The Information - James Gleick [60]
The analogy linked one perplexing phenomenon with another. Electricity was an enigma wrapped in mystery verging on magic, and no one understood nerves, either. Nerves were at least known to conduct a form of electricity and thus, perhaps, to serve as conduits for the brain’s control of the body. Anatomists examining nerve fibers wondered whether they might be insulated with the body’s own version of gutta-percha. Maybe nerves were not just like wires; maybe they were wires, carrying messages from the nether regions to the sensorium. Alfred Smee, in his 1849 Elements of Electro-Biology, likened the brain to a battery and the nerves to “bio-telegraphs.”♦ Like any overused metaphor, this one soon grew ripe for satire. A newspaper reporter in Menlo Park, discovering Thomas A. Edison in the grip of a head cold, wrote: “The doctor came and looked at him, explained the relations of the trigeminal nerves and their analogy to an electric telegraph with three wires, and observed incidentally that in facial neuralgia each tooth might be regarded as a telegraph station with an operator.”♦ When the telephone arrived, it reinforced the analogy. “The time is close at hand,” declared Scientific American in 1880, “when the scattered members of civilized communities will be as closely united, so far as instant telephonic communication is concerned, as the various members of the body now are by the nervous system.”♦ Considering how speculative the analogy was, it turned out well. Nerves really do transmit messages, and the telegraph and telephone did begin to turn human society, for the first time, into something like a coherent organism.
In their earliest days these inventions inspired exhilaration without precedent in the annals of technology. The excitement passed from place to place in daily newspapers and monthly magazines and, more to the point, along the wires themselves. A new sense of futurity arose: a sense that the world was in a state of change, that life for one’s children and grandchildren would be very different, all because of this force and its uses. “Electricity is the poetry of science,”♦ an American historian declared in 1852.
Not that anyone knew what electricity was. “An invisible, intangible, imponderable agent,”♦ said one authority. Everyone agreed that it involved a “peculiar condition” either of molecules or of the ether (itself a nebulous, and ultimately doomed, conception). Thomas Browne, in the seventeenth century, described electrical effluvia as “threads of syrup, which elongate and contract.” In the eighteenth, the kite-flying Benjamin Franklin proved “the sameness of lightning with electricity”—identifying those fearsome bolts from the sky with the odd terrestrial sparks and currents. Franklin followed the Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet, a natural philosopher and a bit of a showman, who said in 1748, “Electricity in our hands is the same as thunder in the hands of nature” and to prove it organized an experiment employing a Leyden jar and iron wire to send a shock through two hundred Carthusian monks arranged in a circle one mile around. From the monks’ almost simultaneous hops, starts, jerks, and cries, onlookers judged that the message—its information content small but not zero—sped round the circle at fantastic speed.
Later, it was Michael Faraday in England who did more than anyone to turn electricity from magic to science, but even so, in 1854, when Faraday was at the height of his investigations, Dionysius Lardner, the scientific writer who so admired Babbage, could quite accurately declare, “The World of Science is not agreed as to the physical character of Electricity.”♦ Some believed it to be a fluid “lighter and more subtle” than any gas; others suspected a compound of two fluids