The Seeds of Life

by Edward Dolnick

  While the duke and a bevy of scientists looked on, Sigaud assigned places to some twenty men, including the three musicians. He sent a shock down the line. Everyone jumped, the musicians as high as the others, and everyone passed the charge to his neighbors. Baffled, Sigaud sent his volunteers on their way. Months later, he performed yet another demonstration. This time the experiment failed, with the electric charge once again making it only partway through the line of volunteers.

  Sigaud repeated the experiment twice more. Two more failures, and each time the chain ended with the same man. (This was not Monsieur Six.) Sigaud examined him head to toe. Finally the light dawned—the last man to feel a shock had been standing on wet ground; when the charge reached him, it traveled down his legs and into the moist earth (as if he were a human lightning rod) rather than into the body of the next man in line. The mystery was a matter of puddles, not sex.

  That electricity should have anything to do with genitals and castrati might not occur to anyone today. In the late 1700s, nothing could have been more plausible. Electricity was, in one historian’s words, “the craze of the century.” Whenever a spectacle was called for, someone would crank a handle and thrill a crowd with sparks and shocks. Whenever a mystery was invoked, electricity was the first suspect named. This was especially true if the mystery had to do with sex, energy, and life.

  In the minds of eighteenth-century scientists, Spallanzani’s painstaking experiments on semen and eggs and the electrical extravaganzas of physicists like Sigaud fit neatly together. (It was Sigaud’s mentor who had suggested to Spallanzani that he put his frogs in boxers.) Electricity had to be a key part of the sex and conception riddle, scientists in the late 1700s felt, because some force plainly was, and all the traditional possibilities had been ruled out. For countless ages, it had been enough to invoke magic or spirit or soul. In the new scientific era, such notions felt outmoded, akin to explaining volcanic eruptions as temper tantrums of the gods. Electricity offered a newer, better answer.

  It would turn out, to peek ahead for a moment, that the focus on electricity was an inspired guess. Humans and other animals are electrical machines, as everyone who has ever watched a heart monitor knows. Filling in the details in that story would prove immensely difficult. Scientists would not truly understand the electrochemical underpinnings of life until the 1970s. But Spallanzani and Sigaud and the other seventeenth-century pioneers had made a brilliant start.

  They believed, mistakenly, that they had done far more than that. In electricity, scientists in the late 1700s decided, they had found the answer to two age-old questions. The first had to do directly with sex and conception. From Aristotle on, biologists who took on the mystery of babies had devoted most of their energy to squabbling over which bits of the body did what. Larger questions, about just where in the picture life came in, they did their best to duck.

  That narrowness of vision was understandable—everyone prefers approachable questions to baffling ones—but also unfortunate. When it came to the biology of sex, scientists found themselves stuck. It was as if they had set out to study flight but ended up focusing all their attention on taxidermy and arranging stuffed birds in attractive settings, and none on asking how actual, living birds manage to lift off the ground and soar into the sky.

  They had studied human and animal anatomy and scrutinized embryos and tissues and all the body’s parts and products, but they had not been able to envision a force that would spark those odds and ends to life. And then electricity came along and seemed, at last, to offer an answer.

  Here was a compact, thrilling story: men and women provided the physical bits that babies were made from, and electricity animated those dribs and drabs. And that was only the first of electricity’s two crucial roles. In the first place, electricity provided the spark that zapped a body to life. Then, over the course of a lifetime, electricity provided the energy that kept those bodies running.

  The “life force” that had been sought since humankind’s earliest days had at last been found. Or so eighteenth-century scientists fervently hoped.

  IN ANCIENT TIMES, NO ONE HAD REGARDED ELECTRICITY AS MORE than a curiosity. Through the millennia when no one understood lightning or knew about batteries or generators, electricity seemed too weak and fleeting to merit much scrutiny. Have you ever noticed how sometimes on a dry day your hair stands up when you brush it? Heat had seemed more promising. Perhaps living animals burn with a slow fire? Humans are warm, after all, and early thinkers had often pictured the heart as a kind of hearth. But wait! Snakes and frogs are alive, and everyone knows they’re cold to the touch.

  Through the ages, this had been the pattern—a big question, a bright idea, and then, almost at once, frustration and dismay. But the hunt for the life force was no mere puzzle. Here was a mystery that carried enormous emotional weight. A gulf separated a living, vibrant body from the same body, identical but so unaccountably different, when life had vanished. Fascinated and appalled, poets and philosophers had explored the theme for eons. Shakespeare confronted it repeatedly. Audiences wept with Lear as he held Cordelia’s body in his arms and howled in grief: “She’s gone for ever! / I know when one is dead, and when one lives; / She’s dead as earth.” Everyone knew that difference. No one knew how to account for it.*

  Now scientists would take their turn. They had begun talking vaguely about electricity in the early decades of the 1700s. The idea was that all living beings—not just a few bizarre sea creatures known since ancient times—contained electricity, and that the force that had traditionally been known by such names as “animal spirits” was in fact “electrical fluid.” Then came the discovery, in the 1740s, that electricity could be generated and manipulated and stored in large, dangerous quantities. What had long been merely an amusement was now transformed into a potent, if still mysterious, natural force.

  As a bonus, probing that mystery made marvelous theater. Scientists and showmen performed for large and eager audiences. (Often the scientists were the showmen.) This was new; gravity had long been recognized as a mighty force of nature, but it did not rate high as a source of entertainment. Pick up rock, drop, repeat. Electricity, on the other hand, provided endless opportunities for creative mayhem. Traveling lecturers set off foot-long sparks, set oil afire, ignited gunpowder, melted metal, electrocuted animals.

  So thrilling were these performances that they displaced ordinary entertainments. Bold men would volunteer to touch a crackling orb, and audiences would gasp and hoot when the victim jumped. In the most elegant homes, the Gentleman’s Magazine reported in 1745, “electricity took place of quadrille.” Who had time for dancing? One of the most popular demonstrations, performed across Europe, was known as the “electric kiss.” A young woman selected from the audience would perch atop an insulated cushion or don a pair of glass slippers. The electric virtuoso would charge her body and then call for gentlemen volunteers, whose task was to give the lady a kiss. “Alas, as they tried to approach her lips a strong spark would discourage any attempt,” one historian writes, “while exhilarating the lady and the rest of the audience.”

  Performances were part educational lecture, part magic show. Electricity was always described as “wonderful,” in the sense of “wondrous.” To contemplate an invisible force that hurtled across the sky in lightning bolts, and made hair stand on end, and gave fish the power to stun anyone who touched them, was to gasp in awe at nature’s bounty.

  In England, France, Italy, even Poland, aristocrats sat next to shopkeepers at electrical shows, and the deeply learned and the merely curious squeezed against one another. In Germany dukes and duchesses “honored [the local electrical savants] with their presence, and their astonishment.” In England, King George III proudly amassed a huge collection of scientific instruments, with electrical gizmos prominent among them. In France, Louis XV ordered up scientific demonstrations in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. In Austria, Emperor Joseph II entertained his guests by bringing them to scientific l
ectures.

  Better than any lecture was the sight of a long line of men bracing themselves for a shock. (Sigaud and his castrati were latecomers to what was, by their day, a familiar entertainment.) This was not quite ten lords a-leaping, but it came close. A French abbot named Jean-Antoine Nollet, who was in charge of a monastery in Paris and a science buff, was one of the first to explore the possibilities. On an otherwise ordinary day in 1746, Nollet ordered two hundred of his monks to form an enormous circle, and then he distributed long, iron rods among them. Each man was to stand facing the center of the circle, his right hand clutching one iron rod and his left clutching another.

  When all two hundred monks were linked together, the abbot connected the two ends of the circle to a Leyden jar, a powerful source of electricity. Two hundred startled monks leapt, bewildered and in pain, into the air. “It is singular to see the multitude of different gestures,” one observer wrote happily, and he noted, too, “the instantaneous exclamations of those surprised by the shock.”

  Word quickly reached Versailles. Louis XV ordered a repeat performance, this time with 180 soldiers holding hands. Soon Europe was dotted with whole regiments of unfortunate soldiers leaping, against their will, into the air. In England, the record was 1,800 tingling, tormented soldiers taking one simultaneous bound.

  BY THE MID-1700S, SCIENCE BEGAN TO NUDGE SHOW BUSINESS to one side. Ben Franklin played a key role in the shift, though his electrical career nearly ended in its earliest days. On a December evening in 1750 Franklin prepared to electrocute a turkey for a Christmas feast. (His plan was to wire the bird to a kind of primitive car battery and then roast it.) He had managed the trick before, but this time, as he told the story to his brother, “I inadvertently took the whole [shock] through my own arms and body.” Franklin’s dinner guests reeled in fright from a flash of light and a crack that sounded like a pistol firing, but Franklin himself missed all the excitement. “My senses being instantly gone, I neither saw the one nor heard the other.” He came to, eventually, when the “violent, quick shaking” of his body gave way to mere numbness.

  Two years later, Franklin ventured into a thunderstorm with a kite. We think of the story as a scene from folklore, like George Washington and the cherry tree, but it really happened, and it demonstrated that the lightning bolt that flashed through the sky and the spark from a dry finger reaching toward a doorknob were identical in nature.*

  The old belief had been that lightning was a form of divine fire, which explained why church steeples were hit so often during storms. (Lightning was sometimes called “heaven’s artillery.”) One response was to send bell ringers up the steeples during electrical storms, on the theory that the sound of the bells would ward off God’s wrath. This proved irrelevant to the lightning and calamitous to the bell ringers.†

  These early experiments were profoundly dangerous. The first person to die by electrical mishap, in 1753, was a German physicist named Georg Richmann, who was trying to follow Ben Franklin’s instructions for building a lightning rod. A ball of lightning raced through the rod and into the room where Richmann was standing, knocking the door off its hinges, ripping open one of Richmann’s shoes, jumping to his forehead, and killing him instantly. Historians cite Richmann as the first experimenter to die of electric shock and, simultaneously, the first person to observe ball lightning.*

  All the early “electricians,” as they called themselves, knocked themselves silly. “The first time I experienced it,” one English physicist wrote, it felt “as though my arm were struck off at my shoulder, elbow, and wrist, and both my legs at the knees and behind the ankles.” As soon as he recovered, he rigged up a room with a hidden battery and wires concealed in the carpet, in order to provide unsuspecting friends the same experience. Another electrician, who had shocked himself so severely that blood spurted from his nose, decided that it was too dangerous to continue experimenting on himself. He recruited his wife instead. Soon he reported that an electric charge had knocked her to the ground and left her temporarily unable to walk.

  Those injuries paled next to the torments that one German physicist inflicted on himself. Johann Ritter was a well-regarded experimentalist who, in the name of science, systematically zapped himself with large currents of electricity. First he sent electricity coursing through his entire body, and then he worked through each sense in turn. “Instead of one of the two hands,” he wrote, “one brings an eye, an ear, the nose, the tongue, or another part of the body into the closed circuit.”

  Ritter’s notion was that sights, sounds, smells—in fact all the sense impressions of the body—originated in electric signals. By way of proof, he found that hooking up electrodes to various body parts sent blue and red lights flashing before his eyes, tones ringing in his ears, cold and heat coursing through his fingers (and sneezing fits racking his whole body). Convinced that he had still more secrets to unearth, he proceeded to attach electrodes to the “organs of reproduction” and “the organs of evacuation,” as he put it, as well as to “other choice parts of the body.” By age thirty-three he was dead. The cause was unspecified, but we can venture a guess.

  IN ENGLAND, IN THE LATE 1700S, ELECTRICAL EXPERIMENTATION had followed an altogether cheerier course. For a few years around 1780, London’s most fashionable lords and ladies were agog with excitement about the sex theories of a dashing, impossibly articulate, not-quite-doctor named James Graham. A Scottish-born medical school dropout, Graham had spent time in America, where he met Benjamin Franklin and concocted his own theory of medical electricity.

  In London Graham opened a Temple of Health that was part theater, part lecture hall. Visitors passed through a series of rooms that proclaimed a link between sex and electricity. Graham, who believed that whatever was worth doing was worth overdoing, made sure no one could miss the point. The Temple’s first room featured an enormous metal cylinder, about eleven feet long and one foot thick, resting atop two half-globes and “blazing with electrical fire.” That fire in turn set an enormous golden dragon to crackling and sparking. From the dragon, the charge passed to a ten-foot-tall (and insulated) throne. Here visitors perched in splendor and absorbed the rejuvenating rays of celestial fire.

  At the Temple’s heart was the most exciting, most celebrated object in Graham’s collection. This was the Celestial Bed, a guaranteed cure for infertility and impotence. (An inscription on the headboard proclaimed, “Be fruitful, multiply, and replenish the earth.”) The bed stretched twelve feet long and nine feet wide and boasted a ceiling-mounted mirror, music from a pipe organ, candles, flowers, and spice-scented breezes, all this accompanied by “the exhilarating force of electrical fire.” For the stupendous fee of £50 a night—in the 1780s a workman might earn £50 in a year—Graham promised “any gentleman and his lady” who made use of the celestial bed that they would achieve “immediate conception,” not to mention “superior ecstasy… never before thought of in this world.”

  The key, Graham told his hordes of eager visitors, was electricity. “Even the venereal act itself,” he explained, “is in fact no other than an electrical operation!” This was not humbug, Graham explained, but established scientific truth. “In the first place… there is the necessary friction or excitation of the animal electrical tube or cylinder, for the accumulation, or mustering up of the balmy fire of life! This is what electricians call the charging of the vital jar. Then follows the discharging, or passage of that balmy, luminous, active principle, from the plus male to the minus female.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  “I SAW THE DULL YELLOW EYE OF THE CREATURE OPEN”

  FROM ITALY CAME A MORE SOBER AND MORE IMPORTANT, though perhaps equally odd, attempt to demonstrate that “animal electricity” was the long-sought life force. A thoughtful, publicity-shy anatomy professor from Bologna had carried out a series of startling experiments. Luigi Galvani’s claim was that electricity coursed through every animal, not just oddities like the sting ray.* Galvani conducted his experiments in the 1780s. They h
ave been hailed as classics ever since. He worked with frog legs, severed from the body so that a large nerve lay exposed and dangling. What Galvani found was that electric signals could make those cut-off legs twitch and kick as vigorously as they had in life.

  He had made his first frog observation “by chance,” he wrote, though this was a characteristically modest way to downplay his flash of insight. (The reason that Galvani had frogs available in the first place, according to his earliest biographer, was that he planned to make a frog broth for his beloved but frail wife, Lucia.) One of Galvani’s assistants happened to be working with an electric generator; independently, a second assistant was preparing a set of severed frog legs for study. No wire—no physical connection of any sort—linked generator and frog. The generator threw off a spark. At the same instant, the frog’s legs gave a forceful kick!

  In follow-up experiments, Galvani pinned up frog legs outdoors on a stormy day and saw that when lightning flashed, the legs kicked. That was fine, and just what Ben Franklin would have predicted. The surprise came when Galvani, who was notably careful and thorough, repeated the experiment on a sunny day. He poked brass hooks through frog legs and hung the legs on an iron railing. They twitched! By 1791, Galvani had sorted it out. Not only did animals respond to electric signals; they also produced electricity of their own. Here was the long-sought vital force, identified beyond a reasonable doubt.

  The scientific world gaped in awe, as staggered by Galvani’s discoveries, one historian remarked, as Europe had been by the French Revolution. But Galvani would soon be challenged. An eminent Italian physicist, Alexander Volta, had been thrilled when he first learned of Galvani’s work. In time he changed his mind.