Alexander von Humboldt: Galvanism,Animal Electricity,and Self-Experimentation Part 2: The Electric Eel,Animal Electricity,and Later Years

After extensive experimentation during the 1790s, Alexander von Humboldt remained skeptical about “animal electricity” (and metallic electricity), writing instead about an ill-defined galvanic force. With his worldview and wishing to learn more, he studied electric eels in South America just as the new century began, again using his body as a scientific instrument in many of his experiments. As had been the case in the past and for many of the same reasons, some of his findings with the electric eel (and soon after, Italian torpedoes) seemed to argue against biological electricity. But he no longer used galvanic terminology when describing his electric fish experiments. The fact that he now wrote about animal electricity rather than a different “galvanic” force owed much to Alessandro Volta, who had come forth with his “pile” (battery) for multipling the physical and perceptable effects of otherwise weak electricity in 1800, while Humboldt was deep in South America. Humboldt probably read about and saw voltaic batteries in the United States in 1804, but the time he spent with Volta in 1805 was probably more significant in his conversion from a galvanic to an electrical framework for understanding nerve and muscle physiology. Although he did not continue his animal electricity research program after this time, Humboldt retained his worldview of a unified nature and continued to believe in intrinsic animal electricity. He also served as a patron to some of the most important figures in the new field of electrophysiology (e.g., Hermann Helmholtz and Emil du Bois-Reymond), helping to take the research that he had participated in to the next level.     

The Role of The Gentleman's Magazine in the Dissemination of Knowledge About Electric Fish in the Eighteenth Century

Although torpedoes and Malopterurus, a Nile catfish, had been described and even used medically in antiquity, their discharges were poorly understood before the second half of the eighteenth century. It was then that their actions, along with those of certain South American “eels,” became firmly associated with electricity. The realization that an animal could produce electricity marked a turning point in the history of neurophysiology, which had long described nerve actions with recourse to animal spirits. By examining The Gentleman's Magazine during the period when electric fish were becoming electrical, one can begin to appreciate how new discoveries about these unusual creatures captured the imagination of scientists and were filtered down to the literate public.     

The experiments of Ramón M. Termeyer SJ on the electric eel in the River Plate region (c. 1760) and other early accounts of Electrophorus electricus

This paper focuses on Ramón M. Termeyer SJ (1737-1814?), a naturalist who experimented with the electric eel in the River Plate region during the 1760s. After going through an enumeration of the chroniclers that since the sixteenth century noticed the benumbing discharge of Electrophorus electricus, the article summarizes the work that immediately preceded Termeyer's and considers as a term of comparison the experiments on the electric eel performed by Bertrand Bajon (fl. 1751-1778) in the French Guyanne. It ends by discussing the meaning of Termeyer's 1781 and 1810 articles in the light of contemporary ideas of animal electricity.     

Visual images in Luigi Galvani's path to animal electricity

The scientific endeavor that led Luigi Galvani to his hypothesis of "animal electricity," i.e., of an electricity present in a condition of disequilibrium between the interior and the exterior of excitable animal fibers, is reviewed here with particular emphasis to the role played by visual images in Galvani's path of discovery. In 1791 Galvani formulated his model of neuromuscular physiology on the base of the image of a muscle and a nerve fiber together as in a "minute animal Leyden jar." This was the last instance of a series of physical models that accompanied Galvani's experimental efforts in the search of a theory capable of accounting for the electric nature of nerve conduction in spite of the many objections formulated in the eighteenth century against a possible role of electricity in animal physiology.     

Urbanization,Place of Experiment And How the Electric Fish Was Caught by Emil Du Bois-Reymond

Laboratories, along with the researchers, organisms, instruments, and experiments associated with these places of investigation, are not isolated from the world beyond their physical and institutional boundaries. Both laboratories and the cities in which they are embedded are subject to change, as was most dramatically apparent in their dynamic and far-reaching transformation during the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. Using the example of Berlin and the institutionalization of experimental physiology by Emil du Bois-Reymond, in this paper I study experimental work on frogs and fish in order to demonstrate how a city and a laboratory cooperate in the production of knowledge. Emil du Bois-Reymond's research on electric fish illustrates how an exotic organism and a laboratory came together in a city and how the research was driven by innovation and development in urban and industrial technology. Ongoing changes in the urban landscape entered du Bois-Reymond's workplace and became part of the material culture of his experimental physiology and his attempts to demonstrate that the electric fish discharge is fundamentally similar to the excitation of nerve and muscle.     

Urbanization, place of experiment and how the electric fish was caught by Emil du Bois-Reymond

Laboratories, along with the researchers, organisms, instruments, and experiments associated with these places of investigation, are not isolated from the world beyond their physical and institutional boundaries. Both laboratories and the cities in which they are embedded are subject to change, as was most dramatically apparent in their dynamic and far-reaching transformation during the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. Using the example of Berlin and the institutionalization of experimental physiology by Emil du Bois-Reymond, in this paper I study experimental work on frogs and fish in order to demonstrate how a city and a laboratory cooperate in the production of knowledge. Emil du Bois-Reymond's research on electric fish illustrates how an exotic organism and a laboratory came together in a city and how the research was driven by innovation and development in urban and industrial technology. Ongoing changes in the urban landscape entered du Bois-Reymond's workplace and became part of the material culture of his experimental physiology and his attempts to demonstrate that the electric fish discharge is fundamentally similar to the excitation of nerve and muscle.     

Representations of electricity: the development of a visual language for electrical phenomena

Abstract

This paper has two primary objectives. First, it addresses the development of an iconography for electrical phenomena in the eighteenth century, showing how scientific progress influenced artistic images, and how, eventually, Franklin's revolutionary discovery that lightning is an electric discharge made it possible to use a zigzag line (already used at the time as the iconographic symbol for lightning) as a sign for electricity. Second, it investigates the creation and evolution of conventions for scientific illustrations. The following original argument is also introduced: that the stylistic ideals of Classicism influenced scientific illustration in the period around 1800.     

规制缓和、结构调整与竞争效率——中日韩电力体制改革比较

本文以中国、日本、韩国电力体制改革实践为比较对象,从改革的起点、目标的选择、引入竞争的方式、电力监管、电力民营化、改革的成效几个角度进行了分析,力求得到一些对深化中国电力市场化改革有意义的启示。     

Extending the ‘White Way’: municipal streetlighting and race, 1900–1930

While the illumination of streets by electric streetlights in Western cities is a given today, in the early part of the twentieth century it was a technology whose conspicuous consumption was a status symbol for both individuals and towns. Not long after its introduction, however, electric lighting in cities also became noticeable in its absence. This paper draws on municipal records to consider how ideologies of white supremacy and progress came together to produce the uneven deployment of streetlighting in the small town of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, thus contributing to the city's segregation in the early part of the twentieth century. By tracing the development of hierarchical streetlighting systems, such as General Electric's White Way, I also show how the racialized deployment of streetlighting was aided by large electrical equipment manufacturers. In conclusion, I argue that these insights are crucial to understanding how technologies racialize space, but also how technologies such as streetlighting are central to the production of the spaces in which race is produced and racism takes place.     

Excavations at I Westgate Street,Gloucester, 1975

LIMITED excavation in Gloucester showed timber structures replacing stone in the late 4th century. The town centre was re-planned in the early 5th century, creating the line of medieval Westgate Street. Preserved organic levels of the 9th century indicate an agricultural economy with animal stabling in the town centre. 10th- to 12th-century levels were also excavated. Specialist reports are offered on Saxon and medieval pottery, seeds, textiles, wood and other materials.     

"Hats off, gentlemen, to our Australian mothers!" Representations of white femininity in North Queensland in the early twentieth century

This paper examines some representations of the anxiety and uncertainty about "white woman's place" in tropical North Queensland that were present in medical and general discourse in the early twentieth century. It focuses on white women's work in the private sphere as both the source of and the solution to these anxieties. Although 'White Australia' had been legislatively established in the "public sphere" by the 1920s, through the passage of the Queensland Aboriginal Protection Act of 1897, and the Commonwealth Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, in the tropics there was still public concern about how it would be established in the "private sphere". This was because even though the conventional wisdom that a white man could not work in the tropics and remain healthy had been successfully challenged by the early twentieth century, the same could not be said about such wisdom as it applied to white women and children. This paper looks at some of the ways that ideologies of race and gender intersected in the early twentieth century to construct white women and children as a group that could bring down the successful establishment of "White Australia", and this group was specially targeted for surveillance by the "new experts" of medicine, sociology and domestic science.     

"Now if you have only sons you are dead": migration, gender, and family economy in twentieth century northwestern Ghana

This article explores the interconnectedness between labor migration, gender, and the family economy in northwestern Ghana in the 20th century. It focuses specifically on the Dagaaba of the Nadowli and Jirapa administrative districts of what is now the Upper West Region (UWR). It examines how the relationships between men and women in terms of roles, status, access to productive resources and inheritance, changed in tandem with broader changes in society in the 20th century; changes that over time produced enhanced value and elevated status for women in the family. These changes in gender relations are reflected increasingly in the belief among elderly men that ‘now if you have only sons, you are dead’. By focusing on the lived experiences of ordinary women and men in the migration process, it argues that even though indigenous social structures privileged men over women in almost all spheres of life, Dagaaba women were nonetheless significantly active in shaping the history of their communities and that gender relations in Dagaaba communities were not static — they changed over time and generation. This article contributes to the ongoing discussion of the internal migration phenomenon in West Africa, which has so far attracted scant historical analysis.     

Cattle Slaughter Industry in Qing China: State Ban,Muslim Dominance,and the Western Diet

Cattle slaughter and beef consumption are barely mentioned in the literature on Chinese economic, food, or animal history. This is possibly due to the widely held popular and scholarly assumption that beef was avoided and even considered taboo in the daily diet of Chinese people in premodern times. This article investigates the tangible regulation and practice of cattle slaughter in Qing China—the period when the beef taboo was argued to be formally subsumed into Chinese morality. I ask the following questions: To what extent did the Qing state ban cattle slaughter? How was the ban enforced in the localities? Did Chinese people slaughter cattle for consumption? Were there lawful beef markets in Qing China proper? How did increasing beef-eating Western sojourners since the mid-19th century impact this sector? Accordingly, I demonstrate that with the leeway provided by the state, the cattle slaughter industry developed in many regions of China proper, especially large cities. In this sector, Chinese Muslim merchants played a dominant role, even though the Han merchants could outnumber them. Their efforts have prepared the state and Chinese merchants to better cope with new circumstances since the mid-19th century. Broadly, this paper sheds light on how different religious, ethnic, and national groups affected the economy and the practice of law in the Qing dynasty.     

Animal Electricity at the End of the Eighteenth Century: The Many Facets of a Great Scientific Controversy

In the 1790s, Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta were the main protagonists of a lively debate on the role of electricity in animal organisms. Significant developments originated from this debate, leading to the foundation of two new disciplines, electrodynamics and electrophysiology, that were to play a crucial role in the scientific and technological progress of the last two centuries. The Galvani-Volta controversy has been repeatedly reconstructed, sometimes in an attempt to identify the merits and the errors of one or the other of the two protagonists, sometimes with the aim of demonstrating that the theories elaborated by the two Italian scholars were irreconcilable, reflecting completely different ways of looking at phenomena and conceiving of scientific research. In this article a different interpretation is offered, based on a discussion of the scientific issues that were central to Galvani's and Volta's research, and with reference to the context of science and society of the eighteenth century.     

Animal electricity at the end of the eighteenth century: the many facets of a great scientific controversy

In the 1790s, Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta were the main protagonists of a lively debate on the role of electricity in animal organisms. Significant developments originated from this debate, leading to the foundation of two new disciplines, electrodynamics and electrophysiology, that were to play a crucial role in the scientific and technological progress of the last two centuries. The Galvani-Volta controversy has been repeatedly reconstructed, sometimes in an attempt to identify the merits and the errors of one or the other of the two protagonists, sometimes with the aim of demonstrating that the theories elaborated by the two Italian scholars were irreconcilable, reflecting completely different ways of looking at phenomena and conceiving of scientific research. In this article a different interpretation is offered, based on a discussion of the scientific issues that were central to Galvani's and Volta's research, and with reference to the context of science and society of the eighteenth century.     

长春市电力消费与经济发展关系研究

利用柯布·道格拉斯函数的形式,把能源引入生产函数,从而可以探讨普遍意义上,能源和经济的关系,以及这种关系在发达地区和欠发达地区之间的区别。事实上从结论可以看出,不光劳动、资本以及科技进步能够促进经济增长,人们生产和生活用能的增加也能促进经济的增长。电力作为能源的一种重要形式,深刻地影响着现代人们的生产和生活,更是现代城市文明的一种深刻体现,上述能源和经济之间关系的探讨,为各种城市合理利用电力,促进经济增长提供了理论支持。     

Glückliche Fügung: Experiments’ Potential to Integrate Disciplines**

This essay reviews the discipline-connecting potential of experimentation. Two examples are used to illustrate how researchers in the first half of the twentieth century profitably combined resources from different disciplines in their experiments. These experiments were designed to test mechanism models describing chemical processes underlying the behavior of biological systems. The researchers had clear expectations about how certain interventions should affect the behavior of the organisms studied, if that behavior was indeed based on the presumed chemical processes. They manipulated the organisms in the relevant ways and determined how the behavior of the organisms changed as a result.     

Forecasting Change in Industry and the Economy with Restricted Resources

Abstract

The objective of this model study is to show how cost-conscious managers in the petroleum refining, electric power and basic chemical industries will respond to policy decisions limiting or not limiting the discharge of any major water or air pollutant and the availability of petroleum fuels for use in electric power generation. This is accomplished by an integrated model of the above industries with economic supply functions for crude oil natural gas and coal and with economic demand functions for important energy end-products. The results of this study show the critical importance of regulating fuel use in electric power generation to achieve within the United States in 1985 both energy goals of independence at acceptable price and environmental goals of clean air and clean water at minimum costs. Prohibition of the use of petroleum fuel in new electric power generating plants is practically mandatory according to the model studies to substitute coal for clean fuels in electricity generation. This prohibition minimize both the market price for natural gas and the capital investments in new plants and equipment. It maximizes the economic conservation of energy by end product consumers and the attainment of clean water and relatively clean air. Unfortunately, greater sulfur dioxide emission must be tolerated, although this may be reduced by 83% if environmental standards with air emission controls are met.