Summary

The modern world imagines that the invention of electricity was greeted with great enthusiasm. But in 1879, Americans reacted to the advent of electrification with suspicion and fear. Forty years after Thomas Edison invented the incandescent bulb, only 20 percent of American families had wired their homes. Meanwhile, electrotherapy emerged as a popular medical treatment for everything from depression to digestive problems. Why did Americans welcome electricity into their bodies even as they kept it from their homes? And what does their reaction to technological innovation then have to teach us about our reaction to it today? In Dark Light, Linda Simon offers the first cultural history that delves into those questions, using newspapers, novels, and other primary sources. Tracing fifty years of technological transformation, from Morse's invention of the telegraph to Roentgen's discovery of X rays, she has created a revealing portrait of an anxious age.

Author Biography

LINDA SIMON is a professor of English at Skidmore College. She is the author of four biographies, including Genuine Reality:A Life of Henry James and The Biography of Alice B.Toklas. She lives in Saratoga Springs, NewYork.

Introduction

(8)

PART I: Wonders

(292)

Working Great Mischief

(21)

Beneficence

(22)

Wilderness of Wires

(26)

Nerve Juice

(27)

Sparks

123

(20)

PART II: Cravings of the Heart

The Inconstant Battery

143

(25)

Haunted Brains

168

(27)

The Inscrutable Something

195

(24)

Part III: Electrostrikes

Live Wires

219

(27)

Magical Keys

246

(26)

Dark Light

272

(29)

Appreciation

301

(2)

Notes

303

(20)

Bibliography

323

(24)

Index

347

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Excerpts

Working Great MischiefThe electric telegraph is the miracle of modern times . . . a man may generate a spark at London which, with one fiery leap, will return back under his hand and disappear, but in that moment of time it will have encompassed the planet on which we are whirling through space into eternity. That spark will be a human thought!The Times, London, October 1856When he was twenty-three, Samuel Finley Breese Morse wrote to his parents from England, where he had been studying and practicing art for two years, defying their wishes that he become a bookseller at home in Massachusetts. Morse had just received an Adelphi Gold Medal for a statuette of Hercules, and Dying Hercules, his painting of the same subject, recently had been exhibited at the Royal Academy. Despite these achievements he was well aware, as were his parents, of the challenges that any artist faced simply in making a living. If those challenges were not quite Herculean, surely they seemed, at the time, heroic. "I need not tell you what a difficult profession I have undertaken," he wrote. "It has difficulties in itself which are sufficient to deter any man who has not firmness enough to go through with it at all hazards, without meeting with any obstacles aside from it."1In 1815, Morse returned to America, where he believed he would face even more obstacles as a professional artist than in Europe. "I should like to be the greatest painter purely out of revenge," he proclaimed.2 Awaiting recognition of his greatness, he opened an art studio in Boston; but clients did not flock to his door, and he resorted to a path he had hoped not to take: cultivating a career as a portrait painter. By the time he married in 1818, he had earned considerable renown, attracting commissions from politicians, college presidents, statesmen, and other public figures. Along the way, he also dabbled in inventing: he devised a fire engine water pump, which unfortunately failed; and a marble-cutting machine, which he could not patent because it infringed upon another inventor's design.In February 1825, Morse was in Washington, painting a portrait of General Lafayette, when his wife, at the age of twenty-five, suddenly died a month after giving birth to their son. By the time Morse received the shocking news and returned to New Haven, where she had been living with his parents, the family already had buried her. This was not the first time that delay in receiving a message had caused Morse distress: while he was in England studying, letters to his family went astray, or their letters to him failed to arrive, generating suspicion and worry for all parties.After his wife's death, followed by his father's death the next year and his mother's in 1828, Morse fell into a depression. Like many of his contemporaries, he sought solace in travel abroad, and in 1829, leaving his children with relatives, he sailed to Europe to paint, study, and revive his spirits. Three years later, he sailed home.

Excerpted from Dark Light: Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-Ray by Linda Simon
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.