- Email: [email protected]
Galvanic cultures: Electricity and life in the early nineteenth century
Galvanic cultures: electricity and life in the early nineteenth century Iwan Rhys Morus Electricity has long proved to be a powerful tool for investigating the properties of life. Towards the beginning of the nineteenth century new discoveries and inventions in electricity stimulated a new popular fascination with such questions. Electricity seemed a good way of understanding the machinery of life. It was the key to unlocking the secrets of vitality. Looking at these early nineteenth-century debates and discussions provides a good way of focusing on the cultural connections and ramifications of science. As electricity provided tools for understanding life, it provided tools for understanding culture also.
Increasingly during the early decades of the nineteenth century, natural philosophers speculated concerning the links between electricity and life. The invention of the voltaic cell in 1800 had provided a powerful new means of producing and studying electricity’. Speculations concerning the links between the forces of electricity, heat, light and magnetism soon expanded to consider the links between such forces and the vital force of life itself2. Discussions of the relationship between electricity and life were fraught with danger. The kind of materialism that such discussion suggested was deeply unpopular in England during the years of war with democratic France. Radical politicians were eager to find ways of putting electrical accounts of the human body to work in advocating a more egalitarian society. There was an increasing pool of resources they and the public could use to put together such accounts. New experiments on animal and human bodies seemed to show clearly that electricity could at least simulate the properties of life in many circumstances. Late in 1802, for example, the Italian natural philosopher Giovanni Aldini arrived in London. He was taking advantage of the recently signed Treaty of Amiens to cross the Channel safely as part of his Grand Tour of Europe. His visit was part of a campaign to defend the reputation of his famous uncle, Luigi Galvani. Galvani was known throughout Europe for his doctrine of ‘animal electricity’ and for his dispute with Alessandro Volta that had led to the invention of the voltaic cell. According to the
popular tale, Galvani had stumbled upon animal electricity while preparing a dish of frogs’ legs for his wife. Observing that the legs twitched in the presence of electricity he experimented further and eventually concluded that animal bodies possessed an innate supply of electricity. This conclusion had been disputed by Alessandro Volta, who argued that the observed electricity was due not to the animal tissue but to the metal rods used to complete the circuit. It was Volta’s efforts to demonstrate this point that led to his invention of the voltaic celP. To provide experimental support for his uncle’s claims concerning animal electricity, and to undermine Volta’s contention, Aldini had to find ways of producing electricity from animal tissue without using metal contacts. This he succeeded in doing with spectacular effect. Where Galvani had experimented largely with frogs, Aldini was considerably more flamboyant in his efforts.
He experimented with rabbits and dogs and even with the heads of oxen, showing that the signs of electricity could be produced from the contact of muscle and nerve tissue without the use of metals. Between 1800 and 1805 he travelled extensively throughout Europe, repeating his spectacular performances and spreading the creed of animal electricity, whereby electricity was held to play a central (if not vital) role in the operations of the animal economy. The trip across the Channel was intended to bring the message of animal electricity to one of Europe’s more prestigious scientific centres. Shortly after arriving in London, Aldini gave one of his performances before a distinguished audience at the Royal Society. By all accounts his spectators there were favourably impressed. The Journal oj enthused that in Natural Philosophy Aldini’s experiments ‘. we have the most
Fig.sQ.
lwan Rhys Morus Is a lecturer and Wellcome University Award holder in the Department of Social Anthropology, Queen’s University, Belfast. He has published extensively on the history of nineteenth-century science and popular culture. He is presently working on a project, financed by the Wellcome Trust, on electricity and the body in the nineteenth century.
Figure
1
Figs 50-53
represent
artificial
crystals
produced
by electricity
in Andrew Crosse’s
experiments.
Copynght 0 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd. All right reserved. 0160-9327/96/$19.00.
PII: SOlSO-9327(98)01067-4
Endeavour
Vol. 22(l)
1998
7
decided substitution of the organized animal system in the place of the metallic pile: it is an animal pile; and the production of the galvanic fluid, or electricity, by the direct or independent energy of life in animals, can no longer be doubted’. It was clear, to this enthusiastic commentator at least, that ‘Galvanism is by these facts shewn to be animal electricity, not merely passive, but most probably performing the most important functions in the animal economy’4. Aldini was soon given the chance of conducting an even more spectacular experiment. On 17 January 1803 he was provided with the opportunity of performing on a human subject. In the presence, amongst others, of Thomas Keate, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, the body of Forster, executed at Newgate for the murder of his wife and child, was taken down and made available for experimentation. The poles of a large galvanic battery made of alternate plates of copper and zinc were connected with various parts of the dead man’s anatomy. Electrical coMections were made between his ears, between his mouth and his ears, and between his ears and his anus. The result was a startling exhibition of contractions and convulsions: On the first application of the process to the face, the jaw of the deceased criminal began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process, the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion. It appeared to the uninformed part of the bystanders as if the wretched man was on the eve of being restored to lifes. Aldini’s experiments were at the time a minor sensation. They were widely reported in the press and his public displays were patronized by the fashionable, including the Prince of Wales. Contemporary commentators seemed largely agreed that Aldini had indeed been successful in making his case for animal electricity. Electrical experiments such as these on the bodies of the dead were by no means commonplace in England, or if they were they were not widely and publicly reported. The only legitimate source of subjects for experimentation at this time was the bodies of executed criminals, and experimenters were hardly likely to widely publicize any experiments they had conducted with that other source of fresh corpses, the resurrection trade. Such experiments fitted in well, however, with an increasing interest in linking electricity to the fundamental processes of life. Galvani himself had implied that his experiments suggested electricity might be the vital force itself. Several contemporaries certainly regarded Aldini’s experiments as evidence to that effect. Another famous series of experiments on the body of an executed criminal did take
8
Endeavour
Vol. 22(l)
1998
Figure 2 A page of figures from the Annals of Electricity. Figs 5658 represent details of the apparatus used by Andrew Crosse to produce living insects by means of electricity. place 15 years later in Glasgow, where the chemist Andrew Ure conducted experiments on the body of Clydesdale on 4 November 18 18. In his account of the experiments Ure described how, under the influence of a powerful electric current, the corpse had recommenced breathing and how different limbs were made to move again through electricity. The experiments on the dead man’s face were, however, the ‘every muscle in his most spectacular: countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action; rage, horror, despair, anguish, and ghastly smiles, united their hideous expression in the murderer’s face, surpassing far the wildest representations of a Fuseli or a Kean’6. In Ure’s account the dead man’s body was treated like a puppet
or an automaton that could be restored to the semblance of vitality through the agency of electricity. If electricity was not itself the vital force of life, it could at least be used to simulate its properties. Ure’s experiments are particularly interesting given his interest in political economy and the relationship between humans and machines in factory production. He was soon to become notorious as an advocate for the replacement of skilled labour by a combination of machinery and unskilled (child and female) labour as a means of controlling the workplace. Just as his electrical experiments on the dead broke down some of the boundaries between living and dead bodies, so did his writings on political economy break down distinctions between
humans and machines7. Ure’s experiments coincided as well with the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which drew heavily on contemporary disputes conceming the origins of life and the possibilities of machinery to paint its nightmare picture of an experiment gone out of control. In the popular mind, if artificial, living machines were a real possibility then electricity would be the means of their animation*. By the 1820s and 1830s electricity was increasingly being adopted as a universal explanation for natural processes of all kinds, including the processes of life. Popular electricians such as William Sturgeon visualized the universe as a kind of vast electrical machine within which God was a cosmic electrician controlling and manipulating the disposition of the subtle fluid. Much the same kind of point was made by the Quaker electrician Robert Ware Fox, who drew on his researches on the presence of electrical currents in deep mines to support his contention that electricity was central to the operations of the universe9. The flamboyant Colonel Francis Maceroni, mercenary and former aide-de-camp to Murat, Ring of Naples, drew on his experiences of volcanic eruptions and violent thunderstorms to draw suggestive analogies between the system of the earth, electrical machines and animal structures. The alternating layers of air, clouds, water and earth were like the alternating layers of a voltaic battery. They were also analogous to the structures of ‘organized’ beings, ‘with their skins, cellular membranes, muscles covered by aponeuroses, continually rubbing against each other; fat, internal membranes, with intervening fluids always in motion’. The analogy extended as far as the nervous system? Are not brains, nervous ganglions, and nerves, which are evidently the seat of vital action, in the identities we call animal, real electrical machines; similar in principle, as they are similar in substance and in structure, to the electrical discharging apparatus of the gymnotus and torpedo, which consist of large brain-like ganglions connected with the spinal cord? The existence of such electric eels and fish was a constant inspiration for those arguing that life was nothing more than electricity. In 1837 the wealthy experimenter Andrew Crosse produced dramatic new evidence of the relationship between electricity and life (Figures l-3). Like Robert Ware Fox, Crosse was interested in terrestrial electricity and had carried out numerous experiments on the production of artificial crystals by means of electricity. During the course of one of these experiments he noted small white spots appearing on the apparatus. The spots soon developed legs and started walking around. It appeared that Crosse had succeeded in producing arthropods by means of
Fiaure 3 A drawina of one of the acarus crossi produced by means of electricity by Aidrew Crosse. -
electricity. When news of these creatures, dubbed the acarus crossi, spread to the press it caused an uproar. Some accused Crosse of blasphemy in meddling with things best left alone. Many of course accused him of being a charlatan. For others, however, Crosse’s experiment was simply the final proof that electricity was indeed the vital forceil. Crosse’s fellowmembers of the London Electrical Society certainly took his work seriously”. One of them, William Henry Weekes, was even successful in replicating Crosse’s production of electrical insects. There were even rumours that the eminent Michael Faraday had successfully replicated the experiment as well. Faraday was obliged to write to The
Times strenuously denying the allegation. The rumour, however, continued circulating in radical circles for decades to come. During the 1830s Thomas Simmons Mackintosh, a follower of the socialist reformer Robert Owen, put electricity to work as the foundation of a revisionist grand theory of the natural order. His ‘electrical theory of the universe’ was truly universal in scope. All motion throughout the solar system was the result of electricity. This applied not only to the movements of planetary bodies but the ‘minuter processes of vegetation, oxidation, and vitrification’ as well. Mackintosh also drew heavily on both Aldini’s and Ure’s experiments on human bodies to establish the central role
Endeavour
Vol. 22(l)
1998
9
Figure 4 Schematic representations of the electrical circuitry of the brain. Figs 2 and 7 represent a dog’s brain; Figs 1 and 6 represent a human brain.
electricity played in maintaining His view was that
human life.
. . . the animal system is a bundle of circles, each connected with the others, like the wheels of a watch, or like the different parts of a steam engine, and that the primary circle, the main spring, which may be said to originate the animal functions, is the nervous, and that the nervous circle is actuated by electrical agency9. One crucial consequence of Mackintosh’s theory was that it posited a definite and limited timespan for the solar system. The natural electricity of the Earth and other planets was gradually being dissipated. The repul-
10
Endeavour
Vol. 22(l)
1998
sive power between the Sun and the planets was gradually being weakened so that eventually they would all fall into the Sun. The planets were in effect ‘propelled down an inclined plane by the power of electricity’. In this view, along with the view of man as ‘an organized machine’, the possibilities of utopia were limited to the terrestrial sphere. Utopia was possible, since if . . . the roots of moral action be in physical organization, in proportion to our knowledge of that organization we can stimulate or retard that action, and turn it into courses which would lead to a larger amount of happiness both to the individual and to the society of which he forms a member.
No organized machine could last for ever, however. If man and the universe were electrical machines, then the Kingdom of Heaven could only be founded on Earth’*. A very similar view of the consequences of recognizing the human body as an electrical machine came from another radical source. Eliza Sharples, mistress of the famous radical pamphleteer Richard Carlile, made extensive use of electricity in her Isis lectures at the Rotunda during the early 183Os, deploying an electrical model of human physical organization to underline her anti-clerical message. Her argument rested on the assumption that the human body was a ‘self-acting electrical machine, sustained by currents of atmospheric air and liquids’. The brain had the capacity to ‘concentrate and direct its electrical power’ to any part of the body by the exercise of will, acting just as would a galvanic battery applied to a corpse to produce movements of various kindsts. For Sharples, the notion of a non-material afterlife was anathema: ‘The conceit that spirit can retain an identity without the aid of the body, is that of superstition and madness.’ The rationale was again electrical: ‘All electricity depends upon certain arrangements of materials, without which it cannot exist; so that the imagination of life without body, is like the creation of all things out of nothing.’ Life and spirit were straightforwardly identified with the electric fluid. Since that fluid could not exist without a material basis, neither could spirit. Recognizing electricity as the basis of all life allowed for a reinterpretation of the Gospels as an exhortation to work towards the transformation of moral action during life rather than to wait for salvation in a hypothetical and physically impossible resurrection14. One of the most far-reaching and comprehensive attempts to establish electrical regulation over the body and to use electricity as the foundation for a new science of man was that of the young surgeon Alfred Smee during the 1840s. Smee published on electrical matters throughout the decade, culminating in 1849 with the publication of his Elements of Electra-biology15. Smee provided a systematic account of the sources of electricity within human and animal bodies and of the way in which body and brain were organized into a number of different batteries. He provided a new nomenclature to classify the different functions of body and mind, attempting to show how all those functions could be produced by means of electrical action. A number of experiments were introduced to illustrate the ways in which electricity could reproduce the sensations of seeing, hearing, smelling and so forthls. The human body was made electrical by showing the ways whereby an electrical experiment could reproduce its functions. Having demonstrated with his ingenious experimental apparatus that electricity could indeed simulate the senses he could
then plausibly argue for electrical structures in the brain. According to Smee’s model, the peripheral battery of the body was linked by ‘bio-telegraphs’ (or nerves) to the central battery of the brain which acted as a sorting and combining system for the vast array of sense impressions which it received (Fig. 4). Unlike Mackintosh or Sharples, Smee was no supporter of radical politics. On the contrary he argued that his electrical model of the human body and brain provided proof of Anglican orthodoxy. A proper understanding of the brain as an electrical system would, according to Smee, be effective as a way of curtailing rather than supporting dangerous radical or religious enthusiasmsl6. Smee’s model is an example of how new technologies could provide novel ways of visualizing the electrical body. The telegraph in 1849 was less than a decade old but had already produced a new vocabulary and new tools for thinking about the human body as an electrical machine. Just as modern commentators describe the human brain as a complex computer, early Victorian commentators drew on the latest technologies to make sense of the mysteries of life
and consciousness. Electricity during these decades turned out to be a useful tool for crossing cultural boundaries and for focusing concerns about life and its origins. Radical politicians and social reformers could use electrical accounts of vitality to argue for a new and more egalitarian social order. Enthusiasts for the new factory economy could use electrical experiments to argue for the machine-like nature of human bodies. Conservative commentators could see electricity as a new means of social control. Electrical accounts of the human body were always open to interpretation. This article has provided a brief overview of the ways in which electrical accounts of the processes of life and of the human body entered popular cultural practice in the early nineteenth century. As the century progressed, and as electrical technologies proliferated, electricity became an increasingly powerful tool for making sense of the human body and its place in culturet7.
2 3
10
11
12 13 14 15
References 1
Heilbron, J. (1979) Electricity in the Seventeenth & Eighteenth California University Press
Centuries.
16 17
Home, R.W. (1970) J. Hist. Philos. 3, 235-25 1 Pera, M. (1986) The Ambiguous Frog: The Galvani-Volta Controversy on Animal Electricity, Princeton University Press Anon (1802) J. Nat. Philos. 3, 298-300 Anon (1803) Philos. Mag. 14,364-368 Ure, A. (1818) Q. J. Sci. 6, 283-294 Ure, A. (1835) The Philosophy of Manufactures. Shelley, M. (1993) Frankenstein (Butler, M.. ed.). Picketing Morus, I.R. Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition & Experiment in London, Early Nineteenth-Century Princeton University Press (in press) Maceroni. F. (1831) Mechanic :r Maguzine. 93-96,98-100 Secord, .I. (1989) in The Uses of D., Pinch, T. and Experiment (Good& Schaffer, S., eds), pp. 337-383. Cambridge University Press Mackintosh, T.S. (1846) The Electrical Theory of the Universe, Sharples, E. (1832) Isis I. 81-85 Sharples. E. (1832)Isis 1, 241-247 Smee, A. (1849) The Elements of Electrobiology. Smee. A. (1850) Instinct and Retrson, Marvin, C. ( 1988) When Old Technologies Were New. Oxford University Press
Endeavour Vol. 22(l)
1998
11
Increasingly during the early decades of the nineteenth century, natural philosophers speculated concerning the links between electricity and life. The invention of the voltaic cell in 1800 had provided a powerful new means of producing and studying electricity’. Speculations concerning the links between the forces of electricity, heat, light and magnetism soon expanded to consider the links between such forces and the vital force of life itself2. Discussions of the relationship between electricity and life were fraught with danger. The kind of materialism that such discussion suggested was deeply unpopular in England during the years of war with democratic France. Radical politicians were eager to find ways of putting electrical accounts of the human body to work in advocating a more egalitarian society. There was an increasing pool of resources they and the public could use to put together such accounts. New experiments on animal and human bodies seemed to show clearly that electricity could at least simulate the properties of life in many circumstances. Late in 1802, for example, the Italian natural philosopher Giovanni Aldini arrived in London. He was taking advantage of the recently signed Treaty of Amiens to cross the Channel safely as part of his Grand Tour of Europe. His visit was part of a campaign to defend the reputation of his famous uncle, Luigi Galvani. Galvani was known throughout Europe for his doctrine of ‘animal electricity’ and for his dispute with Alessandro Volta that had led to the invention of the voltaic cell. According to the
popular tale, Galvani had stumbled upon animal electricity while preparing a dish of frogs’ legs for his wife. Observing that the legs twitched in the presence of electricity he experimented further and eventually concluded that animal bodies possessed an innate supply of electricity. This conclusion had been disputed by Alessandro Volta, who argued that the observed electricity was due not to the animal tissue but to the metal rods used to complete the circuit. It was Volta’s efforts to demonstrate this point that led to his invention of the voltaic celP. To provide experimental support for his uncle’s claims concerning animal electricity, and to undermine Volta’s contention, Aldini had to find ways of producing electricity from animal tissue without using metal contacts. This he succeeded in doing with spectacular effect. Where Galvani had experimented largely with frogs, Aldini was considerably more flamboyant in his efforts.
He experimented with rabbits and dogs and even with the heads of oxen, showing that the signs of electricity could be produced from the contact of muscle and nerve tissue without the use of metals. Between 1800 and 1805 he travelled extensively throughout Europe, repeating his spectacular performances and spreading the creed of animal electricity, whereby electricity was held to play a central (if not vital) role in the operations of the animal economy. The trip across the Channel was intended to bring the message of animal electricity to one of Europe’s more prestigious scientific centres. Shortly after arriving in London, Aldini gave one of his performances before a distinguished audience at the Royal Society. By all accounts his spectators there were favourably impressed. The Journal oj enthused that in Natural Philosophy Aldini’s experiments ‘. we have the most
Fig.sQ.
lwan Rhys Morus Is a lecturer and Wellcome University Award holder in the Department of Social Anthropology, Queen’s University, Belfast. He has published extensively on the history of nineteenth-century science and popular culture. He is presently working on a project, financed by the Wellcome Trust, on electricity and the body in the nineteenth century.
Figure
1
Figs 50-53
represent
artificial
crystals
produced
by electricity
in Andrew Crosse’s
experiments.
Copynght 0 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd. All right reserved. 0160-9327/96/$19.00.
PII: SOlSO-9327(98)01067-4
Endeavour
Vol. 22(l)
1998
7
decided substitution of the organized animal system in the place of the metallic pile: it is an animal pile; and the production of the galvanic fluid, or electricity, by the direct or independent energy of life in animals, can no longer be doubted’. It was clear, to this enthusiastic commentator at least, that ‘Galvanism is by these facts shewn to be animal electricity, not merely passive, but most probably performing the most important functions in the animal economy’4. Aldini was soon given the chance of conducting an even more spectacular experiment. On 17 January 1803 he was provided with the opportunity of performing on a human subject. In the presence, amongst others, of Thomas Keate, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, the body of Forster, executed at Newgate for the murder of his wife and child, was taken down and made available for experimentation. The poles of a large galvanic battery made of alternate plates of copper and zinc were connected with various parts of the dead man’s anatomy. Electrical coMections were made between his ears, between his mouth and his ears, and between his ears and his anus. The result was a startling exhibition of contractions and convulsions: On the first application of the process to the face, the jaw of the deceased criminal began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process, the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion. It appeared to the uninformed part of the bystanders as if the wretched man was on the eve of being restored to lifes. Aldini’s experiments were at the time a minor sensation. They were widely reported in the press and his public displays were patronized by the fashionable, including the Prince of Wales. Contemporary commentators seemed largely agreed that Aldini had indeed been successful in making his case for animal electricity. Electrical experiments such as these on the bodies of the dead were by no means commonplace in England, or if they were they were not widely and publicly reported. The only legitimate source of subjects for experimentation at this time was the bodies of executed criminals, and experimenters were hardly likely to widely publicize any experiments they had conducted with that other source of fresh corpses, the resurrection trade. Such experiments fitted in well, however, with an increasing interest in linking electricity to the fundamental processes of life. Galvani himself had implied that his experiments suggested electricity might be the vital force itself. Several contemporaries certainly regarded Aldini’s experiments as evidence to that effect. Another famous series of experiments on the body of an executed criminal did take
8
Endeavour
Vol. 22(l)
1998
Figure 2 A page of figures from the Annals of Electricity. Figs 5658 represent details of the apparatus used by Andrew Crosse to produce living insects by means of electricity. place 15 years later in Glasgow, where the chemist Andrew Ure conducted experiments on the body of Clydesdale on 4 November 18 18. In his account of the experiments Ure described how, under the influence of a powerful electric current, the corpse had recommenced breathing and how different limbs were made to move again through electricity. The experiments on the dead man’s face were, however, the ‘every muscle in his most spectacular: countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action; rage, horror, despair, anguish, and ghastly smiles, united their hideous expression in the murderer’s face, surpassing far the wildest representations of a Fuseli or a Kean’6. In Ure’s account the dead man’s body was treated like a puppet
or an automaton that could be restored to the semblance of vitality through the agency of electricity. If electricity was not itself the vital force of life, it could at least be used to simulate its properties. Ure’s experiments are particularly interesting given his interest in political economy and the relationship between humans and machines in factory production. He was soon to become notorious as an advocate for the replacement of skilled labour by a combination of machinery and unskilled (child and female) labour as a means of controlling the workplace. Just as his electrical experiments on the dead broke down some of the boundaries between living and dead bodies, so did his writings on political economy break down distinctions between
humans and machines7. Ure’s experiments coincided as well with the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which drew heavily on contemporary disputes conceming the origins of life and the possibilities of machinery to paint its nightmare picture of an experiment gone out of control. In the popular mind, if artificial, living machines were a real possibility then electricity would be the means of their animation*. By the 1820s and 1830s electricity was increasingly being adopted as a universal explanation for natural processes of all kinds, including the processes of life. Popular electricians such as William Sturgeon visualized the universe as a kind of vast electrical machine within which God was a cosmic electrician controlling and manipulating the disposition of the subtle fluid. Much the same kind of point was made by the Quaker electrician Robert Ware Fox, who drew on his researches on the presence of electrical currents in deep mines to support his contention that electricity was central to the operations of the universe9. The flamboyant Colonel Francis Maceroni, mercenary and former aide-de-camp to Murat, Ring of Naples, drew on his experiences of volcanic eruptions and violent thunderstorms to draw suggestive analogies between the system of the earth, electrical machines and animal structures. The alternating layers of air, clouds, water and earth were like the alternating layers of a voltaic battery. They were also analogous to the structures of ‘organized’ beings, ‘with their skins, cellular membranes, muscles covered by aponeuroses, continually rubbing against each other; fat, internal membranes, with intervening fluids always in motion’. The analogy extended as far as the nervous system? Are not brains, nervous ganglions, and nerves, which are evidently the seat of vital action, in the identities we call animal, real electrical machines; similar in principle, as they are similar in substance and in structure, to the electrical discharging apparatus of the gymnotus and torpedo, which consist of large brain-like ganglions connected with the spinal cord? The existence of such electric eels and fish was a constant inspiration for those arguing that life was nothing more than electricity. In 1837 the wealthy experimenter Andrew Crosse produced dramatic new evidence of the relationship between electricity and life (Figures l-3). Like Robert Ware Fox, Crosse was interested in terrestrial electricity and had carried out numerous experiments on the production of artificial crystals by means of electricity. During the course of one of these experiments he noted small white spots appearing on the apparatus. The spots soon developed legs and started walking around. It appeared that Crosse had succeeded in producing arthropods by means of
Fiaure 3 A drawina of one of the acarus crossi produced by means of electricity by Aidrew Crosse. -
electricity. When news of these creatures, dubbed the acarus crossi, spread to the press it caused an uproar. Some accused Crosse of blasphemy in meddling with things best left alone. Many of course accused him of being a charlatan. For others, however, Crosse’s experiment was simply the final proof that electricity was indeed the vital forceil. Crosse’s fellowmembers of the London Electrical Society certainly took his work seriously”. One of them, William Henry Weekes, was even successful in replicating Crosse’s production of electrical insects. There were even rumours that the eminent Michael Faraday had successfully replicated the experiment as well. Faraday was obliged to write to The
Times strenuously denying the allegation. The rumour, however, continued circulating in radical circles for decades to come. During the 1830s Thomas Simmons Mackintosh, a follower of the socialist reformer Robert Owen, put electricity to work as the foundation of a revisionist grand theory of the natural order. His ‘electrical theory of the universe’ was truly universal in scope. All motion throughout the solar system was the result of electricity. This applied not only to the movements of planetary bodies but the ‘minuter processes of vegetation, oxidation, and vitrification’ as well. Mackintosh also drew heavily on both Aldini’s and Ure’s experiments on human bodies to establish the central role
Endeavour
Vol. 22(l)
1998
9
Figure 4 Schematic representations of the electrical circuitry of the brain. Figs 2 and 7 represent a dog’s brain; Figs 1 and 6 represent a human brain.
electricity played in maintaining His view was that
human life.
. . . the animal system is a bundle of circles, each connected with the others, like the wheels of a watch, or like the different parts of a steam engine, and that the primary circle, the main spring, which may be said to originate the animal functions, is the nervous, and that the nervous circle is actuated by electrical agency9. One crucial consequence of Mackintosh’s theory was that it posited a definite and limited timespan for the solar system. The natural electricity of the Earth and other planets was gradually being dissipated. The repul-
10
Endeavour
Vol. 22(l)
1998
sive power between the Sun and the planets was gradually being weakened so that eventually they would all fall into the Sun. The planets were in effect ‘propelled down an inclined plane by the power of electricity’. In this view, along with the view of man as ‘an organized machine’, the possibilities of utopia were limited to the terrestrial sphere. Utopia was possible, since if . . . the roots of moral action be in physical organization, in proportion to our knowledge of that organization we can stimulate or retard that action, and turn it into courses which would lead to a larger amount of happiness both to the individual and to the society of which he forms a member.
No organized machine could last for ever, however. If man and the universe were electrical machines, then the Kingdom of Heaven could only be founded on Earth’*. A very similar view of the consequences of recognizing the human body as an electrical machine came from another radical source. Eliza Sharples, mistress of the famous radical pamphleteer Richard Carlile, made extensive use of electricity in her Isis lectures at the Rotunda during the early 183Os, deploying an electrical model of human physical organization to underline her anti-clerical message. Her argument rested on the assumption that the human body was a ‘self-acting electrical machine, sustained by currents of atmospheric air and liquids’. The brain had the capacity to ‘concentrate and direct its electrical power’ to any part of the body by the exercise of will, acting just as would a galvanic battery applied to a corpse to produce movements of various kindsts. For Sharples, the notion of a non-material afterlife was anathema: ‘The conceit that spirit can retain an identity without the aid of the body, is that of superstition and madness.’ The rationale was again electrical: ‘All electricity depends upon certain arrangements of materials, without which it cannot exist; so that the imagination of life without body, is like the creation of all things out of nothing.’ Life and spirit were straightforwardly identified with the electric fluid. Since that fluid could not exist without a material basis, neither could spirit. Recognizing electricity as the basis of all life allowed for a reinterpretation of the Gospels as an exhortation to work towards the transformation of moral action during life rather than to wait for salvation in a hypothetical and physically impossible resurrection14. One of the most far-reaching and comprehensive attempts to establish electrical regulation over the body and to use electricity as the foundation for a new science of man was that of the young surgeon Alfred Smee during the 1840s. Smee published on electrical matters throughout the decade, culminating in 1849 with the publication of his Elements of Electra-biology15. Smee provided a systematic account of the sources of electricity within human and animal bodies and of the way in which body and brain were organized into a number of different batteries. He provided a new nomenclature to classify the different functions of body and mind, attempting to show how all those functions could be produced by means of electrical action. A number of experiments were introduced to illustrate the ways in which electricity could reproduce the sensations of seeing, hearing, smelling and so forthls. The human body was made electrical by showing the ways whereby an electrical experiment could reproduce its functions. Having demonstrated with his ingenious experimental apparatus that electricity could indeed simulate the senses he could
then plausibly argue for electrical structures in the brain. According to Smee’s model, the peripheral battery of the body was linked by ‘bio-telegraphs’ (or nerves) to the central battery of the brain which acted as a sorting and combining system for the vast array of sense impressions which it received (Fig. 4). Unlike Mackintosh or Sharples, Smee was no supporter of radical politics. On the contrary he argued that his electrical model of the human body and brain provided proof of Anglican orthodoxy. A proper understanding of the brain as an electrical system would, according to Smee, be effective as a way of curtailing rather than supporting dangerous radical or religious enthusiasmsl6. Smee’s model is an example of how new technologies could provide novel ways of visualizing the electrical body. The telegraph in 1849 was less than a decade old but had already produced a new vocabulary and new tools for thinking about the human body as an electrical machine. Just as modern commentators describe the human brain as a complex computer, early Victorian commentators drew on the latest technologies to make sense of the mysteries of life
and consciousness. Electricity during these decades turned out to be a useful tool for crossing cultural boundaries and for focusing concerns about life and its origins. Radical politicians and social reformers could use electrical accounts of vitality to argue for a new and more egalitarian social order. Enthusiasts for the new factory economy could use electrical experiments to argue for the machine-like nature of human bodies. Conservative commentators could see electricity as a new means of social control. Electrical accounts of the human body were always open to interpretation. This article has provided a brief overview of the ways in which electrical accounts of the processes of life and of the human body entered popular cultural practice in the early nineteenth century. As the century progressed, and as electrical technologies proliferated, electricity became an increasingly powerful tool for making sense of the human body and its place in culturet7.
2 3
10
11
12 13 14 15
References 1
Heilbron, J. (1979) Electricity in the Seventeenth & Eighteenth California University Press
Centuries.
16 17
Home, R.W. (1970) J. Hist. Philos. 3, 235-25 1 Pera, M. (1986) The Ambiguous Frog: The Galvani-Volta Controversy on Animal Electricity, Princeton University Press Anon (1802) J. Nat. Philos. 3, 298-300 Anon (1803) Philos. Mag. 14,364-368 Ure, A. (1818) Q. J. Sci. 6, 283-294 Ure, A. (1835) The Philosophy of Manufactures. Shelley, M. (1993) Frankenstein (Butler, M.. ed.). Picketing Morus, I.R. Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition & Experiment in London, Early Nineteenth-Century Princeton University Press (in press) Maceroni. F. (1831) Mechanic :r Maguzine. 93-96,98-100 Secord, .I. (1989) in The Uses of D., Pinch, T. and Experiment (Good& Schaffer, S., eds), pp. 337-383. Cambridge University Press Mackintosh, T.S. (1846) The Electrical Theory of the Universe, Sharples, E. (1832) Isis I. 81-85 Sharples. E. (1832)Isis 1, 241-247 Smee, A. (1849) The Elements of Electrobiology. Smee. A. (1850) Instinct and Retrson, Marvin, C. ( 1988) When Old Technologies Were New. Oxford University Press
Endeavour Vol. 22(l)
1998
11