Aquila Children's Magazine The Electric Issue | Page 16

Imagine a huge oak tree being struck by lightning in a storm, and left
in shreds. Such energy in one bolt from the sky! Victor Frankenstein,
the main character in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, is only about
15 years old when he experiences this, but it amazes him and launches
him (and us) into a tale that mixes science with poetry, philosophy and
even politics in an extraordinary way.
Mary Shelley herself was only 19 when she
began writing Frankenstein. In the summer of
1816, she and her future husband, the
Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, were
staying in Switzerland with Shelley’s
fellow-poet and friend Lord Byron. It was so
rainy that they amused themselves indoors
by reading German ghost stories. That was
when Byron challenged them to write ghost
stories of their own. Mary was the only one to
finish hers — and what a story it was!
SHE’S ELECTRIC
The story’s whole atmosphere is electric. The
Romantic poets loved the mysterious and
awesome aspects of nature, and Mary reflects
that feeling when describing the dramatic
Alpine – and later Arctic – scenery of the
story. But she also reflects it in her young
hero’s intense longing to grasp the secret of
life. Victor devotes himself to studying
science and at last starts his great project: to
create a living person. Using bits and pieces
scrounged from laboratories and elsewhere,
he makes the figure extra large so that he can
work on it more easily.
How could Mary Shelley imagine such a thing?
Even now, after so much scientific progress,
Victor’s goal seems incredible. But people then
were fascinated by early discoveries about
electricity. In the late 18th century, Italian
scientist Luigi Galvani had noted electrical
impulses in the body. Then in 1803 his nephew
Giovanni Aldini came to England. Aldini was also
interested in the work of his uncle’s rival
Alessandro Volta (hmm, I wonder what was
named after him?), who invented the first
battery. With this new knowledge, Aldini
travelled to London, and staged a famous
demonstration in Newgate Prison. In this
demonstration he produced body movements
by passing electric currents into the muscles of a
dead person.
These days, this knowledge has been put to
good use in medical science. Targeted Muscle
Reinnervation or TMR is a brilliant new
technology that helps people control artificial
limbs by using electrical impulses from the brain.
Mary knew about Aldini’s experiments through
her father, William Godwin’s friendships with
leading English scientists of the day. Soon after
reading those ghost stories and being given
Byron’s challenge, she was haunted by such ideas
in a ‘waking dream’. This became the basis for
her tale.
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