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 curiosity. One of his longstanding interests was electricity — when a German couple died from a lightning strike, he had insisted on inspecting their corpses. He later experimented on himself, shocking various parts of his body to see how his muscles reacted.
In what is now Ecuador, he learned about the remarkable fish native to the area that could administer electric shocks to its victims. Humboldt wanted to understand how it could generate its own electricity, so he and a local fisherman hatched a plan. They would herd 30 horses and mules into a pond full of eels. The stampede caused a frenzy as the eels leapt out of the water, relentlessly attacking the horses (and killing two of them). After the eels had worn themselves out, Humboldt collected them and began his experiments.
The incident was illustrated in one of his books later on:
Many of Humboldt’s investigations required putting himself at risk. Once, riding in a boat full of eels, he lost consciousness because the eels’ electricity had charged a puddle of water that he touched by accident. He passed out for more than half the day; as soon as he awoke, he called for paper so he could record his experiences.
Other experiments were more intentional and shocking in more ways than one. He vivisected eels, which shocked him as they died, and… well… brace yourself for this sentence from Inside Science: “Humboldt also used eels to shock various parts of his body, including his eyes and the mucus membrane of his anus, and recorded what he felt.”
Look, what can I tell you? Nineteenth-century scientists were a strange breed. I don’t know if Humboldt learned much from shocking the most sensitive parts of his body with electric eels (other than learning that you should not put an electric eel in your butt), but he did come to understand something of the anatomy of the electric eel, as you can see in this elegant drawing from one of his publications:
Humboldt’s relentless and reckless experimentation paid off in aggregate. He became the world’s most famous scientist before Darwin, and he even managed not to kill himself; he died at the ripe old age of 89.
Alexander von Humboldt wasn’t the only early scientist to perform strange and dangerous experiments with electricity. Perhaps this is because electricity itself is so weird. We take it for granted now, but electricity is an invisible, mysterious force promising both great power — after all, it makes everything from cars to refrigerators work — and great danger. No wonder so many scientists were fascinated by it and risked life and limb to understand it.
The most famous early experiment with electricity was Ben Franklin’s kite. In 1752, he flew a kite with a metal key attached to his kite string in a thunderstorm. The key collected static electricity from the storm (it was not hit by lightning, as is commonly believed; that would have killed Franklin). When Franklin brought the kite back down, he touched the key. According to Joseph Priestley, who publicized the event, this was a great experience:
Struck with this promising appearance, he immediately presented his knucle [sic] to the key, and (let the reader judge of the exquisite pleasure he must have felt at that moment) the discovery was complete. He perceived a very evident electric spark.
Sixty years later, Benjamin West depicted the moment as a moment of almost divine inspiration:
Though Franklin gets all the credit for this idea, a number of intrepid scientists were doing similar things around the same time — including Georg Wilhelm Richmann, who, the following year, was killed when lightning struck an apparatus he had set up.
Richmann’s shoes exploded, his engraver — there to capture the action — heard a loud report, and then the engraver was knocked unconscious.
In a gentler, but still weird, experiment, a Frenchman named Jean-Antoine Nollet created an “electric boy.” He hung a young man from the ceiling, charged him up with static electricity, and stuck things to him. In the illustration below, a woman reaches out her finger to get a shock from the boy:
While some scientists risked death to understand electricity, others messed about with creatures that were already dead. Luigi Galvani believed that “animal electricity” coursed through the bodies of living things, so he undertook a series of experiments on frogs’ legs, discharging static electricity into them and watching them move. Here’s what one of his experiments looked like:
Galvani soon found himself in a public dispute with Alessandro Volta about whether the electricity was causing the frogs’ legs to twitch, or if there was some other cause. Galvani lost his position of prominence because of his opposition to Napoleon, but his nephew, Giovanni Aldini, settled the matter. He did so by performing experiments on the corpse of George Forster, who was executed in 1803 for murdering his wife and child.
Immediately after Forster’s hanging, his body was brought to Aldini, who hoped not only to prove that animal electricity was real — he wanted to show that electricity could revive the dead. In front of a crowd of dozens of people, Aldini applied electricity to Forster’s body, making his eye open and his limbs twitch as the crowd oohed and aahed. Some briefly believed that Forster had indeed been resurrected.
Though Aldini left this experiment — and others like it — disappointed because he had not brought the dead back to life, he had proven that electricity is an important force in the human body. Exaggerated stories of his experiments spread. Mary Shelley was clearly influenced by Aldini’s experiments when she wrote Frankenstein a decade later.
Aldini’s experiments had a long hold on the public consciousness. This cartoon was made 30 years after Aldini’s experiments, showing a corpse brought back to life by a primitive battery, as the demons realize that the dead man is slipping out of their grasp.
The mysterious forces of electricity seemed magical, so people thought they might have healing powers. This seems to be the case with almost every invisible force we discover, from magnetism to radioactivity: we hope that their invisible rays might save our lives.
A small industry of electricity-cure quackery rose up in Europe; in this 18th-century cartoon, we see a rich British man receiving a “Galvanism” treatment; the result is that he has the energy to run across the street and hit on a “pretty girl.”
By the early 1900s, the field of “electrotherapy” promised miracle cures for everything from knee problems:
To cancer:
Even an “electric bath” —something most people really try to avoid — was supposed to be good for you:
I’ll leave you with the most entertaining-slash-disturbing set of images (by the way, do you have any idea how many times I have avoided obvious puns like “shocking” in this post? You’re welcome). Guillaume Duchenne, a French neurologist, experimented in the middle of the nineteenth century with the electrical stimulation of facial muscles. He became convinced that he could replicate any human facial expression — which he believed directly connected to true emotions — by stimulating the right muscles.
Duchenne teamed up with the pioneering photographer Adrien Tournachon to create a catalog of expressions, generated on the faces of his unfortunate volunteers. They produced expressions of cruelty:
“Coquetry:”
Curiosity:
“Fright:”
And “fear and horror:”
Electricity is, of course, incredibly useful, and it’s become so commonplace that we don’t even really think about it. We should probably be a little more awed by electricity. After all, invisible electrons are zipping through the wires all around us, making the modern world possible. Very few of us really understand it, but it makes the world work.
Plus, it’s really fun at parties — just look at the fun these Victorians had with their electric-shock machine!
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So interesting
great post, thank you!