Electric Universe

by David Bodanis

  Revolution was everywhere, even in the home. For the first time in history, glucose stored in human tissue was no longer the sole energy source available to power dreary domestic activities such as carrying, cleaning, and washing. Small electric motors took over many of those tasks.

  This shifted relations that had seemed locked in since time immemorial. When servants are on their knees banging sodden washing, or scrubbing out blackened fireplaces, or trudging up and down stairs with slopping buckets, they seem so different from someone with free time for conversation or reading that it’s easy to imagine that the servant doesn’t “deserve” to vote. (In their exhaustion, servants can also feel that demanding the right to vote is too grand as well.) But with electric pumps and motors to run washing machines, and later with electric refrigerators and sewing machines and more, there was less menial labor and, with that, less subservience: votes for working-class men—and then the full heresy, votes for women—began to seem possible.

  Edison should have been happy, for he and the R&D teams he led played important roles in almost all these technical inventions. Although he complained a bit when he got older, he loved gadgets and accepted most of these social changes. But he was still not satisfied. He continued to puzzle over the underlying science in a way that few of his fellow engineers did.

  He was supposed to be the greatest electrician of his age, yet he didn’t even know what was happening inside an electric wire. Most of the time, when journalists asked him to try to explain how these great inventions really worked, Edison would just laugh them off. He’d say that those matters were for the fancy professors to work out, that he would be long dead before that happened. Once, though, Edison did come across a hint. In 1883 he noticed that a black spot occasionally appeared on the inside of one or another bulb he was testing. This was odd, because the glass was always spotless when it was sealed around the filament. The dot couldn’t have been a scratch (the filament never touched the glass), nor could it have been dust or soot (there was scarcely any air inside the bulb to carry dust).

  Edison was puzzled by the dots. Was something flying out from the filament to create a dot? He wanted to explore further, but his assistants backed off. If it was a practical invention, they’d have worked any hours to help the Old Man. But small black dots? Edison tried to keep investigating on his own, but it was hard without support, and in a few months he gave up. “I was working on so many things at that time,” he once said, many years later, “that I had no time to do anything more about it.”

  It was the mistake of a lifetime. In the next dozen years a few other researchers started looking at this and similar findings. The most persistent was a man just a few years younger than Edison, Joseph John Thomson, working in England in the 1880s and 1890s at the same Cambridge college where Newton had worked.

  Thomson was not the most likely of experimental champions, for even his friends—who called him J.J.—winced at his difficulties in actually building the devices for experiments he could so easily plan. (He’s easy to recognize in an official photograph of the Cavendish laboratory from that time: he smiles weakly from behind thick glasses, the only one with his tie askew.) But he managed to build enlarged versions of Edison’s lightbulbs, and used magnets to invisibly reach inside and “steer” whatever was flying up from the filaments. Then he weighed the flying particles.

  That’s how he discovered the electron. Atoms were not solid little balls. Rather, parts of them could be torn off. The torn-off bits could bounce and skid forward, like smaller balls, within any open channel that lay ahead of them.

  It’s those torn-off bits—electrons—that, as we saw, roll forward inside a wire, creating an electric current. That’s it.

  The quietly bumbling J.J. had managed to explain what Newton and so many others had only guessed at. It seemed so easy! The world is made of powerful electric charges, which are normally hidden, but which we can scrape loose. What pours out of the metals in batteries, it seemed to J.J. and his colleagues, were just miniature flotillas of those electrons, released after untold aeons of being locked inside.

  When those escaping electrons bumped and crashed inside the filament of a lightbulb, their collisions made the filament hot enough to glow. Even the black dot that Edison had seen was simply created by electrons that had erupted from the filaments in his lightbulbs, their accumulated impact etching into the glass.

  The century-long quest to see what was happening inside an electric wire seemed over. J.J. Thomson, rather than Edison, got the Nobel Prize, and was heralded as the man who explained how Victorian electricity really worked.

  But there was one giant flaw.

  Was it really true that electrical apparatuses merely worked by electrons rolling along inside? If that was so, then when someone in New York spoke on the phone to someone in Boston, they’d be pushing electrons from the telephone in New York through a metal cable until the electrons popped out of the receiving phone in Boston. But that didn’t make sense. If the New Yorker talked for a long time, without letting the other person interrupt, would huge black dots begin to accumulate in Boston, as a great mass of electrons started piling up? That never happened. Somehow the explanation was incomplete.

  There had to be something else in the universe—some invisible force that controlled the way electrons moved; a force that could perform the seeming miracle of making these electrons travel without piling up at the far end. But what could it be?

  Edison was convinced this invisible force existed, and he had even once tried to contact it. In absolute privacy he’d built a small pendulum, attached a wire from the pendulum to his forehead, and then tried using the sheer power of thought to move the pendulum. Nothing happened and, half embarrassed, half puzzled, he’d put the experiment away, accepting that he was not going to be the one to reveal any such unseen power.

  In fact there was a whole group of investigators, trying to identify and understand these further powers of electricity. They’d been at it for many years, but their work was so theoretical that it had been ignored by most of the practical inventors of the 1800s. These investigators believed that all of humanity was surrounded by a powerful network of mysterious force fields. According to them, people had been walking through these fields for many thousands of years—in Mesopotamia and Egypt, in China and the Andes—but because the fields were invisible, no one had ever noticed they were there. The only hints of their existence were “mistakes” of nature, such as the sparks caused by static electricity or the flash of lightning.

  Edison vaguely knew of the researchers who held these beliefs, and he also knew that something important to them had taken place in a strange engineering project deep under the Atlantic Ocean in the 1850s, when Edison was still a child. He also knew that even before that engineering project, there had been a great English scientist, Michael Faraday, who’d predicted the existence of these invisible force fields.

  As a young man, Edison had tried reading several of Faraday’s works, but now that he was so busy with lightbulbs and generators and electric motors—now that he had a vast workforce to supervise, and a great personal fortune to invest—it was much harder to find the time for such difficult reading. He could only occasionally try to imagine what powerful new machines that invisible force might produce if it were ever mastered.

  Edison and Bell and the other practical Victorian inventors had thought they’d reached the deepest core of things, when they let out the ancient power of electrons. But they’d only scratched the surface. Underneath, there was something more.

  PART II

  WAVES

  The metals that escaped from ancient exploding stars had a further great power when they fell to Earth. Around each of the landed electrons hidden within them, an invisible force field stretched outward.

  Under normal circumstances that field was impossible to detect, but the invisible field was often stronger than usual when it emerged within iron. Much of the ancient iron had seeped deep into the planet’s de
pths, and as the planet spun, this iron spun as well.

  From that spinning, a planet-embracing magnetic force field was created.

  It spread up from the ground, and although it was unobserved for almost all of human existence, in time the classical Chinese began to detect it. They used some of its power to orient delicate swiveling compass needles for navigation.

  Most of the world’s residents were too poor, and most thinkers were too dogmatic, to go any further with the hint provided by these pervasive magnetic fields. But then, in the thirteenth century of the Mohammedan era, and the twenty-fourth century since the mission of the Buddha, and the fifty-sixth century of the Jewish calendar—in other words, in the nineteenth century of the Christian era—that fundamentally changed.

  4

  Faraday’s God

  LONDON, 1831

  Michael Faraday, the man who did the most to uncover these invisible force fields, was a curly-haired, working-class Londoner who was born in 1791, more than a century before the electron was discovered. He was exuberant as a teenager, teasing his friends with wordplay and games as they raced down the London streets, replying once to a letter from his friend Benjamin Abbott:

  —no—no—no—no—none—right—no Philosophy is not dead yet—no—no—O no—he knows it—thank you—’tis impossible—Bravo.

  In the above lines, dear Abbott, you have full and explicit answers to the first page of yours dated Sept 28.

  Even when he wangled his way into a job as laboratory assistant at the august Royal Institution in 1813, he kept the same humor, on one memorable evening sneaking Abbott in so they could sample the nitrous oxide—laughing gas—which the director of the institution had put aside for one of his experiments.

  But Faraday also had a serious side, and was drawn to the same electrical puzzles that Joseph Henry sought out. How could a coiled copper wire act as a magnet and pull lumps of metal toward it? There was only empty space between the wire and the metal. Nothing in conventional science made sense of this. Hold such a live electromagnet above a nail, and the nail will fly upward. Yet the gravity of uncountable trillions of tons of rock and magma—the entire mass of the Earth—is tugging down on the nail.

  What pull could a magnetized coil of copper send out that would overcome that vast force?

  Faraday was fascinated—it’s what he’d dreamed of unveiling—but for years he was barely allowed to work on such problems. Rumors were being spread behind his back that this onetime slum child, this offspring of a mere blacksmith, was not really capable of serious research. But by 1829 the Royal Institution director who’d slurred him the most had conveniently died. Faraday gave his most sincere compliments to the director’s widow, immediately dumped the assignments the director had given him, and cleared his work schedule as much as possible. He couldn’t put the invisible drawing power of magnets out of his mind. He had to know how it worked.

  In this investigation, Faraday had one great advantage over his rivals in England and on the Continent. They had all been trained in the advanced mathematics that Sir Isaac Newton had developed in the seventeenth century. Newton was famous for the image of a cold, clockwork universe, where planets rolled along like giant, separate billiard balls. There was no place in that universe, they were now taught, for invisible forces to fill up the space between solid objects, holding the solar system or the universe together; there were no invisible cobwebs pulling across the sky. Gravity existed, but it somehow leaped from object to object. In this view, it did not permeate the voids in between.

  This meant that when Faraday’s contemporaries tried to understand the links between magnetism and electricity, they assumed it would have to be a force that leaped across a gap, without really existing in the space within the gap. Their universe was basically empty. When forces operated, it would have to be, they believed, through the cold, distance-leaping process that Newton had labeled “Action at a Distance.”

  Faraday respected Newton, but he’d been supporting himself from the age of twelve, for years as an apprentice bookbinder. He’d learned to think for himself: if he’d gone along with what everyone assumed, he would probably still be at the binding shop. Also, in his years as an apprentice, he’d skipped learning much mathematics beyond elementary arithmetic. This had the further advantage that he’d never been seduced by the beauty of Newton’s Bach-like equations. But even if he hadn’t been poor, and even if he had learned calculus, there was a further reason Faraday wouldn’t have been convinced that space was empty.

  Faraday’s family had been devout members of the gentle religious minority called the Sandemanians, a Quaker-like group with a near-literal belief in the Bible. Even as Faraday moved into the Royal Institution, he remained a devoted member; his wife was a Sandemanian, and his closest friends were as well.

  From his religion, Faraday was convinced that space was not empty, but that a divine presence was everywhere. He was used to being ridiculed for such beliefs (“I am of a very small & despised sect of christians,” he once sighed), and he had learned to keep his views private. But religion dominated all his thoughts, and once, on a small boat in Switzerland, Faraday saw what he took as a proof of his beliefs.

  It was an ordinary rainbow at the base of a waterfall. But a strong wind was blowing, and the gusts often threw the spray so far to the side that the rainbow disappeared. When that happened, Faraday motioned for the guides he was with to wait. Every time, the wind blew the spray in the opposite direction, and the rainbow reappeared.

  “I remained motionless,” Faraday wrote, “whilst the gusts and clouds of spray swept…across its place and were dashed against the rock.” It was, he felt, as if the rainbow were always waiting, even though it could only sometimes be seen. That was what he believed of science. Even when space seemed empty, something was there.

  Now, looking for a further link between electric currents and magnets, he knew to concentrate on the one thing everyone else had missed: the apparent “emptiness,” the voids between the different objects in his lab. He used a simple clue as the way in.

  A common parlor trick of the time was to sprinkle iron filings near a magnet and then watch as they formed curves that stretched from one tip of the magnet to the other. To Faraday this wasn’t just a trick to amuse children. For where did the sudden arcs really come from? They were a sign, just like the rainbow, of the invisible matrix for which he’d been searching.

  Through 1830 and increasingly in 1831, Faraday began circling his quarry. He became fascinated by the way forces seemed able to jump from one domain to another. When clouds of gas vapor ignited, for example, it was common to say that a ball of flame instantly appeared. Faraday didn’t believe that. When he stared more closely, he felt he could see the flame propel itself very quickly from one part of the vapor to another. When he went to the seashore in Hastings, a long day’s coach ride from London, his wife found him kneeling on the beach to examine the ripples in the sand, pondering how they spread. It was something that Edison would never have had the time to do.

  By the spring of 1831 he was close, but still hadn’t found what he wanted. He was thirty-nine years old, and in many of the years the Royal Institution’s director had kept him at bay, he hadn’t come up with any significant discoveries. Had his critics been right in suggesting that he wasn’t a first-rate thinker after all? Faraday cut back on his lecturing and began arriving even earlier at his lab. Occasionally his two nieces would come downstairs to visit, but they knew they’d have to spend most of their time sitting quietly in the corner, cutting out paper shapes or playing with their dolls while Uncle Michael worked. Months passed, colleagues wondered what was happening, and then—in work that came to a head in those pressure-soaked weeks just before a fortieth birthday—one of his oldest friends, Richard Phillips, received a quick note:

  Sept. 23, 1831

  My Dear Phillips,

  …I am busy just now again on Electro-Magnetism, and think I have got hold of a good thing, but can’t say;
it may be a weed instead of a fish that after all my labour I may at last pull up….

  It wasn’t a weed, and after a few more days’ work he had the decisive result. By October he was able to present it in an immensely simple form. He merely held a child’s small bar magnet in one hand and a coiled wire in the other. He pushed the magnet toward the coil of wire, and an electric current started up in the wire. He held the magnet still; the current stopped. He moved the magnet again. The current started up again. So long as he moved the magnet in the vicinity of the wire, he created an electric current.

  No one, ever, had understood this before. He’d created a force field! Something was traveling from the magnet into the wire. But that couldn’t happen if the space between them was empty. There in his cool basement laboratory at the Royal Institute, with the horse-drawn traffic of Regency London pounding outside, Faraday had shown that electricity wasn’t some hissing liquid that could only be funneled along inside a wire. Rather, it could be brought into existence by an invisible force that spread from a moving magnet and stretched across empty space.

  Faraday had opened the door to something greater than anyone had imagined. If he was right, then whenever his nieces playfully tugged a toy magnet, they were also tugging an invisible force field that spread out from the metal of that moving magnet. As best Faraday could estimate, the force field stretched on forever. If he and his nieces were inside a building, part of the force field would stretch outward through an open window or perhaps even through the wall, absolutely invisible, and continue to the moon or possibly beyond.

  It got stranger. Faraday’s basement experiments suggested that our world was filled with untold millions of these invisible, flying force fields. There were hundreds of ships in the London ports and thousands of carriages on the London streets, and whenever any mariner or coachman’s magnetic compass needle moved, yet more of these invisible fields would be loosed. When Faraday looked out at Regency London, the sky wasn’t empty above him. It was arcing with these powerful, invisible presences.