Clockwork Futures

by Brandy Schillace

  The problem for “electricians” and natural philosophers studying electrical effect had to do with storage. Stephen Gray could do wonders with the “flying boy,” but the charge wore off when the sphere ceased rotating, dissipating and disappearing as it went to ground. Those who wanted to study it struggled to find useful means, especially those, like Professor Musschenbroek, who wanted to demonstrate the principles for his students at Leiden University. Because experimenters assumed that electricity was fluid (sensible, since it “flowed” from person to person, or person to object), they theorized it might be captured in a glass jar. Musschenbroek and his assistants assumed that placing a wire into a jar partly filled with water (a conductor) and then placing the same on a resin insulator, they could use the Hauksbee machine to capture electrical charge inside the glass. The theory was sound—but it didn’t work. No matter what they tried, they could not generate a spark. Not, at least, until Musschenbroek, tired from lectures and probably in need of a late dinner and a good sleep, accidentally performed an experiment the wrong way. Musschenbroek charged his jar while holding it in his hand and without using the insulator. After cranking the Hauksbee machine, Musschenbroek touched the top of the jar and its copper wire—and had the shock of his life. In the letter, he claims that he would not try the experiment again, but his caution gave way to curiosity. News of the device, its curious claims, and its horrific powers spread from Holland to England, then to distant Japan and also to the American colonies. The Leiden (or Leyden) jar worked like a battery and an early condenser. And despite or, as historian James Delbourgo suggests, because of Musschenbroek’s cryptic warning, the Leiden jar soon “became an irresistible object of both philosophical curiosity and spectacular corporeal experience.”7 And still, no one knew what it was, or why the human body itself seemed so great a part of the electrical force.

  Electrical phenomena “as simple as attractions and repulsions between charged bodies” were choreographed “to keep audiences from boredom,” says Bertucci.8 Spectators could “feel” the effects and instrument makers after Hauksbee exploited what we now know as “electrostatic induction” to make paper puppets dance. The Bakken Museum has one such device; tiny figures, light as air, would skim and pivot on the static charges of metal discs [Fig. 8].9 To hold that history in your hand, as I have done, is to take part in that fascinating display of theatricality. Think how wide the eyes, how hushed the voices. Think how astonished we would be, ourselves, to see the magic of sparks for the first time. It would be Franklin himself who eventually unlocked the secret of the Leiden jar’s force; he took to making his own experiments and—possibly because of his own background in business—developed an idea of electric economy. There must be positive and negative charge, he reasoned, and because nature seeks always to balance her books, one rushes to cancel the other. In 1747, shortly after the publication of Musschenbroek’s findings, he established the principle we take for granted today: the Hauksbee static machine did charge the jar (itself a non-conductor), but with a negative charge that dissipated. However, the human hand placed on the jar, and the human foot touching earth, sent a positive charge to the glass surface, where it steadily built up. The negative charges built too, on the other side, but neither could travel through the glass, and thus one would still feel nothing. It would take the other hand touching the uninsulated lid to complete the circuit—and the sudden rush of charge from negative to positive resulted in explosive shocks.10 To his critics, Franklin enthusiastically offered “proof”: “If anyone should doubt whether the electrical matter passes through the substance of bodies, or only over the surfaces, a shock from an electrified glass jar taken through his own body, will probably convince him.”11

  Bodies attract. Having made a fair number of unfortunate mistakes around electric devices, I know how readily flesh and blood receives and conducts. There is nothing amorous, nothing enticing, nothing rapturous about the shock of balancing electrons. But the inclusion of the body in eighteenth-century electrical demonstrations aroused more than curiosity. By 1749, the electrical showmen had secured audiences also in Philadelphia, and Benjamin Franklin jested of electric parties where “a turkey is to be killed for dinner by the electric shock, and roasted by the electric jack, before a fire kindled by the electrified bottle.”12 Women became “essential protagonists of electrical soirees,” and spectacles played with sexual difference.13 One famous trial coaxed young men into kissing electrified young ladies. A poem published in 1754 described the experience as one that “pained me to the quick” and almost “broke” teeth in the shock. But hopefuls line up anyway, somehow more attracted by the fact they could not reach the object of desire—some more than once. In the dark of aristocratic salons, in private drawing rooms of the merchant class, in the great halls and public parks of the masses, electrical performers staged a host of bizarre sensory experiments: electric fire could be seen in the dark, it could be heard in the crackle of discharge, it could be smelled in the sulfur tinge (and occasional burnt hair of participants), and best and worst of all, it could shatter through the body itself, shaking limbs and rattling teeth. Seeing, but also feeling, was believing: we had discovered the body electric,* our own blood and bones somehow provided a channel for the mysterious electrical fluid. And for reasons that defy common sense, the dangerous force that so unsettled and damaged Musschenbroek came to be thought of as the latest in medical therapy. The spark of light might just be the spark of life.

  Animated Beings

  “As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump.”

  —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

  How often have we looked to the heavens during a storm and wondered at the fractured bursts? The sizzle of white pulses like cracks in the roof of the world. No one could master that power, no one but God—and men, mere mortals, should not try. Hollywood has rendered the making of Frankenstein’s creature a moment of electric hubris, a taming of heaven’s fire to imbue a monster with life, but Shelley’s story gives only the barest hints. When Walton, having nursed and befriended the dying Victor Frankenstein, asks for particulars, he is rebuked. “Are you mad, my friend? [. . .] Or whither does your senseless curiosity lead you? Would you also create for yourself and the world a demoniacal enemy? Peace, peace! Learn my miseries and do not seek to increase your own.”14 Even so, Frankenstein begins with the blasted oak reduced to ribbons, a moment that affected him as a light dawning in darkness. Here was power. Here was something he might tame, even life itself. The Royal Society had turned its back upon electricity as a pastime without utility; they had missed the opportunity to see with fresh eyes what might be possible, and (particularly under Newton) preferred the mysteries of God to the systematic testing of the elements themselves. That task would be left to a man at odds with the very system on which the Royal Society was built. Possessed of “innate common sense, honest empiricism, secular practical utility, and civic-minded benevolence”15 (or so goes the common mythology), Benjamin Franklin represents a revolutionary idea: science is for everyone—not the elite, most particularly not the elite of England.

  A colonial, and soon to be a democratically minded one, Franklin’s philosophical, political, and rational position refused superstition of any kind. He is widely cheered for flying a kite in a thunderstorm (something he probably didn’t do), but the most fascinating experiment he devised had nothing to do with kites and copper keys . . . Neither did it take place in America. In 1752, Frenchmen George-Louis Leclerc and Thomas-François Dalibard followed Franklin’s theoretical designs and erected a forty-foot metal pole held in place by wooden staves.16 The pole rested inside an empty wine bottle. Franklin had already invented the lightning rod, and recommended that they be fitted to churches and other tall buildings so “the electrical fire would [. . .] be drawn out of a cloud silently,
before it could come near enough to strike.”17 His theory for the Leclerc and Dalibard experiment was that the rod would “catch” the lightning and store it in the bottle, just like a Leiden jar. On May 23, at 12:20 P.M., lightning hit the tip of the pole with incredible force, but the bottle remained intact. An assistant ran forward, and as he neared, a spark leapt from the bottle to his hand, burning it. The force may have been greater, but Leclerc and Dalibard confirmed Franklin’s rationalist theory—lightning and man-made electricity were the same. More importantly, man could “catch” lightning and, as with the lightning rods, render its powerful force (relatively) harmless and contained.18

  “The untaught peasant,” complains Victor Frankenstein, “beheld the elements around him and was acquainted with their practical uses. The most learned philosopher knew little more.”19 But with the advent of new science, even the elements could be controlled. Men might “penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding-places. [. . .] they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.”20 By the 1750s, Immanuel Kant hailed Franklin, not Frankenstein, a “modern Prometheus,” stealing heaven’s fire and giving it freely to humankind. The tale makes up part of the American story; a mere colonial, humble and democratically minded, tames the natural world while British elites look on in superstitious wonderment. He stands as the best representative of the Enlightenment natural philosopher in an age where “empirical demonstrations of cause and effect” showed mastery of nature, and as with the clockworks of the foregoing century, an understood order.21 But the public’s chief interest in electricity, and one that occupied Franklin, too, in the years leading up to the American Revolution, had everything to do with bodies. In the 1740s, German doctor Johann Krüger and his pupil Christian Kratzenstein noticed that electricity caused involuntary muscle movement.22 Incredible claims of miraculous healing soon followed in magazines and even respected journals, everything from gout, baldness, paralysis, nervous conditions, circulatory distress, and more supposedly “cured” by miracle devices. The stories were rarely substantiated and most patently false; the authors of Epitome of Electricity and Galvanism complain of this charlatanism and “vulgar amazement,” warning that “when wonder and credulity are coupled with terror and surprise, we must look for a strange and misshapen progeny.”23 Small sparks didn’t just light the room; they made the surrounding darkness all the blacker. What had been achieved in the eighteenth century was, as Frankenstein describes it, only “the partially unveiled face of Nature.” Like a well-oiled machine, “one by one the various keys were touched which formed the mechanism” of Victor’s being; “chord after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose.”24 Though operating with scant information, and most of it wrong, Shelley’s mad scientist awakens to the new possibilities: “I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.” At the end of the eighteenth century, that mystery would be called “animal electricity” and would lead to a debate as vehement and as influential as the one between Newton and Leibniz over the providence of God. Modern Prometheus, indeed.

  Luigi Galvani, Italian physician, biologist, and philosopher, esteemed professor at the Catholic University of Bologna, spent his evenings closed up in tight quarters with old books . . . and skinned frogs. Franklin suggested flying kites, but Galvani’s lightning experiment attached wires from frog’s legs to iron rods during a storm, just to watch them kick. It began with an accident; he and his assistant prepared frogs for a static experiment—and when the student touched the metal blade to the frog’s sciatic nerve, the legs jumped as though in life (despite the fact that the frog’s head had been removed). It’s an experiment that may be repeated in any lab in the country that might have the tools of high school science. We know the cause so intuitively that it’s hard to step back from it, as hard as imagining the world as flat and the sun spinning around it. But consider the dark night, the dim space lit by guttering candle; a sulfurous fume and the bitter metallic of electric energy dancing on the tongue. A creature entirely disemboweled, piecemeal, scarcely resembling the thing it had been in life, suddenly animates. Its toes splay and grasp, the muscle firing to jump, to flee. Lightning and static may be proved much the same thing, but what was this strange power that emanated from the body itself? It called to mind another strange phenomenon, the “sting” of the torpedo fish and the eel, described by Henry Cavendish some years before.

  Cavendish became convinced that the fish fired an electric charge to kill its prey, and the reports of all who had experienced the sensation confirmed it to be the same in nature as electric shock. At the same time, the fish created no spark . . . and neither did the amphibious limbs twitching on Galvani’s work table. After multiple experiments, he discovered that insulators and weak conductors (set apart by Stephen Gray) didn’t cause a reaction, but use of metals did—and it reminded him of something: “when the phenomenon of contraction occurred, the flow of very tenuous nervous fluid from nerves to muscles resembled the electrical flow discharged from a Leyden jar.” He even put himself in the “circuit,” just as he’d learned from Franklin’s experiments of positive and negative charge.25 It worked—just as the torpedo fish could shock without recourse to a Hauksbee machine, the frog’s muscle and tissue seemed to hold a magical property deep within. His lab became home to more jars and filaments, speared tadpoles, electrified limbs, nervous systems with the organs stripped away, and rows of tiny bodies dangling from copper wire like macabre Christmas decor. He called the magic substance “animal electricity,” or—in honor of Galvani—galvanism, and it became the most contested concepts of the Enlightenment. The old world with its ideas, its mysticism, its giddy promises was about to collide with the new science, and nothing (least of all Galvani himself) would ever be the same.

  Victor Frankenstein discovers galvanism during a lightning storm; he claims, from this moment, a sudden awareness that his old masters, the dusty tomes of the alchemists, were wretchedly flawed. At the same time, galvanism didn’t offer better answers, just new mysteries. “All that had so long engaged my attention suddenly grew despicable,” he recalls to Walton, and “set down natural history and all its progeny as a deformed and abortive creation, and entertained the greatest disdain for a would-be science which could never even step within the threshold of real knowledge.”26 It recalls the words of the Epitome of Electricity and Galvanism, published a few years before Shelley’s novel, almost verbatim: the dangers of wonder and ignorance haunt Frankenstein for the same reasons that electricity tempted the scientist and also the credulous, horror-struck crowds. Math might have lead Kepler and Newton to great heights, but it would never do for the carnival. Who would shout the glory of calculus from a circus tent? Electricity, however, worked by principles still unknown even to the trained mind. It danced. It sparked. It threatened life, but it also—seemingly—gave life, from the twitch of paralyzed muscle to the kick of a dismembered frog. Animal electricity was life itself. Galvani did not ask whence it came; for him, God had put fire into the very stuff of bodies, imbued it with animation and with life. Man might create a false kind of shadow, just as he might build automatons that replicated but could not replace the real. But he had rivals too.

  At the start, Galvani’s 1792 work, De viribus electricitatis in mortu musculari (The Effects of Electricity on Dead Tissue), was met with intense excitement. No longer was electric pulse only to be found in eels and torpedo fish; instead, it was a part of all beings, a vital fluid that accounted for all the activities of life—a latter-day alchemy, a magic bullet. Here was life, soul, and the animating principle in one. Other well-known electricians took up Galvani’s cause, including Tiberius Cavallo and the physiologist Richard Fowler. Fowler trained in Edinburgh and had his work published in London. The Dittrick Museum and Allen Library in Cleveland retain a copy from 1793; it’s been rebound, but its siz
e made it perfect for carrying in Enlightenment coat pockets. Easy to read and full of exciting firsthand accounts of Fowler’s own frequently strange experiments, Experiments and Observations offered a different vision from Galvani’s Latin treatise. Fowler’s book opens (like this one) with an accidental discovery and an unfolding tale:

  Some accidental appearances, certainly electrical, excited, by their novelty, the attention of the Professor of Anatomy at Bologna, to the investigation of the possible, but unknown, dependencies [. . .] of animals upon electricity; and the astonishing effects of that influence upon the human body.27

  Fowler goes on to describe his own attempts at following Galvani’s method, using zinc, nickel, gold, copper, and silver to excite the contractions in the muscles and nerves. The book ends with experiments for the reading public to try, if they have the stomach for it: “as evacuating the blood from a living animal is rather a severe operation,” Fowler explains, it might be more useful to “crush the brains” before proceeding. “I injected [. . .] thirteen drops of opium into each of the hearts of the frogs [and] the hearts became white and ceased contracting”—forty-eight hours later, Fowler attempts to excite contractions in the mangled, bloodless amphibians, but the bloodless limbs produced only the slightest action.28 He continued these daily sequences until the frogs became putrid and foul smelling, then he begins again with his next victims—among them rabbits and dogs. Fowler does not, in the course of his experiments, move higher up the great chain of being, but Galvani, it should be remembered, was also an anatomist. “To examine the causes of life,” Victor Frankenstein explains, “we must first have recourse to death [and] observe the natural decay and corruption of the human body.”29 Galvani meant to show the “how” of electricity; he did not intend to question the divine “why.” He was a man of Newton’s ilk. Fowler used method and experiment to prove Galvani’s claims, but charlatans and public demonstrators capitalized on the ambiguity. In 1798, a “rational mystic [. . .] being the true and lawful Heir of PROMETHEUS” had written to explain electricity is “the vehicle of thought, and peradventure of the human Soul itself.”30 Again, the references to Greek gods and divine fire, but these enthusiastic responses had more of superstition to them and less of science. They would have been decried by Franklin (who died in 1790), and they would not be countenanced a hundred miles away in Pavia, a city swept up in the European Enlightenment. But the idea that electric power contained the secret of life itself caught fire anyway—an antidote to chaos in its very luminosity.