that says, no, we're not going to ground our religious ideas in the past, We're going to ground them in the future. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's it's kind of I mean, this is a time of a huge change, and what do you do when the world changes and you have either an old set of beliefs or you sort of cling to that mode of

belief like you have to. You either have to say no, that's bs, keep that away from me and keep it out of the school books, or you say, yes, bring it here, let me incorporate it. Um. You know, And we've looked at some plenty of examples where religion's ability to incorporate new scientific understanding it is certainly a healthy thing. It doesn't always um lead to sort of fringe belief systems. Well, it's funny now that we think about electricity as just

utterly uncontroversial religiously, right. I mean, there are so many scientific ideas that do come into conflict with with religious ideas. Ideas about, for example, I don't know, cosmology and the origins the universe, ideas about biological evolution, ideas of geology, conflicting with the literal reading of some holy books. Uh, you see these pretty often. But electricity seems just utterly theologically neutral. But that hasn't always been the case. Yeah.

I mean, it's in the same way that it's difficult for us to imagine this this time when electricity was new and exciting. It's hard to imagine it's it's newness and it's and it's excitingness up, you know, having an impact on modes of religious belief. Another example that Nicholas Goodrick Clark draws on is that of Austrian occultist, racial political theorist, former monk and also the founder of Ariosophy

as well as a pretty notable anti Semite. Uh. This is Lens van Levenfells lived eighteen seventy four to nineteen fifty four, and he saw electricity as quote a measure of spiritual evolution unquote that was ranted only to arians, Christ and other spiritual intermediaries. That's pretty nasty. Yeah, he was not a decent guy. Like, this is a guy that when when Hitler rose to power, he was just kissing up immediately apparently, and Hitler just didn't really have

time for him. But but yeah, so yeah he was. He was not a pleasant guy. So as far as we know, Hitler didn't buy into his electrical theological position. Now he seemed from based on what I was reading here, he really had no interest in it. But but but Lan's was one of these guys who was like, yes,

what you're preaching is it's perfectly with with what I'm selling. Uh, and and what I take it all to mean is that the simultaneous advancement of supernatural belief and scientific understanding just can result in some some very weird, seemingly to the outsider weird modes of belief, but also maybe exciting

modes of belief. Okay, but here I think it's time to arrive at at the final stage of the transformer stepped down of the spiritual power of electricity, the metaphor you mentioned in the last episode, because something starts to happen, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, we might say where electricity is losing a lot of its psychic, spiritual and symbolic power. It's becoming less and less incorporated

into I don't know, transcendental language and metaphor. It's becoming less a source of mystery and wonder and more something that resonates with what Thomas Hardy said, the quote we talked about at the beginning of the episode. It highlights something very natural and mundane in contrast to that classical sense of holy otherness. Yeah, it's two am at the nightclub. Lawns and Spear are both still dancing desperately to keep

the party going, while other individuals are are going home. Yeah, and so I want to use just one I think pretty perfect example of this. So you it's December twenty seven nine, and you have just received your copy of the Scientific Americans Supplement and you're leafing through it, and it features on one page an invention by one M. Defoy, which was an electric horse bit. Oh, so, the bit

being the part that goes in the horse's mouth. It was a carriage armed with an electromagnetic apparatus that could send electric current through metal wires embedded in the reins, and if it opened the circuit to the current, it would travel down the reins and through the bit in the horse's mouth, giving the horse an electric shock through

its mouth and teeth. So, according to this article it was the invention was considered a success because it managed to calm down several quote vicious and stubborn horses so that they's long enough that they could be shod. They were trying to, you know, get some shoes on these horses.

They wouldn't cooperate, so zap him in the mouth. The superintendent of the Parisian cab company M. Camille wrote, quote one horse that was to be shod went so far as to lie down and roll over and over on the ground, all the while struggling, defending himself and fighting against everything. Nothing could subdue him. I then had recourse to m Defoy's apparatus, and on the first trial, much to my surprise, the feet of the intractable horse were

lifted without any great difficulty. And on the second trial it was as easy to shoot him as if he had never made the least resistance. The animal was conquered. So we've reduced the noble spark to something that you just uh torment a horsewhip, essentially just a bullwhip. Yeah. Well, and that actually comes in because m defoy went on to create another appliance along the same lines, the electric riding whip, which sounds more or less like a taser

for horses. And if you're thinking, like what horror, nobody would ever do anything like that today. I mean, we have electric fences for livestock. Today, there are shock collars for animals. So I mean using electricity to control and tame wild animal instincts is something that is now a grand tradition. It's not a very pretty one. We don't like to think about it. It doesn't seem like a nice thing to do, but it's a thing we do with the electric fire that used to be such a

cosmic mystery. Yeah, and you know, also when it comes to taming horses, you know, not not every method is that, you know, lovable and horse whispery. But this begins to get at something that that really comes through in an essay we mentioned in the last episode and we're going to refer to again now by a Nicholas Ruddick called Life and Death by Electricity in eighteen ninety the Transfiguration of William Kimmler. Like we mentioned in the last episode,

this is a really great paper. It's worth reading. It's a very interesting history of what was happening with the power of electricity in the late eighteen hundreds. Well, he points to an eighteen nineties Scientific American article that it does a great job of just laying out just how much electricity is in the average person's life. It wakes him up in the morning, it cooks their breakfast, it's

on their right into work, it's all over work. When they go to church, their electric bells, there's an electric oregon, and on up into your death. When you die, an electric apparatus is used to carve your name into a tombstone. So it we we give this enormous power over our lives. Right, it's used in medicine, it can kill, it can it can be a communication technology. And yet at the same

time it has lost its spiritual and symbolic luster, hasn't it. Yeah, Like the poetry is seeping out of it, you know. And uh and and a lot of it just has to do with the fact that maybe all the poetic things that can be said about it have been said, Like the language that we used to describe it is getting a bit dull, even even if it seems exciting to re explore it from a modern perspective. And then yeah, it's also just everywhere, like how mystical can it be?

If it cooks your toast, how mystical can it be? Uh? Um, you know, if it's if it's just lighting a light bulb while you read something, and I think to put a cherry on this. Uh. This transformation into an utterly mundane and dirty, down in the mud kind of force of nature was when it was finally used in illegal execution. Yes, which again brings us back to William Kimler, first man executed by electricity under the world's first electrical execution law,

New York State, January one, eighteen eighty nine. And like the history of this is really interesting. For instance, just how how did we come to the point where that was even on the table? Well? Why, why why use electricity? Well, apparently the key arguments for this were coming from prominent supporters in Buffalo, New York. And that's because Buffalo was really close to Niagara Falls and there was a lot

of hydroelectric work going on there. The damn they began the damn there in six and so they considered themselves to be on the cutting edge of technology. Uh, you know, it's like the Silicon Valley of the day. And uh and and so in particular, you have one Dr Albert Southwick who is lobbying, um with with New York state

representatives for electrical execution. Why with the states sen It's crazy, Yeah, we'll be I mean yeah, I mean it sounds like, for instance, if Silicon Valley big shots were lobbying for execution by virtual reality or maybe streaming video today, right, Like, can you imagine when they're saying, hey, we got this technology, why aren't we using it to kill people? Right? Death by social media. Yeah so, but they had some core arguments for it. They said that, all right, this is

a humanitarian advancement. Forget hanging. Hanging. You know, hanging has all of these horrible associations with the past, particularly with America's past. Let's move beyond it. Let's use something new and exciting to kill people that has less weight to it. I think there was inherently some sense that low tech things were less desirable. Like it wasn't It didn't even

have to be that it caused less pain. It was just more dignified to be killed by this apparatus of science and technology rather than the creepy, low fi image of a hangman's noose. And they also added that hey, if you're if you're gonna hang somebody, you might something might go wrong. You have an accidental beheading that takes place, or if you're actually doing a beheading, there's could be an arterial spray. This is hygienically sound. It is very

signed to the electric chairs. The electric chair is the hygienic, scientifically sound way to go. And since electricity had been observed to kill rapidly and seemingly painlessly, it seemed like like another perfect way to avoid any messy accidents during an execution. Don't worry about the you know, something going wrong with the way you've you've presented the gallows. This way, you just turn. It's basically the off switch for life.

Do you think they believed these arguments they were making or is this just completely mercenary trying to get I don't know. I get the sense that they believed it in the sense that you know, there was data supported. I mean, even just reading over what I what I

just heard. It's like, if you're if you're already on board with the idea that criminals must be executed, then the most humane argument within that mindset is, well, let's make it painless, Let's make it quick, let's make it hygienic, Let's do all of those things that makes it less less horrible. You know, Well, was anybody at this point still trying to hang on to the sacredness of electricity?

They actually were, and that and that, and this is interesting because yeah, there were there were others who were saying that this was a degrading use of miraculous energy. Kind of I guess, kind of like the last vestige of that earlier enthusiasm for it. There her people think, oh, you're gonna kill people with it. Now, that's too far. Now you've just really taken it into an unfortunate area. Even Edison was against it. The man who executed you know,

numerous animals during the War of currents. Uh, they'ugh not Topsy the elephant, apparently, despite some popular coverage to the to the contrary. Huh. Yeah. So anyway, it was a year before the conviction um of Kimbler was finally upheld. Oh yeah, Kimmler had a lot of litigation and appeals, right, yeah, yeah, I mean this was a kind of a big case. It went all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court in eighteen ninety and a lot of the litigation

was presumed to come from Westinghouse Electric Company. Is they were displeased to know that their A C. Dynamos would be used in the execution, having been obtained by three prisons in New York State. So they were afraid of bad press for their electricity, and they paid this guy's legal bills to try to prevent it from from being

used to kill him. Yeah. I mean it's kind of like we create this product, this podcast, what have we found out that prisons had subscribed to the podcast in order to use it in some sort of sonic death device for execution, or to take in another direct. And uh, you know, you have musicians such as Trent Resner who were outraged when they found out that their music might be used by interrogators in certain situations, or rock musicians who have politicians they don't like using their music at

campaign rallies. Exactly, you've created this thing for one purpose, and here someone's gonna use it for this this this rather despicable purpose over here. And then there's this No one knew exactly how electricity would kill him? What a crazy controversy. Yeah, they didn't know what electricity did they due to the body to cause death. They knew it could cause death, right, but what did it do? Yeah? I mean yeah, we knew that, we observed it happened.

We knew that happened. But but experts were split on exactly what would happen um to kimler Um. Doctors knew that the body uti utilized electricity in the nervous system. Some physicians even employed it again as a curative measure, as we've discussed, some even taking the view that the body was like a battery that needed regular recharging. That goes back to the medical electricity talked about shock me

make me better. Yeah so, and then other experiments had proven electricity's ability to revive dying dogs uh and and as well as some of these uh these experiences would just saw that like the animation of tissue. Uh so, perhaps he would enter into a state of what they referred to as electrical asphyxia, where he would be rolled out to the morgue while still alive and presumably like

screaming inwardly. Um. They weren't sure if if he would dive, destroyed vital organs, if he would asphyxiate, And then they didn't know if they should use a C or d C. At first, they ended up going with the former, as it was considered more dangerous a wasp that would strike multiple times rather than a beasting. So they constructed the A C dynamo at Auburn prison uh in order so that it would deliver a maximum of six and eight volts. They killed a horse with it. They killed a cow

with it to test it out. Thousand volts would kill a horse, five hundred would kill a dog. So surely the full uh eight would kill a man without any difficulty. Okay, So what actually happened when it came time for the execution? All right, so they turned it on. They gave him seventeen seconds of current, and he was pronounced dead. And they think, all right, we've done it. That was that sounds that seems perfectly reasonable. Seventeen quick seconds of powerful

current kills him dead. But then then a witness protests, stands up and says, he is alive. I see him breathing, and indeed his chest was moving. He was still alive. So they panicked and they had to turn it back on man, and this is where things start getting horrible. Blood pours from the ruptured capillaries in his face, an unpleasant smell builds up, like I think it was described as worse than unpleasant. Yeah, yeah, And we'll read some

of the quotes from from individuals who witnessed this. Yes, like a stinch of singed hair and flesh and all told. At the end of it, Kimla received eight minutes of current, and they later realized that the electrodes didn't make full contact, so he didn't receive the full power of the current. It so they were just shocking him at a lower voltage. Yeah, and uh yeah, I think back to the breathing on

the frog. Remember breathing that the moisture of one's breath under the frog, and it was a uh enabled you know, full contact to be made with the electrodes on the frog. Similar here, they say if Kimmeler had sweated more, or if they had greased him up or something beforehand, that would have made the difference. But instead they just end up roasting him at a slower rate with with a lower voltage. So yet again this sounds kind of like

the definition of cruel and unusual punishment. Yeah, exactly the opposite of everything they'd preached about a swift, hygienic death. In fact, we have a few quotes from it. What we're gonna read from me now, and this is from Kimmeler's death by torture. That's the headline, New York Herald, August seven. Men accustomed to every form of suffering, grew faint as the awful spectacle was unfolded before their eyes.

Those who stood the site were filled with awes. They saw the effects of this most potent of fluids, which is only partly understood by those who have studied it most faithfully, as it slowly disintegrated the fiber and tissues of the body through which it passed. The heaving of a chest, which had it had been promised, would be stilled in an instant piece as soon as the circuit was completed, the foaming of the mouth, the bloody sweat, the writhing shoulders, and all the other signs of life.

Horrible as these were, they were made infinitely more horrible by the premature removal of the electrodes and the subsequent replacing of them for not seconds, but minutes, until the room was filled with the odor of burning flesh, and strong men fainted and fell like logs upon the floor. And all this done in the name of science. Yeah, the quite a spectacle, um and again quite the opposite of what everyone was promised with this. And then of

course they ended up doing an autopsy. They found that the small blood vessels between the brain and the skull, that that all the blood was like charcoil, charcoal, but not burned ash, but the fluid had been evaporated in the skull itself been badly burned. So yeah, all these gory details made it out into the press, and uh, it was kind of a pr nightmare for for the

electric chairs first entry into the modern world. And I think Nicholas Reddick is making the point in his paper that this is sort of this is the death blow to the to the sacred spirituality of electricity, all of the mystery, all of the metaphorical sense in which it embodied, virility, fertility, spirituality, the great unknown, the power of the universe, the power of God. Whatever it was that you thought was imbued in this force, it was kind of all gone by

this point. Yeah, we've taken this divine energy and we've imperfectly tamed it. We've tamed it, but then in trying to utilize it, utilize it poorly and just the most base purposes. Yeah, and and again needlessly. It's not like

we didn't know how to execute people beforehand. I mean, again, you can certainly give credence to these cases that we needed more modern, hygienic uh and dependable means of of carrying out these sentences, but it's it's hard to argue that too much in the face of of the results there those those those minutes and minutes of roasting electrocution, Yeah, but it also, Reddick points out, wasn't just the this use, this barbaric use of electricity. It was also something about

the familiarity, you know. He comments that by the eighteen nineties, as electricity came more and more into our lives, he says, quote, it was becoming increasingly difficult to talk about transcendental matters in electrical terms. And I think that's really saying something to me that suggests that there's something, uh, we we sort of alluded to this earlier, but about holiness itself.

The concept of holiness and mystery. Uh, that is the same as strangeness and otherness and familiarity with the thing is death to a sense of the holy and the sacred about it. Yeah. Again, if it's cooking your toast, it's hard to find the divine in it. Of course, then again, I often think about how that's a lot of what we do on this podcast is exactly challenging

that impulse discovering the divine Exactly. I often want to take a thing that's familiar and make it strange again, to revisit something that we we might think of as being utterly mundane and rediscover what's fascinating and very unsettling and weird about it. Absolutely so, maybe in these episodes we've helped you find something strange and fascinating about that very force that cooks your Reggo waffles. Hopefully so this episode not paid for by EGO. Yeah, so there you

have it. Um, the role of the transformer is complete. Um, the spiritual has become the mundane. And if you want to check out more about this topic, be sure to check out the landing paid for this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot Com will include links to related content, links out to that how stuff Works article about electricity, to some of the sources we've used in researching the episodes as well. UM, and you'll also find

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