The Man Who First Galvanized The World Was...

...Luigi Galvani!  In 1771, he discovered that frog's legs twitched when touched by static electricity. This in turn galvanized a young gal by the name of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The rest is history.

I was treated to a lively discussion of the original Frankenstein (1931) film the other night on Twitter, led by Victoria (@vbspurs), blake (@bitmaelstrom), and ron (@kngfish). The film got me to thinking about a couple things, namely the strange and lingering connection between life and electricity. I wish to reiterate three points:

I.   Dr. Waldman, Henry Frankenstein's erstwhile mentor in the film, explains that Henry is a genius whose work is in the field of "chemical galvanism and electrobiology." Mary Shelley was perhaps influenced by the then recent popularization of galvanism, as related in the English language by Erasmus Darwin. This inspired someone to write the hand twitching scene "It's Alive:" 

But it wasn't just simple electricity which got the monster moving.

II. The Monster was animated using a new form of radiation created in the lab, presumably using all that cool Tesla apparati. The original script corroborates:

Henry Frankenstein: "Dr. Waldman, I learned a great deal from you at the university about the violet ray - the ultraviolet ray - which you said was the highest color in the spectrum." (Henry leans down, his face close to Waldman). "You were wrong." (Henry turns and gestures toward his apparatus). "Here in this machinery, I have gone beyond that. I have discovered the great ray that first brought life into the world. 

Dr. Waldman: (Incredulous, smiling) "Oh! And your proof?" 

Henry: "Tonight you shall have your proof. At first I experimented only with dead animals. And then a human heart which I kept beating for three weeks." (Henry gestures toward the apparatus off screen). "Now, I am going to turn that ray on that body and endow it with life."

Two new types of invisible rays were discovered around the time of Galvani's experiments and perhaps Shelley was aware of this. Englishman William Herschel discovered infrared radiation in 1800, and the German chemist Johann Wilhelm Ritter, after hearing about Herschel’s discovery, identified another “invisible” radiation which we now know as ultraviolet (UV) in 1801. These "invisible" radiations bracketed the upper and lower range of visible light, lying just outside, (infra and ultra). The rational world could live with the proven unseen at the fringes of the known, but only the imagination could extrapolate well beyond it. Perhaps that's why Shelley's work is considered the first work of science fiction.

III.  Lastly, Lem posted an intriguing story about life on other planets. I think the unspoken question is, "but did they have the spark of life?"  I'm not being creationist here. The famous Miller-Urey Experiment was anything but that.