Physics Rediscovered #17: Will the real Dr Frankenstein please stand up

Putting things in our mouths seems to be a mainstream way of doing experiments.

Children do it, adults do it, everybody does it. The cultural influence of putting things in your mouth in order to discover their properties is so strong that it made it into video games, for example. In everyone’s favourite RPG series The Elder Scrolls, from Bethesda, the way you develop your “Alchemy“ skill is by ingesting potential ingredients until you learn what they do… for good or bad.

In that cultural spirit, in the previous episode, I hypothesized that, historically, someone might’ve swallowed enough magnets to become a human compass. You probably thought that was a joke.

Well, by now you should’ve learned that we don’t do jokes here. Don’t believe me? Ok then.

Take Johann Georg Sulzer, for example. He decided to put a piece of lead and silver in his mouth, as you normally do. He positioned one piece above his tongue and the other one below. When the pieces didn’t touch, it was just like having an ordinary sensation of lead and silver in your mouth. However, when the pieces touched, he tasted something new. And you thought science is about lasers, satellites and accelerators? Well, suck on lead.

That’s nothing though, compared to the true original gangster of mad scientists, a real Dr Frankenstein - Luigi Galvani.

The frog slayer

G Dogg started off with frogs. Dissecting frogs to be specific. Lots and lots of frogs. During yet another dissection session one of his assistants accidentally touched one of frog’s nerves with a brass scalpel. Unexpectedly and frighteningly the leg twitched, giving everyone a heart attack. When Galvani learned of this, he smelled progress.

He went about recreating this experiment in different configurations. He touched all the frogs with different things, while placing them on various surfaces. It turned out that a frog caught between a metal and insulator does not move. Another placed between metals of the same type barely twitches. However, when you attach a frog to metals of a different kind, it goes into a full techno rave.

Galvani suspected that electricity is the culprit here. He needed more. He yelled for MOAR POWER!!!, I deeply believe, and went outside to do the same in a storm. The pressing question was: could he get the dead frog to dance to the beat of thunder. It turned out that sometimes he could. “It’s alive!“ he screa… nah, he didn’t, but you get the picture.

Afterwards he thought that maybe all this was a bit dramatic and lightning was an unnecessary overkill. Repeating the same experiment in clear weather seemed to yield similar results. Going with the flow, he locked the frog in a vacuum chamber to isolate it from the atmosphere altogether. To his surprise, twitching ensued.

But Galvani wouldn’t stop at small amphibians. After all, maybe this effect was specific to frogs only. He had to make sure and proceeded to experiments on larger animals, getting similar results. Now he was a real Dr Frankenstein. And sure, the animals were no monsters, but I’m sure you could terrorize a small village with a frog brought back from the dead.

So, if the legs on the dead frogs can twitch without attaching them to a generator or applying any external electricity source, then there must only one explanation. The electricity must live inside the animal at all time. At least that’s what Galvani thought. He called this phenomenon animal electricity.

Now, if some things are electric and animals are electric, and if also some things are magnetic, then it’s unavoidable to conclude that animals are magnetic as well. Hence, animal magnetism.

This idea was put forward by Franz Anton Mesmer, who really seemed to mean well. He imagined that all living things are filled with a magnetic fluid and by manipulating it one could alter their state. For example, you could heal others from various ailments by waving magnets in front of their faces, but with very practiced motions. Or, if you were out of magnets, you could just perform a “laying of hands“ on your patients are regulate the flow of magnetic fluid to its desired level, I guess. Several commissions investigated Mesmer’s claims, but couldn’t find anything substantial. Quite ironically, their attempts at critical verification, on top of an already mysterious practice that sparked the imagination, fueled the popularity of what became known as mesmerism. Soon, all kinds of quacks and charlatans came out of the woodwork, offering miracle cures and products — magnetic cups, combs, magnetic everything. If you didn’t have something magnetic on you at all times you were asking for trouble. Some things never change…

Mesmer and the sad sight of human gullibility aside, Galvani made serious waves in public opinion, as well as within scientific communities. Many people were jumping on the occasion to repeat his experiments and not only physicists, but also the other phs — the physicians. After all, his findings introduced not only new qualities to the phenomenons of electricity, but opened a new window of investigation into neurology.

However, as the story usually goes, not everyone was impressed.

A huge pile of shock

One Alessandro Volta, who started out as a self-taught amateur and ended up a professor at the University of Padua was especially suspicious. While super impressed with Galvani’s discovery, he thought that the man’s explanation of it was frogshit. Here’s what he had to say:

“Since quite some time I am convinced that the true source of this action is in the metals which are in touch with humid bodies or the water itself. Electric fluid in humid bodies is pushed by these metals in varying degree...”

But he knew words are cheap and he was about to prove it physically. In 1800, some twenty years after Galvani’s mad experiments, he would accomplish his goal by building a huge pile - Volta’s pile. He would take a disc of copper and place moist paper on it. Then he would place a disc of zinc on top of that, then a disc of copper on top and so on. He would soon have a huge tower of wet metal. Volta leaves a very important instruction here:

“I continue, I say, to form from several of these steps a column as high as can hold itself up without falling...”

So what of it? Well, by connecting the top and bottom tower with a wire, he could make that wire red hot and even melt the damn thing.

Boom! Electricity just like that out of nowhere - no animal carcasses required. The “nowhere“ part especially struck Volta. At some point he became convinced that he might’ve discovered an infinite source of power, a perpetual machine even. However, it rapidly became apparent that the effect doesn’t last.

The granddaddy of the battery.

As a result of all this, Galvani and Volta had a loud and public dispute and were not on the best of terms. However, being the gentlemen that he was, Volta called this electric effect of his pile - galvanism. The scientific community went berserk when learning about this invention. Though no one could explain it properly, everyone realized this has to do something with the chemistry of the metals. Everyone scrambled to their labs trying to take the relationship between chemistry and electricity to the next level. People were building pile and electrifying everything that moved. Electric dissociation became a thing, where one would apply an electric current to a piece of matter and get a new, sometimes previously unseen matter in return. Water was soon disassociated into hydrogen and oxygen while Sodium and potassium made their way on to the table of elem… no sorry, too soon for that.

Anyway, Volta’s piles became present everywhere. None could really explain what was happening, but at least they knew how to make it work. No serious physicist walked around without one and, perhaps more surprisingly, also no physician. That is because Volta’s pile was supposed to be the miracle cure for deafness, for example. The logic behind was that many believed deafness to be primarily caused by nerve damage. Therefore, applying current to the nerve should make it better, right? I mean the frogs twitch so why wouldn’t it?

I swear, we are hopeless. If it’s not magic magnets, then it’s electroshocks, snake oil or radium toothpaste. Ah, getting ahead of myself again…

Vikings to the rescue

I can sense a question forming in your mind, gentle reader. All this talk about electricity, but where does magnetism fit into all this? Well, magnetism is its own thing for the time being. It has its own “fluid“, different behavior and much less success than electricity had with Volta’s pile.

However, that thing that Volta invented really broke the world. The pile touched every sensitive subject at the time. Heat, was one of those, because you could take the pile and make stuff hot with it or even melt it. Chemistry as well, since the differing nature of the metals used had obviously something to do with it. Even light was involved as the wire connecting the ends of the pile shined before it turned into molten slag.

So, if Volta’s pile interacted with seemingly everything, maybe that also meant magnetism?

To answer that, two academics from Paris, N. P. Hachette and C. P. Desormes, decided to build a huge pile, making sure it has enough juice, and make it afloat. Their inspiration came from doing the same with a magnetic bar and witnessing it aligning with the Earth’s magnetic field. The floating part was important as they wanted to minimize the friction that could interfere with the pile’s magnetic adjustment. They have built the pile, placed it on water and … observed absolutely nothing.

Nothing to see here - was their conclusion. It was widely taken for granted by the scientific community and no further investigations were performed. Little did the team from Paris know, that they missed a fundamental element of this whole puzzle - the damned wire. Either through negligence or ignorance they didn’t connect the two ends of the pile.

Although a critical mistake, it was, admittedly, easy to make. The accounts of Volta’s work, that were around disseminated the academic world, often referred to its properties in an “open“ state, or not connected by the wire. Connecting being the word used to describe the wire instead of conducting, would make all the difference in perceiving the workings of the device.

It would be 15 years until, in 1820, the spell of ignorance would be broken by Hans Christian Ørsted. The great Dane just couldn’t accept that electricity and magnetism are their own separate things. His motivation came from subscribing to the German school of thought referred to as Naturphilosophie, which is one of the few non-threatening German words out there. This philosophical approach to physics insisted that all aspects of Nature must interact with one another - no exceptions.

He came up with the most ridiculously simple experiment. He took Volta’s pile, remembered to connect the ends with a wire and brought it in the vicinity of a compass. Lo and behold! The compass needle moved! The sight must’ve been incredible and shocking.

If Volta’s pile electrified the world, Ørsted’s compass experiment burned it to a crisp. The moving needle changed everything. Some tried their best at explaining the moving needle with simple electrostatic repulsion know from countless experiments of the past. This argument was quickly obliterated by Ørsted placing the wire over or under the compass. Depending in the positioning the needle move in different directions.

Suddenly it became obvious that electricity and magnetism are indeed connected. Those who were unconvinced could easily do the experiment themselves. Everyone had a pile, every had a compass, all that remained was to shock yourself with awe instead of the current running through the wire.

The flood gates open

So there you have it. Unknowingly and accidentally a guy discovered the battery because he just couldn’t resist the urge of putting stuff in his mouth. One thing led to another and we ended up understanding that electricity and magnetism, two seemingly separate domains, are profoundly connected.

Physicists of the time had to come to terms with the fact that their understanding was severely limited. That sounds soulcrushing, but this is, in fact, what true scientists live for. To learn enough to know that we understand nothing. At that point the real fun begins.

The situation in 1820 was no different. Ørsted’s experiment opened the flood gates of understanding. Everyone accepted that new physical approaches need to be developed and that we cannot look at the world in the same manner as we did so far.

Incredible things were about to come from this shift, but that is a story for the next episode of Physics Rediscovered.