Monstrous: The Lore, Gore, and Science Behind Your Favorite Monsters
ELECTRONS NEUTRONS NUCLEUS PROTONS LITHIUM ATOM FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER You probably already know a little about Frankenstein a wacky scientist steals body parts from local graves and cobbles them together to create a monster with a gigantic forehead and no eyebrows He then brings the creature to life with a few electric jolts and voilà a monster is born Let’s start with what gave Frankenstein’s creation the first sparks of life Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a new science called an Entertainment for Angels was sweeping across Europe and North America We know it today as electricity but before light bulbs and televisions no one really understood what this strange force of nature actually was Was electricity a vapor a fluid or a supernatural fire What is elecTricity Electricity begins with tiny units of matter too small to see without a microscope called atoms Inside an atom is a nucleus The nucleus contains protons with a positive charge and neutrons with no charge Orbiting around the nucleus are negatively charged electrons Atoms balance the positive charge of their protons with the negative charge of their electrons But sometimes electrons break free and move to another atom When this happens one material ends up with too many electrons and becomes negatively charged while the other ends up with too few electrons and becomes positively charged This imbalance is electricity There are two main types of electricity static electricity and electric current When electricity builds up on a surface it causes static electricity You experience static electricity when you go down a slide The slide transfers a positive charge to your hair and because a positive charge repels another positive charge your strands of hair stand on end to get away from one another When electricity moves from one place to another it is called an electric current Examples of electric currents are light bulbs batteries motors or in this case Dr Frankenstein’s machine 9
This frog will power the world with animal electricity c B A No one signed a parental consent form for this No one in the eighteenth century understood how electric currents worked but they did know one thing electricity could be loads of fun Scientists of the day held electrical parties in darkened rooms where they used electrical machines to crank out sparks that would make a lady’s hair stand on end or turn a boy into a human static electricity generator In the experiment called the flying boy a boy was suspended from the ceiling by silk cords while a rotating sulfur ball charged his body with static electricity The boy would then mysteriously pull tiny pieces of feathers and gold leaf onto his charged hands like a puppeteer making objects dance without strings It kind of freaked people out It also proved the human body could conduct electricity and made people wonder whether electricity could reanimate the dead Italian scientist Luigi Galvani certainly thought so In 1771 Galvani was dissecting a frog near an electrical generator when he noticed something strange When two different pieces of metal touched a frog’s nerve and its spinal cord at the same time the leg muscle contracted He used these experiments to hypothesize that all living beings have animal electricity an electric fluid responsible for muscle contractions static eleCtriCiTy The flying Boy In the flying boy experiment a man cranked a sulfur ball A which transferred an electric charge to the boy B so that he could attract the oppositely charged feathers and gold leaf C To eighteenth-century audiences not familiar with static electricity this appeared to be magic elecTric cUrrent The frog BatTery Galvani believed living things contained a vital force called animal electricity The electricity really came from the metals used to create a circuit not from inside the frog’s tissue Today we understand that neurons the heart and muscle tissues all respond to outside electrical impulses 10
The real corPse reanimator Now making frog legs twitch was clearly entertaining but Galvani’s nephew Giovanni Aldini wanted to take his uncle’s experiments one step further He wanted to reanimate humans instead of amphibians All he needed was a dead person to bring back to life So Aldini convinced London officials to hand over the very dead corpse of a convicted murderer named George Forster so he could test his hypothesis In January of 1803 George Forster’s corpse was laid out on a cold slab in a dimly lit basement before an eager crowd Aldini attached electrodes to Forster’s head neck chest limbs and yes even up his derrière To these electrodes he attached galvanic cells consisting of two oppositely charged metal plates immersed in tubes of acid As soon as the electric current entered Forster’s lifeless body one of his eyes flickered open His face grimaced in agony His fingers twitched His back arched in protest and his chest heaved up and down Up and down Faster and faster And then just as suddenly the body lay motionless Frustrated Aldini cracked open Forster’s sternum and applied the current to his heart but the shriveled organ would not beat Aldini didn’t bring Forster back to life but he succeeded in making lifeless limbs twitch At the very least Forster did seem to come back to life for a few brief moments And that terrified people One man in the audience was so frightened he died of shock later that night Aldini went on to publish accounts of his electrical experiment on Forster and it became the talk of Europe and America Many people wondered could the dead be brought back to life with electricity 11
