Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the Battery That Started It All
Frankenstein's Real Science: How Alessandro Volta's Battery Changed Everything
I cannot tell you how much chaos the battery caused, both philosophically and scientifically. A device you can build in your kitchen - and I know because I built one in my kitchen - brought into question what humanity thought it knew about the soul.
The Two Scientific Revolutions
The first scientific revolution brought forth a determined, mechanistic world, a world with life imbued by a creator. Like the humans trapped in the Matrix, though, who rejected their world and how the architect programmed it, many humans in the 18th century rejected Newton’s world, too. Why? Because Newtonian science asked people to doubt their own minds, which observed how a tree grew from a seed and how the five senses drew the character - or soul if you prefer - onto the blank slate of babies.
This explains the second or romantic scientific revolution, which promoted chemistry and electricity to the big leagues of science and left astronomy in the rear-view mirror. The romantic revolution brought with it a ‘common ideal of intense, even reckless, personal commitment to discovery’ (Holmes, 2008).
The Legacy of Romantic Science
Romantic science arrived between Captain Cook’s round the world trip in 1768 and Darwin’s adventures on the Beagle in 1831. Unsurprisingly, Volta discovered the battery smack bang in the middle of those dates, in 1799. This period, as I argue in Visionaries, Rebels and Machines, left us with two ideas we cannot shake off.
The first is that scientists worked on their own, for knowledge’s sake, and were so reckless that ethics did not get in the way of their ambitions. The second is that eureka moments happen when the scientist’s genius, acting as a lightning rod, attracts a bolt of inspiration. The reckless, lone scientist is personified by Victor Frankenstein. The stereotypes of the lone scientist and their eureka moments are myths. Shameless romantic rewriting made up the story of Newton and the apple falling on his head. But we still live with, and fight with, these romantic stereotypes today.
The Soul on Rocky Ground
The religious tried to push back on the romantic science but Captain Cook and other adventurers, who brought back all kinds of animals and their skeletons, kept them on the back foot. These animals, in the hands of the active scientists of the day, who replaced their passive and observant predecessors, showed that humans shared hands, feet and skulls with ‘lesser’ animals. We shared livers, hearts, brains and lungs with them too. The other mammals even replaced themselves, like we did, through sexual procreation. Lined up in a row with other animals, humans seemed to be on the end of a continuous chain like man-made products seem to be on the end of their own continuous chains.
Romantic science, putting the soul and the creation of life on rocky ground, planted the seeds for Charles Darwin to reap three decades later. In other words, Darwin continued a line of inquiry that started way before he was born.
Animal Magnetism and the Spark of Life
This left one nagging question. If the spark of life did not come from God or at least a god, where did it come from? Magnets placed next to a metal made it move. Us mammals also don’t beat our own hearts. Something inside and invisible to us makes us move, too. These two ideas grew into ‘animal magnetism’, the idea that an invisible force moves us around and maybe that force was put there by God (or a god).
This is where Volta came in.
Galvani, Volta, and the Great Debate
In Italy, Luigi Galvani investigated animal electricity, a competing and rather less silly idea than animal magnetism. When Galvani severed the spine of a torpedo fish, it lost its ability to shock. Galvani correctly concluded that the brain contained the source of electricity in animals. Another one of Galvani’s experiments saw him rig up a small circuit that included a frog’s leg. When he closed the circuit, the leg twitched. Galvani concluded that frog’s legs, like the torpedo fish’s brain, contained animal electricity, too. These experiments set off ferocious debates around Europe.
Volta ended these debates. They arguably ended God, too, because by the end of the next century secular alternatives to religion, such as Adler’s Ethical Culture, displaced traditional religions.
How did Volta end the debate? When he stacked up zinc and silver disks and placed between them disks soaked in salt water, the device released a continuous electric current which, true to the reckless nature of romantic science, Volta proved by wiring up his own eye and tongue in a circuit. When he closed the circuit, his tongue tingled and light appeared in his eye.
Volta’s work stunned the whole world for two reasons. Firstly, humanity had never created or controlled a continuous flow of electricity before. Now that they bottled Zeus’ thunderbolts, what would they do with them? Secondly, if the spark of life—which could, after all, make a frog’s leg twitch—was electricity that could be made from metal disks in salt water, then scientists could maybe, just maybe, create artificial life.
Aldini’s Experiment at Newgate Prison
A few years later, these speculative questions came roaring back to life when Giovanni Aldini, Galvani’s nephew, came to London in 1803. Using voltaic batteries, Aldini promised to bring back to life the body of George Forster. Later, the experiments were written up in ‘An Account of the Late Improvements in Galvanism’.
Mary Shelley Personifies Aldini
After that fateful day at Newgate Prison, a physician, Anthony Carlisle, went to spend time with his friend, William Godwin. One of the children sent to bed that night, but only after getting caught eavesdropping on the conversation, was Mary Godwin. She later married the poet Percy Shelley.
Years later, trapped in a holiday home on Lake Geneva, Mary Shelley and the group she travelled with, bored senseless, tried to scare each other with ghost stories. 90,000 words later, Mary’s story became Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus.
In the book, Dr. Victor Frankenstein stitched the creature together with parts of humans but the spark of life he zapped into it with a voltaic battery big enough for the job. Working alone, Dr. Victor Frankenstein created an articulate creature that passed through all stages of humanity. First, he learns to create fire. Then, he learns, by reading Goethe, about world history. He eavesdrops on the cottagers and learns about war and politics - is this how Mary as a child learnt about electricity? And at the end of all of that, the creature learns loneliness and that he can only be complete with female companionship.
The creature promises Frankenstein that he will leave, and live in harmony with nature in the rain forests of the Amazon, but only if Victor creates a companion for him. Frankenstein agrees but, worried he has created a soulless new animal that will breed, he reneges on the deal. The creature exacts a terrifying revenge and then chases Victor to the North Pole where they face each other. One has no soul, the other has lost his. In his dying words, capturing the spirit of romantic science, Victor tells Walton, the captain of a ship who found him,
Walton! Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.
After all that had happened, Frankenstein cannot shake off his reckless ambition that destroyed his own life.
Where to now?
If you really want to know more about this, you’ll have to listen to the podcast or wait for me to upload the full essay here. But, before I go, and now that we’ve heard Frankenstein’s last words, here are my last words:
The voltaic battery conceived one of the most controversial debates in history. The rationalists used it as the first or maybe last nail to hammer into the coffin of an all seeing God, which explains the explosion of deism and secular alternatives to religion that popped immediately after. (More on these later when we meet a precocious, secular young visionary and rebel called Robert Oppenheimer.)
The battery, though, also brought forth a new genre of literature; when Shelley merged the worlds of science and literature she created the world’s first work of science fiction. I cover this in the podcast.
Finally, the battery, earth shattering on its own, is the antecedent of every electrical technology we use today. We owe everything to it and to Volta.
Now my final, final thought: once the battery arrived, imaginative men-at-arms dreamed about closing the circuit with a switch miles away in order to remotely detonate a bomb at enemy’s castle. Third inventors, in other words, immediately started to find uses for this the battery that Volta had not thought of. It is to the most famous third inventor of the battery that we now turn.
Further Reading
Why Did Mary Shelley Write Frankenstein?
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in the summer of 1816 after Lord Byron proposed a ghost story competition during a cold and dark holiday at Lake Geneva. Her story, no doubt fertilised by the death of her first child, grew from a conversation she overheard when she was a child, after Anthony Carlisle returned from Newgate Prison after watching a man call…
Holmes, R. (2008). The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. London: HarperPress.