Unformatted text preview: The INVISIBLE RAINBOW
A History of Electricity and Life Arthur Firstenberg
Chelsea Green Publishing
White River Junction, Vermont
London, UK Copyright © 2017, 2020 by Arthur Firstenberg.
All rights reserved.
Drawings on pages 3 and 159 copyright © 2017 by Monika Steinhoff.
“Two bees” drawing by Ulrich Warnke, used with permission.
No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Originally published in 2017 by AGB Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Sucre, Bolivia.
This paperback edition published by Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020.
Book layout: Jim Bisakowski
Cover design: Ann Lowe
Printed in Canada.
First printing February 2020.
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Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020930536
ISBN 978-1-64502-009-7 (paperback) | 978-1-64502-010-3 (ebook)
Chelsea Green Publishing
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In memory of Pelda Levey—friend, mentor, and fellow
traveler. Author’s Note
FOR EASE OF READING I have kept the
endnotes to a minimum. However, all
sources referred to in the text can be found
in the bibliography at the back of the book,
together with other principal works I have
consulted. For the convenience of those
interested in particular subjects, the
literature in the bibliography is organized
by chapter, and within some chapters by
topic, instead of the usual single
alphabetical listing.
A.F. Contents
Prologue
PART I From the Beginning…
1. Captured in a Bottle
2. The Deaf to Hear, and the Lame to Walk
3. Electrical Sensitivity
4. The Road Not Taken
5. Chronic Electrical Illness
6. The Behavior of Plants
7. Acute Electrical Illness
8. Mystery on the Isle of Wight
9. Earth’s Electric Envelope
10. Porphyrins and the Basis of Life
PART II … To the Present
11. Irritable Heart
12. The Transformation of Diabetes
13. Cancer and the Starvation of Life
14. Suspended Animation
15. You mean you can hear electricity?
16. Bees, Birds, Trees, and Humans
Photographs
17. In the Land of the Blind
Notes
Bibliography About the Author Prologue
ONCE UPON A TIME, the rainbow visible in the sky after a
storm represented all the colors there were. Our earth was
designed that way. We have a blanket of air above us that
absorbs the higher ultraviolets, together with all of the X-rays
and gamma rays from space. Most of the longer waves, that
we use today for radio communication, were once absent as
well. Or rather, they were there in infinitesimal amounts. They
came to us from the sun and stars but with energies that were a
trillion times weaker than the light that also came from the
heavens. So weak were the cosmic radio waves that they
would have been invisible, and so life never developed organs
that could see them.
The even longer waves, the low-frequency pulsations given
off by lightning, are also invisible. When lightning flashes, it
momentarily fills the air with them, but they are almost gone
in an instant; their echo, reverberating around the world, is
roughly ten billion times weaker than the light from the sun.
We never evolved organs to see this either.
But our bodies know that those colors are there. The
energy of our cells whispering in the radio frequency range is
infinitesimal but necessary for life. Every thought, every
movement that we make surrounds us with low frequency
pulsations, whispers that were first detected in 1875 and are
also necessary for life. The electricity that we use today, the
substance that we send through wires and broadcast through
the air without a thought, was identified around 1700 as a
property of life. Only later did scientists learn to extract it and
make it move inanimate objects, ignoring—because they could
not see—its effects on the living world. It surrounds us today,
in all of its colors, at intensities that rival the light from the
sun, but we still cannot see it because it was not present at
life’s birth. We live today with a number of devastating diseases that
do not belong here, whose origin we do not know, whose
presence we take for granted and no longer question. What it
feels like to be without them is a state of vitality that we have
completely forgotten.
“Anxiety disorder,” afflicting one-sixth of humanity, did
not exist before the 1860s, when telegraph wires first encircled
the earth. No hint of it appears in the medical literature before
1866.
Influenza, in its present form, was invented in 1889, along
with alternating current. It is with us always, like a familiar
guest—so familiar that we have forgotten that it wasn’t always
so. Many of the doctors who were flooded with the disease in
1889 had never seen a case before.
Prior to the 1860s, diabetes was so rare that few doctors
saw more than one or two cases during their lifetime. It, too,
has changed its character: diabetics were once skeletally thin.
Obese people never developed the disease.
Heart disease at that time was the twenty-fifth most
common illness, behind accidental drowning. It was an illness
of infants and old people. It was extraordinary for anyone else
to have a diseased heart.
Cancer was also exceedingly rare. Even tobacco smoking,
in non-electrified times, did not cause lung cancer.
These are the diseases of civilization, that we have also
inflicted on our animal and plant neighbors, diseases that we
live with because of a refusal to recognize the force that we
have harnessed for what it is. The 60-cycle current in our
house wiring, the ultrasonic frequencies in our computers, the
radio waves in our televisions, the microwaves in our cell
phones, these are only distortions of the invisible rainbow that
runs through our veins and makes us alive. But we have
forgotten.
It is time that we remember. PART ONE 1. Captured in a Bottle
THE EXPERIMENT OF LEYDEN was a craze that was
immense, universal: everywhere you went people would ask
you if you had experienced its effects. The year was 1746. The
place, any city in England, France, Germany, Holland, Italy. A
few years later, America. Like a child prodigy making his
debut, electricity had arrived, and the whole Western world
turned out to hear his performance.
His midwives—Kleist, Cunaeus, Allamand, and
Musschenbroek—warned that they had helped give birth to an
enfant terrible, whose shocks could take away your breath,
boil your blood, paralyze you. The public should have
listened, been more cautious. But of course the colorful reports
of those scientists only encouraged the crowds.
Pieter van Musschenbroek, professor of physics at the
University of Leyden, had been using his usual friction
machine. It was a glass globe that he spun rapidly on its axis
while he rubbed it with his hands to produce the “electric
fluid”—what we know today as static electricity. Hanging
from the ceiling by silk cords was an iron gun barrel, almost
touching the globe. It was called the “prime conductor,” and
was normally used to draw sparks of static electricity from the
rubbed, rotating glass sphere. Line engraving from Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences Plate 1, p. 23,
1746 But electricity, in those early days, was of limited use,
because it always had to be produced on the spot and there
was no way to store it. So Musschenbroek and his associates
designed an ingenious experiment—an experiment that
changed the world forever: they attached a wire to the other
end of the prime conductor and inserted it in a small glass
bottle partly filled with water. They wanted to see if the
electric fluid could be stored in a jar. And the attempt
succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
“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.2
But 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
Its inventors were not the only ones who tried to warn the
public. Johann Heinrich Winkler, professor of Greek and Latin
at Leipzig, Germany, tried the experiment as soon as he heard
about it. “I found great convulsions in my body,” he wrote to a
friend in London. “It put my blood into great agitation; so that
I was afraid of an ardent fever; and was obliged to use
refrigerating medicines. I felt a heaviness in my head, as if I
had a stone lying upon it. It gave me twice a bleeding at my
nose, to which I am not inclined. My wife, who had only
received the electrical flash twice, found herself so weak after
it, that she could hardly walk. A week after, she received only once the electrical flash; a few minutes after it she bled at the
nose.”
From their experiences Winkler took away the lesson that
electricity was not to be inflicted upon the living. And so he
converted his machine into a great beacon of warning. “I read
in the newspapers from Berlin,” he wrote, “that they had tried
these electrical flashes upon a bird, and had made it suffer
great pain thereby. I did not repeat this experiment; for I think
it wrong to give such pain to living creatures.” He therefore
wrapped an iron chain around the bottle, leading to a piece of
metal underneath the gun barrel. “When then the
electrification is made,” he continued, “the sparks that fly from
the pipe upon the metal are so large and so strong, that they
can be seen (even in the day time) and heard at the distance of
fifty yards. They represent a beam of lightning, of a clear and
compact line of fire; and they give a sound that frightens the
people that hear it.”
The general public did not react as he planned, however.
After reading reports like Musschenbroek’s in the proceedings
of France’s Royal Academy of Sciences, and his own in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London,
eager men and women by the thousands, all over Europe, lined
up to give themselves the pleasure of electricity.
Abbé Jean Antoine Nollet, a theologian turned physicist,
introduced the magic of the Leyden jar into France. He tried to
satisfy the insatiable demands of the public by electrifying
tens, hundreds of people at once, having them take each other
by the hand so as to form a human chain, arranged in a large
circle with the two ends close together. He would place
himself at one of the ends, while the person who represented
the last link took hold of the bottle. Suddenly the learned
abbot, touching with his hand the metal wire inserted in the
flask, would complete the circuit and immediately the shock
would be felt simultaneously by the whole line. Electricity had
become a social affair; the world was possessed, as some
observers called it, by “electromania.” The fact that Nollet had electrocuted several fish and a
sparrow with the same equipment did not deter the crowds in
the least. At Versailles, in the presence of the king, he
electrified a company of 240 soldiers of the French Guard
holding each other by the hands. He electrified a community
of monks at the Carthusian monastery in Paris, stretched out in
a circle more than a mile around, each connected to his
neighbors by iron wires.
The experience became so popular that the public began to
complain of not being able to give themselves the pleasure of
an electric shock without having to wait in line or consult a
physician. A demand was created for a portable apparatus that
everyone could purchase for a reasonable price and enjoy at
their leisure. And so the “Ingenhousz bottle” was invented.
Enclosed in an elegant-looking case, it was a small Leyden jar
joined to a varnished silk ribbon and a rabbit skin with which
to rub the varnish and charge the jar.4
Electric canes were sold, “priced for all pocketbooks.”5
These were Leyden jars cleverly disguised as walking canes,
which you could charge surreptitiously and trick unsuspecting
friends and acquaintances into touching.
Then there was the “electric kiss,” a form of recreation that
even preceded the invention of the Leyden jar but became
much more exciting afterwards. Physiologist Albrecht von
Haller, at the University of Göttingen, declared incredulously
that such parlor games had “taken the place of quadrille.”
“Could one believe,” he wrote, “that a lady’s finger, that her
whale-bone petticoat, should send forth flashes of true
lightning, and that such charming lips could set on fire a
house?” Line engraving c. 1750, reproduced in Jürgen Teichmann, Vom Bernstein zum
Elektron, Deutsches Museum 1982 She was an “angel,” wrote German physicist Georg
Matthias Bose, with “white-swan neck” and “blood-crowned
breasts,” who “steals your heart with a single glance” but
whom you approach at your peril. He called her “Venus
Electrificata” in a poem, published in Latin, French, and
German, that became famous throughout Europe:
If a mortal only touches her hand
Of such a god-child even only her dress,
The sparks burn the same, through all of
one’s limbs,
As painful as it is, he seeks it again. Even Benjamin Franklin felt compelled to give
instructions: “Let A and B stand on wax; or A on wax and B
on the floor; give one of them the electrised phial in hand; let
the other take hold of the wire; there will be a small spark; but
when their lips approach, they will be struck and shock’d.”6
Wealthy ladies hosted such entertainment in their homes.
They hired instrument makers to craft large, ornate electrical
machines that they displayed like pianos. People of more
moderate means bought off-the-shelf models that were
available in an assortment of sizes, styles, and prices.
Aside from entertainment, electricity, assumed to be related
to or identical with the life force, was used primarily for its
medical effects. Both electrical machines and Leyden jars
found their way into hospitals, and into the offices of doctors
wanting to keep up with the times. An even greater number of
“electricians” who were not medically trained set up office and
began treating patients. One reads of medical electricity being
used during the 1740s and 1750s by practitioners in Paris,
Montpellier, Geneva, Venice, Turin, Bologna, Leipzig,
London, Dorchester, Edinburgh, Shrewsbury, Worcester,
Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Uppsala, Stockholm, Riga, Vienna,
Bohemia, and The Hague.
The famous French revolutionary and doctor Jean-Paul
Marat, also a practitioner of electricity, wrote a book about it
titled Mémoire sur l’électricité médicale (“Memoir on Medical
Electricity”).
Franklin treated patients with electricity in Philadelphia—
so many of them that static electric treatments later became
known, in the nineteenth century, as “franklinization.”
John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church,
published a 72-page tract in 1759 titled Desideratum; or,
Electricity Made Plain and Useful. He called electricity “the
noblest Medicine yet known in the World,” to be used in
diseases of the nervous system, skin, blood, respiratory
system, and kidneys. “A person standing on the ground,” he felt obliged to add, “cannot easily kiss an electrified person
standing on the rosin.”7 Wesley himself electrified thousands
of people at the headquarters of the Methodist movement and
at other locations around London.
And it wasn’t just prominent individuals who were setting
up shop. So many non-medical people were buying and
renting machines for medical use that London physician James
Graham wrote, in 1779: “I tremble with apprehension for my
fellow creatures, when I see in almost every street in this great
metropolis a barber – a surgeon – a tooth-drawer – an
apothecary, or a common mechanic turned electrical
operator.”8
Since electricity could initiate contractions of the uterus, it
became a tacitly understood method of obtaining abortions.
Francis Lowndes, for example, was a London electrician with
an extensive practice who advertised that he treated poor
women gratis “for amenorrhea.”9
Even farmers began testing electricity on their crops and
proposing it as a means of improving agricultural production,
as we will see in chapter 6.
The use of electricity on living beings in the eighteenth
century was so widespread in Europe and America that a
wealth of valuable knowledge was collected about its effects
on people, plants, and animals, knowledge that has been
entirely forgotten, that is far more extensive and detailed than
what today’s doctors are aware of, who see daily, but without
recognition, its effects on their patients, and who do not even
know such knowledge ever existed. This information is both
formal and informal—letters from individuals describing their
experiences; accounts written up in newspapers and
magazines; medical books and treatises; papers read at
meetings of scientific societies; and articles published in
newly founded scientific journals.
As early as the 1740s, ten percent of all articles published
in the Philosophical Transactions were related to electricity. And during the last decade of that century, fully seventy
percent of all articles on electricity in the prestigious Latin
journal, Commentarii de rebus in scientis naturali et medicina
gestis, had to do with its medical uses and its effects on
animals and people.10
But the floodgates were wide open, and the torrent of
enthusiasm about electricity rushed on unhindered, and would
continue to do so during the coming centuries, sweeping
caution against the rocks, crushing hints of danger like so
many bits of driftwood, obliterating whole tracts of knowledge
and reducing them to mere footnotes in the history of
invention. 2. The Deaf to Hear, and the Lame
to Walk
A BURMESE ELEPHANT has the same set of genes whether
it toils in a logging camp or runs free in the forest. But its
DNA will not tell you the details of its life. In the same way,
electrons cannot tell us what is most interesting about
electricity. Like elephants, electricity has been forced to bear
our burdens and move great loads, and we have worked out
more or less precisely its behavior while in captivity. But we
must not be fooled into believing we know everything
important about the lives of its wild cousins.
What is the source of thunder and lightning,...
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