The Modern Prometheus
Galvani did not ask where the spark of life originated, but Victor Frankenstein does. On the cold decks of an icebound ship, its sides lashed by gales that caused timbers to rock and groan in plaintive, splintering squeals, the young Walton prepares to hear the strangest of all stories. But despite how Hollywood has chosen to portray the “mad doctor,” Shelley’s original narrative gives us, instead, an enlightenment natural philosopher. “In my education,” Victor explains, “my father had taken the greatest precautions that my mind should be impressed with no supernatural horrors.”31 He never once trembled at a tale of superstition or feared ghosts and spirits. Walton sets a course to the north where the sun never sets, but upon Victor’s fancy, “Darkness had no effect” and a churchyard was “merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life.” He spends his days and nights in such charnel houses and among the collected bones of the dead and gone, and he thinks what a terrible waste of nature’s most perfect creature: “I saw how the fine form of man was degraded [. . .] I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain.”32 Victor may not fear the darkness of death; he intends, instead, to overthrow it. Darkness is anathema. He would bring the light of science (he tells us), the patient, methodical, plodding light of painful, dull, repetitive work. His hours of study and toil in the boneyard and anatomy theater are ignored by film and screen, but for the Enlightenment scientist, the method is the point. Work in tiny increments, little by little, and in conversation with other thinkers—that is how light dispels the darkness. Frankenstein worked alone, but real-life scientists rarely do. Shortly after Galvani published on animal electricity as the beginning of all life, commentaries on the work are delivered into the hands of one Alessandro Volta. Unlike Galvani in almost every respect, Volta reads the discoveries and, unable to stomach the grand claims, sets about testing them by his own methods.
Alessandro was to Galvani as Leibniz had been to Newton. He appreciated the good things in life, dressed well, and was reasonably attractive and popular with the ladies. He liked high living, drank too much, and kept current on the latest operas—and, like the other “genius” temperaments described by Elting Morison (or the occasional steampunk supervillain), Volta thought the world of his own unique and powerful mind. To better himself, he applied to learned men with a combination of fervor and charm, and so built a social network that eventually earned him a place at the University of Pavia. He could both flatter and please, and, explains literary scholar Roseanne Montillo, his “knack for showmanship” gained him both peers and patrons.33 In Newton’s day, Leibniz could be outfoxed by staunch stratagem and sour-faced loyalists to order and restraint. At the century’s end, the tables had turned. Franklin and the electrical experimenters had all been showmen, to a degree, and electricity offered the first best example of a science that lent itself readily to the public. But showmanship also launched balloons.
The dream of flight, says Richard Holmes, enticed humankind since the “myth of Icarus” (who fell to his death when his wax wings melted in the sun).34 And flight, like lightning, was a thing of the gods. It should surprise no one that Benjamin Franklin, at the end of his life, spent his time reporting aerial experiments to the Royal Society. Two Frenchmen, Joseph-Michel Montgolfier and his brother Jacques-Étienne, launched a hot-air balloon—and others soon followed. In 1785, the imposing figure of a living Juno—a woman of substance in low-cut silks—boarded a striped and stately balloon basket at Hyde Park in London. The aeronautical master of the occasion, the Italian Vincenzo Lunardi, gave the day its flourish. Dashing, gallant, fearless, and proud, Lunardi had become the toast of England for his expeditions as the self-proclaimed “First Aerial Traveler in Britain.” His accomplishments included being one of the finest marketers of his day, and many were the snuff boxes (and garters) graced by his name or form, or the figure of a balloon. Never mistaking an opportunity for a “first,” Lunardi planned to launch the first Aerial Female—with her sashes and petticoats, good humor, and not a little courage. It sold tickets. It garnered support. But like the electrical experiment, flight was wretchedly dangerous. French aeronauts Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier (another dashing national hero) and Pierre Romain fell to their deaths in an attempt to cross the Channel from Boulogne to Dover. The upper hydrogen balloon caught fire and they plummeted, Pilâtre leaping from the basket amid smoke plumes. The bodies of both were horribly mangled by the organ-rupturing impact. Despite all the carnage, the expense, the sheer danger of unpredictable winds and unknown landing sites, when the seventy-seven-year-old Franklin was asked about the use of a hot-air balloons, he scoffed: “what’s the use of a newborn baby?”35 Science and spectacle and wonder mingled, “misshapen progeny” or not. Volta knew the game better than anyone; did Galvani think he had found a secret? Volta would bring the fight to him in an arms race of experiments the likes of which Victor Frankenstein had never seen.
At first, Volta was inclined to admit animal electricity as a possibility. He’d done his own experiments and measured weak electricity from frogs, but Volta could not shake the idea that the frogs’ bodies were passive, rather than active, parts of the electrical process. We can peer in on Galvani’s method even today; his experiments, macabre as they were, have been well documented and well preserved [Fig. 9]. He exposed the nerves of frogs, including the sciatic nerve. He then touched the nerves with metallic rods or pins. The original experiments included the use of a Hauksbee machine, but Galvani repeated it (as did Fowler) with all sorts of varying implements of zinc and silver, and also copper. The nerves, he said, were conductors—the muscle the “Leiden jar,” storing it up to be released with the circuit was closed with two different types of metal. But even Fowler noted that not all metals worked the same. And a new idea nibbled at Volta’s understanding. Perhaps the entire frog was a conductor, and the electric current had been generated from the metals themselves. He made a long wire of two types of metal and pressed the ends to a nerve. The muscle contracted, though not part of the “circuit”; it must be the dual metals, acting together as a “biometalic arc.”36 Now it was Galvani’s turn. He and his assistants tried new tests with different frog preparations. This time, they left the metals out of it and merely touched one part of the frog to another part, nerves to nerves.37 A strange sensation occurred, and a kind of acidity followed. He had “tasted” electricity—and he followed the first experiment with one more nerve-shattering (and worthy of Newton’s self-experimentation): he put the arc contacts into his eye. The result was unexpected. In the darkness—there was light.38 Not a burst, not quite, but a pinprick of light that registered to Volta how the electricity worked.
The result of the metal-free experiment sent Volta back to his lab, but not in defeat. An elastic mind and complete faith in his abilities anchored him while he searched for a solution. The answer, he decided, had to do with “humid conductors”; Galvani had touched one slick, wet, skinless part of a frog to yet another slick, wet, part. Somehow, the electric fluid communicated in that environment. But there was no way to prove it, not from that quarter. If Galvani determined to take the metal out of the experiment, Volta would remove the body itself. He’d already done a test of the dual metal wires by pressing them to his tongue. Now he set about creating a false frog, a construction entirely of those metals and weak acid (which the fluid of the mouth and eye represented) in a “pile.” Layer by layer, he built the stack of metal and acid, attached the arc wires, and presented the first electricity that was neither mechanically generated nor emanating from some “vital fluid” inside biological flesh. But the strange, messy, sulfurous, and bubbling device did something else too. It produced continuous electric current. Leiden jars must be charged; they stored only for a short time and produced electricity in bursts. The pile, by contrast, offered something entirely new. Volta had invented the battery, and nine years later, a young Humphry Davy would take the stage to aston
ish the Royal Society with the experimental science they once turned their back upon: steaming stacks of Voltaic piles lined a basement room, and above stairs, he delivered the first arc lamp demonstration, bright, white, blinding and constant light. And still the question remained: what was this substance, and what could it be used for?
“From the midst of this darkness,” says Victor Frankenstein, “a sudden light broke in upon me—a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised that among so many men of genius who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret.”39 The light, for Frankenstein, was life—the ability to reanimate dead tissue, to steal the beating heart of man from the grim clutches of death. This fascination, morbid though it may be, has been with humankind almost from the first moment we looked upon our wondrous bodies and realized they would not last. The morbid fascination remains with us still, shadowing our discoveries in science and medicine, dogging our steps. Volta won the scientific argument and vanquished Galvani, who died in Bologna a broken man with his faith shaken and his reputation in ruins. But Galvani’s work returns in surprising ways; his nephew Giovanni Aldini sought to resurrect his brilliant, not by electrifying frogs, but by reanimating dead humans. The perfect solution to the human machine would be the ability to reengage it, to rebuild it, to achieve what only fiction had yet dreamed of.
On January 17, 1803, Aldini advertised the event of the age. The body of murderer Thomas Forster, hanged at Newgate, was brought to the public arena in London. A gruesome report follows—its detail tantalizing in its similarity to Frankenstein’s. Shelley writes: “I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs [. . .] His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks.” In the report on Aldini’s first attempts, “the jaw began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the left eye actually opened [. . .] the fists clenched and beat violently the table on which the body lay, natural respiration artificially established.”40 Public outcry against these horrors resulted in them being banned and Aldini being chased back to Italy in 1805, but his experiments were taken up again by Johann Ritter in light of Humphry Davy’s improved voltaic battery.41 Ritter’s work would be communicated back to the Royal Society with increasing uneasiness, and the final report ending with the chilling indictment: “it is impossible to conceive anything so disgusting and humiliating for the human understanding than their dreams.”42 For historian Richard Holmes, these dreams are impressed upon the very fabric of Frankenstein, not least because Ritter’s led him to ruin—the loss of position, friends, family, and finally his sanity. To quote from Hamlet, “in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?” Mortality triumphed. Ritter died in 1810 still young, unaware that his ideas would be resurrected in a work we now consider both the beginnings of science fiction and the seedbed for steampunk tropes of mad science, technological hubris, and life’s unfathomable forces. But its warnings didn’t slow the march of progress into a disaster-blind future.
I Make the Light of Safety
“Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.”
—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Around the same time Galvani and Volta battled in Italy, a whole other revolution was taking place in England. The German astronomer William Herschel, inventor of the largest telescope the world had ever seen (at forty feet), discoverer of comets and planets, and—with Kepler—one who dreamed of mountains, and even cities, on the moon, delivered an astonishing paper about the cosmos. There was no God in the machine, he explained in 1791. There was no machine at all. For the first time, he calculated that the universe was far older than expected, and that it was subject to fluid changes over time. Nebulae and star clusters could be compared, explained Herschel, to plants in various stages of development, rather than mechanical contraptions.43 The botanist Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, praised this new idea of an “evolving” cosmos. Darwin also honors Herschel’s disturbing idea that the cosmos may collapse in the end, that “death and night and chaos mingle all.”44 In 1792, Herschel’s friend Jérôme Lalande claimed, “I have searched through the heavens, and nowhere have I found a trace of God,” while the French astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace claimed the solar system required no special act of creation, no divine intervention.45 An organic universe, constantly expanding and changing, would have devastated a mind like Newton’s as the worst vision of chaos. But these new men of science, like Victor Frankenstein, saw the explosion of new ideas as the beckoning of uncharted territories. In 1802, Herschel developed the idea of deep space and deep time, the first inkling that looking at stellar light was looking into the past, seeing the distant ancestors of the cosmic universe, whose light had only just reached earth. He pushed his ideas outward, suggesting that there were other galaxies, even other Milky Ways.46 The Romantic writer Lord Byron, friend of the Shelleys and present during the ghost-telling episode that spawned Frankenstein, visited Herschel’s telescope as though visiting a strange and world-weary sage. The experience left him sobered: “the comparative insignificance of ourselves and our world, when placed in competition with the mighty whole,” he confides, “led me to imagine that our pretensions to eternity might be overrated.”47 The sky for Herschel, explains Richard Holmes, was “full of ghosts,” because “the light did travel after the body was gone.”48 Far from an ordered universe with an impenetrable but trustworthy God, the cosmos existed in flux with no one at the helm. The new breed of philosophers saw this great, mad world and invented new ways of pushing the boundaries. But even here, they chased the light. At the close of the eighteenth century, explorers and experimenters led risky, adventurous lives. They didn’t want to stare into the void and despair—that wanted to hurl thunderbolts at it. And chief among them was Humphry Davy, already animated by Herschel’s discoveries, and intent on illuminating the world.
Buoyant, attractive, and poetic in nature, Davy flirted with the Romantic ideal. Portraits preserve the sparkling luminosity of his eyes, a personality of vigor and verve that miraculously fit in his small frame (about five feet, five inches).49 Mr. Davies Gilbert, who first employed him, described Davy’s pleasure at being surrounded by scientific instruments as “the delight of the child introduced to a magazine of toys.”50 His conversation was excited and exciting, his personality charming, and his spirit adventurous to a fault. His experiments were often reckless (and smelly—the chemical odor a common complaint of his neighbors alongside the explosions of glass vessels unable to take the pressure of reaction).51 Like Newton, he also experimented on his own body, even “forced exhalation” of air from his lungs using the pumps first designed by Hauksbee. After three tries, he passed out, but managed to mumble, “I do not think I shall die,” to anxious assistants. And as early as 1801, while still a prancing young man (and man about town), his research into galvanism entitled him to a position with the Royal Institution of London. Best of all, the energy with which he applied his theories made his lectures popular not only among the learned but also the public. He is described in a 1868 tribute to “distinguished men” of science in Britain as possessing “a mind of a poetic cast,” which supplied “a rich variety of metaphors and original illustrations, such as poets themselves regarded with admiration.”52
The compliment is borne out in his earliest publications, a voice that sings with admiration of the sciences and of nature—but more particularly, of light: “Nature is a series of visible images: but these are constituted by light. Hence the worshipper of Nature is a worshipper of light.”53 Like the poets whose work spoke of cataracts sublime, Davy takes works from Kepler, Newton, and Descartes, as well as moderns like Herschel, Volta, and Galvani, and delivers them like a statesman’s address: “We may consider t
he sun and the fixed stars (the suns of other worlds) as immense reservoirs of light, destined by the great Organizer to diffuse over the Universe organization and animation.”54 Mind and matter meld, the life force and its principles gathered together in what Davy calls the “Law of Animation”—a life spark that tied the mind itself to the “corpuscular motion,” human consciousness and physiological process rarified to chemical constituents. “What had been the study and desire of the wisest men since the creation of the world was now within my grasp,”55 exclaims Victor Frankenstein. Davy addressed new and larger crowds for his excited speeches, including one that a young Mary Shelley attended with her father. Davy, a mythic figure, was a showman of the first order who reveled in demonstrations of strange gases and chemicals; Davy proclaimed: “I was born to benefit the world by my great talents,”56 a prodigy and a genius whose most sustaining work would really and truly light up the dark.
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