animal electricity Concepts

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds

by Sally Adee · 27 Feb 2023 · 329pp · 101,233 words

of the soul.” It’s the first time in the document—after pages cataloging his many experiments—that he dares to spell out the phrase “animal electricity.”20 But he didn’t publish right away. Scientist, Catholic monk, and Galvani biographer Brother Potamian ascribed this to his solid character: “He had

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when he repeated Galvani’s experiments for himself, he became convinced. That spring, he enthused that “I have changed my mind [about the idea of animal electricity] from incredulity to fanaticism.” Immediately, he wrote a paper in response to Galvani’s manuscript, introducing it in the spring of 1792 as “one of

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visited the French Académie des sciences to demonstrate Galvani’s experiments there.31 Valli had been among the first to publish a supporting paper on animal electricity, in which he wrote that “Galvani’s discovery” had robbed him of “sleep during several nights.” After witnessing the demonstrations, the Académie launched a

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published at the end of the same year, he dropped the gauntlet. “If that is how things are, then what is left of the animal electricity claimed by Galvani? The entire edifice is in danger of collapsing.” Many undecided scientists were swayed by these muscular proclamations; Galvani’s frogs were in

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pardon you, sir, if you fail to do so.”36 All the while, no one could reach a definitive conclusion on the validity of the animal electricity that was increasingly being referred to as “galvanism.” After the first French commission of the Académie des sciences ended in uncertainty, in 1793 the

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come.” It was a prescient statement. The series was a fundamental experiment for the foundation of all electrophysiology. Neither Volta nor the other adversaries of animal electricity ever bested it. This should have ended all argument. Galvani should have harvested the fruits of all his long years of experiments. In a

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since 1797, and had certainly shared them with colleagues. He had thoroughly won the day. The battery invalidated Galvani’s claim to the existence of animal electricity—not because Volta had proved it, but because he said so. Apart from a few stubborn Galvani loyalists like Spallanzani, the voltaic pile swung

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detected by the instruments of the day. No instrument had emerged from the ruck of studies—French and otherwise—that could support the theory of animal electricity the way the obviously useful voltaic pile had immediately buttressed Volta’s notion of metallic contact electricity. Volta could prove his theories with a

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and many use cases. Galvani could not. One crucial limitation of Galvani’s experiments was that he was never able to separate the source of animal electricity from its detector—they were both the frog. No similar confusion plagued Volta’s research. That put Galvani at a major disadvantage, because it

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muddled the terms. So while Volta’s invention of the battery did not itself invalidate any of Galvani’s theories about animal electricity, it effectively shut down all further challenge. Volta had changed the terms of the debate, leaving his contemporaries so dazzled by the device and

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was January, and the body had been left hanging for an hour in temperatures two degrees below freezing. The chill might stunt the flow of animal electricity through the body, rendering his experiment a humiliating, public flop. He was putting his faith in the enormous piles of alternating zinc and copper

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Instead of reviving his family’s legacy as well as decapitated bodies, his experiments would play a major role in banishing the serious study of animal electricity into a desert of quacks and mountebanks for the next four decades. Aldini’s gambit Aldini’s loyalty to Galvani wasn’t just a matter

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Volta had actually involved just Volta and Aldini.9 But after Galvani’s death, few champions remained to take forward the serious scientific inquiry into animal electricity. In 1801, Napoleon’s French Académie launched a commission (the fifth in as many years), offering a prize of 60,000 francs for anyone

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initial investigations after his uncle’s death focused on buttressing the basic science underlying this experiment, and how it could advance a deeper understanding of animal electricity. He had assumed the chair of physics at Bologna in 1798, just before Galvani passed away. This was a prestigious post from which to

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called a “series,” and used the resulting animal current to violently electrify a dead frog. But when he tried to reverse the experiment, applying the animal electricity of frog nerves to the decapitated heads of oxen, he found the results less dramatic and even disappointing. All these experiments successfully replicated Galvani’s

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you read that right) moistened with salt water.13 Its effect was allegedly “decisive”—generating a current that provided yet another piece of evidence that animal electricity was just as relevant and present in human tissues as it was in animal tissues. It was never entirely possible to extricate galvanism from its

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s name had the opposite effect. They created a self-perpetuating spiral that destroyed what was left of Galvani’s reputation as the father of animal electricity: the more quacks who co-opted galvanism for their own purposes, the fewer legitimate researchers were willing to be associated with the relationship between

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scientists and historians looking back on the Volta–Galvani feud began to ad lib historical details about Galvani that confirmed the cynical new perspective on animal electricity—and his ignorance in believing it to exist. One of the most enduring of these is the pernicious origin myth that Galvani accidentally bumbled

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electric force field around themselves that no one could touch, protecting themselves from both the biologists and the charlatans. Medical professionals also separated themselves from animal electricity in due course, even as some of them continued to deploy the artificial electricity that could zap people’s ailments. In the 1830s, a young

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he charged his posh patients a hefty fee to alleviate vague maladies. But not everyone abandoned the project of building a legitimate discipline around investigating animal electricity. Behind the scenes, another scientist had been working to keep its study on life support: Alexander von Humboldt had reviewed Galvani’s work for

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strongly suspect that Volta and Galvani’s theories did not contradict each other after all, and that Volta had in fact been wrong to dismiss animal electricity out of hand.34 Humboldt would go on to become chamberlain to the Prussian king and a leader of the Enlightenment, shaping how we

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anus and found that “a bright light appears before both eyes.” It would be hard to go further to prove one’s dedication to understanding animal electricity. In 1800, he undertook a journey to Venezuela for the purposes of investigating John Walsh’s experiments with live eels, which didn’t tend

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which were five feet long and discharged 700-volt shocks—enough to stun the horses and mules) he saw for himself the unambiguous power of animal electricity. After the trip, he began to draw connections between this kind of powerful defensive biological electricity and the more quotidian variety that underpinned everyday

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with his belief that Galvani had been right, Humboldt played the long game to bring experimental physiology back: he encouraged promising young scientists to study animal electricity. When Humboldt returned to Berlin from his travels in the late 1820s, he became a patron of the up-and-coming physiologist Johannes Müller

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the world-beating university his brother Wilhelm von Humboldt had founded two decades earlier.37 The electroquacks had so thoroughly discredited the official record of animal electricity that when the first real evidence of its existence finally presented itself, even the scientist who rediscovered it didn’t understand quite what he had

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improved version really was better, Nobili needed to find the weakest possible current. He remembered Volta’s assertion that Galvani had witnessed not some special “animal electricity,” but nothing more than the vanishingly faint currents generated from contact between two dissimilar materials. He realized that if his device could measure something as

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its spine to its legs, which remained whole. When the wire made contact, the hideous little half-puppet immediately jerked into the familiar dance. Animal electricity—and animal electricity alone—had caused a dead frog’s legs to move. Here, forty years after Galvani’s death, was the first real progress in electrophysiology since

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the days of Galvani himself. Matteucci was another of the promising young scientists who had been mentored and funded by Humboldt during the decades animal electricity fell out of favor. Humboldt had been inspired by Matteucci’s enthusiasm for the promise of an underlying electrical force in the nerves, and

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-five-year tenure at the University of Berlin turned into an attempt to secure his place in history by usurping Galvani as the father of animal electricity. He was Galvani’s heir in many ways. His commitment to good science and rigor was legendary. To characterize and measure the currents in

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impulse and intent to the limbs to carry out, and carried back the sensations of the world outside, were electric. Animal spirits were animal electricity. But instead of calling it animal electricity, the new term was “nervous conduction.” It meant the same thing; it was just science instead of philosophy. Galvani was vindicated. PART

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report quoted how the oceans around the main research centers briefly ran out of squid). But the spike in interest was short-lived. Just when animal electricity should have taken the spotlight once more, a cloud passed over the sun. No sooner had Hodgkin and Huxley revealed the elusive mechanism of

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signals Few protests had been lodged about the horrific dissection of either Galvani’s frogs or Aldini’s decapitated prisoners in the quest to understand animal electricity, but the dog-loving citizens of the UK had their limits. In 1909, an affronted member of the anti-vivisection lobby arrived at the

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electrical imaging that proliferates today to diagnose sleep and neurological disorders. These advanced brain diagnostics, in turn, opened the door to the idea that animal electricity is the body’s way of digitizing information so that it can speak to itself in a kind of specialized neural code, an idea that

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Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer, 2013; see also Messbarger, The Lady Anatomist, pp. 171–3 17 Foccaccia, Miriam, and Raffaella Simili. “Luigi Galvani, Physician, Surgeon, Physicist: From Animal Electricity to Electro-Physiology.” In: Harry Whitaker, C. U. M. Smith and Stanley Finger (eds), Brain, Mind and Medicine: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Neuroscience. Boston: Springer

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89 20 Bresadola & Piccolino, Shocking Frogs, p. 122 21 O’Reilly & Walsh, Makers of Electricity, p. 133–3 22 See Bernardi, W. “The controversy on animal electricity in eighteenth-century Italy. Galvani, Volta and others.” In: F. Bevilacqua and L. Fregonese (eds), Nuova Voltiana: Studies on Volta and His Times Vol. 1

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152 30 Bresadola & Piccolino, Shocking Frogs, pp. 143–4 31 Bernardi, “The controversy,” pp. 104–5 32 Material about the French commissions from Blondel, Christine. “Animal Electricity in Paris: From Initial Support, to Its Discredit and Eventual Rehabilitation.” In: Marco Bresadola and Giuliano Pancaldi (eds), Luigi Galvani International Workshop, 1998, pp. 187

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–204 33 Blondel, “Animal Electricity,” p. 189 34 Volta, Alessandro. “Memoria seconda sull’elettricita animale” (14 May 1792). Quoted in: Pera, Marcello. The Ambiguous Frog. Trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum. Princeton,

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personal account and the Newgate Calendar, 22 January 1803, p. 3 8 Sleigh, “Life, Death and Galvanism,” p. 224 9 Parent, André. “Giovanni Aldini: From Animal Electricity to Human Brain Stimulation,” Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences / Journal Canadien des Sciences Neurologiques, vol. 31, no. 4 (2004), pp. 576–84 (p. 578) 10

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Blondel, Christine. “Animal Electricity in Paris: From Initial Support, to Its Discredit and Eventual Rehabilitation.” In: Marco Bresadola and Giuliano Pancaldi (eds), Luigi Galvani International Workshop, 1998, pp. 187

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Cases, Shewing Their Effects in the Cure of Diseases.” London: A. Phillips, 1803, p. 86 <https://wellcomecollection.org/works/bzaj37cs/items?canvas=100> 14 Blondel, “Animal Electricity,” p. 197 15 Aldini, John [sic]. “General Views on the Application of Galvanism to Medical Purposes, Principally in Cases of Suspended Animation.” London: Royal Society

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Reviewers.” Quoted in: Miller, “Elisha Perkins,” p. 52 34 Finger, Stanley, Marco Piccolino, and Frank W. Stahnisch. “Alexander von Humboldt: Galvanism, Animal Electricity, and Self-Experimentation Part 2: The Electric Eel, Animal Electricity, and Later Years.” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, vol. 22, no. 4 (2013), pp. 327–52 (p. 343) 35

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of the Chlorides, Bromides, and Iodides of Potassium, Ammonium, and Sodium.” Journal of Anatomy and Physiology 12 (October 1877), pp. 58–72 6 Campenot, Robert, Animal Electricity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016, p. 114 7 McCormick, David A. “Membrane Potential and Action Potential.” In: Larry Squire et al. (eds), Fundamental

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32, pp. 1–35; and Finger, Stanley, and Marco Piccolino. The Shocking History of Electric Fishes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 402 12 Campenot, Animal Electricity, pp. 210–11 13 Agnew, William, et al. “Purification of the Tetrodotoxin-Binding Component Associated with the Voltage-Sensitive Sodium Channel from Electrophorus Electricus Electroplax

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“A Demonstration on Man of Electromotive Changes accompanying the Heart’s Beat.” The Journal of Physiology, vol. 8 (1887), pp. 229–34 5 Campenot, Robert. Animal Electricity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016, p. 269 6 Burchell, Howard. “A Centennial Note on Waller and the First Human Electrocardiogram.” The American Journal of

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Internal Medicine Perspectives, vol. 2 no. 1 (2012), loc. 14383 8 Ashcroft, Frances. The Spark of Life. London: Penguin, 2013, p. 146 9 Campenot, Animal Electricity, pp. 272–4 10 Aquilina, Oscar. “A brief history of cardiac pacing.” Images in Paediatric Cardiology, vol. 8, no. 2 (April 2006), pp. 17–81

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Johnson, Bryan. “The Urgency of Cognitive Improvement,” Medium, 14 June 2017 <https://medium.com/future-literacy/the-urgency-of-cognitive-improvement-72f5043ca1fc> 4 Campenot, Robert, Animal Electricity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016, pp. 110–11 5 Finger, Stanley. Minds Behind the Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp 243–7.

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis

by Jeremy Rifkin · 31 Dec 2009 · 879pp · 233,093 words

provided a useful model for building the telegraph, while the electric fish gave Volta ideas about how to build a battery. Du Bois-Reymond dedicated Animal Electricity, his 1848 book on electrical excitation in nerves and muscles, to Michael Faraday, whose “descriptions of induction in electrical circuits” provided useful analogies for describing

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Allen, Woody altruism Amazon rain forest Ambrose of Milan American culture American Dream American Idol American Indian American Literature American Psychologist American Revolution Anderson, David Animal Electricity (du Bois-Reymond) Animal Planet animal protection animal rights movement animal species fairness and gestures and language grooming behavior learned behavior play and sense of

Energy and Civilization: A History

by Vaclav Smil · 11 May 2017

physical units. Famous eighteenth-century milestones included Luigi Galvani’s (1737–1798) experiments with frog legs during the 1790s (and hence his mistaken notion of “animal electricity”), Charles Augustin Coulomb’s (1736–1806) studies of electric force (the coulomb is now the standard unit of electric charge), and Alessandro Volta’s (1745

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence

by George Zarkadakis · 7 Mar 2016 · 405pp · 117,219 words

more precise, with frog’s legs. The experiments showed that when electricity passed through a dead frog’s legs they kicked. Galvani coined the term ‘animal electricity’. He had discovered bioelectricity. Galvani’s experiments were repeated by Alessandro Volta (1745–1827) – who later invented the electrical battery – and ignited the imagination of

Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences

by Edward Tenner · 1 Sep 1997

Life Is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe

by Johnjoe McFadden · 27 Sep 2021

captured in a Leiden jar. Colonel John Walsh (1726–95), an English soldier, scientist and diplomat posted to India, performed a more extensive study of animal electricity, as it came to be known. After being elected a member of the Royal Society in 1772, he was introduced to Benjamin Franklin and the

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passed along a human chain. He wrote to Franklin reporting that ‘The Effect of the Torpedo appears to be absolutely Electrical’ and an example of animal electricity. Walsh’s experiments had pretty much proved that the torpedo’s shock was a form of electricity, but could electricity play a more fundamental role

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and the other its tail, only one of them usually received a shock, which could be delivered at either end. These experiments convinced Humboldt that animal electricity was essentially the same as ‘the electrical current of a conductor charged by a Leyden vial, or Volta’s pile’ but one that the animal

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the debate had moved on from the question of whether the shocks from the fish were electrical to the more general role, if any, of animal electricity. More significant in the end was the founding, in 1811, of the university known today as the Humboldt University of Berlin by Alexander and his

The Power Makers

by Maury Klein · 26 May 2008 · 782pp · 245,875 words

long and winding road of discovery in this area began with Alessandro Volta, an unassuming physics professor who had been drawn to some experiments with animal electricity conducted by another professor, Luigi Galvani.26 During his research with frogs, Galvani had in 1780 stumbled onto an astonishing discovery: A dead frog’s

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to the Royal Society of London in 1791, the same year Galvani published his paper. By late 1793 Volta had rejected Galvani’s claim of “animal electricity,” believing that the source of electricity lay rather in the contact of two dissimilar metals during the experiment. Using one of his own inventions, the

The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes · 15 Jan 2008 · 778pp · 227,196 words

many scientific men of the day he was entranced by the potentialities of the voltaic battery, and its possible connections with ‘animal magnetism’ and human animation. Electricity in a sense became a metaphor for life itself. ‘The experiments of Sir Humphry Davy seem to me to form an important link in the

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coast to collect some specimens of the electrical eel or torpedo fish at Trieste. He had renewed his interest in Vitalism and the mysteries of animal electricity. But he hurried back to Laibach, again writing to Jane almost teasingly: ‘I am just returned to my old quarters & my pretty Illyrian nurse, after

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one on the safety lamp in 1816. He did not want the torpedo to be his last, and he continued to investigate the mystery of ‘animal electricity’ and its possible connection with the universal principle of life. John Herschel would be particularly struck by this paper, which compared the electric eel to

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, his pulse rate rising to 150. As in the old days, John took over the dissection of the torpedo fish, and they gently debated whether ‘animal electricity’ was the intrinsic source of its life, or a mere physiological mechanism for paralysing prey or for self-protection. ‘The greater part of the day

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’, he traced the experimental path which led to increasingly precise and sophisticated concepts of electrical current, conductors, positive and negative poles, batteries, charge and discharge, animal electricity (’an unfortunate epithet’), nervous circuitry, chemical affinity (Davy’s ‘total revolution’) and ‘the wonderful phenomenon of electro-magnetism’, which awaited further exploration.24 Herschel prophetically

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. (See Chapters 3 and 7) LUIGI GALVANI, 1737-98. Italian physician, Professor of Anatomy at Bologna University. His dramatic claim to have discovered reanimation or ‘animal electricity’, when dead specimen frogs were fixed with metal pins, was disproved in a celebrated paper sent to the Royal Society by Volta in 1792. Nevertheless

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Museum, Munich. (See Chapter 6) ALESSANDRO VOLTA, 1745-1827. FRS and Professor of Experimental Physics, Como, Italy, 1775. He disproved Luigi Galvani’s theory of animal electricity in 1792, and went on to produce a historic paper on the first chemical pile or battery, which Banks was quick to publish in the

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

by Brian Merchant · 19 Jun 2017 · 416pp · 129,308 words

’ nervous systems—the series of experiments that would inspire Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—and had come to believe the amphibians had an internal store of “animal electricity.” He’d noticed that when he dissected a leg that was hung on a brass hook with an iron scalpel, it tended to twitch. Volta

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution

by Henry Schlesinger · 16 Mar 2010 · 336pp · 92,056 words

two differing theories circulating between supporters of both sides, Galvani in some of his last writings proffered the idea of two different types of electricity—animal electricity and common electricity. Not quite a complete concession, the good doctor’s suggestion was closer to a compromise based on diplomacy and perhaps weariness with

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debate rather than experiment or scientific fact. Volta, still working hard to prove his bimetallic theory, offered up his own compromise. He would admit that animal electricity exists, but not in the way that Galvani described—accumulating in muscles, particularly in severed limbs and small pieces of muscle. Yes, the nerves may

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an engagement at the Royal Society, focused on the battery’s design and function rather than theory and touched only lightly on the controversy over animal electricity that had lasted eight years. Volta carried with him a small, pocket-sized battery as well, showing how the device could be scaled down for

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patents at the time often listed medical purposes. NOT SURPRISINGLY, WITH A DEVICE capable of producing a continuous flow of electrical current, the debate surrounding animal electricity was soon forgotten. Unlike a Leyden jar, which required constant laborious charging and from which electricity exploded in an electrostatic burst, the battery was easily

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these science shows was that of Giovanni Aldini, the physicist nephew of Luigi Galvani. An early and ardent supporter of his uncle’s theory of animal electricity, he surpassed experiments featuring twitching frogs, taking the same general principles to stunningly morbid levels. During one demonstration in the early 1800s Aldini applied current

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also took a conservative view after witnessing his experiment in 1803. Its object was to shew [sic] the excitability of the human frame, when this animal electricity is duly applied. In cases of drowning or suffocation, it promises to be of the utmost use, by reviving the action of the lungs, and

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of these frauds the human body was portrayed as a giant “galvanic cell,” an idea that weirdly harkened back to Galvani’s debunked theory of animal electricity, then reemerged awash in computer-generated special effects in science fiction form in the hit movie The Matrix. One popular nineteenth-century lecturer, a J

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Strange Machines Built the Modern American. New York and London: New York University Press, 2003. Pera, Marcello. The Ambiguous Frog: The Galvani-Volta Controversy on Animal Electricity. Translated by Jonathan Mandelbaum. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Petrus Peregrinus. The Letter of Petrus Peregrinus on the Magnet, A.D. 1269. Translated by Brother

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, 205–206 ammonium chloride, 142 Ampère, André-Marie, 74, 129 amp, 81, 128, 129 amplifier, 243–44 anatomy, 19, 43 ancient world, 2–6, 11 animal electricity, 39–44, 45, 47, 50, 53, 162 anode, 77, 86, 87 Apollo 13, 235–36 arc lights, 147, 148, 153 Arfwedson, Johan, 271 Aristotle, 2