A Brief History of Creation (14 page)

In the sciences, Erasmus Darwin's beliefs were seen as radical. To some, they were even absurd. He was an early believer in transmutation,
the theory that would one day come to be known as evolution. He held that species were subject to a gradual process of change that eventually led to new species and that was responsible for all the diverse organisms on the planet. The living world, Darwin believed, was molded by this process of transmutation, and the original source of life was the phenomenon of spontaneous generation. In his day, Erasmus Darwin was the most famous advocate of spontaneous generation in the English-speaking world. Both evolution and spontaneous generation often found a voice in his poetry. They were neatly summed up in his last and greatest work, the epic poem
The Temple of Nature
:

Hence without parent by spontaneous birth

Rise the first specks of animated earth;

From Nature's womb the plant or insect swims
,

And buds or breaths, with microscopic limbs
. . .

Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves

Was born and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves;

First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass

Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;

These, as successive generations bloom

New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;

Whence countless groups of vegetation spring
,

And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing
.

Such notions weren't out of place in Mary Shelley's world. She was surrounded by freethinkers and religious skeptics. She traveled in the bohemian, avant-garde intellectual circles that were the English equivalent of La Boulangerie, its ranks filled by atheists who felt they had a particular stake in the question of life's origin. Her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was probably the most famous British atheist of the time. Her father, the radical political philosopher William Goldwin, was perhaps the second most famous. In their eyes, like those of d'Holbach, God played no direct
part in the creation of human beings. There had to be a naturalistic explanation for creation.

By the time of Andrew Crosse's insect-generating experiment, the connection with Shelley's mad scientist would have been an easy one for people to make. Both created life in a laboratory. Then there was the role of electricity in Crosse's experiment. The fact that Shelley had once attended one of Crosse's early lectures on electricity would, in later years, cause some to assume that he had been the inspiration for her Dr. Frankenstein. But such an association was highly unlikely, since at the time of the lecture, Crosse showed little interest in biology.

The analogy people drew between Crosse and Shelly's fictional scientist actually owed less to the book than to the wildly popular stage version of
Frankenstein
that appeared in 1823, which added electrical apparatuses as an embellishment. Shelley herself had left ambiguous the method by which Dr. Frankenstein revived his creature. At one point, she says he breathed “a spark of being into a lifeless thing.” But the word “electricity” was never used. In the preface, however, Shelley did mention the influence on her text by the experiments of Luigi Galvani, a scientist whose own work had piqued interest in the possibility that human beings could come to harness the power to create life.

Galvani was an Italian professor of anatomy at the University of Bologna who had conducted an experiment that seemed at the time even more miraculous than Crosse's. Galvani had been studying a dissected frog leg, when he was startled to discover that the leg twitched whenever he touched it with his scissors. He suspected that this twitching had something to do with the electrical storm raging outside his laboratory. Later that year, the same thing happened when a crude electric generator was left on during a dissection. Galvani was by nature a cautious man and didn't easily jump to conclusions. “So easy it is to deceive oneself in experimenting, and to think that we have seen and found that which we wish to see and find,” he once wrote.

Gradually, though, Galvani came around to the idea that he had hit upon a life force that he called “animal electricity.” His experiment became rather infamous, mostly because of the showmanship of Galvani's nephew,
Giovanni Aldini. Aldini delighted in public demonstrations of his uncle's “animal electricity,” and even took his show on the road to London. In 1802, he stimulated movement in a dead ox before an astounded audience that included King George III's wife, Queen Charlotte, and their son, the future King George IV. A year later, Aldini electrically animated the head of an executed criminal in front of some of London's most important physicians. He later recounted that “the jaw began to quiver . . . and the left eye actually opened.” His uncle's discovery eventually became so renowned that it spawned the word “galvanize,” meaning “to stimulate” or “to bring to life.”

In a way, Galvani was right, although not in the way he thought or in ways anyone of his era would have been able to understand. Living cells are, in effect, miniature batteries, powered by the charge differential they maintain across their membranes, which is transformed into work by the molecular pumping of ions. In animals, the discharge of this electrical potential mediates the transmission of nerve signals, which in turn activate
the muscles. Electricity, in essence, keeps the heart pumping, operates the limbs, and creates the phenomenon of consciousness. But the idea that Galvani's famous experiment proved the existence of a special life force was eventually debunked by Alessandro Volta, whose name now graces our unit of electrical potential. In order to refute Galvani's experiment, Volta created the first example of an electric battery, now known as a voltaic cell. In his investigation into electricity's role as a life-giving force, Volta paved the way for a second industrial revolution—this one powered by electricity.

Galvani's frog leg regeneration.

T
HE FIRST PERSON
known to have written about electricity was the Greek playwright Aristophanes, who noticed that after amber is rubbed with a swath of fur, it exerts a pull on lightweight objects like feathers. Anaximander's mentor in Thales had observed an even more striking example in the way a piece of magnetite, commonly called lodestone, exerted a pull on anything made of iron. Thales attempted to describe the phenomenon, but as he did with most subjects that he found hard to explain, he turned to metaphysical explanations. The lodestone, he thought, must have a soul that was exerting power. Had Anaximander written about the phenomenon, he likely would have described it differently. But Thales's conclusion wasn't so different from what most people saw in electrical phenomena for the next two thousand years. Saint Augustine was left speechless by a simple parlor trick of moving bits of iron around a table by using a lodestone concealed underneath. He often recalled the episode as an example of a miracle, definitive proof of the divine. More than a thousand years later, van Helmont was not shy in using the word “magic” to describe the phenomenon of magnetism.

By the nineteenth century, the belief that electricity constituted some secret ingredient of life had become widespread, and it fit neatly into the theory of vitalism. Vitalists maintained that an unbreakable barrier stood between life and nonlife, that living and inanimate matter were fundamentally different and incompatible. To the vitalists, spontaneous generation was simply not plausible without the infusion of an
élan vital
.

Vitalism was an old theory. It could be traced all the way back to Thales's time, and it had a long history in Western medicine, where it found a place in the works of such seminal figures as Hippocrates and Galen, who believed, long before the discovery of air, or even of gases, that the lungs worked by drawing on a mysterious supernatural energy that Thales called
pneuma
. But like the theory of preformation in the time of Needham and Voltaire, vitalism had been reinvigorated—galvanized, one might say—by those who feared the growing threat of materialism.

The nineteenth century was the age of industrialism, the age of the machine. Cities were filling with factories and their endless plumes of smoke. Railways sprawled through once pristine countryside. Everything from architecture to social traditions seemed to be under siege by the rapid progress brought by the industrial revolution. In the sciences, the vision of a universe arranged like a mathematically precise clock, expounded by Newton and Descartes, was growing ever more prominent. The line between the living and the nonliving was blurring. This trend was unsettling for many. Vitalism was an attempt to stave off what its adherents saw as a cold and dehumanizing vision of the universe.

Central to the theory was the idea that living things were different from the nonliving because they had a soul. But what exactly was a soul? The concept needed a scientific veneer fit for an age of scientific skepticism. Believers in vitalism began describing a kind of cosmic fluid. Some called it “ether,” a “vital force,” or an “
élan vital
.” Still others called it an “imponderable fluid,” which one vitalist writer described as an “electric, magnetic-mineral, or organic fluid.” The name “imponderable fluid” was a little ironic. It might indeed be invisible, but it held characteristics that could be observed, or pondered. That was the point of vitalism. The seemingly magical pull of a magnet, the invisible force of an electric current—these were observable phenomena that seemed to defy materialistic explanation. This is what set vitalism's “soul” apart from the soul that most people might imagine in the twentieth century. Vitalists believed the soul could be observed, and perhaps measured, if only with great difficulty.
^†

So eager were people—even natural philosophers—to embrace vitalism that Alexandre Bertrand, the science reporter for the Paris-based newspaper
Le Globe
, wrote of a “revolution in the high regions of physics. . . . The universe appears to us now as if entirely plunged into an infinite ocean of imponderable matter.” In hindsight, it would be easy to dismiss the movement as quackery. But in the first half of the nineteenth century, vitalism was so pervasive that it inspired the separation of the field of chemistry into two separate branches, organic and inorganic. Most of the leading figures in the life sciences would have described themselves as vitalists—even Louis Pasteur. They believed in the unassailable line between the living and nonliving. Not all of them believed in “imponderable fluid,” but many still saw clues to the nature of life in electricity and electromagnetism.

A
NDREW CROSSE'S
first connections to the world of electrical science came through his family. His father, Richard Crosse, was a good friend of two men who understood the science of electricity as well as any others in the late eighteenth century did: Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley. The friendships stemmed from the radical politics shared by all three. Richard Crosse was a well-known supporter of the French Revolution and had joined the crowds on the day of the storming of the Bastille, even hoisting the French
Tricolore
over the battlements. His efforts had ruined his reputation in England, where he was seen as an eccentric troublemaker or, worse, a Jacobin revolutionary. Upon his return from France, angry mobs had tried to attack his carriage. Yet Richard Crosse's radicalism also earned him admirers, among whose ranks were Franklin and Priestley. Both men were guests at Fyne Court, and both were scientific visionaries who left important marks on the emerging field of electricity.

At the time, scientists explained phenomena such as magnetism as the product of two distinct and different electrical fluids having two different powers: attraction for one, repulsion for the other. Franklin still believed that electricity was a fluid, but a single fluid, with both positive and negative
charges that explained its strange properties. He didn't understand that electricity's apparent movement was simply the flow of electrons between atoms. Still, his view was a huge step toward understanding how electricity worked and what it actually was. While Franklin was serving as the American ambassador to France, his reputation in the field earned him an appointment to a royal commission to investigate claims by a vitalist, the German hypnotist Franz Mesmer, that he could heal people with invisible electrical fluid. Mesmer's cure was to have his subject swallow pieces of iron and then to attach magnets to the rest of the subject's body. The phrase “animal magnetism” comes from Mesmer's belief that electromagnetism constituted a supernatural life-giving force.

Priestley was almost as remarkable a figure as Franklin. Raised in a strict Calvinist household, he became a dissenting clergyman at an early age, turning to Unitarianism and denying the divinity of Christ, and fleeing to Pennsylvania when anti-French rioters burned down his house in England. He is probably best remembered for his work in chemistry and his discovery of oxygen, which he called “dephlogisticated air.” Priestley also was the first person to describe electrical force mathematically, in a formula he subsequently included in his seven-hundred-page book
The History and Present State of Electricity
, which became the standard text in the field for over a century.