Monstrous: The Lore, Gore, and Science Behind Your Favorite Monsters

Monstrous: The Lore, Gore, and Science Behind Your Favorite Monsters — page 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