Acid Batteries and the Power Principle
The Stack Exchange’s Science Fiction and Fantasy page asks: Why So Little Steam in Steampunk? So many of the gadgets appear powered by clockwork—and, in fact, “clockpunk” has been applied to the more da Vinci–like aesthetic. Even if we suspend disbelief, even if we allow for pseudoscientific possibilities, we can’t quite get beyond the fact that steam power requires furnace, water, heat, and room. Steam power, like the carbolic acid sprayer, doesn’t lend itself to mobile devices, but mobility and power frequently align. Jules Verne knew this all too well; you cannot have an extraordinary voyage if you can’t get off the ground. Around the World in Eighty Days takes flight with fire-heated air, and The Steam House required fuel to power its steam-engine elephant into the thick of Indian jungle. But not every Vernian vehicle relied on Northumberland coal. In 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Captain Nemo powers the Nautilus with an unusually vril-like propellant. “There is a powerful agent,” he explains to his captives, “obedient, rapid, facile, which can be put to any use and reigns supreme on board my ship. It does everything. It illuminates our ship, it warms us, it is the soul of our mechanical apparatus. This agent is—electricity.”26 We have tracked electricity’s convoluted history from Galvani and Volta to Tesla. But though the Nautilus uses electricity for cooking, lighting, distilling water, and forward thrust, it requires no fossil fuel. Undersea Warfare, an official magazine of the US Navy, dedicated one issue to the ship’s key features, from its conventional four-bladed propeller at the stern to its speed of 50 knots—to its remarkable source of power: a “hugely scaled-up elaboration” of a nineteenth-century battery, the “Bunsen cell.”27
Invented in 1841 by Robert Bunsen (1811–1899), the battery uses a carbon cathode suspended in acid. Nitric acid and a zinc anode in dilute sulfuric acid, to be exact,28 but Nemo makes modifications that turn a potential of 1.89 volts into something supremely powerful indeed: “Mixed with mercury, sodium forms an amalgam that takes the place of zinc in Bunsen batteries. The mercury is never consumed, only the sodium is used up, and the sea resupplies me with that. Moreover, I can tell you, sodium batteries are more powerful.”29 Sadly, some things only work in fiction, and the closest equivalent to Nemo’s unlimited power is probably the nuclear submarine. But acid batteries were, in fact, the future. Without the means to store a charge, electricity would have remained a fascinating but unpredictable and short-lived event. With acid, power became portable.
Voltaic batteries, like the one that powered Davy’s arc light, did not immediately find their utility in gadgets and gizmos (Wild Wild West notwithstanding). Tesla had begun to appreciate the possibilities through his Telautomatics, but the acid battery’s earliest innovators turned away from the machine, and back to the body. Despite the constant vigilance of Faraday and the engineers, whose great aim was to make electricity respectable and who wanted nothing to do with plans for medical electricity, Galvani’s “animal electricity” joined forced with Anton Mesmer’s “animal magnetism” to turn the 1790s into a spectacular carnival of body experiments. Harry Lobb founded the Galvanic Hospital in 1861, and though the Lancet attacked Lobb as a quack, the Electrician hailed the place a roaring success: “an asylum for this science, a home from whence all our English discoveries will emanate.”30 His supporters came from the aristocracy, including Sir Charles Locock, 1st Baronet and obstetrician to Queen Victoria.31 More importantly for the history of the medical battery, however, is Lobb’s association with George Augustus Constantine Phipps, heir of the 1st Marquess of Normanby.32 Lobb and Phipps corresponded at length over the “mysterious” condition of his daughter, Lady Constance Phipps. The lady, with her unknown malady, becomes a human test case for Lobb’s outlandish ideas [Fig. 9]. Men might improve their virility and forgo exercise by having their muscles artificially contracted,33 and women might be relieved of uterine diseases but also “nervous exhaustion.”34 Somehow, we’ve moved back to the electric principle of life, just in its more portable version.
Historian Iwan Rhys Morus describes Lobb’s treatment as somewhat ambiguous, but it seems the good doctor had been using the battery to pass electrical currents through Constance’s head and hand (where she was most afflicted with her mysterious illness). Unfortunately, we never hear from Constance herself, though her father writes that “she’s made a wonderful improvement since you saw her” and that she might go down to London. In the meantime, “if you would like her to go on with the Galvanism,” Lobb needed to send another battery.35 The original had “broken.” The process sounds, at first, like a step back, mimicking the experiments of Franklin and others in the eighteenth century (those who “drew sparks” the way doctors “drew blood”). But unlike them, this device could be used even when the doctor was not present and required no cord, no dynamo, no steam power to make it work. Lobb had medicalized the Pulvermacher chain.
Simple, small, and versatile, the chain consisted of a small metal plate and wire wound around a wooden dowel. The free end of the zinc wire is twisted into a loop while its other end pierced the dowel; at its opposite end, a loop of copper wire winds the dowel between the zinc and pieces the other side. The result, according to Lobb, was “sufficient tension, without the great heat and chemical power of large batteries”—in effect, a “perfect miniature” galvanic battery.36 Lobb explains the utility in his 1859 treatise On the Curative Treatment of Paralysis and Neuralgia; when “excited” by acid, the battery generates electricity from positive to negative poles along a hydroelectric chain. For producing uninterrupted current, Pulvermacher’s device could be set in motion by “clockwork” called the “electrophysiological modificator.”37 These strange chains of mini-batteries might be hung around the neck or stretched between parts of the body to administer minor electric charges, and Lobb was known to use chains as long as sixty links. His descriptions of the chain could be, with very little imagination, compared to descriptions of his lady patients, both “constant” and “easily excited,” while the acid becomes the actor in an impassioned scene: it “runs up” to “excite” with “great energy,” and is especially useful in the bath.38 Men like Lobb continued to suggest electric batteries as curatives well into the nineteenth century, sold as chains or electrified belts, good for everything from headache to “female” trouble [Fig. 17]. Bizarre, brilliant, but essentially fairly useless as concerned Lady Constance, who (very probably misdiagnosed) died at the age of thirty-one. Perhaps ironically, then, German-English physician Julius Althaus makes the point in his own (far more popular) A Treatise on Medical Electricity: electric current “was not one of those remedies which, if they do no good, do no harm.”39 The trick with medical batteries is that, in effect, the body is a battery too—as well as a conductor: acid within the body, acid without. Lobb’s popularity faded, and medical electricity would take a backseat to the progressive era of antiseptics and pharmaceuticals. But ambitious minds had bigger ideas for batteries than Pulvermacher chains; wizards like Tesla and Edison fought over power’s manufacture. The wizard of Northumberland, by contrast, set his sights on the secondary problem: once made, how is power stored? We are back to the earliest question, but with renewed zeal: how to catch lightning in a bottle.
William Armstrong’s northern estate, dubbed “the palace of the modern magician,” may have included fire alarms, telephones, an elevator, Turkish baths and hundreds of electric lights, but in the mid-Victorian era, electricity remained inconsistent and unreliable, especially to a far-off country home like Cragside. How could he power an estate of such size without interruption? The answer would take him back to his early fascination with falling water, and would end in the complete alteration of the landscape. Charlie Pye-Smith describes the process by which Armstrong turned “1,000 acres of barren land into a magnificent, densely wooded, lake-strewn estate” and its rambling house. The lake was needed so there might be a dam, the dam so that there might be gravity-fed water, the water to power the dynamo or turbine—and all of it to creat
e the first hydroelectric house.40 Alan Morrison—former curator of Cragside Energy Centre—suggests that, while neither the discoverer of electricity nor the inventor of the water-driven turbine, Armstrong was the first to put the two together on such a scale. In 1878, Armstrong coupled a Vortex turbine to a Siemens dynamo in Debdon Lake—and two years later, Joseph Swan of Gateshead (Edison’s chief competitor) installed incandescent lamps in the Cragside library, forty-five in all, though only nine could be lit at a time.41 Dissatisfied with the problem of insufficient power, Armstrong took his electric quest a step further. He built a power house replete with a generator . . . and great, glass fish tanks of battery acid.
The tanks are, in themselves, worth the visit. They line the walls in banks of eerie blue-green, strangely luminous and reminiscent of fictional horrors. They aren’t in use today (though the house is still powered by hydroelectric screw), but at the height of the Victorian age, each of the fifty-six viscous cubes served as lead-acid batteries, two volts each, to store power for uninterrupted use. Developed only a few years earlier in 1859 by French physicist Raymond-Louis-Gaston Planté and the chemist Fauré, these batteries could be charged. In 1859, Planté delivered a paper to the Academy of Sciences in France, claiming to have produced “a secondary battery of great power.” It would also influence X-ray technology (just as Crookes’s tubes had done). The battery used a sheet of lead and a sheet of positively charged lead oxide, separated by rubber. He rolled the whole into a tight cylinder and fastened electrodes to either end before submerging in sulfuric acid.42 All batteries today are but advances on the original design, but there’s no mistaking this for green energy. Noxious and poisonous, the copper rods grow crystalline growths of deadly coral.43 Cables laid in wooden troughs took it from battery to house, a far cry from the wireless dreams of Tesla, more a representation of the same old tether that still holds us—linking lines between wants and needs, between the coal miner and the bright light. Armstrong never realized the dream of full reliance on hydropower; his estate burned gas to light less auspicious halls amid fantastic machines that failed, and fumbled, and needed to be serviced by human hands. (And meanwhile, the labor strikes continued, with their own version of acid power.)
Captain Nemo’s dream of endless power and a symbiotic relationship between ship and sea evaporates in the reality of actual batteries—and their limitations. From dubious medical batteries to Armstrong’s toxic fish tanks, acid provided power with consequences, the real bubbling vats behind the fiction. And the fact that such devices could, if so employed, render the human form unrecognizable was not lost upon the general public. While vitriol may have been the means of weaponizing the disenfranchised, some of the most notorious murderers of the nineteenth century turned to acid as a “closer” of sorts. The deed already done, acid became the means not of death, but of disposal.
Dissolving a Murder
Night of the Bubbling Death offered TV viewers an image of how a caustic vat could get rid of pesky heroes and leave nothing behind. Dracula, in the steampunk-flavored Van Helsing, had his own steaming, acrid cauldrons, and (with the aid of CGI and an R rating) revealed floating, fleshless bones after a crew of evil minions went tumbling to their deaths. In the history of science, steam, and electricity, we’ve had plenty of heroes and rivals, but rarely do we encounter in real life the types of villains who would seek such a devilish means of dispatching their quarry. Not, that is, until the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The fair—lit not by Edison, but by Westinghouse with Tesla’s AC technology—represented the greatest achievements of the present and future, a suitable symbol of steampunk’s greatest aspirations. Meanwhile, a villain of the first order was busy at the “manufacture of sorrow.”44
Charismatic and attractive, the enigmatic H. H. Holmes, subject of Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City, stepped off the train and into Chicago history. In a space of years, he tortured, murdered, dissected, and dissolved at least nine victims (though the count is suspected to be far higher) at his private “murder castle,” the World’s Fair Hotel. Fifty years later in England, the horror repeated when John George Haigh lured six women to their deaths in similarly grisly fashion. Unknown to one another, Holmes and Haigh nonetheless sought a similar answer to the principal problem of murder—how to get rid of the body. We began this chapter with Jim West dangling over certain doom, but the true history behind “Night of the Bubbling Death” is far stranger and far darker, and has roots in chemistry, medicine, and the very innovations the World’s Fair meant to celebrate. Acid might be power, but acid also had the power to consume, to reduce a body to its constituent parts through grim chemistry. H. H. Holmes and Haigh (and others who copied their means to cover their tracks) relied upon acid for the grimmest of vanishing acts.
Chemistry and the chemical advantages of acid, generally, had been established long before the Victorian age, making up part of the tradition of alchemy and, further back, to the wonders of ancient Egyptian practitioners.45 The field of organic chemistry, however, solidified in the mid-1800s, in large part to the efforts of Justus von Liebig and Friedrich Wöhler. Following Jöns Jacob Berzelius, most chemists believed that “organic” compounds (those formed from carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen) couldn’t be created in labs—they were mysterious, they had a “vital force.”46 Von Liebig and Wöhler disproved the idea through their separate synthesis of molecules, and the discovery that arrangement of atoms mattered as much as number and composition. New combinations and the discovery of stable organic compounds earned Liebig his place as a founder of organic chemistry, his later work focused on agriculture—and upon food production. Agricultural chemistry studies production, or the processing of raw materials into food consumables. Liebig reduced the “building blocks” of plant life to its most basic nutrients (principally nitrogen), and as Clay Cansler points out in “Where’s the Beef?,” this spurred his interest in “more literal reductions.”47 Liebig spent the remainder of his career boiling beef to jelly. Turning cattle into potable, nutrient-rich, and easily accessible syrup for the starving masses turns out to be tricky business. The only thing more difficult than squeezing thirty pounds of beef into a pound of extract was actually raising the beef in the first place. The solution came from a partnership with George Christian Giebert and a cattle yard and factory in Buenos Aires (with a far easier climate for ranching than Germany). The processing consisted of “pulping” the meat, soaking and boiling it, and turning it into a thick, dark liquid that could be promoted not for use in the pantry (or not at first), but as medicine.48
Meat tea or meat juice may not sound remotely appetizing to many, but Liebig’s company and the apothecaries that sold it recommended it for weak digestion and other ailments, a quick way to receive proper nutriment in liquid form. The Dittrick Museum has a share of ephemera advertisements and not a few physicians’ tracts. Dr. J. C. Eno published A Treatise on the Stomach and Its Trials in 1865, suggesting “raw meat jelly” for the dyspeptic. “Valentine’s Meat-Juice” offered a competitor’s solution to Liebig’s extract for the late Victorian in America, while in England, the Liebig name was “borrowed” by other manufacturers in their bid to provide the magic meat elixir. (Another of these mystery concoctions bears a strange relationship to Bulwer-Lytton and vril. Bovril may still be found on grocery store shelves in the UK. John Johnson developed the strange paste-like concoction in 1870 and took the suffix from the novel to boost sales.) But while advertisements hailed the extracts of meat juices as nutritious and beneficial for “wasting and debilitating disease,” and while St. Thomas Hospital in London reportedly used over 12,000 jars of it a year, Liebig’s extract ultimately proved a false hope.49 By the time thirty pounds of meat had been scraped, pulped, boiled, skimmed, rolled, pressurized, and liquefied—very little actual nutrition remained. Historian Mark Finlay, in “Quackery and cookery: Justus von Liebig’s extract of meat and the theory of nutrition in the Victorian age,” even cites an experiment where dogs were fed nothing but the ext
ract . . . And all perished of starvation and its complications.50 As advanced nutrition, the liquefaction of animal matter failed. As a means of reducing bodies to easily disposed-of “meat juice,” however, the process did have certain advantages.
Hotel of Horrors: H. H. Holmes
H. H. Holmes arrived in Chicago in 1886. Larson re-creates the scene for Devil in the White City, describing his crisp suit, his good looks, his mesmerizing blue eyes (here meant quite literally). A physician names John Capen would describe Holmes in depth much later, using the physiognomy techniques popular at the time, and recalling his thin lips, dark mustache, and small ears—the overall effect might be compared to the one in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, from the vampire’s “hard mouth” and “heavy mustache” to his cruel and piercing eyes. In addition, Holmes “stood too close, stared too hard, touched too much and too long”; the effect, combined with his physique and manner, made him a favorite among the young women flocking to the city.51 He set up shop as a pharmacist after “removing” the original proprietors (though never proven, most assume he murdered and disposed of the woman who owned it). He married in 1887, at least on paper; he had already married under a previous name, and he continued to court other women—including his bookkeeper’s wife, Julia. Philandering was hardly the worst of his crimes, however. In 1892, the first act of a bizarre drama far more macabre (and indeed harder to believe) than any episode of The Wild Wild West unfolds: Mr. Holmes built the World’s Fair Hotel.
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