January 3, 2026 • 34 mins
This 2021 episode covers Andrew Crosse, who observed a strange thing happening on an electrified rock in his lab in the early 1800s, and was catapulted into the public spotlight.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Our classic today has connections to two things
that we mentioned on the show this week, Richard Owen
and the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace. It's Andrew
Cross who did some goofy stuff with electricity at crystals
in the nineteenth century. We have a couple of little
updates not directly related to Andrew Cross. In this episode.
(00:24):
We have a whole conversation about comments on our website
at mysonhistory dot com. The website no longer has comments
on it. If you go running to there to leave
us a comment, there will not be an option to
do that. We also talk about Cross's home of Fine Court,
which is a National Trust property today. We say in
(00:44):
the episode that the cafe is takeout only due to
COVID precautions. That is, of course not the case, and
it's also now home to a used bookstore that I
don't recall being mentioned when I first researched this episode.
This originally came out on January twenty seventh, twenty twenty one.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
(01:09):
production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. After we did
our episode on John Cleves Simms and his ideas of
the Earth being hollow, somebody suggested that we do an
(01:30):
episode on Andrew Cross. And I wrote all this down,
including the fact that he thought he invented life from crystals.
And now I'm going to totally depart from the document
that I gave Holly for our outline to come in
here because I just figured out who who suggested this.
What was originally written in this outline was that I
(01:52):
had gone looking in our email and our Facebook comments
and our our Twitter mentions, being like, who's just this?
I wrote all this down and I did not write
down their name. Literally sitting in this studio, I was like,
maybe it was a comment on our website. It was
a comment on our website from Kumari. I hope I
(02:16):
have said your name correctly. I'm so sorry if I
did not who left the comment? How about a podcast
on Andrew Cross who thought he created life in eighteen
thirty six with his crystals and electricity. Because it's goofy,
it is goofy. This was a joy to work on day.
It also just came together with remarkable ease which was
(02:37):
great because I was taken a long weekend then I
wanted I needed to get all my stuff done. No
shade at all to kumarif we're having left this comment
on our on our website, but I will note we
do not get notification of comments on the website at
mistonhistory dot com. It is often weeks or longer before
(02:59):
we ever see anything on there, and we also do
not have the ability to turn the comments off because
it's like a whole company wide thing to have the
comments on there. So if you are going to leave
a comment on our website, we're probably not going to
see it in a timely manner and we may never
respond to it. But my last minute, literally sitting here
(03:20):
in the studio, oh maybe it was a comment on
the website. It was. It was Cross's account of what
really happened. Is a little bit more down to earth
than thinking that he invented life, or not invented life,
but created life with crystals and electricity. But it's still
a delightful story. It's a lot of fun to work on.
So thank you Kumari again. I hope I have said
(03:43):
your name right. I have a good check because I
literally made the connection just now dun dun dum uh. Yeah,
thank you for suggesting this. So. Andrew Cross was born
on June seventeenth, seventeen eighty four, at Fine Court in Broomfield, Summer, England,
and the manor house at fine Court was first built
(04:03):
in the early seventeenth century, and then it was added
onto over the years, so by the time Cross was
born it had been his family's home for well over
one hundred years. Andrew's mother was named Susannah and his
father was Richard Cross, High Sheriff of Somerset. When Andrew
was four, the family moved to France and they stayed
there for the next four years. Andrew spoke both French
(04:25):
and English by the time he got back home, but
after that he really did not keep up with the
French and he eventually lost it all. Although he studied
Latin and Greek in school, he didn't really think he
had much of an aptitude for languages. However, he did
invent a new language with his younger brother Richard, and
the two of them made up a world that was
(04:46):
populated by beings they called either Hobblege's or hobble Geese.
We don't know for sure, which they made out of
fur cones. And they imagined a whole society for the
hobble Geese, complete with its own legal system and a
system of government, which about as charming as you can
get in my opinion. In his own words, Andrew was
quote a very happy boy, careless, and extravagantly fond of fun,
(05:10):
and both boys were somewhat eccentric as they grew up.
We're gonna get into Andrew's eccentricities in more detail. But
as for Richard, as one example, he was really really
into the metric system, so much so that his clocks
were divided into ten hours instead of twelve. I have
a number of questions about this, like, if you're running
your household on ten hour clocks, do you just translate
(05:32):
in your head to make sure you're on time for
your engagements or all? Are you always not on time?
We're gonna have a talk about this in our Friday
episode Super because your foolish co host may have tried
something similar as an adult. Oh, I'm so excited. After
(05:52):
the Cross family got back from France, Andrew was enrolled
in a school in Dorchester that was run by a
reverend Mister White, and Then in seventeen ninety three, when
he was nine, he moved to a school in Bristol
run by the reverend mister Samuel Sayer. In addition to
his work as a teacher, Sayer wrote memoirs historical and
topographical of Bristol in its neighborhood from the earliest period
(06:15):
down to the present time. Andrew did not really enjoy
his time at this school. He never felt like he
had enough to eat, and he thought the food that
they did have was terrible. He also didn't get along
with Sayer or some of the other teachers. Plus, being
extravagantly fond of fun included getting into mischief and playing
jokes and pranks on people, Like when a classmate asked
(06:37):
him for help translating some Latin, Andrew told him that
what he wanted translated meant the stork is safest in
the middle of the pond, when it really meant the
middle course is safest. And Sayer apparently did not appreciate
this particular brand of silliness. Some of the trouble that
Andrew got into at school was also more serious than that.
(06:58):
Andrew liked to make his own own fireworks, and that's
what he was doing. One day, while he was also
studying his Virgil Sayer came and caught him and took
what he was working on a way. In Andrew's words quote,
I watched where he put it. It was on the
window sill of a room which was always kept locked.
The window, though not glazed, had close iron bars through
(07:22):
which nothing could pass. The case was hopeless. I could
not recover my rocket mixture, but a happy thought struck me.
I was resolved that no one else should enjoy the spoil,
which I regarded as so valuable. I had a burning
glass in my pocket, and I thought of Archimedes and
the Roman fleet. The sun was shining, and I soon
(07:43):
drew a focus on the gunpowder, which immediately blew up.
It was well that the house was not set on fire.
As for me, I was reckless of all consequences. At
one point, some of the boys at school decided to
go on strike to try to get longer holiday breaks.
But beyond just refusing to go to class, they were
inspired by the British troops fighting in the French Revolutionary Wars,
(08:06):
so they also planned to take over the school armed
with muskets. This plan was discovered and thwarted, thankfully before
anybody carried it out, and although the ringleaders were expelled
and other participants were flogged, Andrew somehow escaped notice. Aside
from all of that, though, Andrew's love of science, and
(08:26):
particularly of electricity, really blossomed while he was at mister
Sayer's school. This might have had roots back in his
home life. His father was actually friends with Benjamin Franklin.
But while he was at Sayer's school, Andrews saw an
advertisement for a lecture series, with the first installment being
about optics and the second about electricity. He asked for
(08:49):
permission to go, and that was granted and things really
took off from there. Soon he and some schoolmates were
shocking people with a Leyden jar that they made from
an apothecary's bottle. So a leyden jar is a vessel
that stores static electricity, in this case probably a stoppered
vial filled partway with water with a wire through the stopper,
(09:09):
which you charge by touching the wire to something staticky.
Before long, Andrew was writing home to ask for money
to buy various electrical gadgetry. To be clear, this Leyden
jar shocking would not have been dangerous, but it would
have been annoying. Andrew's father died in eighteen hundred when
(09:29):
he was sixteen, and about that time he started to
experience what he described as nervous attacks, and they would
recur regularly for the rest of his life. While he
had described himself in childhood as happy and careless, he
grew up to be kind of a generally anxious person,
with these attacks coming on suddenly and lasting for as
(09:50):
long as thirty minutes at a time. In eighteen oh two,
Cross entered Brasenose College at Oxford, which he called quote
a perfect hell on earth. Wine seemed to be the
focal point of social life at the college, and he
hated wine. He also hated his classmates, snobbery and classism,
and later on he said, quote I was less liberal
(10:10):
at this time than at any other of my life.
It took some years to rub off the prejudices of
class which I had acquired At Oxford. Cross earned his
degree in law in eighteen oh five, and he also
inherited fine Court after his mother's death on July third
of that same year. This was one of a long
series of losses over a period of about five years.
(10:32):
He lost both of his parents, a sister, an uncle,
two close friends, and one of his household staff, who
he described as quote a most faithful and attached servant.
It's not really clear whether the grief over all of
this led him to abandon law, but he did. He
gave up law after two or three years. Instead, he
(10:54):
established himself as a country gentleman at fine court, becoming
absorbed in studying electricity, mineralogy, and chemistry. He also served
as a magistrate, where he developed a reputation for being
quite liberal, and he wrote a lot of poetry. Cross
became friends with George John Singer, author of Elements of
(11:14):
Electricity and Electrochemistry. Like Cross, Singer was an amateur scientist
whose family business involved making artificial feathers and flowers, but
he was knowledgeable on the subject of electricity and held public
lectures and demonstrations that were attended by people like Michael Faraday.
Cross and Singer did experiments together until Singer's death from
(11:37):
tuberculosis in eighteen seventeen at the age of only thirty one.
George John Singer had built a laboratory and lecture hall
at his own home, but Andrew Cross's efforts to devote
his home to research went even farther. We'll talk more
about that after we paused for a sponsor break. In
(12:05):
eighteen o seven, Andrew Cross became fascinated with crystal formations
in Holwell Cavern, which is a limestone crevice in Broomfield,
not far from where he lived. The entrance to this
cavern has since been filled in, and in Cross's words quote,
I felt convinced at an early period that the formation
(12:25):
and constant growth of the crystalline matter which lined the
roof of this cave was caused by some peculiar upward attraction,
and reasoning more on the subject, I felt assured that
it was electric attraction. Cross got a tumbler of water
out of the stream that ran through the cavern, and
he ran a current through it on wires, and eventually
(12:46):
some crystals did start to form. This was the first
of many experiments that he conducted in electrocrystallization, which is
when metals are deposited onto electrodes, eventually forming crystals. He
would eventually start to experiment with electro refining, or extracting
metals from their oars with electricity, which is also called
electro winning electrowinning, which by the way, sounds like a
(13:10):
great band name, was first developed by Sir Humphrey Davy,
who came up in our John Cleves Simms episode Everything
Connects in History. Yeah, Davy was one of the people
who thought John Cleeve Simms did not know what he
was talking about, because he didn't. As Cross experimented, though,
more and more of his home became devoted to this
(13:33):
work over the next few decades. He installed six or
seven furnaces for purifying metals. The estates, glassware, and china
became laboratory vessels, and he purified the household silver for
use in his experiments. He also strung up about a
third of a mile of copper wire from poles and
(13:53):
the tallest trees on the grounds, and he connected all
that to about fifty laden jars in the organ loft
of the museom. This setup became particularly dramatic in foggy
or stormy weather. Sir Richard Phillips visited Fine Core and
relate a conversation with Cross quote. He told me that
sometimes the current was so great as to charge and
(14:13):
discharge the great battery twenty times in a minute, with
reports as loud as a cannon, which, being continuous, were
so terrible to strangers that they always fled, while everyone
expected the destruction of himself and premises. If the weather
wasn't cooperating. Cross could also manually charge the laden jars
by turning a device with a crank. Here is how
(14:36):
a visitor described fine Court. During all this quote, here
was an immense number of jars and gallipots containing fluids
on which electricity was operating for the production of crystals.
But you were startled in the midst of your observations
by the smart crackling sound that attends the passage of
the electrical spark. You hear also the rumblings of distant thunder.
(14:59):
The rain is already splashing and great drops against the glass,
and the sound of the passing sparks continues to startle
your ear. Your host is in high glee, for a
battery of electricity is about to come within his reach,
a thousandfold more powerful than all those the rooms strung together.
You follow his hasty steps to the organ gallery and
(15:22):
curiously approach the spot. Once the noise that has attracted
your notice, you see at the window a huge brass
conductor with a discharging rod near it, passing into the floor,
and from what knob to the other sparks are leaping
with increasing rapidity and noise, rap rap rap, bang bang bang. Nonetheless,
(15:43):
your host does not fear. He approaches as boldly as
if the flowing stream of fire were a harmless spark.
Here comes the big no surprise moment. Many of his
neighbors did not particularly care for all of this. Cross
was nicknamed the Wizard of Broomfield, and at one point
he was speaking at a meeting ahead of an election
and local farmers were booing him. When an outsider asked
(16:07):
what was wrong, someone replied, quote, why don't you know him?
That's Cross of Broomfield, the thunder and lightning man. You
can't go near his kurshed house at night without danger
of your life. Them as have been there have seen
devils all surrounded by lightning, dancing on the wires that
he has put up round his grounds. At the same time, though,
there were local people who thought his experiments had curative properties.
(16:31):
In her account of his life and work, Cross, his
second wife, Cornelia, described the case of a local man
who was paralyzed on one side of his body and
also had a salivary gland issue quote. After being electrified
twice a week for six weeks, he was so much
better that he could walk to find court and the
complaint in the throat was entirely removed. I'm making a
(16:54):
grimacing face. Another gem from Cornelia about their booming flashing quote,
we were never troubled with burglars at fine Court. We
will get back to Cornelia in a bit, since they
got married later on in Andrew's life. His first wife
was Marian Hamilton, daughter of Captain John Hamilton. They got
(17:15):
married in eighteen oh nine, relatively early into cross His
time as a gentleman scientist. They would go on to
have seven children together over the next ten years, although
three of those children died when they were still children.
Their oldest child, John, was born in eighteen ten. Cross
seems to have been really deeply fond of his wife
(17:36):
and children and very traumatized by those three deaths. At
the same time, though, in terms of family, he'd been
on his own aside from a couple of younger siblings
for four years before he got married, and he just
wasn't used to having a regular home life, and along
with all of his experiments, that made things a little
bit chaotic. Ada Lovelace became friends with both Andrew and
(17:58):
his son John. John actually had a romantic relationship that
was also tangled up with her gambling. She summed up
the atmosphere at fine Court this way, quote the dinner
hour was an accident in the day's arrangements. Even though
they were living in a seventeenth century manor house, which
suggests a lot of wealth, the Cross family's lifestyle wasn't
(18:20):
particularly extravagant compared to other people in a similar situation.
They did have problems with cash flow, though, and Cross's
words quote, my family were learned and honorable men as
long as I can look back. But they had the
happy knack of turning a guinea into a shilling, and
I have inherited that faculty pretty strongly. Cornelia described him
(18:44):
as quote injudicious in his expenditure. Apart from his friendship
with George John Singer, Andrew Cross was intellectually actually pretty isolated.
One of his closest longtime friends was John Kenyon, who
had been one of his classmates at mister Sayer's school,
and while Kenyon was interested in Cross's experiments, science was
(19:05):
really not his calling. Their overlapping interest was poetry. Kenyan
wrote poetry himself, and he was a distant cousin of
Elizabeth Barrett Browning. At one point before her marriage, he
brought Andrew Cross to visit her. He also supplemented Robert
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's income and left the money when
he died in eighteen fifty six. So Cross did talk
(19:28):
about his work in public, but not really all that
often and somewhat reluctantly. On December twenty eighth of eighteen fourteen,
he gave an address at Garnerin's Lecture Hall, and it
is possible that Mary Shelley, who at the time was
Mary Godwin, attended this lecture. She references it in her diary,
but her notes about it are also kind of vague.
(19:49):
She writes about going from place to place looking for
Thomas Jefferson Hogg, but not finding him at any of
those places, before saying quote, go to Garneran's lecture on
a electricity, the Gases and the phantasmagoria. Return at half
past nine, Shelley goes to sleep, So it's not one
hundred percent clear whether Garneran's was one of the places
(20:10):
she was looking for. Hog and she was just noting
the topic of the lecture that night, or if she
actually attended the lecture herself. Either way, though, sometimes people
point to this diary entry as evidence that Cross was
an inspiration for Shelley's novel Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus,
which was published four years later. In eighteen thirty six,
(20:32):
Cross reluctantly agreed to speak at the annual meeting of
the British Association for the Advancement of Science that was
being held in Bristol. He had intended to go to
the meeting simply as an observer, but he was persuaded
to talk about his experiments with electrocrystallization. It turned out
that people were fascinated. John Dalton, who we just covered
(20:53):
on the show, was in attendance, and he told Cross
he had never before listened to anything so interesting. All
this attention and made Cross fairly uncomfortable, though, and his
words quote, I slipped away out of it all and
he went home before the meeting was over. It was
not long before he was getting even more attention, though,
and we'll talk more about that after a sponsor break.
(21:24):
After the British Association for the Advancement of Science Meeting
in eighteen thirty six. A lot of the response to
Andrew Cross's work was pretty positive, but he did have
some detractors. On January thirty first of eighteen thirty seven,
he wrote a letter to a newspaper called The Atlas,
in which he responded to what he described as an
(21:46):
attack by a doctor Ritchie. I could not find the
text of this article, but Ritchie apparently criticized Cross for
framing his work as discoveries when other people had discovered
these things many years before. Ritchie also described Cross's work
in a way that just wasn't very accurate. Cross's tone
(22:10):
is kind of along the lines of you were there
at the meeting, doctor Ritchie, and you could have just
asked me if you had questions, instead of writing this
incorrect article mischaracterizing me and my experiments, which I do
because I love them. In this response, Cross framed his
work as observations, not discoveries. His letter ended quote, ps
(22:31):
I should have sent this answer long since, but have
been prevented by severe illness. I must beg in future
to decline engaging in scientific warfare, with anyone having neither
inclination nor time for that kind of amusement, but doctor
Ritchie's article that he was responding to was just the
tip of the iceberg. Not long after he spoke at
(22:51):
the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Andrew Cross
became famous in a way that he really did not
expect and also really did not want. He had been
experimenting with a piece of porous volcanic rock, which he
was using because of its porosity rather than because of
its composition. He kept this rock electrified with a voltaic battery,
(23:13):
and he had placed it in a fluid that was
saturated with black flint and potassium carbonate. In his words quote,
on the fourteenth day from the commencement of this experiment,
I observed through a lens a few small whitish excrescenses,
or nipples, projecting from about the middle of the electrified stone.
On the eighteenth day, these projections enlarged and struck out
(23:36):
seven or eight filaments, each of them longer than the
hemisphere on which they grew. On the twenty sixth day,
these appearances assumed the form of a perfect insect standing
erect on a few bristles which formed its tail. Till
this period I had no notion that these appearances were
other than an incipient mineral formation. On the twenty eighth day,
(23:58):
these little creatures moved their life. I must now say
that I was not a little astonished. After a few days,
they detached themselves from the stone and moved about at pleasure.
He went on to write, quote, and the course of
a few weeks, about a hundred of them made their
appearance on the stone. I examined them with a microscope
and observed that the smaller ones appeared to have only
(24:20):
six legs, the larger ones eight. Cross thought the most
likely explanation for this startling occurrence was that airborne mites
had deposited their eggs on his equipment, which was exposed
to the air, but that didn't explain why the mites
seemed able to survive in an environment that should have
killed them. Later on, he also acknowledged that the early
(24:41):
stage of these creatures formation was nearly indistinguishable from the
early stages of crystal formation, so he might have just
been mistaken. Beyond that, he said quote, I have never
ventured an opinion on the cause of their birth, and
for a very good reason I was unable to form one.
He talked over what he had seen with some other scientists,
(25:01):
and he sent some samples to Richard Owen. Owen was
a biologist, a comparative, ananimist, and a paleontologist. He's actually
the person who coined the term dinosauria. He also very
vocally criticized Charles Darwin's work on evolution. Owen said that
these were cheese mites, which are arachnids from the genus Acarus.
(25:23):
Cross called them Acarus galvanicus. Cross never intended to publicize
this find anywhere, but at some point he either mentioned
it to or was overheard by William Bragg of the
Somerset County Gazette. Bragg published an article on December thirty first,
eighteen thirty six, titled Extraordinary Experiment. Although Bragg's article did
(25:44):
not make this claim, soon papers all over Britain and
Ireland were printing sensationalized reports that Andrew Cross of Somerset
had used electricity to create life. So to be clear,
Andrew Cross did make some far fetched claims during his lifetime,
like he told a story about being bitten by a
(26:06):
cat that died that day of hydrophobia, which is Rabi's
About three months later Cross had a worrying combination of symptoms.
He was thirsty, but his throat spasmed when he tried
to drink water, and he had a pain that started
in his hand and worked its way up to his
elbow and shoulder. Convinced that he was going to die
(26:28):
of hydrophobia, he went shooting and intentionally exerted himself, and
thanks to his physical exertion and mental focus, he was
better in three days. He wrote quote. I mentioned the
circumstance to doctor Kinglake, and he said he certainly considered
that I had had an attack of hydrophobia, which would
possibly have proved fatal had I not struggled against it
(26:50):
by a strong effort of mind. You cannot cure rabies
with exercise and positive thinking. It would just never occur
to me to be like, I think I might have rabies.
You know what I should do? Go shooting. That's gonna help.
As an anxious person, I can totally see myself being like,
oh no, this thing is happening to me. Uh. We
(27:14):
don't really know if doctor King Lake really did think
that he had somehow staved off an attack of rabies,
or if King Lake was humoring him. That's right, dear,
you cured yourself. But even though he had this whole
story about the cat and the rabies, he did not
(27:36):
say that he had used electricity to create life. He
steadfastly maintained that not only had he never made that claim,
he had never said anything that a reasonable person could
interpret that way. He really didn't know for sure why
mites had hatched in his experiment. I mean, he had
that kind of best guest of like, maybe some mites
(27:58):
put their eggs on there, but he he definitely did
not think he had created them or given life to
them with electricity. For the next few years, though, Cross
faced ongoing accusations of blasphemy and atheism. Because of this
misreporting of his work and the rumors that followed, people
called him a Frankenstein and a disturber of the peace
(28:20):
of families. Cornelia Cross later wrote quote, after disavowing all
intention to raise any questions connected with either natural or
revealed religion, he went on to observe that he was
sorry to see that the faith of his neighbors could
be overset by the claw of a mite. Other people
tried to replicate Cross's results, but only one, William Henry Weeks,
(28:42):
of Sandwich had any success, and that happened in eighteen forty.
Weeks had placed his experiment under a bell jar in
Mercury to seal it off from the external air, and
he said that quote five perfect insects formed on November
twenty fifth, eighteen forty one one, after more than a
year of the experiment running. So he had started the
(29:04):
experiment in eighteen forty and then reported this eighteen forty one.
He named these mites a chrus cross Eye after Andrew Cross.
Cross and Weeks were both threatened with violence, and they
were not the only people caught up in this media storm.
Another was Michael Faraday, who was falsely reported as having
confirmed Cross's experiment in February of eighteen thirty seven. Not
(29:28):
only had he not done this, he also had not
tried to. As all of this was happening, several members
of Cross's family were seriously ill. His wife Mary Anne
died in eighteen forty six, and his brother Richard died
just four days later. Andrew was absolutely bereft, and he
went to London, where he spent most of the next
(29:50):
four years. As the house and grounds of Fine Court
fell into disrepair. While he was in London, he met
Cornelia Augusta Hewitt Berkeley, who was a fan of his work.
In her words, quote when young, I had always been
intensely interested in mister Cross's experiments in electrical science. I
had cut out scraps from the newspapers that made mention
(30:11):
of his discoveries, so that it was with no common
feelings that I looked upon the man whose power, in
wielding that mysterious agent electricity, had so excited my imagination.
She goes on to say that she was disappointed that
at their first meeting he didn't talk about electricity. Perhaps
he was hungry. I love that. Andrew and Cornelia got
(30:33):
married in eighteen fifty he was sixty six and she
was twenty three. They went back to fine Court, where
they had a son in eighteen fifty two, followed by
two more children, bringing his total surviving children to ten.
Cornelia helped Andrew with his experiments and observation. He tried
to use electricity to purify seawater and restore spoiled foods
(30:55):
to wholesomeness, and make a hangover cure by electrifying wine
and beer. When he published his work, he did so
through the electrical Society, which took a more populist egalitarian
approach than many of the more formal academic societies. In
eighteen fifty one, the Crosses went to the Great Exhibition
in London at Joseph Paxson's Crystal Palace, which we've covered
(31:18):
previously on the show. They also went on a tour
of England, coming back to Fine Court in eighteen fifty five.
On May twenty eighth, eighteen fifty five, Andrew Cross had
what he called a paralytic seizure. It was probably a
stroke that paralyzed part of his body. He died on
July sixth, in the same room where he had been born.
(31:39):
On his deathbed, he changed his will to leave his
property to his wife rather than his oldest son, John,
but she then gave the estate to John and his family.
Andrew Cross is buried in the churchyard at the Church
of Saint Mary and All Saints in Broomfield. Cornelia had
an obelisk erected in his memory there. In eighteen fifty seven,
(32:00):
Ornelia published Memorials Scientific and Literary of Andrew Cross the Electrician,
which discussed her late husband's life and work, including many
of his poems and correspondents, and a complete account of
the experiment with the mites. In eighteen ninety two, she
published Red Letter Days of My Life, which included her
recollections about the scientists and writers and thinkers that she
(32:23):
had come to know during their marriage. Most of the
manor house at Fine Court is no longer standing. It
was largely destroyed in a fire in eighteen ninety four,
but the library and music room are still there, as
well as a gardener's cottage and a church. Some of
the structures still standing on the property are used as
office space, including for organizations like Somerset Wildlife Trust, and
(32:46):
visitors can stay at the gardener's cottage. It is primarily
a nature preserve with walking trails and a tea room
with a tea room currently only takeout due to the
COVID nineteen pandemic. We have made some references to Andrew
Cross's poetry, and I thought we would end on one
of his poems. This is called the Three Trenches. Three
(33:08):
circling trenches round my heart. I throw to keep at bay,
each intermeddling foe within the first the world may enter free,
whateer their sect, opinion or degree safe or the next
I greet a fair array, serenely smiling, as a summer's
day to pass. The third alas how few contrive, and
(33:30):
of those dearest few, how few survive. That is Andrew Cross.
This is one of those topics that if I had
a do over and a time machine, I would have
saved this for like a tour show, because it's so fun.
It's very, very fun. Thanks so much for joining us
(33:56):
on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note,
our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and
you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Happy Saturday. Our classic today has connections to two things
that we mentioned on the show this week, Richard Owen
and the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace. It's Andrew
Cross who did some goofy stuff with electricity at crystals
in the nineteenth century. We have a couple of little
updates not directly related to Andrew Cross. In this episode.
(00:24):
We have a whole conversation about comments on our website
at mysonhistory dot com. The website no longer has comments
on it. If you go running to there to leave
us a comment, there will not be an option to
do that. We also talk about Cross's home of Fine Court,
which is a National Trust property today. We say in
(00:44):
the episode that the cafe is takeout only due to
COVID precautions. That is, of course not the case, and
it's also now home to a used bookstore that I
don't recall being mentioned when I first researched this episode.
This originally came out on January twenty seventh, twenty twenty one.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
(01:09):
production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. After we did
our episode on John Cleves Simms and his ideas of
the Earth being hollow, somebody suggested that we do an
(01:30):
episode on Andrew Cross. And I wrote all this down,
including the fact that he thought he invented life from crystals.
And now I'm going to totally depart from the document
that I gave Holly for our outline to come in
here because I just figured out who who suggested this.
What was originally written in this outline was that I
(01:52):
had gone looking in our email and our Facebook comments
and our our Twitter mentions, being like, who's just this?
I wrote all this down and I did not write
down their name. Literally sitting in this studio, I was like,
maybe it was a comment on our website. It was
a comment on our website from Kumari. I hope I
(02:16):
have said your name correctly. I'm so sorry if I
did not who left the comment? How about a podcast
on Andrew Cross who thought he created life in eighteen
thirty six with his crystals and electricity. Because it's goofy,
it is goofy. This was a joy to work on day.
It also just came together with remarkable ease which was
(02:37):
great because I was taken a long weekend then I
wanted I needed to get all my stuff done. No
shade at all to kumarif we're having left this comment
on our on our website, but I will note we
do not get notification of comments on the website at
mistonhistory dot com. It is often weeks or longer before
(02:59):
we ever see anything on there, and we also do
not have the ability to turn the comments off because
it's like a whole company wide thing to have the
comments on there. So if you are going to leave
a comment on our website, we're probably not going to
see it in a timely manner and we may never
respond to it. But my last minute, literally sitting here
(03:20):
in the studio, oh maybe it was a comment on
the website. It was. It was Cross's account of what
really happened. Is a little bit more down to earth
than thinking that he invented life, or not invented life,
but created life with crystals and electricity. But it's still
a delightful story. It's a lot of fun to work on.
So thank you Kumari again. I hope I have said
(03:43):
your name right. I have a good check because I
literally made the connection just now dun dun dum uh. Yeah,
thank you for suggesting this. So. Andrew Cross was born
on June seventeenth, seventeen eighty four, at Fine Court in Broomfield, Summer, England,
and the manor house at fine Court was first built
(04:03):
in the early seventeenth century, and then it was added
onto over the years, so by the time Cross was
born it had been his family's home for well over
one hundred years. Andrew's mother was named Susannah and his
father was Richard Cross, High Sheriff of Somerset. When Andrew
was four, the family moved to France and they stayed
there for the next four years. Andrew spoke both French
(04:25):
and English by the time he got back home, but
after that he really did not keep up with the
French and he eventually lost it all. Although he studied
Latin and Greek in school, he didn't really think he
had much of an aptitude for languages. However, he did
invent a new language with his younger brother Richard, and
the two of them made up a world that was
(04:46):
populated by beings they called either Hobblege's or hobble Geese.
We don't know for sure, which they made out of
fur cones. And they imagined a whole society for the
hobble Geese, complete with its own legal system and a
system of government, which about as charming as you can
get in my opinion. In his own words, Andrew was
quote a very happy boy, careless, and extravagantly fond of fun,
(05:10):
and both boys were somewhat eccentric as they grew up.
We're gonna get into Andrew's eccentricities in more detail. But
as for Richard, as one example, he was really really
into the metric system, so much so that his clocks
were divided into ten hours instead of twelve. I have
a number of questions about this, like, if you're running
your household on ten hour clocks, do you just translate
(05:32):
in your head to make sure you're on time for
your engagements or all? Are you always not on time?
We're gonna have a talk about this in our Friday
episode Super because your foolish co host may have tried
something similar as an adult. Oh, I'm so excited. After
(05:52):
the Cross family got back from France, Andrew was enrolled
in a school in Dorchester that was run by a
reverend Mister White, and Then in seventeen ninety three, when
he was nine, he moved to a school in Bristol
run by the reverend mister Samuel Sayer. In addition to
his work as a teacher, Sayer wrote memoirs historical and
topographical of Bristol in its neighborhood from the earliest period
(06:15):
down to the present time. Andrew did not really enjoy
his time at this school. He never felt like he
had enough to eat, and he thought the food that
they did have was terrible. He also didn't get along
with Sayer or some of the other teachers. Plus, being
extravagantly fond of fun included getting into mischief and playing
jokes and pranks on people, Like when a classmate asked
(06:37):
him for help translating some Latin, Andrew told him that
what he wanted translated meant the stork is safest in
the middle of the pond, when it really meant the
middle course is safest. And Sayer apparently did not appreciate
this particular brand of silliness. Some of the trouble that
Andrew got into at school was also more serious than that.
(06:58):
Andrew liked to make his own own fireworks, and that's
what he was doing. One day, while he was also
studying his Virgil Sayer came and caught him and took
what he was working on a way. In Andrew's words quote,
I watched where he put it. It was on the
window sill of a room which was always kept locked.
The window, though not glazed, had close iron bars through
(07:22):
which nothing could pass. The case was hopeless. I could
not recover my rocket mixture, but a happy thought struck me.
I was resolved that no one else should enjoy the spoil,
which I regarded as so valuable. I had a burning
glass in my pocket, and I thought of Archimedes and
the Roman fleet. The sun was shining, and I soon
(07:43):
drew a focus on the gunpowder, which immediately blew up.
It was well that the house was not set on fire.
As for me, I was reckless of all consequences. At
one point, some of the boys at school decided to
go on strike to try to get longer holiday breaks.
But beyond just refusing to go to class, they were
inspired by the British troops fighting in the French Revolutionary Wars,
(08:06):
so they also planned to take over the school armed
with muskets. This plan was discovered and thwarted, thankfully before
anybody carried it out, and although the ringleaders were expelled
and other participants were flogged, Andrew somehow escaped notice. Aside
from all of that, though, Andrew's love of science, and
(08:26):
particularly of electricity, really blossomed while he was at mister
Sayer's school. This might have had roots back in his
home life. His father was actually friends with Benjamin Franklin.
But while he was at Sayer's school, Andrews saw an
advertisement for a lecture series, with the first installment being
about optics and the second about electricity. He asked for
(08:49):
permission to go, and that was granted and things really
took off from there. Soon he and some schoolmates were
shocking people with a Leyden jar that they made from
an apothecary's bottle. So a leyden jar is a vessel
that stores static electricity, in this case probably a stoppered
vial filled partway with water with a wire through the stopper,
(09:09):
which you charge by touching the wire to something staticky.
Before long, Andrew was writing home to ask for money
to buy various electrical gadgetry. To be clear, this Leyden
jar shocking would not have been dangerous, but it would
have been annoying. Andrew's father died in eighteen hundred when
(09:29):
he was sixteen, and about that time he started to
experience what he described as nervous attacks, and they would
recur regularly for the rest of his life. While he
had described himself in childhood as happy and careless, he
grew up to be kind of a generally anxious person,
with these attacks coming on suddenly and lasting for as
(09:50):
long as thirty minutes at a time. In eighteen oh two,
Cross entered Brasenose College at Oxford, which he called quote
a perfect hell on earth. Wine seemed to be the
focal point of social life at the college, and he
hated wine. He also hated his classmates, snobbery and classism,
and later on he said, quote I was less liberal
(10:10):
at this time than at any other of my life.
It took some years to rub off the prejudices of
class which I had acquired At Oxford. Cross earned his
degree in law in eighteen oh five, and he also
inherited fine Court after his mother's death on July third
of that same year. This was one of a long
series of losses over a period of about five years.
(10:32):
He lost both of his parents, a sister, an uncle,
two close friends, and one of his household staff, who
he described as quote a most faithful and attached servant.
It's not really clear whether the grief over all of
this led him to abandon law, but he did. He
gave up law after two or three years. Instead, he
(10:54):
established himself as a country gentleman at fine court, becoming
absorbed in studying electricity, mineralogy, and chemistry. He also served
as a magistrate, where he developed a reputation for being
quite liberal, and he wrote a lot of poetry. Cross
became friends with George John Singer, author of Elements of
(11:14):
Electricity and Electrochemistry. Like Cross, Singer was an amateur scientist
whose family business involved making artificial feathers and flowers, but
he was knowledgeable on the subject of electricity and held public
lectures and demonstrations that were attended by people like Michael Faraday.
Cross and Singer did experiments together until Singer's death from
(11:37):
tuberculosis in eighteen seventeen at the age of only thirty one.
George John Singer had built a laboratory and lecture hall
at his own home, but Andrew Cross's efforts to devote
his home to research went even farther. We'll talk more
about that after we paused for a sponsor break. In
(12:05):
eighteen o seven, Andrew Cross became fascinated with crystal formations
in Holwell Cavern, which is a limestone crevice in Broomfield,
not far from where he lived. The entrance to this
cavern has since been filled in, and in Cross's words quote,
I felt convinced at an early period that the formation
(12:25):
and constant growth of the crystalline matter which lined the
roof of this cave was caused by some peculiar upward attraction,
and reasoning more on the subject, I felt assured that
it was electric attraction. Cross got a tumbler of water
out of the stream that ran through the cavern, and
he ran a current through it on wires, and eventually
(12:46):
some crystals did start to form. This was the first
of many experiments that he conducted in electrocrystallization, which is
when metals are deposited onto electrodes, eventually forming crystals. He
would eventually start to experiment with electro refining, or extracting
metals from their oars with electricity, which is also called
electro winning electrowinning, which by the way, sounds like a
(13:10):
great band name, was first developed by Sir Humphrey Davy,
who came up in our John Cleves Simms episode Everything
Connects in History. Yeah, Davy was one of the people
who thought John Cleeve Simms did not know what he
was talking about, because he didn't. As Cross experimented, though,
more and more of his home became devoted to this
(13:33):
work over the next few decades. He installed six or
seven furnaces for purifying metals. The estates, glassware, and china
became laboratory vessels, and he purified the household silver for
use in his experiments. He also strung up about a
third of a mile of copper wire from poles and
(13:53):
the tallest trees on the grounds, and he connected all
that to about fifty laden jars in the organ loft
of the museom. This setup became particularly dramatic in foggy
or stormy weather. Sir Richard Phillips visited Fine Core and
relate a conversation with Cross quote. He told me that
sometimes the current was so great as to charge and
(14:13):
discharge the great battery twenty times in a minute, with
reports as loud as a cannon, which, being continuous, were
so terrible to strangers that they always fled, while everyone
expected the destruction of himself and premises. If the weather
wasn't cooperating. Cross could also manually charge the laden jars
by turning a device with a crank. Here is how
(14:36):
a visitor described fine Court. During all this quote, here
was an immense number of jars and gallipots containing fluids
on which electricity was operating for the production of crystals.
But you were startled in the midst of your observations
by the smart crackling sound that attends the passage of
the electrical spark. You hear also the rumblings of distant thunder.
(14:59):
The rain is already splashing and great drops against the glass,
and the sound of the passing sparks continues to startle
your ear. Your host is in high glee, for a
battery of electricity is about to come within his reach,
a thousandfold more powerful than all those the rooms strung together.
You follow his hasty steps to the organ gallery and
(15:22):
curiously approach the spot. Once the noise that has attracted
your notice, you see at the window a huge brass
conductor with a discharging rod near it, passing into the floor,
and from what knob to the other sparks are leaping
with increasing rapidity and noise, rap rap rap, bang bang bang. Nonetheless,
(15:43):
your host does not fear. He approaches as boldly as
if the flowing stream of fire were a harmless spark.
Here comes the big no surprise moment. Many of his
neighbors did not particularly care for all of this. Cross
was nicknamed the Wizard of Broomfield, and at one point
he was speaking at a meeting ahead of an election
and local farmers were booing him. When an outsider asked
(16:07):
what was wrong, someone replied, quote, why don't you know him?
That's Cross of Broomfield, the thunder and lightning man. You
can't go near his kurshed house at night without danger
of your life. Them as have been there have seen
devils all surrounded by lightning, dancing on the wires that
he has put up round his grounds. At the same time, though,
there were local people who thought his experiments had curative properties.
(16:31):
In her account of his life and work, Cross, his
second wife, Cornelia, described the case of a local man
who was paralyzed on one side of his body and
also had a salivary gland issue quote. After being electrified
twice a week for six weeks, he was so much
better that he could walk to find court and the
complaint in the throat was entirely removed. I'm making a
(16:54):
grimacing face. Another gem from Cornelia about their booming flashing quote,
we were never troubled with burglars at fine Court. We
will get back to Cornelia in a bit, since they
got married later on in Andrew's life. His first wife
was Marian Hamilton, daughter of Captain John Hamilton. They got
(17:15):
married in eighteen oh nine, relatively early into cross His
time as a gentleman scientist. They would go on to
have seven children together over the next ten years, although
three of those children died when they were still children.
Their oldest child, John, was born in eighteen ten. Cross
seems to have been really deeply fond of his wife
(17:36):
and children and very traumatized by those three deaths. At
the same time, though, in terms of family, he'd been
on his own aside from a couple of younger siblings
for four years before he got married, and he just
wasn't used to having a regular home life, and along
with all of his experiments, that made things a little
bit chaotic. Ada Lovelace became friends with both Andrew and
(17:58):
his son John. John actually had a romantic relationship that
was also tangled up with her gambling. She summed up
the atmosphere at fine Court this way, quote the dinner
hour was an accident in the day's arrangements. Even though
they were living in a seventeenth century manor house, which
suggests a lot of wealth, the Cross family's lifestyle wasn't
(18:20):
particularly extravagant compared to other people in a similar situation.
They did have problems with cash flow, though, and Cross's
words quote, my family were learned and honorable men as
long as I can look back. But they had the
happy knack of turning a guinea into a shilling, and
I have inherited that faculty pretty strongly. Cornelia described him
(18:44):
as quote injudicious in his expenditure. Apart from his friendship
with George John Singer, Andrew Cross was intellectually actually pretty isolated.
One of his closest longtime friends was John Kenyon, who
had been one of his classmates at mister Sayer's school,
and while Kenyon was interested in Cross's experiments, science was
(19:05):
really not his calling. Their overlapping interest was poetry. Kenyan
wrote poetry himself, and he was a distant cousin of
Elizabeth Barrett Browning. At one point before her marriage, he
brought Andrew Cross to visit her. He also supplemented Robert
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's income and left the money when
he died in eighteen fifty six. So Cross did talk
(19:28):
about his work in public, but not really all that
often and somewhat reluctantly. On December twenty eighth of eighteen fourteen,
he gave an address at Garnerin's Lecture Hall, and it
is possible that Mary Shelley, who at the time was
Mary Godwin, attended this lecture. She references it in her diary,
but her notes about it are also kind of vague.
(19:49):
She writes about going from place to place looking for
Thomas Jefferson Hogg, but not finding him at any of
those places, before saying quote, go to Garneran's lecture on
a electricity, the Gases and the phantasmagoria. Return at half
past nine, Shelley goes to sleep, So it's not one
hundred percent clear whether Garneran's was one of the places
(20:10):
she was looking for. Hog and she was just noting
the topic of the lecture that night, or if she
actually attended the lecture herself. Either way, though, sometimes people
point to this diary entry as evidence that Cross was
an inspiration for Shelley's novel Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus,
which was published four years later. In eighteen thirty six,
(20:32):
Cross reluctantly agreed to speak at the annual meeting of
the British Association for the Advancement of Science that was
being held in Bristol. He had intended to go to
the meeting simply as an observer, but he was persuaded
to talk about his experiments with electrocrystallization. It turned out
that people were fascinated. John Dalton, who we just covered
(20:53):
on the show, was in attendance, and he told Cross
he had never before listened to anything so interesting. All
this attention and made Cross fairly uncomfortable, though, and his
words quote, I slipped away out of it all and
he went home before the meeting was over. It was
not long before he was getting even more attention, though,
and we'll talk more about that after a sponsor break.
(21:24):
After the British Association for the Advancement of Science Meeting
in eighteen thirty six. A lot of the response to
Andrew Cross's work was pretty positive, but he did have
some detractors. On January thirty first of eighteen thirty seven,
he wrote a letter to a newspaper called The Atlas,
in which he responded to what he described as an
(21:46):
attack by a doctor Ritchie. I could not find the
text of this article, but Ritchie apparently criticized Cross for
framing his work as discoveries when other people had discovered
these things many years before. Ritchie also described Cross's work
in a way that just wasn't very accurate. Cross's tone
(22:10):
is kind of along the lines of you were there
at the meeting, doctor Ritchie, and you could have just
asked me if you had questions, instead of writing this
incorrect article mischaracterizing me and my experiments, which I do
because I love them. In this response, Cross framed his
work as observations, not discoveries. His letter ended quote, ps
(22:31):
I should have sent this answer long since, but have
been prevented by severe illness. I must beg in future
to decline engaging in scientific warfare, with anyone having neither
inclination nor time for that kind of amusement, but doctor
Ritchie's article that he was responding to was just the
tip of the iceberg. Not long after he spoke at
(22:51):
the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Andrew Cross
became famous in a way that he really did not
expect and also really did not want. He had been
experimenting with a piece of porous volcanic rock, which he
was using because of its porosity rather than because of
its composition. He kept this rock electrified with a voltaic battery,
(23:13):
and he had placed it in a fluid that was
saturated with black flint and potassium carbonate. In his words quote,
on the fourteenth day from the commencement of this experiment,
I observed through a lens a few small whitish excrescenses,
or nipples, projecting from about the middle of the electrified stone.
On the eighteenth day, these projections enlarged and struck out
(23:36):
seven or eight filaments, each of them longer than the
hemisphere on which they grew. On the twenty sixth day,
these appearances assumed the form of a perfect insect standing
erect on a few bristles which formed its tail. Till
this period I had no notion that these appearances were
other than an incipient mineral formation. On the twenty eighth day,
(23:58):
these little creatures moved their life. I must now say
that I was not a little astonished. After a few days,
they detached themselves from the stone and moved about at pleasure.
He went on to write, quote, and the course of
a few weeks, about a hundred of them made their
appearance on the stone. I examined them with a microscope
and observed that the smaller ones appeared to have only
(24:20):
six legs, the larger ones eight. Cross thought the most
likely explanation for this startling occurrence was that airborne mites
had deposited their eggs on his equipment, which was exposed
to the air, but that didn't explain why the mites
seemed able to survive in an environment that should have
killed them. Later on, he also acknowledged that the early
(24:41):
stage of these creatures formation was nearly indistinguishable from the
early stages of crystal formation, so he might have just
been mistaken. Beyond that, he said quote, I have never
ventured an opinion on the cause of their birth, and
for a very good reason I was unable to form one.
He talked over what he had seen with some other scientists,
(25:01):
and he sent some samples to Richard Owen. Owen was
a biologist, a comparative, ananimist, and a paleontologist. He's actually
the person who coined the term dinosauria. He also very
vocally criticized Charles Darwin's work on evolution. Owen said that
these were cheese mites, which are arachnids from the genus Acarus.
(25:23):
Cross called them Acarus galvanicus. Cross never intended to publicize
this find anywhere, but at some point he either mentioned
it to or was overheard by William Bragg of the
Somerset County Gazette. Bragg published an article on December thirty first,
eighteen thirty six, titled Extraordinary Experiment. Although Bragg's article did
(25:44):
not make this claim, soon papers all over Britain and
Ireland were printing sensationalized reports that Andrew Cross of Somerset
had used electricity to create life. So to be clear,
Andrew Cross did make some far fetched claims during his lifetime,
like he told a story about being bitten by a
(26:06):
cat that died that day of hydrophobia, which is Rabi's
About three months later Cross had a worrying combination of symptoms.
He was thirsty, but his throat spasmed when he tried
to drink water, and he had a pain that started
in his hand and worked its way up to his
elbow and shoulder. Convinced that he was going to die
(26:28):
of hydrophobia, he went shooting and intentionally exerted himself, and
thanks to his physical exertion and mental focus, he was
better in three days. He wrote quote. I mentioned the
circumstance to doctor Kinglake, and he said he certainly considered
that I had had an attack of hydrophobia, which would
possibly have proved fatal had I not struggled against it
(26:50):
by a strong effort of mind. You cannot cure rabies
with exercise and positive thinking. It would just never occur
to me to be like, I think I might have rabies.
You know what I should do? Go shooting. That's gonna help.
As an anxious person, I can totally see myself being like,
oh no, this thing is happening to me. Uh. We
(27:14):
don't really know if doctor King Lake really did think
that he had somehow staved off an attack of rabies,
or if King Lake was humoring him. That's right, dear,
you cured yourself. But even though he had this whole
story about the cat and the rabies, he did not
(27:36):
say that he had used electricity to create life. He
steadfastly maintained that not only had he never made that claim,
he had never said anything that a reasonable person could
interpret that way. He really didn't know for sure why
mites had hatched in his experiment. I mean, he had
that kind of best guest of like, maybe some mites
(27:58):
put their eggs on there, but he he definitely did
not think he had created them or given life to
them with electricity. For the next few years, though, Cross
faced ongoing accusations of blasphemy and atheism. Because of this
misreporting of his work and the rumors that followed, people
called him a Frankenstein and a disturber of the peace
(28:20):
of families. Cornelia Cross later wrote quote, after disavowing all
intention to raise any questions connected with either natural or
revealed religion, he went on to observe that he was
sorry to see that the faith of his neighbors could
be overset by the claw of a mite. Other people
tried to replicate Cross's results, but only one, William Henry Weeks,
(28:42):
of Sandwich had any success, and that happened in eighteen forty.
Weeks had placed his experiment under a bell jar in
Mercury to seal it off from the external air, and
he said that quote five perfect insects formed on November
twenty fifth, eighteen forty one one, after more than a
year of the experiment running. So he had started the
(29:04):
experiment in eighteen forty and then reported this eighteen forty one.
He named these mites a chrus cross Eye after Andrew Cross.
Cross and Weeks were both threatened with violence, and they
were not the only people caught up in this media storm.
Another was Michael Faraday, who was falsely reported as having
confirmed Cross's experiment in February of eighteen thirty seven. Not
(29:28):
only had he not done this, he also had not
tried to. As all of this was happening, several members
of Cross's family were seriously ill. His wife Mary Anne
died in eighteen forty six, and his brother Richard died
just four days later. Andrew was absolutely bereft, and he
went to London, where he spent most of the next
(29:50):
four years. As the house and grounds of Fine Court
fell into disrepair. While he was in London, he met
Cornelia Augusta Hewitt Berkeley, who was a fan of his work.
In her words, quote when young, I had always been
intensely interested in mister Cross's experiments in electrical science. I
had cut out scraps from the newspapers that made mention
(30:11):
of his discoveries, so that it was with no common
feelings that I looked upon the man whose power, in
wielding that mysterious agent electricity, had so excited my imagination.
She goes on to say that she was disappointed that
at their first meeting he didn't talk about electricity. Perhaps
he was hungry. I love that. Andrew and Cornelia got
(30:33):
married in eighteen fifty he was sixty six and she
was twenty three. They went back to fine Court, where
they had a son in eighteen fifty two, followed by
two more children, bringing his total surviving children to ten.
Cornelia helped Andrew with his experiments and observation. He tried
to use electricity to purify seawater and restore spoiled foods
(30:55):
to wholesomeness, and make a hangover cure by electrifying wine
and beer. When he published his work, he did so
through the electrical Society, which took a more populist egalitarian
approach than many of the more formal academic societies. In
eighteen fifty one, the Crosses went to the Great Exhibition
in London at Joseph Paxson's Crystal Palace, which we've covered
(31:18):
previously on the show. They also went on a tour
of England, coming back to Fine Court in eighteen fifty five.
On May twenty eighth, eighteen fifty five, Andrew Cross had
what he called a paralytic seizure. It was probably a
stroke that paralyzed part of his body. He died on
July sixth, in the same room where he had been born.
(31:39):
On his deathbed, he changed his will to leave his
property to his wife rather than his oldest son, John,
but she then gave the estate to John and his family.
Andrew Cross is buried in the churchyard at the Church
of Saint Mary and All Saints in Broomfield. Cornelia had
an obelisk erected in his memory there. In eighteen fifty seven,
(32:00):
Ornelia published Memorials Scientific and Literary of Andrew Cross the Electrician,
which discussed her late husband's life and work, including many
of his poems and correspondents, and a complete account of
the experiment with the mites. In eighteen ninety two, she
published Red Letter Days of My Life, which included her
recollections about the scientists and writers and thinkers that she
(32:23):
had come to know during their marriage. Most of the
manor house at Fine Court is no longer standing. It
was largely destroyed in a fire in eighteen ninety four,
but the library and music room are still there, as
well as a gardener's cottage and a church. Some of
the structures still standing on the property are used as
office space, including for organizations like Somerset Wildlife Trust, and
(32:46):
visitors can stay at the gardener's cottage. It is primarily
a nature preserve with walking trails and a tea room
with a tea room currently only takeout due to the
COVID nineteen pandemic. We have made some references to Andrew
Cross's poetry, and I thought we would end on one
of his poems. This is called the Three Trenches. Three
(33:08):
circling trenches round my heart. I throw to keep at bay,
each intermeddling foe within the first the world may enter free,
whateer their sect, opinion or degree safe or the next
I greet a fair array, serenely smiling, as a summer's
day to pass. The third alas how few contrive, and
(33:30):
of those dearest few, how few survive. That is Andrew Cross.
This is one of those topics that if I had
a do over and a time machine, I would have
saved this for like a tour show, because it's so fun.
It's very, very fun. Thanks so much for joining us
(33:56):
on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note,
our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and
you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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