Bodies on Show
![[image]](21701713_coil.jpg) | | Queen's University Belfast | | The giant Induction Coil at the Royal Polytechnic Institution. | The human body itself, whether that of the performer or those of his audience, was frequently the subject of electrical display. This was something that had a long history, embracing Stephen Gray's conducting charity boys or Bose's beatification experiment as well as Nollet and his jumping monks. Eighteenth-century electrical parlour tricks like the Venus Kiss, in which male guests were challenged to kiss an electrified girl sitting on an insulated stool, remained popular well into the Victorian period. The anecdote with which this seminar started is an indication of the degree to which electrical exhibition was regarded as having a tactile, bodily dimension. Electrical displays at the Adelaide Gallery or the Royal Polytechnic Institute included "artful snares laid for giving galvanic shocks to the unwary," where even as eminent a visitor as the Duke of Wellington, according to one story, could fall into a galvanic trap, so that "the hero of a hundred fights, the conqueror of Europe, was as helpless as an infant under the control of that mighty agency." Visitors to the exhibitions were challenged to grab the poles of a galvanic battery or an induction coil and see how much of the electric fluid they could tolerate. Bodies themselves were part of the business of electrical showmanship. ![[electra]](21701713_electra.jpg) | | Queen's University Belfast | | A scene from the ballet Electra, performed at Her Majesty's Theatre in 1848 to show off the electric arc light. | Benjamin Ward Richardson, a London doctor and enthusiastic natural philosophical operator made good use of the Polytechnic Institute's massive induction coil, weighing 15 cwt with a primary wire of 3770 yards and a secondary wire 150 miles in length, in lectures of the effect of electricity on the body. His dramatic demonstrations offered a meticulous examination of electricity's effect on animal bodies and tissues whilst simultaneously reproducing lightning inside the Polytechnic's lecture theatre. Richardson looked at and demonstrated the effects of different kinds of electrical discharges from different sources on organic tissue. Tracing the electric current's path through the different organs and tissues of the body he used the latest in the electricians' technology of display to demonstrate the animal body's variable resistance to his audience. Using "Gassiott's [sic] electric fountains or cascades" he could show his Polytechnic audience "how beautiful is the light as it streams over the glass within the globe…now, the light is decreased, and the current from the coil, instead of making its way silently, flies across from a point to a point; we have interposed our tube containing fat, and the current resisted by that, flies across. See, again, the fountain is nearly as beautiful as at first; we have removed our tube holding fat, and interposed blood…Lastly we see a difference between blood and spinal cord." ![[tesla]](21701713_tesla.jpg) | | Queen's University Belfast | | Nikola Tesla showing off his experiments with high-frequency, high-tension electricity before the Royal Society. | The performances of the inventor-entrepreneur Nikola Tesla provide a telling example of the ways in which displaying electricity on the body could prove a highly effective strategy. Born in Croatia 1856 and having emigrated to the United States in 1884, he soon made a name for himself as a consummate public performer. His flamboyant public lectures are a good example of the ways in which exhibition played a role in establishing the persona of the inventor as much as the cultural context of electricity. When Tesla visited London in 1892 he delivered a typical lecture at the Royal Institution. Demonstrating his high-frequency, high-potential apparatus, Tesla took full advantage of his facility in making his own body part of the electrical circuit to spectacular effect.Here is a simple glass tube from which the air has been partially exhausted. I take hold of it; I bring my body into contact with a wire conveying alternating currents of high potential, and the tube in my hand is brilliantly lighted. In whatever position I may put it, wherever I move in space, as far as I can reach, its soft pleasing light persists with undiminished brightness. (T. C. Martin, The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla (New York NY, 1995), pp.198-293, on p.200) Tesla placed himself in the same circuit as light bulbs "filled with magnificent colors [sic] of phosphorescent light" or with induction coils from which "streams of light break forth from its distant end." His performances showed the power of exhibitionism in establishing his mastery over his machines, over nature and over his own body. The lesson was not lost on other inventor-entrepreneurs. Thomas Alva Edison was a consummate self-publicist, amongst all his other talents. He carefully cultivated his image as the "Wizard of Menlo Park," making sure that the newspapers were continually aware of the miraculous new inventions constantly emerging from within the walls of his laboratory. Like his predecessors earlier in the century he was well aware that being a showman was crucial to being a successful inventor. Sebastian de Ferranti in England first came to prominent public attention through performance at an Exhibition. Ferranti's first major recognition as an electrical inventor of significant status came with his winning a Silver Medal at the International Inventions Exhibition of 1885 for an electric meter of unprecedented accuracy. He was hired by Sir Coutts Lindsay to revive the fortunes of the Grosvenor Gallery Power Station, originally an installation built to provide electric illumination to enhance the exhibition of Pre-Raphelite paintings but soon extended to provide electric lighting to a network of nearby West End clubs, theatres and wealthy households. His connection with the Grosvenor Gallery led, by the end of the 1880s, to his pivotal role as Chief Engineer in one of the largest electricity generating projects of the age at the new Deptford Power Station. His participation in the Deptford works established his reputation as an iconoclastic, individualist and ambitious inventor-entrepreneur. The episode provides a fascinating example of an inventor's self-fashioning as Ferranti utilized all his resources to simultaneously establish his own public image and that of his troubled (and ultimately unsuccessful) grand design. Men like Edison, Ferranti or Tesla were well aware that establishing their own physical presence was a vital part of forging their reputations as electrical inventors. An inventor was a showman as much as he was a thinker or a tinkerer and as such had to act in particular ways. The world of the Exhibition provided a stage for individuals like these, on which they could fashion themselves as much as they fashioned electricity. In fact their relationship to electricity--still widely regarded as a "mysterious fluid"--was a key part of their public presentations of self. What they demonstrated to their publics through exhibiting electricity was that they had the capacity to control that capricious power. Electricity at the beginning of the Victorian era was hailed as a power that "far exceeds even the feats of pretended magic and the wildest fictions of the East." It was a "spirit like Ariel to carry our thoughts with the speed of thought to the uttermost ends of the earth." It offered the promise of being able to "annihilate time and space." Those perceptions were still in place at the end of the nineteenth century. Exhibiting electricity was therefore a good way for inventors to exhibit their own place within the Victorian cult of progress. |
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