In Our Time - Electrickery

Episode Date: November 4, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the dawn of the age of electricity. In Gulliver's Travels, published in 1726, Jonathan Swift satirised natural philosophers as trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. Perhaps he would have been surprised, or even horrified, by the sheer force of what these seemingly obscure experimentalists were about to unleash on society. Electricity soon reached into all areas of 18th century life, as Royal Society Fellows vied with showmen and charlatans to reveal its wonders to the world. It was, claimed one commentator, 'an entertainment for Angels rather than for Men'. Electricity also posed deep questions about the nature of life. For some it was the divine spark that animated all things, for others it represented a dangerous materialism that reduced humans to mere machines.But how did electricity develop in the 18th and 19th centuries? Why was it so politically contentious and how was it understood during the age in which it changed the world forever?With Simon Schaffer, Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Darwin College; Patricia Fara, historian of science and a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge; Iwan Morus, Lecturer in the History of Science at Queen's University Belfast.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in Gulliver's Travels published in 1726, Jonathan Swift satirised natural philosophers as trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers.

Perhaps you would have been surprised or even horrified by the sheer force of what these seemingly obscure experimentalists were about to unleash on society. Electricity, or electricery, as it was also called early on, soon reached into all areas of 18th century life, as Royal Society fellows vied with showmen and charlatans to reveal its wonders to the world. It was, claimed one commentator, an entertainment for angels rather than for men.

Electricity also posed deep questions about the nature of life. For some it was the divine spark that animated all. things. For others, it represented a dangerous materialism that reduced humans to mere machines. But how did electricity develop in the 18th and 19th century? Why was it so politically contentious, and how was it understood during the age in which it changed the world forever? When we to discuss the origins of electricity are Patricia Farah, historian of science and a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. Ewan Morris, lecturer in the history of science at Queen's University Belfast and Simon Schaffer, Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Darwin College.

Simon Schaffer, the word electricity was first coined by William Gilbert, Elizabeth, the first physician. How did he come to that word? And can you just do a brief reference? So the Greeks had mentioned it about 2,000 years before then, then everybody forgot about it. Electricity in English is first used by William Gilbert, yes, in 1600. It comes from the Greek word for amber, electron in Greek. So what that meant was that electricity for centuries was simply the strange thing amber seems to be able to do. Amber can pull and then repel light bodies in its ambit.

It was an occult quality. It belonged, therefore did electricity to something like mineralogy or natural history. It was an occult property of nature, which humans could not make themselves. So there was no artificial electricity. And Gilbert mentions it in 1600 because it's part of a book he then published on the magnet. He was discussing principles which were hidden or occult, and he names this strange rather spooky thing that Amber can do. And so it enters public discourse that way.

The journey that we're about to go on in this program could be said to start, as far as we're concerned, a useful starting point, is an apprentice of Isaac Newton, Francis Hawkesby. Can you tell us what he discovered and how that started on the way to learning about, knowing about it, and then discovering the potential of electricity? Francis Hawksby.

The Hawksby's main achievement in the history of electricity is to begin to shift electricity from something that is just a rather strange property of one natural substance, to something that is artificial, that humans can produce for themselves with instruments. Hawksby had been working first for Robert Boyle and then for Isaac Newton. He was a well-experienced experimenter.

It was also, let me mention, a draper, a cloth merchant, so skilled in managing cloth, wool, friction. And I think that's crucial for Hawksby's skills. It was well known in the late 17th century that if you took a barometer tube, so a thin glass tube with mercury in it, and you rub the tube rather violently, the space above the mercury starts to glow. What Hawkesby found was that it's not just that the space starts to glow, but that the glass-tubbed, when it's rubbed, will do what Amber does.

It will pull and then repel objects nearby. So this came to be called, we're in about 1,709, 1,110, this comes to be called artificial electricity. Newton seized on this. He loved the fact that his prize experimenter had produced evidence of a force which seemed to be related to fire and light. And so artificial electricity, under Hawkesby's hands, with Newton gazing down from the president's chair of the Royal Society, comes already rather early in the 18th century to occupy a central place in experimental and natural philosophy. And it's central to the philosophy of Newton and the others, which was to make the invisible visible.

to make the powers that govern the world, but we cannot see to make them visible in the mathematics or in practical experiments. Yes, and Newton describes the business of natural philosophy as identifying what it is inside apparently passive matter that makes it active and indeed alive. And there are essays by Newton which seem already to begin to connect the principle of artificial electricity with the principle of life. And that's really a charter for the experimental production of artificial electricity right through the 18th century. So it begins to go, Patricia Farrow, from there. Let's assume, other Philippine, sorry, and all over the past. But it begins to go from there.

What's the next development? The next development is, I prompt you perhaps to do with the invention of instruments and lighten jar and things like that. Can you tell us of the next major push forward? Yeah, well, the major instruments in electricity in the 18th century, I'd just like to emphasise that we're talking about static electricity here and the current electricity doesn't appear until the 19th century. And I think the laden jar is one of the major instruments that appeared in the middle of the 18th century.

And it's important for two reasons. One, because for the first time, it enabled people to store large charges of electricity and carry them from one place to another. And it's also very interesting because it emphasizes how the development of electricity was led by instruments and not by theory. Can you briefly tell the listeners what a Leyden Jarre is?

It came out of the University of Leiden. This is not beginning to be a European movement. But simply, what is it? How did it work? Right. It was discovered accidentally, and it relied on an invention that was led on from Hawkesby's experiments. It relied on a machine called an electrical machine, which was an... Hawksby discovered that if you had an evacuated glass globe,

which became possible after air pumps were invented, If you turned a handle to rotate the glass globe and put your hands on the globe, then a glow would appear. That machine was developed, and a man called Peter van Mushenbrook, who was a researcher in Leiden, which was then a very prominent university in Europe, discovered accidentally that if he took a metal tube,

gun barrels came in quite handy for this, and at one end of the tube, he had a helper who was turning the handle of the electrical machine, and charging up the gun barrel or the tube. And then at the other end of the tube, you have a wire which dips down into a flask of water. And that flask is called the laden jar. And what Mushenbrook discovered to his sort of both joy and misfortune

that if you're holding the jar in one hand and you touch the wire or the gun barrel, which is called the prime conductor, if you touch that with the other hand, then you get a very, very, very nasty electric shock. So what Mushenbrook did was right off to all his, colleagues in France and say, I've just discovered the most awful thing on no account ever try this out for yourselves. It's much too dangerous. And then he gave a list of very detailed

instructions on exactly how to replicate this experiment. So of course everybody in France, particularly a man called Nolley, started to try this out for themselves and found that indeed they could get very, very serious electric shots. A few people died from carrying out these experiments. But bringing in Nolley is not, we're not only talking about experiments here at this stage, it enters into, let's loosely call it, spectacle, rather than show, but it's much better word, it enters into spectacle, and Nolley in front of the King of France lines up 180 soldiers and passes, they hold hands, and passes an electric charge along the line, does the same with 200 Carthusian monks in their monastery, electric charge, and each time it goes to, they

jump in the air, so it's, at that time, is it regarded as an entertainment, fit for O' King, that sort thing? I think we tend too much to think of science as being divorced from real life. If you go back to the 18th century, natural philosophers had to convince people that what they were doing was useful and interesting, that they had to demonstrate that they had control over nature. And one way of doing that was through entertainment. And I think you have to put yourself back into a century which had never had any light except for candles and oil lamps. And I actually was present at a replication of one of these experiments myself. And we were sitting in a darkened room in Oxford University in the physics lab. And we had one of these globes. And I was given the job of

turning the handle and eventually I learned how to turn it at the right speed. And we saw the glow appearing in the middle of the darkened room. And even for us who've grown up in a world of electricity, it was incredibly exciting. So I think for people in the 18th century to see sparks flying through water, to see glasses of brandy that could be set a light by a sword, to be kissed by a woman who had an electric charge on her lips. All those sort of entertainments were literally absolutely thrilling. Can we develop that, Ewan Morris? This business, it entered into the channels of, let's stick to our country,

Britain, England, didn't it? They took it up as toys as entertainment. So the natural philosophy and, as Patricia was saying, science are running hand in hand with it. showmanship? Yes, absolutely. Throughout the 18th century, electricity is very much part of fashionable, public and popular culture. And it's precisely, as Patricia suggested, around the instruments of electricity that this culture of scientific showmanship develops. Electricity is about making power visible. It's about sort of spectacular shows of shocks and sparks. It's

about directly engaging the public and audiences flock to electrical shows in London, in fashionable spa towns like Bath and successful electrical performance, successful electricians, as they call themselves, they will go on tours of the provinces, so as we speak, they'll organise lecture shows where people come along to be amazed, to be entertained, and to be entertained, and to be almost literally enlightened through these kinds of spectacular performances, because that's what electrical instruments are designed to do. They're designed to demonstrate.

This is the middle of the 18th century, we're talking about it. It's throughout the 18th century, certainly from the middle of the 18th century, and on into the 19th century. Was there any sense, with natural philosophers, as we can still call scientists at that time, natural philosophers, the scientists at that time, were rather snooty about this, Sherman's.

aspect, they think, look, we've got a real job to do here. It's a serious problem. It's all very well for you, larking around giving electric shocks by kissing the wrong people, i.e. unearthed people, but we'd like to get on with it. Was there any rivalry, though? Not between natural philosophers and showmen, more often than not, the natural philosophers were the showmen. There's certainly, however, a great deal of competition between these electrical showmen as to who could put on the most spectacular showmen. there are closely guarded secrets of how to beatify a human being, how to literally have a halo appear around their head

or how to manipulate the electric fluid in a particular sort of way because this is where these people make their living. And it's how they demonstrate their own particular mastery as of the powers of nature. Simon Chaffer, you mentioned when you began this programme, You mentioned the relevance, as you thought, that Hawksby had to this study because of his experience in the cloth tray, the clothing. Can you elaborate on that a bit? Yeah, I mean, it's, as historians always say, it cannot be a coincidence that several early 18th century electricians,

such as Hawksby, Stephen Gray, working in London, Charles Dufi, working in Paris, are all experts in the handling of cloth, silk, wool, and so on. For the first half of the 18th century, most electrical performances and most electrical phenomena involve the manipulation of different kinds of threads, either because that's how you rub the evacuated glass machine, and it's by rubbing the glass that you bring up an electric charge on its surface. And that's actually, exactly as Patricia said,

that's much harder, in fact, than it might seem in retrospect. rubbing thread, I want to get this absolutely straight. So having experience with threads helps up, does it? Absolutely. Similarly, how do you know when, let's say, the surface of a rotating glass sphere is charged? How do you

know that? Well, one of the ways that Hawksby and Gray designed was to bring up a bundle of threads and if they stiffened and, to use the 18th century term, became erect, you can see why Jonathan Swift got interested in all this,

then you knew that something electric was going on. Now, all of these things required a finger-end feel for rather exotic, challenging phenomena that not everybody could do. One of the most exciting things about electricity right through the 18th century is that not everybody seems to be able to do this. There seems to be, and this is much commented on at the time,

right through into the 19th century, something which links together the public show of electricity, with inner states of the human body. Perhaps the nerves, perhaps the muscles. So there's always, right through the period, a relationship between electrical performances and something much more like physiology.

And I think that's where artificial electricity really begins to take off in the later 18th century. I think also, because we're dealing with static electricity rather than current electricity, people weren't interested in metals. They were interested in what we would call. insulators and they called them electrics. So things like silk

and feathers and leather materials like that which we don't normally associate with electricity were of prime importance for them and I think that's where all the drapers and people like that come in. So Stephen Gray for instance decided to try to conduct bits of static electricity

from one place to the other and he set up elaborate schemes of threads all over his room and all over the estates of his friends and his most famous experiment was when he got a small boy from one of the charity schools, and he hung this boy up by silken threads from the ceiling, and then charged him up with an electrical machine, and then this poor boy had his hand over a plate full of feathers, and the feathers, or else you can use by his filings, were all attracted up to his hand,

and that was a fantastic spectacle that was repeated all over Europe, all these poor little boys were getting recruited to be hung from the ceiling. You see this very well also, briefly, in one of the great empirical breakthrough, of the early 18th century, which is the discovery that there are two kinds of static electricity. One kind you get by rubbing glass, so that's called vitrious, and the other you get by rubbing either cats or resin or wax,

and all sorts of theoretical breakthroughs, I think, come from these commonplace experiences with cloth, glass animals. Can't we just nail precisely what you mean by static electricity before we move on, Patricia? I think it's more interesting to think what people meant in the 18th century. And Simon's just talked about the two different kinds of electric fluid that people thought that there were. And getting back to the laden jar, the great significance of that for historians in particular is that the instrument was unable.

Nobody could explain how the instrument worked. According to the two fluid theory, it was impossible for it to work. And this was when Benjamin Franklin really became important because he provided a completely new theory, which is more like our own, of electric charge. And he said that... Hold on. I can't get to Franklin yet. Just a second.

I'll come back to him. One of the steps, Richard, don't worry. I will come back to him. But, I want to go to Priestley first with Ewan. How did electricity... Because it moved into many areas of thought as well, and I want to keep this in parallel. It moved into politics.

It moved into ideas about all sorts of other notions at the time. How did Joseph Priestley bring it into his notions of materialism, you know? What's interesting about Priestley in terms of electricity is that, whereas, as Simon explained, according to Newton and Newton's immediate Newtonian followers, matter itself is passive. Matter is dead, is inert. Things like electricity, heat, light, these active power are superimposed on matter. Priestley, however, took a completely different perspective. for priestly matter is active.

Electricity is a manifestation of the activity of matter itself. And it's one of the number of fluids, of principles, that balance that regulate nature's economy. Electricity, flogist and various kinds of gases, these are all in the universe around us, and it's the balance between these different powers that sustains the economy of nature. and for Priestley, the economy of nature teaches us about the social economy, about the proper ordering of society.

And that has massive, obviously, political implications. Yes, well, and Patricia, the idea then it enters on to political stages. You have Burke and people are very worried by the electricity and other forms of materialism because they see this as threatening the way that life has been thought about until then. There is that, and I'm afraid it comes back to Franklin again. Franklin is the source of Freelieu side. I'm not going to be getting to him. I just want to get to Burke first.

Chronologically, Franklin comes before Priestley and before Burke. And the reason that I've got to mention Franklin again is because the greatest political debate was about the shape of lightning conductors and lightning conductors were Franklin's great innovation. The idea that you have a metal wire that takes electricity down the outside of tall buildings and ships and stops them from being set on fire,

which was a very real problem in the 18th century. And there a debate emerged about whether lightning rod should be pointed, which is what Franklin said, or whether lightning rod should have rounded ends. And after the Perfleet arsenal was destroyed in London, they carried out a big experiment in one of the major concert halls in the middle of London, where they simulated a thundercloud electrically,

and they had lightning rods of different shapes. And this became a political debate, because Franklin was a Whig, he belonged to revolutionary America, he was seen as a threat to the conservative political factions in England. And when there's a story, I don't know whether it's true or not, but when the experiment showed that the rounded points, the rounded tops of the lightning rods are more effective, which was the conservative viewpoint, the president of the Royal Society allegedly resigned because he said that he couldn't support. to political decision, he had to support the facts of nature. So it had moved into that, and also the very fact that lightning rods were more effective at keeping away the wrath of lightning than spires of churches and were often sort of put on the spires of churches.

It was science, as it were, in a crude way, is there any science sort of superseding religion, wasn't it? That was very visible. Well, for some people, yes, they thought it was sacrilegious to try and interfere with it because churches were particularly vulnerable to lightning attacks because they have got those metal crosses on the top already. And so people saw that as the wrath of God descending on the church in particular. But let's move it out, if we can leave Benjamin Franklin for a second picture.

We'll obviously come back to Benjamin Franklin. In fact, we'll just spend the rest of the back. Anyway, never mind, Simon. It is moving on to political area here, isn't it, with Franklin? And Burke, if I may mention it, it is actually becoming part. of the argument of the end of the 19th century. It's part of the science, religious argument. It's part of how does she, how do you, the re-engagement with what is human nature, what are we made of is, is talked of philosophically as well as in nature. Yes, I think that's absolutely right. And it's coming out of these extremist electricity. There are, there are two trends which are coming together. One, we've already mentioned, men like Franklin and Priestley are taken to be arguing that life itself is something like electrical, that the principle that flows through, the nerves and perhaps in Priestley's case even the immortal soul can simply be understood as an

aspect of something like electricity and that's clearly heretical the other trend is the emphasis on the practical here which I think is very important Edmund Burke's attack on men like Priestley and the supporters of the French Revolution is wonderfully that they're in practical, that they're visionaries, that they're trying to impose on the complexities of human nature, their abstract schemes concocted in the laboratory, that they're not practical enough. So the pressure on electrical philosophers was often to differentiate themselves twice, once from the claim that they're materializing and reducing human nature, and the other from the claim that they're completely useless. So one had some tendency to show that one was effective in the world without reducing the world simply to the principles of electricity. And that's perhaps why you and Morris, that's perhaps why these spectacular public experiments were so necessary all the time. And one that we have passed is Benjamin Franklin experiment by flying a kite into a storm to show that the lightning was related to, which was God made or made out there, was related to electricity, which is being made in, in labs and in salons and so on.

Can you tell us about that very famous experiment that he did and why it was so important at the time? It was important because it drew various relationships between nature and artificiality, if you see what I mean. It was bringing an atmospheric fluid down to Earth into a laboratory, into the performance route. But what did you do? The interesting thing that he did it was quite simple.

in a way, but extraordinary dramatic. Can you just describe precisely what he did with his kite? What he did quite literally with the kite was fly it. He sent it up into the air during a thunderstorm. Lightning struck. It travelled down the line

and then it was captured using the technology of mid-18th century electricity, using Leiden jars. He could then manipulate the lightning, literally manipulate the lightning in exactly the same way as electricians manipulated the products of artificial electricity, the products of electrical machines.

It has to be said Franklin was not different in this respect from some of the other showmen. He staged a dinner on the banks of a river just outside Philadelphia, in which all the turkeys had been killed by electricity. He used to electrify some of his dinner plates this way as well. So even the great Franklin, after all, is linking together, precisely as Iwan says, showmanship, which I think is what the kite experiment is all about, with something rather fundamental about the relation between nature and art. I mean, it's making enlightenment visible in a certain sense,

and it's also part of the process of playing with this distinction between the artificial and the natural in terms of electricity. It becomes an increasingly common way of experimenting with electricity to try and construct items of apparatus, different kinds of instruments, that if you like mimic or model natural operations, it's another way of displaying one's power of nature to show that you can make a machine that does this and put it on show and play with it. But it must have been an extraordinary thing, Patricia Farie, that you, as it were, can use and control lightning

and for your purposes. Do we know enough about the immediate effect of that on the intellectual community that frankly this had been done by this man and the repercussions and the thoughts it must have provoked? I think everybody was delighted that electricity had at last found something very, very useful and natural philosophers were always looking

for ways that they could demonstrate how valuable electricity could be to society. And Franklin and a lot of other national, natural philosophers were also trying to use electricity medically. And at the beginning, it was really rather a dangerous practice. People would administer quite substantial electric charges to people who were paralyzed or had some sort of chronic illness that couldn't be treated in any other way. And by the end of the century, they'd learned how to monitor the charges and deliver them in small doses.

And there was an electric dispensary that was set up in London towards the end of the 18th century. and it treated several hundred patients a year and claimed to be able to cure about half of them. So medical electricity was the other great virtue of the 18th century electrical research. It was the great practical outcome. Do we know those half were cured? Is there evidence that they were cured

or that they were okay the next day and so on? Well, coincidentally, it might seem odd. A lot of the people who went to hospitals like this were rather poor people. A lot of people who experimented on were poor people. and there was the idea that you couldn't really trust their testimony. So testimony had to be given by a gentleman who was reliable. So someone like Franklin, for example, would report what had happened

to the people that he'd given the electricity too. There was also the idea, exactly, that electricity might be the panacea. This is still an epoch in which you're more likely to die in hospital than out of it. And one of the backers of medical electricity, fascinatingly, I think from our point of view is John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. Wesley loathed established medicine, and reasonably enough thought it was a conspiracy of the physicians against the laity. Electricity, he thought, which he called the desideratum,

might be the universal cure that the poor could use and have administered to them. And indeed, we still find 18th century electrical machines in Methodist chapels, because they were put there from the 18th century onwards as part of the Methodist program of public welfare. It's extraordinary how soon it sort of spread out into so many areas of society. It's in showmanship, it's in philosophy, it's in politics, it's in religion, and yet they're not getting there, really,

in terms of discovering what it is. And for that they turn... Can I just finish this bit, Simon? Can I just finish this bit, Simon? For that they turned the next big stage is to turn to bringing electricity to living creatures. Electricity and life, let us say, is the next big stage. It's very hard for us to remember what it's like living in a world lit by candlelight

and a world in which electrical hardware still has a rather limited range. We're still talking about static electric charges. What is being passed from one electrical object to another? remains static electricity. The big problem is electric generation, a kind of permanent source of electricity. Where is that going to come from? And this, technologically, economically, commercially,

and I think politically, will direct late 18th century attention towards the bodies of animals and humans. Because if you think that the nerves are illicitally, electrical, then our own bodies look like a permanent source of electricity. So let's take that, sorry, Patricia, can I just direct, let's take this on now. Cavendish, Duke of Cavendish, before we go to the Italians, found a fish called torpedoes of Floresh, which had electrical charges in them like electrical gas.

And he began to do experiments on the fish, see what was happening there. He didn't experiment directly on the fish. what he did was he built a model of the fish out of leather and various bits of glass. And he demonstrated that he could produce an effect very similar to that the torpedo did. The big debate was whether what a real electric fish does to you, whether that's the same sort of electricity as a sort of electricity that people like Cabendish are producing from inert materials. So that's part of the problem with deciding whether all the different kinds of electricity

that are going to be produced during the next few years, deciding whether they're all exactly the same kind of electricity. And for example, it's extremely difficult to get sparks from electric fish, yet drawing a spark was taken to be a key sign that something was electrical. And I think one of the most important things Cavendish does with the fish model is to construct a difference which is going to be absolutely fundamental for later electrical work. Cavendish explains that the reason why these fish and his model don't produce sparks but do produce sharks is that they deliver lots of electricity but at very low tension

and that distinction between tension what we would now call voltage to slightly to give the game away and current is going to be very important indeed right through the late and then into the 19th century Well, as I said earlier, it's a European quest this, and the two famous and very industrious. In influential Italians, Galvini and Volta had an argument about electricity and animals. Can you briefly, and can you tell us about what Galvani did and how far that went and why Volta, his rival, objected to it so much? Galvani was a physician from Bologna in northern Italy and as a physician who had his own interest in natural philosophy

he'd been working on the question if you like of bodily electricity from grand in about 1780 I mean it's known that as we've all talked about that electricity has particular effects that seem very very intimately related to human and animal bodies and that's Galvani's area of interest. And in that work, he experiments on frog's legs, frogs' legs, frogs are often victims of 18th century natural philosophy. They're dissected, they're played around with. And he's trying to compare the effects on frogs' legs, if you like,

of atmospheric electricity, of artificial electricity. And in so doing, by 1791, he discovers that he can make something very peculiar happen to frog's legs. What frog legs do in the presence of electricity is twitch, essentially. He shows that they twitch when there's lightning outside, they twitch when electricity has passed through an electrical machine, when there's a spark. In our modern terms, we'd say that they're affected by electric waves. But he shows he can get them to twitch by themselves,

by connecting the nerves and the muscles of frog's legs with a set of metal pliers. It's important, maybe two different metals involved in the pliers, but if you connect the muscles and the nerves like that, the frog's leg treaches just as if an electrical

charge was being discharged. And Galvani announces, therefore, in 1791, this is animal electricity. The muscles are made of little Leiden jars and there's there's a passage of electricity through the frogs

But Patricia, his contemporary in a neighbouring university, Volta takes objects to this and conduct his own experiment to disprove it. And Volta was a great showman and a great self-promoter, and he felt that he was sort of stuck away in Italy. And he wrote to the Royal Society in London and told them in very rhetorical terms about this marvellous experiment he carried out, where he made, he called it a pile, It's the precursor of what would later become an electric battery. And he built up a little column of three kinds of disks, which alternated up the column. There were two kinds of metals such as zinc and silver, for example, and between them were bits of cardboard soaked in salty water. And he built this column, this pile, and he showed that that did generate electricity.

And so then the great debate was, again, was whether this electricity generated from his electric pile, was the same as the electricity that Galvani was noticing in his frog's legs spread out on his laboratory bench. And this debate is supposed to resolve itself in what way, Simon? I'm not sure it did resolve itself quickly. It was extraordinarily important because almost every issue that natural philosophy and theology cared about was involved here. Galvani was saying there's something special about animals and by implication humans. generate permanent supplies of a strange kind of electricity, which is no longer static, but flows, its current electricity. And this will be called the galvanic fluid after galvan.

And that looks possibly like a candidate for the principle of life. But what Volta is saying is, no, we can do everything the galvanists do without any animal being present. Just bits of metal, cardboard and seawater will do the trick. If that's true, and you could generate what will now be called an electric current, so we've now moved beyond static electricity to current electricity, without any animal material being present, then a whole area of a new enterprise opens, and that will be physics, electrical physics, a science which will not fundamentally experiment on living beings. perhaps it will try to emulate them with artificial material objects. But I think around about the first decade of the 19th century,

which is where we are in this story now, one starts to see one of the most important distinctions, really for modern science, which is a distinction between biology, a word coined in the first decade of the 19th century, and physics. We've got to move rather quickly. We've got to get to Faradab.

If we do this program without mentioning Frankenstein, we deserve to be shot. So Mary Ewan, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley in Byrne, they went to lectures and demonstrations being given. There was, you one could say loosely, there's quite a bit of, she knew the current state of thinking when she was writing that. Oh, absolutely. Mary Shelley knew all about these kinds of debates. She knew about, for example, the galvanist's response to Volta, where Volta had tried to confute. the galvanist by showing you could produce current electricity by purely inanimate means. The galvanist responded by showing that, well, you could do what Galvani, what Volta did by purely organic. You could build batteries out of bits of animal flesh, if you like.

And Shelley is perfectly well aware of these kinds of experience. She knows that at the beginning of the 19th century, Giovanni Aldini, Galvani's nephew, visited London on part of a grand tour of Europe to defend his uncle Galvani's reputation. And in London carried out experiments on the corpse, poor George Forster executed at Newgate for murder, to see if he could bring him back to life, to reproduce bodily movement, to reproduce the kinds of gestures and physical expressions

that denoted life through electricity. And that's certainly part of the mix that goes into the making of Frankenstein, the story of how the spark of life is reproduced in this monstrous being. So it's entered into a, it's tapped a deeper consciousness race. So it's moved from this rubbing of a bit of glass. It's moved into all sorts of areas. It comes together, let's, we have to go now for Faraday. It comes together, let us say that other stages along the way,

comes together with Faraday, who, as it were, brings, certain knowledge to it. Can you just begin to describe that, Patricia May. Well, I think the key experiment which Faraday developed was carried out by a man called Erstead in Denmark when he brought together for the first time

he conclusively demonstrated that electricity and magnetism work together. This has always been debated. And so building up on the basis of that experiment Faraday created a new science of electromagnetism and it's that that powers the enormous

electrical industry that we have today. So how did he do that? Because he took the experiment with his friend in Denmark and he switched it around, didn't he? He showed that if you have if you have something rotating in a magnetic field, then an electric current is generated. And that's the basis of

how an electromagnetic motor works. Now when Faraday did that, Simon, you say, in some of the notes you gave us, that he found in modern society, Now, A, did he know he'd done that, and B, what do you mean by that? He certainly didn't know that he'd done that, and that wouldn't have been an expression Faraday would have recognised.

But I think what matters here is that the work of Faraday and his collaborators brings together all the strands we've been talking about. First, it's showmanship. Faraday works at the Royal Institution, by far the most important theatre of science in early 19th century Britain. He therefore, secondly, commands the best resources anyone in Britain had, in terms of electrical and magnetic performance, batteries of an unprecedentedly large scale,

reliable instrument makers, and huge, polite, fee-paying audiences, with a laboratory, a wonderfully equipped lab in the basement in Mayfair. Still that? And it's still that, thank goodness. And finally, what Faraday pulls, together, I think, is the story

we've been trying to tell about electricity and life and electricity and experimental apparatus. So what does he lead to, briefly? Can three or four things that because of Faraday we have, and the electric clock is ticking away? Because of those assimilations,

one begins to electrify society as a whole. Perhaps the single most important thing is the construction of electrical network. over very long range, telegraphy, the light and power system, and the system that really electrifies society. I don't think Faraday was uniquely responsible for any of those things, but what's so striking is that the barreds of electrical society needed a hero,

and Michael Faraday is that man. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Simon, Patricia Vera, and Ewan Morris. The winner of In Our Time Quiz is Sue Davis from Sheffield. and the prize is in the post. And next week we'll be talking about zero-astrianism, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.com.