Dangerous electricity

“I am going to tell you about a new but terrible experiment,” Musschenbroek wrote to a friend in Paris, “which I advise you never to try yourself, nor would I, who have experienced it and survived by the grace of God, do it again for all the Kingdom of France.” He held the bottle in his right hand, and with the other hand he tried to draw sparks from the gun barrel. “Suddenly my right hand was hit with such force, that my whole body shook as though struck by lightning. The glass, although thin, did not break, and my hand was not knocked away, but my arm and whole body were affected more terribly than I can express. In a word, I thought I was done for.”1 His companion in invention, biologist Jean Nicolas Sébastien Allamand, when he tried the experiment, felt a “prodigious blow.” “I was so stunned,” he said, “that I could not breathe for some moments.” The pain along his right arm was so intense that he feared permanent injury.2But only half the message registered with the public. The fact that people could be temporarily or, as we will see, permanently injured or even killed by these experiments became lost in the general excitement that followed. Not only lost, but soon ridiculed, disbelieved, and forgotten. Then as now, it was not socially acceptable to say that electricity was dangerous. Just two decades later, Joseph Priestley, the English scientist who is famous for his discovery of oxygen, wrote his History and Present State of Electricity, in which he mocked the “cowardly professor” Musschenbroek, and the “exaggerated accounts” of the first experimenters.3

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 What is the source of thunder and lightning, that causes clouds to become electrified and discharge their fury upon the earth? Science still does not know. Why does the earth have a magnetic field? What makes combed hair frizzy, nylon cling, and party balloons stick to walls? This most common of all electrical phenomena is still not well understood. How does our brain work, our nerves function, our cells communicate? How is our body’s growth choreographed? We are still fundamentally ignorant. And the question raised in this book—“What is the effect of electricity on life?”—is one that modern science doesn’t even ask. Science’s only concern today is to keep human exposure be-low a level that will cook your cells. The effect of nonlethal electricity is something mainstream science no longer wants to know. But in the eighteenth century, scientists not only asked the question, but began to supply answers.

The INVISIBLE RAINBOWA History of Electricity and Life

by Arthur Firstenberg