Tech UPTechnologyWho was the real Frankenstein?

Who was the real Frankenstein?

The summer of 1816 was especially bleak throughout the northern hemisphere due to the large amount of ash and volcanic dust that had been thrown into the atmosphere by the eruption of Mount Tambora in April of the previous year: that is known as “the year without a summer”. Little could we imagine that such a phenomenon would be the trigger for one of the best-known horror novels in history.

Things sometimes don’t go as planned, and the expected break full of excursions along Lake Geneva (Switzerland) that the 24-year-old English poet Percy Shelley was going to enjoy, was cut short by rainy weather. He was accompanied by his 19-year-old lover, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, their second son, William, and her half-sister, Claire Clairmont, who was expecting a child by George Gordon Byron, famous for his poetry and scandals. Forced to stay at home because of the continuous rain, they spent their days and nights in the villa that Lord Byron had rented near theirs together with his friend and traveling companion, the physician John William Polidori.

Among their endless conversations were the experiments in galvanism and the possible reanimation of dead matter , following the train of thought written in an 1802 poem by the physician Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the famous biologist and naturalist. The reading of German ghost stories, an especially terrifying dream where Mary saw a man who gave life to “the horrible ghost of an extended man” and Lord Byron’s challenge to his fellow speakers to write a short horror story, He made the young Englishwoman draft in a few pages what would end up becoming the most famous gothic horror novel, Frankenstein , which she published in 1818 in book form under her married name, Mary Shelley.

The idea that electricity could be the cause of life dates back to 1786 , when an Italian named Luigi Galvani was having fun conducting experiments in his laboratory. One day he observed that a dissected frog leg twitched when placed near an electrostatic generator. Galvani, intrigued, continued to investigate this amazing phenomenon. He baptized his new offspring with the name of animal electricity , later to be known as galvanism.

Galvani’s work on the effect of electricity on the leg of that anonymous frog caught the attention of another Italian, Alessandro Volta. For Volta the contractions of the frog were nothing extraordinary, no type of electricity other than that already known. Simply, the nerves and muscles of the frog behaved like an extremely sensitive device capable of detecting very weak electrical currents, much more than those measurable with the instruments of the time. As proof of his ideas Volta invented the first practical electric battery, which he described in a letter to the prestigious Royal Society of London in 1800, and with it the door was opened to experimentation to solve the enigma: did electricity hide the secret of life? Moreover, what would happen if a corpse was electrocuted?

It was Galvani’s grandson, Giovanni Aldini, who plunged fully into the peculiar art of corpse reanimation, offering a hair-raising spectacle throughout Europe: the electrification of a dead person. His fame reached a climax on January 18, 1803 when at the Royal College of Surgeons in London he electrocuted the body of George Forster, 26, who had been sentenced to hang for murdering his wife and son. The sentence specified that his body would be handed over to science for dissection and thus not be able to resurrect on Judgment Day like any other good Christian.

Aldini took the corpse and that same day he prepared his experiment before the eyes of a good number of doctors and curious public. He started by placing electrodes on his face: with the electric shock his jaw twitched and his left eye opened. With different electrodes distributed throughout the body, Aldani managed to make the executed man move his arms, bend over, and even appear to breathe. But Aldini saved the best for last: He placed an electrode in his ear, another in his anus, and opened the circuit . Forster’s lifeless body began to move as if performing a dance of macabre. A journalist from the London Times wrote: “The right hand was raised and the legs began to move. To the unprepared viewer, it seemed as if it was coming back to life.” Some thought that Aldini was really going to resurrect the murderer ; even the minutes revealed that if that happened, the condemned would be hanged again. But Aldini did not share this opinion: for him, electricity “exerted a considerable influence on the muscular and nervous system” but in no way affected the heart.

Not surprisingly, other researchers tried to replicate Aldini’s experiences. One of them was the chemist Andrew Ure, who in December 1818 revealed the experiments he had been doing on another executed man, Matthew Clydesdale.

It had all started a month earlier, on November 4 in Glasgow, when he connected the executed man to a battery twice as powerful as Aldini’s. When he placed two electrodes on the spinal cord and the sciatic nerve, every muscle in his body began to shake convulsively. Connecting the phrenic nerve with the diaphragm caused “the body to begin to perform the movements of breathing”. Finally, he attached the electrodes to a nerve in the forehead and another in the heel : “each of the muscles of his face simultaneously showed a horrific expression, which united rage, horror, despair, anguish and frightening smiles on the face of the murderer.” As in the best horror movies, several of those present ran out of the room in fear and one of them fainted.

Ure thought that the use of electricity went beyond what seemed like a macabre puppet show: he believed that under very specific circumstances a corpse could be reanimated: “There is a certain probability of returning life. This undesirable occurrence with a murderer, and perhaps against the law, would be excusable on only one occasion, when it would be useful to science.” Of the same opinion was the physicist and inventor of the electromagnet William Sturgeon, who in the 1840s tried to bring four drowned youths back to life by applying an electric current to them . Despite his failure Sturgeon was convinced that if he had dedicated himself to this type of research long ago – then he was in his fifties and would die in 1850 – he would have achieved some success. Be that as it may, the only thing certain is that none of them managed to emulate the feat of Victor Frankenstein.

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