The frog, the ox, and the hanged man: Giovanni Aldini and the popular uses of Galvanism in Britain, 1802-1803

Abstract: In the winter of 1802-1803 the Italian experimental philosopher Giovanni Aldini visited Britain to showcase his experiments in the new and rapidly-developing science of Galvanism. His dramatic displays involving the application of the newly-invented voltaic battery to animal bodies – often with powerful and lurid results – captured an audience of the social elite and turned Galvanism into a popular vogue existing at the border between scientific demonstration and grotesque spectacle. This talk, based on work in progress, will examine Aldini’s experiments and the Galvanic sensation they created, and also their reappropriation as a cultural object by newspapers and by other experimenters who refashioned them into popular instructive entertainments in places varying from London theatres to Yorkshire pubs. In the process, it will touch on what it meant for this particular science to become ‘popular’ circa 1800, the consequent connection to jokes, spoof, and satire, and the birth of electrochemistry.

Speaker Bio: Iain Watts is a graduate student in the History Department at Princeton University, working in the History of Science and British History in the 18th and 19th centuries. Previously he completed an MSc in History of Science from University College London and Imperial College London, and originally trained in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge.