A Brief History of Creation

by Bill Mesler

  As soon as Andrew Crosse’s story found its way onto the pages of one of these new local newspapers, it didn’t take long for it to spread nearly everywhere. Practically overnight, the quiet, unassuming man from Broomfield became a nineteenth-century version of a tabloid celebrity, the subject of drawing-room conversations throughout Britain and abroad. He became the scientist who created “life in a laboratory,” and not just some invisible microbe. Crosse had supposedly proved the doctrine of spontaneous generation by creating a living, visible creature. His experiment was something that was beginning to pique the interest of wide segments of the public, the kind of thing the sensationalizing newspapermen of the day could use to sell papers.

  Two books, in particular, were crucial in shaping the way Crosse’s story was received. One was an immensely popular science book that appeared seven years after Crosse’s experiment and held up his insects as proof of the creation of life purely through the laws of nature followed by a transformative process that led to more complex forms of life.

  The other was a novel that had been published nearly twenty years before Crosse’s experiment, one that whetted the public’s thirst for new explanations of the mysteries of life. It had been conceived of on the shores of Lake Geneva, where a teenage girl had spent a rainy afternoon penning one of the most enduring works of fiction ever written.

  IN THE SUMMER of 1816, eighteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft and her soon-to-be husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, traveled to Switzerland to visit the writer Lord Byron.* Shelley hoped to cultivate the more established Byron as a friend and mentor. While at Byron’s villa on Lake Geneva, the group had planned a sightseeing expedition into the Swiss Alps, but heavy rains forced a change in their plans. Instead, they spent a legendary evening sharing German ghost stories. Byron challenged each in the group to write a story of their own. Only Mary and the English writer John William Polidori took up the challenge by writing novels. Published in 1819, Polidori’s book, The Vampyre, was a classic in its own right, spawning a literary vampire craze that never really ended. But Wollstonecraft’s novel had even greater and longer-lasting impact.

  By the time of its publication, Mary Wollstonecraft had become Mary Shelley, and her book had a title: Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. The critics hated the book almost as much as the public adored it. What made Shelley’s story unique—and so compelling—was the centrality of science. Her Dr. Frankenstein did not simply create a monster. He created a living creature from nonliving material, life from nonlife, just as Andrew Crosse was later supposed to have done. The book was, in a sense, a modern creation myth, one that reflected new ideas about the laws that govern life. And these ideas sprang from the science and skepticism of the time. It was a tale that could not have been written by the old German writers whose ghost stories were told that rainy day in Switzerland. Some have argued that it was the first science fiction novel.

  In a preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley described the inspiration behind the story. Her plot stemmed from a conversation between Lord Byron and her husband about the experiments concerning spontaneous generation conducted by a “Dr. Darwin”—a description that has tended to confuse later readers. The Darwin she was referring to was Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, a larger-than-life character known as much for his brilliance as a scientist as for his eccentricities. He once famously turned down King George III’s invitation to become royal physician. Corpulent and crippled by a childhood affliction with polio, Erasmus Darwin nonetheless fathered fourteen children by two wives and a governess, and scandalously prescribed sex as a cure for hypochondria.

  In the sciences, Erasmus Darwin’s beliefs were seen as radical. To some, they were even absurd. He was an early believer in transmutation, the theory that would one day come to be known as evolution. He held that species were subject to a gradual process of change that eventually led to new species and that was responsible for all the diverse organisms on the planet. The living world, Darwin believed, was molded by this process of transmutation, and the original source of life was the phenomenon of spontaneous generation. In his day, Erasmus Darwin was the most famous advocate of spontaneous generation in the English-speaking world. Both evolution and spontaneous generation often found a voice in his poetry. They were neatly summed up in his last and greatest work, the epic poem The Temple of Nature:

  Hence without parent by spontaneous birth

  Rise the first specks of animated earth;

  From Nature’s womb the plant or insect swims,

  And buds or breaths, with microscopic limbs . . .

  Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves

  Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves;

  First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass

  Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;

  These, as successive generations bloom

  New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;

  Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,

  And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.

  Such notions weren’t out of place in Mary Shelley’s world. She was surrounded by freethinkers and religious skeptics. She traveled in the bohemian, avant-garde intellectual circles that were the English equivalent of La Boulangerie, its ranks filled by atheists who felt they had a particular stake in the question of life’s origin. Her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was probably the most famous British atheist of the time. Her father, the radical political philosopher William Goldwin, was perhaps the second most famous. In their eyes, like those of d’Holbach, God played no direct part in the creation of human beings. There had to be a naturalistic explanation for creation.

  By the time of Andrew Crosse’s insect-generating experiment, the connection with Shelley’s mad scientist would have been an easy one for people to make. Both created life in a laboratory. Then there was the role of electricity in Crosse’s experiment. The fact that Shelley had once attended one of Crosse’s early lectures on electricity would, in later years, cause some to assume that he had been the inspiration for her Dr. Frankenstein. But such an association was highly unlikely, since at the time of the lecture, Crosse showed little interest in biology.

  The analogy people drew between Crosse and Shelly’s fictional scientist actually owed less to the book than to the wildly popular stage version of Frankenstein that appeared in 1823, which added electrical apparatuses as an embellishment. Shelley herself had left ambiguous the method by which Dr. Frankenstein revived his creature. At one point, she says he breathed “a spark of being into a lifeless thing.” But the word “electricity” was never used. In the preface, however, Shelley did mention the influence on her text by the experiments of Luigi Galvani, a scientist whose own work had piqued interest in the possibility that human beings could come to harness the power to create life.

  Galvani was an Italian professor of anatomy at the University of Bologna who had conducted an experiment that seemed at the time even more miraculous than Crosse’s. Galvani had been studying a dissected frog leg, when he was startled to discover that the leg twitched whenever he touched it with his scissors. He suspected that this twitching had something to do with the electrical storm raging outside his laboratory. Later that year, the same thing happened when a crude electric generator was left on during a dissection. Galvani was by nature a cautious man and didn’t easily jump to conclusions. “So easy it is to deceive oneself in experimenting, and to think that we have seen and found that which we wish to see and find,” he once wrote.

  Gradually, though, Galvani came around to the idea that he had hit upon a life force that he called “animal electricity.” His experiment became rather infamous, mostly because of the showmanship of Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini. Aldini delighted in public demonstrations of his uncle’s “animal electricity,” and even took his show on the road to London. In 1802, he stimulated movement in a dead ox before an astounded audience that included King George III’s wife, Queen Cha
rlotte, and their son, the future King George IV. A year later, Aldini electrically animated the head of an executed criminal in front of some of London’s most important physicians. He later recounted that “the jaw began to quiver . . . and the left eye actually opened.” His uncle’s discovery eventually became so renowned that it spawned the word “galvanize,” meaning “to stimulate” or “to bring to life.”

  In a way, Galvani was right, although not in the way he thought or in ways anyone of his era would have been able to understand. Living cells are, in effect, miniature batteries, powered by the charge differential they maintain across their membranes, which is transformed into work by the molecular pumping of ions. In animals, the discharge of this electrical potential mediates the transmission of nerve signals, which in turn activate the muscles. Electricity, in essence, keeps the heart pumping, operates the limbs, and creates the phenomenon of consciousness. But the idea that Galvani’s famous experiment proved the existence of a special life force was eventually debunked by Alessandro Volta, whose name now graces our unit of electrical potential. In order to refute Galvani’s experiment, Volta created the first example of an electric battery, now known as a voltaic cell. In his investigation into electricity’s role as a life-giving force, Volta paved the way for a second industrial revolution—this one powered by electricity.

  Galvani’s frog leg regeneration.

  THE FIRST PERSON known to have written about electricity was the Greek playwright Aristophanes, who noticed that after amber is rubbed with a swath of fur, it exerts a pull on lightweight objects like feathers. Anaximander’s mentor in Thales had observed an even more striking example in the way a piece of magnetite, commonly called lodestone, exerted a pull on anything made of iron. Thales attempted to describe the phenomenon, but as he did with most subjects that he found hard to explain, he turned to metaphysical explanations. The lodestone, he thought, must have a soul that was exerting power. Had Anaximander written about the phenomenon, he likely would have described it differently. But Thales’s conclusion wasn’t so different from what most people saw in electrical phenomena for the next two thousand years. Saint Augustine was left speechless by a simple parlor trick of moving bits of iron around a table by using a lodestone concealed underneath. He often recalled the episode as an example of a miracle, definitive proof of the divine. More than a thousand years later, van Helmont was not shy in using the word “magic” to describe the phenomenon of magnetism.

  By the nineteenth century, the belief that electricity constituted some secret ingredient of life had become widespread, and it fit neatly into the theory of vitalism. Vitalists maintained that an unbreakable barrier stood between life and nonlife, that living and inanimate matter were fundamentally different and incompatible. To the vitalists, spontaneous generation was simply not plausible without the infusion of an élan vital.

  Vitalism was an old theory. It could be traced all the way back to Thales’s time, and it had a long history in Western medicine, where it found a place in the works of such seminal figures as Hippocrates and Galen, who believed, long before the discovery of air, or even of gases, that the lungs worked by drawing on a mysterious supernatural energy that Thales called pneuma. But like the theory of preformation in the time of Needham and Voltaire, vitalism had been reinvigorated—galvanized, one might say—by those who feared the growing threat of materialism.

  The nineteenth century was the age of industrialism, the age of the machine. Cities were filling with factories and their endless plumes of smoke. Railways sprawled through once pristine countryside. Everything from architecture to social traditions seemed to be under siege by the rapid progress brought by the industrial revolution. In the sciences, the vision of a universe arranged like a mathematically precise clock, expounded by Newton and Descartes, was growing ever more prominent. The line between the living and the nonliving was blurring. This trend was unsettling for many. Vitalism was an attempt to stave off what its adherents saw as a cold and dehumanizing vision of the universe.

  Central to the theory was the idea that living things were different from the nonliving because they had a soul. But what exactly was a soul? The concept needed a scientific veneer fit for an age of scientific skepticism. Believers in vitalism began describing a kind of cosmic fluid. Some called it “ether,” a “vital force,” or an “élan vital.” Still others called it an “imponderable fluid,” which one vitalist writer described as an “electric, magnetic-mineral, or organic fluid.” The name “imponderable fluid” was a little ironic. It might indeed be invisible, but it held characteristics that could be observed, or pondered. That was the point of vitalism. The seemingly magical pull of a magnet, the invisible force of an electric current—these were observable phenomena that seemed to defy materialistic explanation. This is what set vitalism’s “soul” apart from the soul that most people might imagine in the twentieth century. Vitalists believed the soul could be observed, and perhaps measured, if only with great difficulty.†

  So eager were people—even natural philosophers—to embrace vitalism that Alexandre Bertrand, the science reporter for the Paris-based newspaper Le Globe, wrote of a “revolution in the high regions of physics. . . . The universe appears to us now as if entirely plunged into an infinite ocean of imponderable matter.” In hindsight, it would be easy to dismiss the movement as quackery. But in the first half of the nineteenth century, vitalism was so pervasive that it inspired the separation of the field of chemistry into two separate branches, organic and inorganic. Most of the leading figures in the life sciences would have described themselves as vitalists—even Louis Pasteur. They believed in the unassailable line between the living and nonliving. Not all of them believed in “imponderable fluid,” but many still saw clues to the nature of life in electricity and electromagnetism.

  ANDREW CROSSE’S first connections to the world of electrical science came through his family. His father, Richard Crosse, was a good friend of two men who understood the science of electricity as well as any others in the late eighteenth century did: Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley. The friendships stemmed from the radical politics shared by all three. Richard Crosse was a well-known supporter of the French Revolution and had joined the crowds on the day of the storming of the Bastille, even hoisting the French Tricolore over the battlements. His efforts had ruined his reputation in England, where he was seen as an eccentric troublemaker or, worse, a Jacobin revolutionary. Upon his return from France, angry mobs had tried to attack his carriage. Yet Richard Crosse’s radicalism also earned him admirers, among whose ranks were Franklin and Priestley. Both men were guests at Fyne Court, and both were scientific visionaries who left important marks on the emerging field of electricity.

  At the time, scientists explained phenomena such as magnetism as the product of two distinct and different electrical fluids having two different powers: attraction for one, repulsion for the other. Franklin still believed that electricity was a fluid, but a single fluid, with both positive and negative charges that explained its strange properties. He didn’t understand that electricity’s apparent movement was simply the flow of electrons between atoms. Still, his view was a huge step toward understanding how electricity worked and what it actually was. While Franklin was serving as the American ambassador to France, his reputation in the field earned him an appointment to a royal commission to investigate claims by a vitalist, the German hypnotist Franz Mesmer, that he could heal people with invisible electrical fluid. Mesmer’s cure was to have his subject swallow pieces of iron and then to attach magnets to the rest of the subject’s body. The phrase “animal magnetism” comes from Mesmer’s belief that electromagnetism constituted a supernatural life-giving force.

  Priestley was almost as remarkable a figure as Franklin. Raised in a strict Calvinist household, he became a dissenting clergyman at an early age, turning to Unitarianism and denying the divinity of Christ, and fleeing to Pennsylvania when anti-French rioters burned down his house in England. He is probably
best remembered for his work in chemistry and his discovery of oxygen, which he called “dephlogisticated air.” Priestley also was the first person to describe electrical force mathematically, in a formula he subsequently included in his seven-hundred-page book The History and Present State of Electricity, which became the standard text in the field for over a century.

  IN HIS LATER YEARS, Andrew Crosse never mentioned his father’s famous friends when retracing his own fascination with electricity. This omission was not surprising. Andrew Crosse was a progressive, but he was merely a proponent of reform, not a radical or revolutionary like his father had been. Andrew Crosse’s outlet was the reformist Whig Party, and he even served a term as a member of Parliament representing Somerset County. With Richard Crosse’s political views growing ever more marginalized as the years went by, it is not surprising that Andrew Crosse chose to steer clear of reference to Franklin and Priestley to avoid conjuring the specter of his father’s radicalism.

  Andrew Crosse received his first electric machines when he was sixteen, the year his father died. Crosse was by that time devouring entire volumes of the Philosophical Transactions as soon as he could acquire them. He read whatever he could find on the subject of electricity. The bookseller at the shop Crosse frequented turned out to be an experimentalist himself and took an interest in the boy. He gave Crosse a crude generator that could produce energy from simple friction and a “battery table” that held thirty Leyden jars. Little more than a glass jar filled with water and containing a piece of metal foil to conduct electricity, the Leyden jar, named after the Dutch city where it was invented, was one of the earliest versions of an electric capacitor.‡ In time, Crosse would find a more efficient way to harness electricity from the atmosphere in the condensers and lightning rods he arranged in the trees outside his home. But the Leyden jar remained a staple in his laboratory. Eventually, his basement held three thousand of them.