ABOUTyour centuries-old fascination with Dr. Frankenstein's monster, which inspired tens films, including Guillermo del Toro's recent one, may have been sparked by a scientific feud over frogs. An electrical conflict that also gave us a battery.
In the 18th century, scientists sought to determine the effects of electricity on living things and whether it could be used to resurrect the dead. Italian physicist and physician Luigi Galvani. stated discover an internal form of electricity in animals after noticing that the severed legs of frogs moved on their own. For example, he placed a creature's limb on a copper hook and, cutting it with a steel scalpel, twitched.
This intrigued Italian physicist Alessandro Volta, who later discovered that the electrical current swaying a frog's legs came from charge moving between the two types of metals, rather than from the frog's leg itself. Isolated frog leg was just serving as a conductor. Later, based on this discovery, he invented an early version of today's batteries, known as the “voltaic battery.”
Galvani's nephew, Giovanni Aldini, was intrigued by this work and wondered if it could somehow be used to reanimate bodies. But he went even further, experimenting not only on humans, but also on other animals. Using the Voltaic Column, Aldini began showing his work on non-human animals and executed prisoners throughout Europe. got interested while studying the bodies of these people to learn how their systems function shortly after death. To the horror of observers, Aldini stimulated decapitated human bodies with electricity and even encouraged some sit upright.
In 1803, Aldini made headlines by experimenting on the body of George Forster, who had recently been executed for murder. In London Aldini placed electrodes on Forster's body. The deceased's “jaws were shaking” and “his whole head was moving.” In the same experiment, spectators watched as in Forster's “the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and hips were in motion.” To some viewers it seemed that Aldini had resurrected him.
Although the provocative exhibition caused a great stir in the press at the time, Frankenstein author Mary Shelley was a child when this show was on. But later connections may have introduced her to Aldini's work and similar experiments. Her orbit included eminent electrical researchers who were friends with her father, William Godwin; and her doctor John Abernethy, stated that “the phenomena of electricity and life coincide.”
Read more: “Electric body»
In the summer of 1816 Shelley spent summer in Switzerland with a group of literary figures, including the poet Lord Byron and her future husband Percy Shelley. On this tripthey allegedly talked about “galvanism”, a term referring to the work of Luigi Galvani and other subsequent experiments with electricity. In the preface to the book of 1831 FrankensteinShelley notes how this idea influenced her creative process: “Perhaps the corpse would be reanimated; Galvanism gave a sign of such things: perhaps the constituent parts of a being could be manufactured, assembled together and endowed with vital warmth.”
Even if Aldini's dreams never came to fruition, the fantasy they generated continues to animate our imagination.
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Main image: Theodr von Holst/Wikimedia Commons
