Shocking, Just Shocking

A compendium of strange experiments with electricity

Alexander von Humboldt, the greatest and best-known scientist of the early nineteenth century, was an impressive, and impressively strange, man.

Humboldt advanced a number of fields. He mapped large parts of the Americas, studied ocean currents, learned about the magnetic field of the planet, and cataloged hundreds of new species. He understood some of the important concepts that would shape our modern understanding of the world — like the idea that the earth’s biology was not stable and that many species had gone extinct, and the fact that various parts of nature are intertwined with one another — before almost anyone else.

But the thing that stood out the most about Humboldt was his obsession with discovery and experimentation, even when it meant putting himself at risk. Like when he became interested in electric eels.

Humboldt spent five years traveling around the Americas, especially northern South America, collecting species, climbing mountains, and generally indulging his curiosit…