The Holy Amber: Early Days of Electricity, Part 1

Electricity lost its magic over the course the 18th and 19th centuries. The "invisible fire" steadily transitioned from a mysterious force of wonder to a mundane reality of daily modern life. In this two-part edition of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the various electrical experiments, stunts, inventions, performances, innovations, occultisms and atrocities that transformed the tractable thunder.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind. From how stup
works to Carlos. Now, therefore you are hereby order, commanded
and required to execute the said sentence upon him, the
said William Kimmler, otherwise called John hort Upon, some day

(00:25):
within the week commencing on Monday, the twenty four day
of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand,
eight hundred and eighty nine, and within the walls of
Auburn State Prison, or within the yard or enclosure adjoining
there too by then, and they're causing to pass through
the body of him, the said William Kimdler otherwise called

(00:46):
John hort a current of electricity of sufficient intensity to
cause death, and that the application of such current of
electricity be continued until he, the said William Kimmler, otherwise
John Horte, be dead. Gentlemen, I wish you all good luck.
I believe I'm going to a good place, and I'm

(01:08):
ready to go. I only want to say that a
great deal has been said about me that is untrue.
I'm bad enough, it is cruel to make me out worse. Hey,
welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is
Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick, and those were a
couple of quotes concerning the death of one William Kemmler,

(01:30):
the first person in the world ever to be legally
executed by electric chair. That's right, this was nine And
as we'll roll out in these episodes this week on electricity,
on the sort of the weird history of electricity. Uh.
This this episode, this electric execution kind of serves as
like the the final thrashing moment, uh for the mysticism

(01:55):
of electricity, the sort of supernatural zeal that surrounded it
for so long. I remember when I was growing up
and I learned that the Constitution of the United States
prohibited cruel and unusual punishment of criminals, and then I
tried to reconcile that with the fact that people were
executed by electric chair. It was just hard to think

(02:20):
of a stranger way to kill somebody on purpose. Yeah,
and I think that will I think that will become
clear to everyone, especially the second episode when we get
into the details of this, about how how this came
to be on the table, how the argument was made
that we should electrocute a prisoner, why it was a
good idea, and why it was the most modern and

(02:40):
humane and hygienic thing to do. Yeah. So this is
going to be the first part of a two part
series on the weird history of electricity, as we've said,
and we want to focus on a different side of
the story of electricity than you probably learned about in school.
So you've probably learned about things like, uh, Benjamin frank
some of Benjamin Franklin's experiments and uh and how the

(03:01):
battery was invented and the voltaic pile and eventually Thomas
Edison and uh and maybe if your teacher was pretty
cool Nicola Tesla and the you know, the current wars
and and stuff like that. But what we want to
look at a different side of how electricity came to
be a fixture of of our society today, and not

(03:21):
just the technological journey, but the spiritual journey exactly now
and now, if you want more on that technical journey,
do go to how stuff works dot com and check
out the article how electricity works. That's by Marshall Brain,
William Harris, and uh and me to a very limited extent.
I think I touched up that article at one point,
but mostly it's it's Brain and Harrass that could be
a thank for that article, But do you have to

(03:43):
add updates all the new things we've covered about electricity
in the past period. Basically did punch up on it
in the same way that you know, a comedian might
punch up a script. I like went in there and
uh made it a little more fun at the beginning,
and updated the references, but otherwise left all the technical
information as is. But but yeah, this is about sort

(04:04):
of this is the spiritual journey of electricity, the cultural
journey of electricity from from the realm of the magical
to the realm of the munday. And as I was
thinking about these episodes actually this morning in the shower
and on the drive into work, I kept thinking of
it in terms of the transformer. Okay, like like you see,

(04:25):
you know, on with high tension wires. So the times
experiments and thoughts that we're going to present in this
pair of podcast that they serve as a sort of transformer.
So a transformer decreases the voltage of alternating current, turning
a dangerous high voltage current that's capable of traveling long
distances into a lower voltage current that's appropriate for just

(04:47):
mundane use in your home. So these events that we're
going to discuss are are the inner workings of the
cultural transformer that transformed electricity from a magical, holy, spiritual,
otherworldly inner g into something that you can just completely
take for granted every day of your life. Okay, well,
let's let's go back in time from the execution of

(05:08):
William Kimmler and go all the way back to the
earliest things we know about electricity, because before humans began
to recognize and test electromagnetism as a force of physics,
we were aware of it in several natural settings. For example,
lightning that's pretty obvious, the shocks of electric fishes, and
objects that naturally pulled toward one another through some invisible attraction.

(05:32):
So you might have a loadstone, or you know the
name for magnetite, or or you might find that friction,
you know, we're just rubbing one object against another could
cause attraction. And before we had even the slightest idea
what electricity was, its power found a way into our metaphors.
We naturally recognized that there was something very mysterious and

(05:55):
important going on in these invisible forces. So, for example,
and Plato's Mano dialogue, you know, you remember this one mayno.
He compares socrates style of argument to a torpedo ray,
which it's a type of electric fish. It's a genus
of a ray that stuns prey and enemies with jolts
of electric charge issued through the water. And the point

(06:18):
of the comparison is that Socrates stuns his interlocutors into
a state of just utter perplexity by illuminating the aporia,
the realization of an internal contradiction in one's worldview. Okay,
in other words, that he's dropping truth bombs exactly, He's
stunning you with his truth bombs. That that's a very
similar metaphor, I'd say, except they wouldn't say truth bombs

(06:40):
because they didn't have bombs, but they did have electric fish.
So so he's dropping truth torpedo fish. And just in aside,
there are there are numerous electric fish out there. Uh.
The the electric eel, which is more of an electric catfish,
tends to get most of the press because it is
the most electric fish. But there are varying levels of

(07:01):
electric fish out there, ranging from those that stunned their
prey to those that use it as more of a
communication senstory scenario. Yeah, and then there's a the lease
of my leads. So this is a Greek philosopher known
as one of the legendary Seven Wise Men, and he
may have been the first human to really study electricity,
and this would have been around a six hundred BC. Now,

(07:22):
he was the one who was doing friction experiments. He
would take amber, so you know, fossilized tree resin host
the stuff from Jurassic Park. Yeah, well, hopefully there's an
insect in there, something that kind of you know, crippled
and and frozen in time. But he didn't come up
with the idea to get its DNA out. No, he
wasn't quite up to that level unless you want to
view the resulting spark here is like the soul of

(07:44):
the bug leaving the amber. So he'd rubbed the amber
with fur, and he was able to attract dust, feathers,
and other lightweight objects. And so these were the first
experiments with electrostatics, the study of of stationary electric charges
or electricity. In fact, the word electricity comes from the
Greek electron, which means amber. Yeah, and what else the

(08:07):
ancients knew about electricity, It's it's hard to know. There.
There is, of course, the quite famous Baghdad battery, which
I think most archaeologists now think was not actually a battery.
But the idea there was that there was a clay
jar and then found near it were some metal elements that,
if arranged in the right way, perhaps could have accumulated

(08:28):
electric charge. I've read that archaeologist now just almost all
agree that it was just a normal, ordinary storage jar.
It was not actually a battery. But one could hope,
you know, you always, you always kind of think, wouldn't
it be cool if there was some ancient person who
who had knowledge way ahead of their time, and and
it was just lost to history because I don't know,
they didn't write it down or nobody would believe them.

(08:51):
But people recognized there was a force at work. There
was electromagnetic attraction, there was static discharge, shocks, sparks, arcs,
But what was it? People commonly spoke about it using
sort of familiar but vague or incorrect points of comparison,
Like Benjamin Franklin in his letters and notes in the

(09:11):
mid seventeen hundreds, spoke of the electrical fire. This was
a common point of comparison. People would speak of the
fire that that carries the electrical fluid or in Even
in eighteen eighty nine. Much later, Thomas Edison, who worked
with electricity in a technological sense, he could command electricity
to do his bidding, yet when asked what it was,

(09:33):
he vaguely explained that electricity was a mode of motion,
a system of vibrations. Yeah. I love this quote because
apparently edisonally just out there pressing the flash. It was
like a formal engagement. I think he was having lunch
at somebody at the Eiffel Tower, and then somebody asked him, So, Edison,
the electricity is your thing, tell me what is it?
This is all he could really come up with. Yeah.

(09:55):
And so even after people were performing experiments with electricity,
even creating some electrical technologies that they were using for
for purposes in uh in say, medicine, whether or not
those purposes were quite on the money in terms of
improving people's health. People were using electricity, but they they
didn't know what it was. Even in seventeen sixty seven,

(10:16):
after a lot of these famous experiments like Benjamin Franklin's experiments,
Joseph priestly described electricity as the youngest daughter of the sciences,
which I think is kind of a sweet thing to say.
But what was the invisible fire? The electrical fire? It
seemed it was a natural force of the world people understood,
and yet it commanded a sense of mystery because it

(10:39):
was invisible most of the time. It could act at
a distance like a ghostly force almost, you know. The
attraction between objects could be like a ghost reaching out
through the ether to pull things toward one another. It
could spark in the dark, and these were strange and
mysterious phenomena. Even when people began to be able to
control it, they didn't know what it was. Is So

(11:00):
the modern era of electrical research, I think, is often
traced back to the add to the creation of the
Leyden jar. Right, So, the Leyden jar was a thing
that was invented in the seventeen forties, usually cited a
seventeen forty five or forty six, discovered independently by different
people at different times. But the laden jar was what

(11:21):
was then known as a condenser. But it's what we
now call a capacitor. So in simple terms, this is
a device capable of storing and quickly discharging a large
amount of electricity. Yeah, I've read the laden jar, particularly
the one that was created by a Dutch instrument instrument
makers Edwald von Kleist and pet von muschen Bruck. This

(11:43):
was basically a glass jar full of water and had
a nail in it. And this was this was able
to They were able to use this to store an
electrical charge. Yeah. They had the different metals on the
inside and outside, and the differential between them could allow
electric charge to accumulate and then you could charge it. Yeah,
and and pretty massively like apparently the first time mussen

(12:04):
Brock used the jar, he basically shocked the hell out
of himself. I mean didn't die, but tremendous amount of
shock coming out of this jar of water and nail. Well,
but once you look at what this kind of jar
is capable of delivering a shock like that, obviously some
applications could come to mind, and they sure did come

(12:24):
to some minds, especially the mind of one Benjamin Franklin.
So you might know about some of Benjamin Franklin's experiments
with electricity. Probably the most famous story is one we
only have second hand, actually, and that's the story about
Franklin flying a kite tied to a key in a
thunderstorm to demonstrate the electrical nature of lightning. And we
only have been in me that Disney cartoon did really

(12:47):
go by. I don't know what that is. That's how
they did a whole cartoon about Benjamin Franklin and the kaite.
But there's this mouth that's really the brilliance behind then,
and and he's constantly urging ben on. I mean, just
the been Franklin activities that are acceptable for children to watch,
you know. I think this story was propaganda invented by

(13:07):
the kite maker's lobby. No, but seriously, so, we don't
know if this story actually happened or not. It probably did.
We get the story from Franklin's friend Joseph Priestley, who
reported it later, so not from Franklin himself. But Franklin
certainly did do lots of experiments on electricity. He invented
the lightning rod, which is a rod mounted on top

(13:28):
of a building that's connected to a wire leading down
to a ground rod embedded in the earth. And what
this does is it gives the lightning a an avenue
of travel from the top of the building to the ground,
sort of a harmless path, rather than it going through
the building, starting fires, potentially damaging people or structural elements. Yeah,
it's like the expressway going around a major population center

(13:50):
so that the traffic doesn't have to go directly through
town where it can cause all sorts of havoc. Yeah.
So you've probably heard about these things, but you might
not have heard about Franklin's ex periments in the electric
slaughter of large fowl, a specifically the turkey, which I
do want to just throw in really quickly that Franklin
famously said that that he thought the turkey should be

(14:11):
the national bird. Yeah, a lot of thanks he gives it.
He's like, national bird, you will die. Yeah, why I
would think he would maybe go out and get shocked
the eagle since he saw the eagle is this kind
of horrible, moral, morally offensive bird as opposed to that
the noble slightly vain and preposterous, but the courageous turkey. Yeah,

(14:33):
well he what he did see the eagle as a
thief and a scavenger, right yeah. Yeah, he's like, that's
that's really not our in our spirit, it should be
the turkey. Well, I guess there's no law that says
don't kill what you believe is noble. Because he believed
the turkey to be noable, but he also wanted to
roast it with electrical current and eat its flesh. Well,

(14:54):
I guess it's easier to obtain a turkey than an eagle.
That's true. The eagles fight back. Yeah. So on April nine,
Franklin wrote to the scientist Peter Collinson a letter detailing
the results of some recent experiments he'd done in electricity.
And he ended with a strange proposal for a quote

(15:15):
party of pleasure on the banks of the Schookole the river.
And so this is what he said. Quote a turkey
is to be killed for our dinners by the electric
shock and roasted by the electric jack before a fire
kindled by the electric bottle, when the healths of all
the famous electricians in England, France and Germany are to

(15:35):
be drank in electrified bumpers under the discharge of guns
from the electric battery. Okay, first of all, what's an
electric bumper? This is great? So Franklin explains this in
a marginal note. He says, an electrified bumper is a small,
thin glass tumbler near filled with wine and electrified. This,

(15:55):
when brought to the lips, gives a shock if the
party be close shaved and does not breathe on the liquor.
How is that not factoring into modern exology that you
think that would? I can see that going over huge
at trendy bars, right, especially glass. Yeah, well, it seems
like it would really go with the you know those
trends in the nineteen I guess was at the fifties,
or they'd have electric movie seats that would shock you harm. Yeah,

(16:18):
so they should have served drinks that would shock you
as well. So anyway, Franklin's attempt to slaughter turkeys with
the electric discharge of Leyden jars, which is what he
was using. The Leyden jars we talked about earlier. Those
were his electric bottles. This happened in seventeen fifty, and
it did not go so well. According to a letter
from one William Watson to the Royal Society in London, quote,

(16:42):
he first made several attempts on fouls and found that
two large thin glass jars guilt holding each about six gallons,
and such as I mentioned I had employed in the
last paper I laid before you upon this subject, were
sufficient win fully charged to kill common hens out right.
But the turkey is though thrown into violent convulsions and
then lying as dead for some minutes, would recover in

(17:05):
less than a quarter of an hour. So they had
turkeys coming back from the dead. I mean, that's pretty
messed up. Watson continues, however, having added three other such
to the former too, and he's talking with the laden
jars there. Uh, though not fully charged. He killed a
turkey of about ten pounds weight and believes they would

(17:26):
have killed a much larger He conceded as himself says
that the birds killed in this manner eat uncommonly tender.
You know, that's that's one heck of a yell review.
But but but I do appreciate the spirit of the
thing that the spirit of the dinner was. We're just
gonna have a completely electric dinner. Everything from the death

(17:46):
of the bird, to the cooking of the bird, to
the the curious way that the drinks make your lips tinkle,
everything is going to be powered by this this this
divine energy that we are now harnessing with our modern science. Well,
it almost sounds like the scientific counterpart to those spirit
parties people would have where you know, where you'd have

(18:06):
a seance and you have people doing all kinds of
spiritualist games and demonstrations. Here it's the other side of
the coin. But they're using natural phenomena. You know. Then
again how natural because all these mysteries remained, what is
the electrical fire? Like? Ultimately they're playing with something that
they don't completely understand. Um you know, now with that,

(18:27):
I have to add the caveat that had a lot
of us today do not really completely understand the electricity
that we're we're employing, right, We're we're fine to let
it power our toaster ovens and cook our ego waffles,
but we don't really We couldn't engineer electrical dynamos ourselves exactly,
and of course that's just part of modern life. And
then they should also be stressed as well that we

(18:48):
haven't completely filled in all the all the blanks, all
the spaces in our understanding of electricity itself, Um there are,
which is kind of weird to imagine. Yeah, but back
to the dinner party, how did our host recover from
this setback of reanimated turkey? Well, yeah, you might think
that the turkeys coming back from the dead would be

(19:10):
enough to stun you into silence, but but Franklin was
in for another shock, because he actually managed to shock
himself so bad that he was knocked unconscious. Watson writes
later in this same letter that he says from this experiment,
maybe seen the danger even under the greatest caution to
the operator when making these experiments with large jars. For

(19:31):
it is not to be doubted but that several of
these fully charged would as certainly by increasing them in
proportion to the size, kill a man as they before
did the turkey. Alright, so here we see the two
sides of the coin. Like. On one hand, electricity can
be managed, it can be used, uh, it can be
played with. But it can also prove dangerous uh in

(19:54):
high enough quantities, certainly, and indeed electricity experiments could prove
deadly if proper care was not taken. I want to
look at one example, which is gae Org Wilhelm Rickman.
So he was a scientist, he was experimenting on electricity.
He was conducting an experiment involving an insulated lightning rod
during a storm in St. Petersburg in seventeen fifty three,

(20:17):
and Rickman got dead. He was struck dead in his
lab by what has been described as a burst of
ball lightning I want to read out the account here,
which is bizarre and fascinating. So this is a letter
to the Pennsylvania Gazette from March seventeen fifty four explaining
what happened to Rickman. It says the place for the

(20:37):
experiment was a kind of gallery, with its entrance toward
the north and a window towards the south. Whether the
window was open is not known. All that is certain
is that near the window was a cupboard four ft long,
on which replaced the electrical needle, and a vessel of water,
partly filled with brass filings, over which came an iron
bar about an inch thick and a foot long fast

(21:00):
and at the top to a wire which came down
from the roof of the house through the gallery door.
So they were sort of playing with death here. They're saying, Okay,
we've got a lightning rod on the top of the house.
We've got it running down to an insulated wire in
the room that suspended over this bowl. And so they continue.
The professor, judging from the needle that the tempest was

(21:20):
at a great distance, assured Mr. Soko Law that there
was no danger, but there might be at the approach.
So they don't think the storm's hit yet. But Mr
Rickman stood about a foot from the bar, attentively observing
the needle. Soon after Mr Socolow saw the machine being untouched,
a globe of blue and whitish fire about four inches

(21:41):
in diameter dart from the bar against Mr Rickman's forehead,
who fell backwards without the least outcry, which is a
creepy way to die, right. You'd expect a person to scream.
Instead he just silently falls, right, And this is important
to keep in mind later, this sort of accidental electronic
electrical death where death is just instantaneous, seemingly seemingly, which

(22:07):
is the scariest part based on what we finally found
out can happen. But also towards the end of the
same letter, what is the takeaway from this, Well it
they learned some interesting things. Quote. The new doctrine of
lightning is, however, confirmed by this unhappy accident, and many
lives may hereafter be saved by the practice, it teaches.

(22:28):
Mr Rickman, being about to make experiments in the matter
of lightning, had supported his rod and wires with electrics
per se, which cut off their communication with the Earth
and himself standing too near where the wire terminated. Helped
with his body to complete that communication. So he formed
the road. Instead of Franklin's model, where the electric current

(22:50):
takes the freeway bypass around the city, this went straight
through the city and through a dude to the other side,
basically through his living right. Uh alright, So so based
on that, you might think, well, surely everyone's learning the
lesson here. Electricty is dangerous. You should not employ it
at your dinner parties, you should not employ it in

(23:11):
your parlor. And yet uh, we see the trend go
in the opposite exactly the opposite way. So that was
seventeen fifty three that that happened to Rickman. And and
at the same time, in the salons and galleries of
Europe and North America, electricity was becoming the hottest bit
of edutainment, uh, that there had ever been. So I

(23:35):
want to draw now from mostly from a paper called
Sparks in the Dark, The Attraction of Electricity in the
eighteenth Century by Paula Bertucci. And she's been a really
good source for us in these episodes of Several of
her papers have been big sources of our researches. She's
done a lot of work on the history of electricity,
and these papers are great reads. Yeah, we'll make sure

(23:56):
to link out to some of her materials on the
landing page for this episode of Stuff to Your Mind
dot Com, because, yeah, she seems to be one of
the forefront researchers and historians on the history of electricity. Yeah.
So coming back to these sparking salons, So, in the
Enlightenment climate of eighteenth century Europe, public demonstrations of electrical
phenomenon experiments became really popular forms of entertainment among the wealthy.

(24:21):
So if you walked into a Parisian salon in the
mid seventeen hundreds, you might find a horde of socialites
sitting silent in the dark, watching a lecturer on natural
philosophy charge and or hanging atop a spike until it glowed.
Or they might give an audience member shocks of static electricity.

(24:41):
And another funny thing you might see would be Benjamin
Franklin sitting in the audience as this was his scene.
This was like, this was like the DC punk scene,
but the Paris electricity scene. Yeah, it's that much a scene.
One of the scenes that Franklin frequented. Uh, in the city. Okay.
But so it was during the seventeen forties that the

(25:02):
educated audiences in Europe and North America really became familiar
with the power of the electric fire. And it wasn't
just Benjamin Franklin and his inner circle that we're showing
off all the sparkling experiments. There was a whole generation
of what what Bertucci calls itinerant lecturers, which is great
because that makes me think of itinerant priests or itinerant

(25:23):
evangelists traveling around spreading the gospel message, except in this case,
this is the electricity gospel. So they would tour from
place to place giving demonstrations. Uh, in an early incarnation
of what we might call edutainment. I would say, they
would show off some sparks, show off some electromagnetic attraction,

(25:44):
and they'd say, are you not edutane? Well, what are
some examples of some of the demonstrations that they would
roll out for the for the entertainment hungry population. Right,
So one would be uh, having somebody touch in electrical
apparatus and then you'd see their hair rise up, or
you could see somebody become electrically charged and then attract
small objects with one's hands. Or you could use electrostatic

(26:08):
induction to make objects move, for example, maybe maybe making
bells ring or something. Or you could darken the room
and show sparks jumping between objects, or electro luminescent glowing
inside glass containers. Now, the great thing about this, I
meagine a lot of people are thinking this is and
from a modern perspective, you think of Mr Wizard, you

(26:28):
think of various various science shows. For me, I think Beakman. Yeah,
for me, I'm also reminded of the sort of street
festival they have for the World Science Festival in New
York City every year, where kids go around, they go
to different science booths and there's always at least one
where they have some sort of electrical experiment going on.

(26:48):
I mean it's electrical experiments lend themselves so well to
to public lectures in public displays, and we're still into
them to this day. Yes, absolutely, I mean it it's
important to notice how much of this was just spectacle.
I don't know how much the average person was learning
from these demonstrations and the salons, especially given how little

(27:10):
the people lecturing probably knew about electricity. Like we said,
they didn't know about electrons, yet we didn't know what
the electrical fire was. There were a lot of suppositions,
you might say, But but it's funny to imagine the
level of confidence in the display and the spectacle of
it versus what was actually probably misinformation being communicated to people.

(27:35):
So the demonstrations really played to the senses. They had
flashes of light, crackling noises, smells even sometimes like a
sulfurous smell in the aftermath of things. A couple of
examples of people who would give these things. One was
Jean Antoine Melas, who was a French physicist and instrument maker,
and he would arrange experiments with chains of people holding

(27:57):
hands who would be shocked in unison is the person
at one end of the chain touched the rod or
the inner surface of the laden jar, and the person
at the other end touched the outer surface. And there's
something almost weirdly orgiastic about this, isn't there. Yeah, it
reminds me of these these scenes of seances taking place
more or less around the same pole hands in the circle. Yeah, yeah,

(28:19):
and and and all of this also reminds me of
magic tricks, except in this case the magic is real.
And the magic is a is a natural phenomenon that
we don't have at this point, we don't have all
the answers for, and thus still retains a lot of
its magical qualities. Yeah. Yeah, So, as much as these
lecturers probably wanted to emphasize the scientific and natural nature

(28:40):
of the electrical phenomenon people were observing, there is undoubtedly
a very spiritual power to what people were experiencing at
these demonstrations, if you know what I mean. A couple
other things that might be showed off. One thing was
medical electricity began to emerge in this period in the
mid seventeen hundreds as this sort of a useful incarnation

(29:01):
of this force, which I mean, that's funny to imagine
back then. But though the medical utility of the electrical
fire was still debated, demonstrators began in this period to
definitely offer therapeutic electrical shocks to people who sought them
for I guess primarily conditions of the nerves. Yeah, I mean,
here's this electricity that has this kind of um, you know,

(29:24):
magical quality to it already, and you're definitely gonna feel it.
So you wrap a little bit of healing hocus pocus
language around it, and you have yourselves up potentially one
heck of a placebo there, right, yeah, yeah. And so
there were a couple other things that Bertucci mentions that
were often showed off. There were thunder houses and the
the Aurora flask. I love the idea of a thunder house.

(29:47):
This is it was basically a demonstration that was sort
of an ad for the lightning rod because it was
a model house. So imagine a dollhouse then with a
lightning rod sticking out the top of it. Then the
demonstrators would shock the house with electrical discharge and if
the rod was properly grounded, nothing would happen, but if
the rod was ungrounded, a shock to the house would
ignite gunpowder planted inside the dollhouse and cause an explosion.

(30:11):
And then also there was a thing called the Aurora flask,
which was a pear shaped glass bulb designed to simulate
the luminous display of the Aurora borealis inside a container.
So that's a weird way that we could put this
this amazingly beautiful, vast, uh natural display inside a bottle,
which is almost a metaphor for what these people were doing.

(30:33):
You know, they were taking the most powerful and mysterious,
huge grand forces of nature and capturing it and putting
it in a bottle that you could look into and
tap on the glass. Lightning in a bottle, And then
all the way to our modern time where what is
what is a light bulb but another form of lightning
in a bottle and yet the most mundane thing imaginable. Yeah,

(30:54):
And I think because partly because of all these demonstrations,
people began to think of electric the as as sort
of the the embodiment of all the force of the cosmos.
So in the second half of the eighteenth century, people
were beginning to explain all kinds of natural forces through
the the electrical fire. So obviously lightning and thunder, but
people started to say, well, earthquakes, that's probably electricity too, tornadoes, whirlpools,

(31:20):
it's all electricity. And Bertucci says, quote such demonstrations contributed
to the construction of an electrical cosmos. Health, sickness, thunderstorm, earthquakes,
and Aurora borealis all resulted from the motions of the
electrical fire. Again taking on what sounds like kind of
a spiritual aspect. It's almost like the the you know,

(31:41):
the power and love of God that controls the motions
of all the spheres. Yeah, the sense that they're they're
tapping into this hidden network of energy that underlies all things.
The kind of thing that I've seen, I've seen discussed
in various uh you know, accult or some sort of
spiritual uh papers, where they're talking about saying like they're
being a chaos matrix manith reality, and if you can

(32:04):
tap into that chaos matrix, then you have chaos chaos
magic at your disposal. Like this is. This is as
if one were suddenly saying, hey, we found the chaos
matrix and we can make the chaos magic fly from
the tips of our fingers. Now, what is the D
and D alignment of the electrical phantom? Is it chaotic
evil or chaotic neutral? I think chaotic neutral. It's all,

(32:27):
but it all depends on how you engage with it. Okay,
now we're gonna take a quick break, but when we
come back, we're gonna hear about one of the weirdest
demonstrations of the electrical fire. Hey, everybody, you know the
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(33:57):
uh so we're going to discuss here the work of
once Steven Gray. Now, Stephen Gray did plenty of experiments
in electricity, right, yes, yeah, he was an English dier,
the son of a dire Uh. He was an astronomer
and uh indeed an electrical conduction pioneer. He's remembered for
a number of discoveries and the various he experiments he

(34:18):
conducted uh uh you know, showed how electricity moves. But
the most notable of these is his seventeen thirty one
experiment the Hanging Boy, which just a creepy name it is.
And you can we'll try to include some links to
some images of this, because there's some wonderful um schematics
for what this looked like, which don't still don't capture

(34:39):
the full majesty of what people saw, because it's just
it really resonates with occult dramatics, right yeah, I mean,
it's it's like something out of a Kin Russell movie.
I love that you make that comparison, because Ken Russell
really captures this kind of sense of the electrical demonstrations.
Right this this bizarre, our intersection of the magical and

(35:01):
the scientific. Yeah, totally. So I'm gonna try and present
it to you as if you were showing up for
a presentation of the Hanging Boy. Wait, so you're you're
you're saying I've accepted an invitation to come view the
Hanging Boy. Yes, yes, I'm that kind of person. You are.
You know, you're you're one of the local You're in
the local science community. You're you're interested in this kind
of thing. There's something cool going on, so you're gonna

(35:23):
go check it out. So you enter the private home
of a of another upstanding member of the scientific community,
and you come and you find that the furniture has
been rearranged, the lighting has been dimmed, and everyone is
gathered in the largest room of the house for this
very peculiar experiment. So you've been looking forward to it
for weeks. You're making a lot of assumptions about me
and my feelings towards the Hanging Boy. This is the

(35:45):
biggest thing. This was a hit all over Europe. This
is like finally getting to see cats or something, Right,
what is it? Tell me? Okay, so the main event
here is that a nine year old boy. Don't worry.
It's just a local street urchin and they've paid him
for his particip patient nine year old boys brought in
and swaddling clothes, you know, dressed essentially like cupid. Right, so,

(36:08):
so already we're we're engaging dramatic symbolic power here. And
then he is suspended from the ceiling by silk cords.
Oh they gotta be silk cords, of course. Oh yeah, yeah,
I mean, what are to to suspend the boy with
just rope would be weird and just out of keeping
with the symbolic drama of the thing. Right now, just

(36:31):
below the boy's head. Uh, they've positioned a stand on
which they've they've play small light flakes of brass. Well, meanwhile,
our friend Mr Gray here uh comes over with a
charged glass to essentially a friction generator, and he's holding
this near the boy's feet. And I'll read you a
quote to let and this is from the letters sent

(36:54):
from Stephen Gray to one Cromwell Mortimer. Upon the tubes
being rubbed and held near his feet without touching them,
the leaf brass was attracted to the boy's face with
with much vigor, so as to rise to the height
of eight and sometimes ten inches, so hold on with
So they were drawing uh pieces of brass leaf to

(37:17):
his face. Yes, so the boys hanging there from the silk,
he touches this electric wand of the boy's feet and
then all these flakes of metal began to to drift up,
fly up from the table through the air towards his face. Okay,
what else they got, Well, they would have the boy
reach out and turn the pages of a book without
physically touching it. Volunteers from the audience were invited to

(37:40):
touch the boy's hand, and in doing so, they were
able to turn the pages in the book with the
same electrical magic just by touching the boy's hand. And
finally the main event, the lights were dimmed and the
volunteer was asked to touch the boy's nose and that's
when crack, a visual spark flies between the flying boy

(38:01):
and the audience member. Wow. So this, I mean, the
whole thing is just fad with because there's a sense
of the boy is an angel but also a child
sacrifice exactly, there's a sense of child sacrifice, and they
kind of make him the sort of a literal embodiment
of electricity as is a is A is a virgin

(38:21):
as this this this child that is without fault, you know,
a holy, blameless creature. Well, there you get into something
else that I think it's going to be very important
to talk about, because there's this mysterium, there's this great
strange mystery about what the electrical fire is. There's this
spiritual element to it. But then there is also a
very clear emerging theme of sexuality to electricity, because one

(38:47):
of the notes that I got from Bertucci about the
hanging boy experiment was that sometimes you mentioned that he
would transfer the electric fire to somebody else and they
would be able to attract things. Well, she mentions that
sometimes the boy transmitted the electric fire to a young
girl who would attract light objects to herself. So strangely
sexual theme. There's like the passage of the thing across

(39:10):
the sex barrier. And this wasn't the only case of
sexual themes emerging in electrical demonstrations. For example, Bertucci tells
us in one of her papers that the presence of
women and the accentuation of sex differences became a crucial
part of these electrical demonstrations in the eighteenth century. For example,
a really popular experiment was called the electrifying venus. Yeah,

(39:35):
also known as the electric kiss, which was invented by
the German professor Georg Matthias Boza. And it goes like this.
So you've got a beautiful lady standing on an insulated
stool and an electrical apparatus charges her body with electricity,
so this would probably be like a friction generator. And

(39:56):
after she's charged up, the demonstrator invites general and from
the audience to come up and steal a kiss from
the electric venus. Unfortunately, for these amorous gentlemen, as they
approached the charged venus with their lips, they would receive
a spark to the mouth and that would drive them
back and discourage further attempts. Okay, so imagine how exciting

(40:19):
this must have been to, you know, a court lady
in the seventeen hundreds who was sick of the advances
and sexual harassment of the aristocratic men in her circle.
They even try to kiss there and they get a shock, right, uh.
So Bertucci goes on to note, like like the invisible things,
except for exact for horny aristocrats. So Bertucci goes on
to note that Boza even wrote a poem about electricity.

(40:42):
He was kind of a showman type. He wrote a
poem about electricity, which he dedicated to the Princess of
Gotha and the Duchess of Brutal Colorath, who were attendees
of his demonstrations. And there's a section from the poem
she quotes. It says, once only what temerity I kissed
venus ending on pitch. It pained me to the quick.

(41:02):
My lips trembled, my mouth quivered, my teeth almost broke.
That's intense stuff. So even the demonstrator himself, knowing the risks,
could not resist an attempt to kiss the sparking venus,
but to please the fellows of the salons that they
would not be entirely discouraged in their feats of electrical manliness,

(41:25):
because for their amusement they could wield an electrified sword
and use it to ignite small quantities of liquor. All right,
Well they had that, and then to just sort of
leave everybody on a good note, right right, Yeah, So
the the psycho sexual significance of electricity didn't even in
their boza. That same guy came up with the theory
of the sexology of electric fire, and it's about as

(41:47):
male chauvinist as you would guess. I want to quote
from Bertucci, who writes characterizing it, the male fire emitted
by metals and animal bodies was unsurprisingly strong and powerful. Sparks,
with their crack cling sound, were visible manifestations of this
kind of fire. The female fire instead, was a weak,
luminous emanation, the kind of light that characterized the Aurora borealis.

(42:11):
I love that because there is kind of using science
to recreate Daoism in this case. You know, the whole
division of the yin and yang energies defining the universe. Oh,
does that have a male female element? Oh? Yeah, yeah,
one is like the male is is heat and power
and strength, and the female energy is uh is colder

(42:33):
and more subtle in their their opposites in the universe. Well,
that's like the cosmic electric spience spirituality yet again, So
through the second half of the eighteenth century, there was
a lot of popular thinking that associated electricity with sex, virility,
and fertility. Electrical imagery showed up in erotic poetry all
the time. They'll be talks about sparks and friction and UH,

(42:57):
and medical experts even promoted sex sual health cares I
should have said, experts. You couldn't hear me doing air
quotes medical quote. Experts promoted sexual health care is via
the electrical fire. And there will be more on that
when we talk about a guy named James Graham in
the next episode. But there's a weird paradox emerging here
with the relationship between electricity and virility and health. How

(43:23):
come the body seems to be able to be, uh,
I don't know, sort of animated by electricity in one sense,
you could be sparked into action, and yet the discharge
of electricity from a laden jar might be enough to
kill you. That seems like a weird tension there, right, Yeah,
it kind of comes back to that, that that sort

(43:44):
of weird Dallastu interpretation of male and female energies to
a certain extent. Yeah, And so later in the seventeen
hundreds this comes to a head, I think in the
argument about the nature of animal electricity. So, like we said,
there are electric fishes and uh so there was some
knowledge about different types of bioelectricity. Uh, but but what

(44:06):
happened in the in the seventeen eighties, Well, we had
a man by the name of Luigi Galvani. Alright, he
was mid seventeen eighties Italian physician, and he he said
Italian with an Italian accent. Well, you can't say Luigi
Galvani without giving in to it a little bit, right.

(44:26):
So in one of his earlier experiments, he connected the
nerves of a recently dead frog to a long metal
wire and pointed towards the sky during a thunderstorm. Uh.
And then with each flash the dog the frog moved again,
as if with life. So the dead frog and and
this this suggests a kind of mechanical connection between the

(44:48):
parts of the body and the electrical fire. Right. Indeed,
I mean this is where we get the term galvanism from,
which refers to muscle contractions due to an electric current. Now,
at the time, Galvani referred to this as animal electricity,
thinking he discovered a unique form of electricity, something intrinsic
to the muscle tissue. So external electricity could galvanize its sure,

(45:12):
But his argument was that it also possessed its own
unique electricity as well. So he was saying, these were
the bioelectricity and the external electricity were different types of
electricity exactly. Yeah, the you but you had two different
species of electricity to deal with here Um, and this
didn't set well with everyone, particularly another name that resonates

(45:33):
with electrical history, um Alessandro Volta. You can hear the
electrical terms in both of their last names, like Galvinize
and Volta. Yeah, so you know that this is this
isn't just some nobody entering the fray. So Volta. He
walks in, and he's intent on disproving animal electricity. He
doesn't buy it. He asserts that the animals here in

(45:55):
Um in Galvani's experiments reacted to electricity produced by two
different metals used to connect their nerves and muscles, and
and that it's not any kind of intrinsic special electricity,
and this argument eventually wins over the scientific community. Um
Galvani conducted experiments to counter the claim, but never got
very far in trying to convince anyone and eventually dies,

(46:17):
but obviously showing a connection between the workings of the
human body, which was still in many senses, were mysterious
at the time and and infused with spiritual and soul
ish potential. With this supposedly, I don't know purely natural
force like electricity that had to cause some feelings of

(46:39):
maybe aporia, right yeah, yeah, I mean, and certainly I
don't want to imply that Galvani wasn't onto something and
wasn't himself, you know, a very intelligent guy that was
making some breakthroughs in our understanding electricity. But of course
these bioelectricity beliefs led to some pretty interesting and weird experiments.
Right yeah. Fast forward to January eighteen o three. Convicted

(47:00):
murderer George Forster or Foster, depending on which source you're
looking at. He dies by hanging at London's Newgate Prison
and then attendance transport his body to the Royal College
of Surgeons, also in London, so that this in itself
wasn't an uncommon practice. You have a fresh body, it's
perfect for the exploration of human anatomy. But then they

(47:23):
roll the corpse into a crowded operating theater where owaits
Giovanni Aldini, the nephew of the late louisgi Galvani. Yeah,
and as you would imagine given the podcast episode to hear, uh,
he's waiting with a battery and some connecting rods, so
you know what he's gonna They've got a corpse coming in.

(47:44):
He's stitting there with this battery? Is he is he
twirling his mustache? I I should hope so. Um, maybe
even with electricity. But this is from the records. This
is what Alboni had to say about the results here.
On the first application of the arcs, the job began
to quiver, The adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the

(48:05):
left eye actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process,
the right hand was raised and clinched, 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 life, you know.
And I bet for the people at the time, they

(48:28):
didn't necessarily know that wasn't going to happen. Yeah, I mean,
we we know now, but yeah, at the time, we
were still figuring out how electricity work, what it did
to the body, and so so, unlesson four members of
the audience, it seemed entirely possible that he might have
brought this character back to life in some form. If
it's conceivable that the electricity is the soul, is the

(48:48):
soul that animates the flesh and uh and the death
causes that this electricity to evaporate. Could you restore the
soul that animates the flesh to the body by charging
it back up. Yeah. And Plus if you're if you're
buying into a basic bio mechanical understanding or certainly mechanical
understanding of the body. If electricity physically animates the body,

(49:10):
then why not the mind itself? Why not the soul?
Why not the person entire um? And of course a
lot of this probably instantly brings to mind images of Frankenstein,
of Dr Frankenstein bringing his creation to life. Now funny,
I remember electricity being a big part of the movie,
But I and when I've read the book, I don't

(49:31):
remember much mentioning of electricity in it. There's not a
lot um but a couple of him. First of all,
like the timeline works perfectly for this. So Mary Shelley
is a book comes out in eighteen eighteen, so that's,
you know, just just a couple of decades in the wake.
I think she would have been she would have been
a small child at the time of of the Georgia

(49:52):
Forster Foster reanimation experiment. But there's actually a portion of
Frankenstein that reads this follows. Before this, I was not
unacquainted with the more obvious laws of electricity. On this occasion,
a man of great research and natural philosophy was with
us and excited by this catastrophe. He entered on the

(50:13):
explanation of a theory which he had formed on the
subject of electricity and galvinism, which was at once new
and astonishing to me. Quote Dr Frankenstein well, as will
mention in the next episode, Mary Shelley had more than
one influence of mad Science on her life. Probably, Oh, yes, yes, um,

(50:33):
because certainly, uh, I think you can see in Frankenstein.
I mean, there's a lot to say about Frankenstein. We
could do a whole podcast about, uh, the cultural and
scientific underpinnings of that book. But but yeah, there's a
lot of the this new age of of understanding and
reason of our attempt to to harness all these natural

(50:54):
wonders with our scientific understanding. You see that in these
these these electric experiments we've discussed. You see that in
Frankenstein as well. Okay, well, I think that's gonna have
to be it for our first episode, the first part
of this series, and we've we've made it from the
mystery of the ancients, to the to the to the
strange obsession with electrical fire, and the electrical cosmos of

(51:16):
the mid and late seventeen hundreds. But in the next
episode we're going to chase that rabbit further down the
circuit circuit. Yeah, I think that'll be it. Yeah, yeah,
so yeah. In the next episode, electric chairs, uh, electrical
personal massage devices, electric religion, um, and you know, there
will be a little bit of Frankenstein, but don't worry,

(51:39):
we'll also fit John Wesley in there as well, and
of course the striking conclusion to the story we opened
with about the first legal electrocution. Indeed, and until then,
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(52:21):
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(52:41):
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