The Lightning Tamers: True Stories of the Dreamers and Schemers Who Harnessed Electricity and Transformed Our World

Copyright © 2022 Kathy Joseph

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Dedication

This book is dedicated to the archivists. Thank you for finding, preserving, and scanning, not just old scientific papers but also old newspapers, magazines, letters, and even diaries. This book would be nothing without you.

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Small Beginnings

1.1 The Doctor Who Named Electricity

1.2 The Stinky Ball

1.3 The Glowing Ball

1.4 The Feather That Changed History

1.5 Du Fay’s Laws

Chapter 2: Electricity Party

2.1 Electricity for Fun and Entertainment

2.2 The Shocking Leyden Jar

2.3 Enter Benjamin Franklin

2.4 Franklin’s Kite and a French Rivalry

2.5 Coulomb Lays Down the Law

Chapter 3: The Birth of the Battery

3.1 A Most Unusual Professor

3.2 The Frog Battery

3.3 Volta’s Artificial Electric Organ

3.4 The Influential Humphry Davy

Chapter 4: A Galvanized World

4.1 The Electric Life of Michael Faraday

4.2 The Mighty Ampère

4.3 The Shoemaker Who Made the Electromagnet

4.4 Electricity from Magnetism

4.5 Ohm Finds Resistance, and Joule Heats It Up

Chapter 5: The Mighty Telegraph

5.1 The Teacher and the Telegraph

5.2 The Painter Who Annihilated Space and Time

5.3 Aleck, Mabel, and the Speaking Telegraph

Chapter 6: Edison and Westinghouse

6.1 Thomas Alva Edison

6.2 The Generator and Arc Lamp Grow Up

6.3 Edison’s Electric Light

6.4 Enter George Westinghouse

Chapter 7: War of the Currents

7.1 The Transforming Transformer

7.2 The AC–Motor Problem

7.3 Death on the Wire

7.4 The Hidden War: Three-Phase vs. Two-Phase

Chapter 8: Our Electric World

8.1 The Rise and Fall of Nikola Tesla

8.2 The Wizard of Schenectady

8.3 Men Die and Their Myths Are Born

8.4 A World of Electrical Dependence

Author’s Note

References for Figures

References

Preface

The spark for this book was lit around eight years ago when I was at a dinner party and told a story of how I asked my students where electricity comes from and one of my students confidentially told me, The wall. This response, while technically correct, wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for. A woman at the table chuckled and then admitted that she, too, would have responded with, The wall. She added that even if she’d thought of generators or different kinds of power stations, it wouldn’t have mattered, because she felt that she understood none of it. Although she used electricity every day and was completely dependent upon it, it was an utter black box. After I gave her an impromptu physics lesson, she seemed excited to understand the world a little better. This made me realize that there was a desire for people to understand where electricity comes from, and this is ultimately what inspired the audacious thought of someday writing a book on the subject.

At around the same time, I showed my students a clip from a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) documentary called Einstein’s Big Idea. The video showed an actor portraying a young Michael Faraday and his dramatic rise from binding books to being an assistant to England’s most famous chemist and to eventually discovering the electric motor. After watching the same clip, year after year, for five classes in a row, I became fascinated with the history of science. It started to hit me that discoveries didn’t come from thin air but were developed by real people with real stories and real trials and tribulations.

As Marie Curie once elegantly wrote, The life of a great scientist in their laboratory is not, as many may think, a peaceful idyll. More often it is a bitter battle with things, with one’s surroundings, and above all with oneself. A great discovery does not leap completely achieved from the brain of the scientist, as Minerva sprang … from the head of Jupiter.¹ Inspired by that video, I thought it would be interesting to write a book that explained how electricity was discovered by telling the stories of the personal history of the men and women who discovered it. Something that described not only how electricity works but how we got electricity to work. However, it was only several years after I had this idea when I had the time to try my hand at this project.

While researching the history of electricity, I made three important realizations. The first discovery I had was that Faraday wasn’t the only one who had an interesting life story. Every scientist I encountered had a fascinating life with twists and turns and amusing anecdotes. Despite our image of a scientist being only a certain type, I found a wide range of personalities: some were quiet and studious, while others were flamboyant, artistic, cruel, romantic, or even totally insane!

The second surprising realization I made from my investigations is that no discovery, no matter how much it changed our understanding or our daily lives, was dramatically different from what was known before. For example, a shoemaker and retired soldier named William Sturgeon discovered the electromagnet in 1824 when he put current in a wire wrapped around an iron bar and found that it acted like a strong bar magnet. However, Sturgeon only did that because he was copying a French scientist named André-Marie Ampère who had discovered that wires could work like weak magnets if they were wrapped in a spiral around a glass bar.

Similarly, Ampère only conducted that experiment because a Danish scientist and philosopher named Hans Christian Oersted discovered that current in a wire would move a magnet, which made Ampère believe that he could make magnets out of electricity. Of course, Oersted was only able to conduct his experiment because Volta invented the battery first. Following the pattern, Volta only invented the battery because he was in a philosophical debate about the nature of electrical fire with a doctor named Galvani who discovered that two different metals would make a dead frog jump, and on and on. Every idea, every invention, is linked in a human chain of discovery. Nothing is completely new.

The third surprising realization I made as I read about these discoveries was that the words of the original scientists led me to have a deeper understanding of the science itself. I feel honored to have met all the great scientists and inventors in this book and am grateful to have learned more about the science of electricity from them.

My hope is that you, irrespective of your scientific background, learn something new from the amazing, delightful, and at times, infuriating people who are profiled in this book.

Chapter 1

[Do not] despise the small beginnings—they precede of necessity all great things. Vesicles make clouds; they are trifles light as air, but then they make drops, and drops make showers, rain makes torrents and rivers, and these can alter the face of a country.

– Michael Faraday (1858)²

There used to be an odd commercial on late-night television for the amazing static duster. What made it so amazing, and why I was a little obsessed with it, was how, after you removed a plastic sleeve, dust would fly toward the duster. The people in the commercial would gasp with amazement as dirt, stray paper, feathers, and even parts of their hair would zoom toward the duster like magic (although I still don’t know why you want your duster to attract the hair on your own head).

Of course, the people who sold these devices were aware that this was static electricity in action, which is why they named it "the amazing static duster." What they might not have known was that the first glimpses of modern electricity started with the study of this same strange, amazing power. It was this seemingly inconsequential study that was to form the foundation of our electric universe.

Ready to learn about folks rubbing objects and then staring intently at floating feathers and pieces of fluff? Let’s go!

1.1 The Doctor Who Named Electricity

I would like to start with an Elizabethan doctor named William Gilbert (1544–1603), who is often referred to as the Father of Electricity.³ Gilbert was the first person whom we know of who scientifically studied electricity, and his studies made him famous. In the painting below, you can see him demonstrating static cling to Queen Elizabeth. But what, you might ask, inspired a medical doctor like Gilbert to study static cling, and why would that interest the queen of England?

The first part of the answer is that neither Gilbert nor the queen was particularly interested in electricity—they were actually interested in magnets and compasses, and Gilbert only studied electricity to see if it was a form of magnetism or not. So, why would a doctor and a queen be interested in magnets? The answer can be found accidentally in the painting. See the man behind the table leaning over to get a better view? That’s a depiction of the explorer, slave trader, state-sanctioned pirate, and politician Sir Francis Drake.⁴

Drake’s rise to fame and fortune occurred on September 26, 1580, when he hobbled back to England from three years at sea, having lost four out of five ships and 105 of his original 164 crew members.⁵ However, that one remaining ship was full of spices from Asia and gold stolen from the Spanish, and Elizabeth’s cut was more than she earned from taxes for the year. Drake was immediately knighted and given every honor that Elizabeth could bestow upon him. At the time, William Gilbert was an up-and-coming 36-year-old surgeon who was an expert on tropical diseases⁶ and known to practice medicine to great success and applause,⁷ which is why he came into contact with Drake and his surviving crew.

Figure 1: Painting from 1902 depicting William Gilbert demonstrating electrical attraction to Queen Elizabeth while Sir Francis Drake leans in for a better look from behind the table

Possibly while curing Drake or one of the crewmen with magnetic cures (basically waving a magnet over them), Gilbert learned a fact that was known to long-distance sailors for a while—compasses don’t always point exactly toward the North Star. Gilbert must have been shocked since he’d been taught differently at medical school. However, it wasn’t surprising that there were no previous public writings about experiments on magnetic forces, since medical doctors didn’t typically investigate the physics of their medical tools and sailors typically held their magnetic observations as state secrets. With this new knowledge, Gilbert was inspired to start an informal club to investigate all things magnetic.

Gilbert didn’t like the typical method of studying science at the time, complaining that most people treat the subject [of magnets] esoterically, miracle-mongeringly, abstrusely, reconditely, [and] mystically.⁸ Gilbert claimed that in all of the other books he’d read there was never a proof from experiments, never a demonstration do you find in them.⁹ Instead, Gilbert declared that he would start with an experiment and see what happened, which was a method, according to Gilbert, that was almost a new thing, unheard-of before.¹⁰ (Gilbert studied magnets almost 40 years before Francis Bacon published his highly influential book on the scientific method, Novum Organum, which is widely considered the origin of the scientific method.)¹¹

For the next 16 years, Gilbert and his friends diligently studied every aspect of magnets that they could think of. He even made a mini-Earth by taking a natural magnet and smoothing it into a sphere, concluding that Earth itself is a magnet and must be full of iron (which we still think is true today).¹² In addition, he found that his mini-Earths, if free to rotate, would revolve around their axes every 24 hours. Gilbert bravely speculated that the earth therefore rotates, and by an energy that is innate … revolves in a circle toward the sun.¹³

This was some 50 years after Copernicus’s theory of heliocentrism was published, but Gilbert’s statement was still considered heresy among most religious leaders, Catholic and Protestant alike. Gilbert also named the ends, or poles, of the magnets the north and south poles after the geographic directions, which is why the uppermost point of the globe is called the North Pole, even though it’s in no way a point or a pole.¹⁴

In the midst of all of these magnetic studies, Gilbert also devoted a little time toward the study of electric forces. Doctors at the time regarded these two things as identical because magnets would attract small pieces of metal from a distance and certain materials, like amber jewelry, would attract pieces of fluff from a distance if they were rubbed first. Some doctors believed they could remove bad spirits with sparks from electrified amber or magnets. But is static electric attraction the same phenomenon as magnetic attraction?

There were some obvious differences as electric objects had to be rubbed first and could produce sparks, while the effects from magnets were permanent and didn’t produce sparks. The more Gilbert looked, the more differences he found. Magnets could only attract specific types of metal, but an electrically charged object could attract any light object. Also, static electricity does not work in humidity or when the rubbed object is submerged in water, while magnets are unaffected by these conditions. It would be another 230 years before scientists found a relationship between electricity and magnets. However, we still think that static electric attraction is different from magnetic forces for mostly the same reasons that Gilbert did.

Figure 2: A natural magnet with nails stuck to it (left); amber jewelry with feathers stuck to it (right)

Gilbert wondered if electric attraction was a special property of amber or could be found more widely, and he began to rub every object he could get his hands on. To his surprise, a whole host of objects could attract feathers if they were rubbed. It was not, as he put it, a rare property possessed by one object or two (as commonly supposed), but evidently belongs to a multitude of objects, both simple and compound.¹⁵ Because this property was common in many objects but different from magnetism, it needed its own name. As static electricity was first noticed by the ancient Greeks with rubbed amber jewelry, and the ancient Greek word for amber was elektron, he called this phenomenon an electrius force (or Latin for amber-like), which was translated into English as an electric force. Gilbert published his thoughts on electric and magnetic forces in a book titled De Magnete (On Magnets) in 1600, to great acclaim.¹⁶

Perhaps from the successes of his magnetic research, Gilbert quickly moved up the ranks of the Royal College of Physicians, a prestigious group started 55 years earlier under King Henry VIII, he of the many wives, as a way of distinguishing quality doctors. By 1600 Gilbert was elected as president of the college.¹⁷ That same year Gilbert was also made Queen Elizabeth’s personal physician, which was basically a ceremonial position as Elizabeth detested doctors and would have none of their drugs.¹⁸ For this reason, Gilbert wasn’t blamed in 1603 when Queen Elizabeth died. In fact, he was hired as the personal physician for the new king, James. Unfortunately, the new gig didn’t last long as Gilbert died eight months after Queen Elizabeth, most likely from the dreaded bubonic plague.¹⁹

Despite all of Gilbert’s careful measurements, he made one significant mistake. He noticed that magnets could attract or repel, but he didn’t realize that electrics could repel too. It would take another 60 years or so before anyone noticed this effect. This brings us to a German politician with some ridiculously awful theories about gravity who found a way to chase feathers with a stinky ball on a stick.

1.2 The Stinky Ball

In 1660 a German politician and amateur scientist named Otto von Guericke noticed that electricity could repel as well as attract when he observed that feathers move toward and away from a charged stinky ball of sulfur on a stick.²⁰ * Why was Guericke playing with a ball of sulfur? Well, Guericke was the kind of scientist that Gilbert detested, a person who used science to demonstrate his philosophies concerning the nature of the heavens and Earth. In this case, the ball of sulfur was a model of Earth and static electricity was a model of gravity.

Otto von Guericke was the mayor of his hometown of Magdeburg, in what is modern-day Germany. Guericke thought politics was a grim and soul-destroying business,²¹ and was desperate to quit and focus on science. You might ask how Guericke got stuck in politics in the first place. First, Guericke came from a political family, as both his father and grandfathers were mayors, so it was considered natural for him to be a politician as well. Second, he’d survived turbulent times and felt it was his patriotic duty to protect his town.

From 1618 to 1648 there was a terrible religious war between Catholics and Protestants in Europe, now known as the Thirty Years’ War.²² In 1631 the Protestant town of Magdeburg was sacked, burned to the ground, and 25,000 out of 30,000 inhabitants perished. According to Guericke, Many thousands of innocent men, women and children were … wretchedly executed in manifold ways, so that no words can sufficiently describe it, nor tears bemoan it.²³ Guericke and his family barely escaped the attack. However, his infant son was mortally wounded in the process, and all of his servants were slaughtered in front of his young family. The next year, Guericke was invited to return as an engineer and leader to help reconstruct his city.²⁴ Thus, even after the war had ended, Guericke was still stuck with politics. In fact, he was only allowed to retire in 1677 when he was 75 years old.

Meanwhile, he tried his best to be a scientist in his free time. Guericke was fascinated by the barometer, which had been invented in 1643 to demonstrate that air has weight and pressure. Guericke was actually the first person to think of using a barometer to predict storms.²⁵ He then created the first vacuum pump, which removes air to create a vacuum. Amusingly, he made dramatic demonstrations by taking two hemispheres and evacuating the air between. The air pressure would hold them together, and then he’d have teams of horses try to pull them apart.

The vacuum pump and the barometer would turn out to be very practical devices, and his work on the vacuum pump led directly to the steam engine. But Guericke wasn’t interested in practicality—he was interested in theory. He used the vacuum pump to model the vacuum of space and the barometer to model the atmosphere in the air. What he needed was an experiment to model Earth, and for that reason he came up with a truly strange idea. He represented Earth with a ball of sulfur on a stick and modeled gravity with static electricity. Guericke never said why he used sulfur instead of glass, as it is difficult to work with and commonly smells like rotten eggs. The only thing I can think of is that volcanoes can sometimes smell sulfuric (which is due to a compound of sulfur called hydrogen sulfide), so maybe he felt that the interior of the earth was sulfuric.

Guericke placed ground sulfur in a glass vial attached to a wooden stick that he used to hold it. He heated the sulfur until it melted, cooled it, and then broke the glass. Voilà, a very stinky yellow ball on a stick. He rubbed the sphere with his hand to electrically charge it and watched as feathers stuck to the surface, using static electricity as an analogy for gravity. Fascinatingly, the equation for static electricity is of a similar form to the equation for gravity (depending on the two charges or masses divided by the distance squared), but that has nothing to do with Guericke nor his stinky model. After a while, Guericke noticed that small objects fell off the sphere. Guericke then realized that small objects didn’t just fall off the stinky sphere—they were repelled off the sphere. He spent many hours chasing feathers about the whole room with the globe wherever one wishes.²⁶ This is the first mention that electric forces can repel as well as attract.²⁷

Guericke published his theories and experiments as a book in 1672. His magnum opus was very popular and inspired the study of vacuums in Europe. Although several people were interested in his reports on electric repulsion, very few tried to recreate his self-described wonderful globe, probably due to the difficulty in creating it—not to mention its lovely odor.²⁸ However, it was his experiments with vacuums and the barometer that led to the next great development in electricity, the first electric light.

Figure 3: Guericke’s drawing of chasing feathers (labeled a) around with electrostatic repulsion

1.3 The Glowing Ball

Now we leave Germany and return to William Gilbert’s hometown of Colchester, England, where Francis Hauksbee was born in May 1660.²⁹ Francis was the youngest of five sons and an undetermined number of sisters (as no historian paid any attention to such unimportant things as sisters) of a solidly middle-class family. His father, Richard, was a draper, a person who sells cloth, as well as a local low-level politician. By his teens, Francis was following in his father’s and brothers’ footsteps to a life as a draper.

However, he was fascinated with mechanical devices and started to tinker with them in his free time. By 1701 Hauksbee figured out how to build sophisticated machines and started to sell air pumps and pneumatic engines as a side job.³⁰ At the time, a draper was good enough to sell devices, but science was reserved for the upper class. It was through his side hustle of selling mechanical devices that Hauksbee met Isaac Newton, and through this relationship that he became sufficiently famous—and connected—to write a book.

To understand Hauksbee a little better, perhaps a little backstory is needed. In 1649, the king of England, Charles I (James I’s son), was beheaded by radical Protestants (or Puritans) who took over the government.³¹ About the time of Hauksbee’s birth, England reinstated Charles’s son (also named Charles) as the king in an action called the Restoration. Charles II was invested in undoing the restrictive rules of the Puritans. He supported the arts, sciences, and, apparently, every attractive woman in London. (Charles II had at least 12 illegitimate children.)³²

In 1662 King Charles II approved of the creation of a science club called the Royal Society to promote scientific research. The Royal Society was the world’s first independent science academy, and today its journal is the world’s oldest continuously published science journal.³³ On one hand, the society and its journal were a major font of scientific development, emphasizing the scientific method, peer review, and a desire for knowledge for its own sake. Their motto "Nullius in verba roughly translates to take nobody’s word for it."³⁴ On the other hand, the society was relentlessly classist and sexist, as was common for everyone in power at the time. For example, for hundreds of years, many of the members were elected based on their social standing alone without having to demonstrate any scientific merit or ability. Also, to be published in their journal, one needed to be a member or have approval from a member of the academy. For this reason, it took over 120 years before they published the first article by a woman and 282 years before they elected their first female member.³⁵

In 1687 the Royal Society published Isaac Newton’s Philosophæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.³⁶ Publication had been delayed because the publishing house was broke due to the disappointing sale of a book on fish. Newton’s notoriously unpleasant personality and personal miserliness had not hastened its publication either.* Newton’s book is ridiculously difficult to read and has been called one of the most inaccessible books ever written.³⁷ However, as the years passed, the brilliance hidden in the text became more and more clear, and following Newton and Newtonian physics became basically a sign of English patriotism.

In 1703, 16 years after publishing his book, Newton’s rival Robert Hooke died, and Newton was nominated to be the president of the Royal Society. After surreptitiously destroying all portraits of Hooke at the Royal Society, Newton turned to improving the Royal Society and refocusing on scientific research and discussion.³⁸ For that reason Newton decided to start a series of weekly science demonstrations to emphasize the scientific nature of his position and hired Hauksbee to be his assistant and run the demonstrations. Alas for poor Hauksbee, Newton’s personality had not improved with fame, as he was still notoriously temperamental and aloof. He was described by a contemporary as having the most fearful, cautious, and suspicious temper that I ever knew.³⁹ Newton made Hauksbee’s income both meager and inconsistent. His yearly pay was determined by his productivity and was doled out, according to Royal Society notes, as he deserves.⁴⁰

At first Hauksbee performed experiments using vacuums, which included making superior vacuum pumps. Then, he learned that years earlier a French astronomer named Jean Picard had moved a mercury barometer in the dark, and the vacuum at the top produced a faint glow. When Picard had carefully shaken it up and down, it glowed even more.⁴¹ Hauksbee did everything he could to kick this experiment up a notch. (Remember, his pay depended on the quality and entertainment value of his demonstrations.) When Hauksbee added a splash of mercury to an evacuated glass globe and shook it, to his satisfaction he found that it glowed moderately bright.

Next, he put the glass globe on a table with a handle to spin it instead of shaking it, which made it look like a strange sewing machine (see figure 4). He found that when he touched the globe with his hand, the globe would glow, emitting a curious purple light, which was, according to Hauksbee, bright enough to read large print.⁴² Hauksbee realized, from his reading of Guericke, that by rubbing the spinning tube he was creating a lot of static charge. As the electric charge made the mercury vapor glow, Hauksbee actually recognized that he’d invented the first electric light bulb.

Not only had Hauksbee created the first electric light bulb, he’d also created the first powerful static electricity machine, even without the vacuum and the splash of mercury. Hauksbee made a new machine without a vacuum and studied the electrical effects of adding a semicircle of wire with threads in order to see how the electrical forces worked. However, the results were confusing to him, so he quickly moved on to work on surface tension and didn’t experiment much more with electricity or electric lights. He published a compilation of his experiments as a book in 1709 and died four years later from an unknown cause at the age of 52. The Royal Society gave his widow so little money that she was forced to live in an almshouse and go back to being a draper.⁴³

Figure 4: Hauksbee’s machine that glowed (left); Hauksbee’s drawings of how the machine would create static electricity even without mercury or a vacuum (right)

Hauksbee’s death was obviously a tragedy to his friends and family, while Newton, of course, simply found another assistant—an immigrant from France named John Desaguliers. Desaguliers wasn’t directly of much significance in terms of electricity, but indirectly, he was of utmost importance. See, Newton had a long list of enemies and used Hauksbee to keep these people from power or publication.⁴⁴ Upon Hauksbee’s death, Newton’s new assistant decided to just ignore or pretend not to understand Newton’s long-standing rivalries and, in fact, started to help some of them. One of these now-lucky individuals was a clothing dyer named Stephen Gray, who would change the course of electrical history with a single feather.

1.4 The Feather That Changed History

Stephen Gray’s early life was similar to Hauksbee’s. He was born around the same time (in 1666 instead of 1660) in the town of Canterbury, which is located 60 miles from London (whereas Hauksbee’s hometown of Colchester is around 55 miles away).⁴⁵ Gray, too, was not from the upper class, and his family was involved with clothing. However, Gray came from a lower social status than Hauksbee as Gray’s family were clothing dyers, which was backbreaking work with little profit. Like Hauksbee, Gray went into his family business even though he was fascinated with science. Gray then completed self-funded research on a wide variety of topics, including telescopes, microscopes, and a detailed attempt to capture the Canterbury ghost.⁴⁶

In 1698, Gray’s research (which was mainly in astronomy) brought him to the attention of a very powerful scientist named John Flamsteed, who was the first royal astronomer (a post created in 1675 by the busy King Charles II to work on more accurate measures of the stars for navigation).⁴⁷ However, Flamsteed partook in heated and angry battles over star maps with Newton, after which Newton basically blackballed Flamsteed and anyone connected to him from publishing at the Royal Society.⁴⁸

For example, between 1696 and 1703, Gray published nine papers at the Royal Society, but after Newton became president of the society in 1703, Gray fell silent for 18 years. In addition, Gray found his day job of dying cloth to be difficult, physically onerous, and deeply distracting from his desire to study science. In 1705 Gray apologized to Flamsteed. I have very little time and am so fatigued that I can make but a few Astronomical observations.⁴⁹ Poor Stephen Gray then threw his back out and, in July 1711, wrote a friend: Now being in the 45th year of my age think it time to consider how I shall procure a comfortable subsistence, being already so infirm as to be able to follow my employ without much more difficulty and pain than in former years, caused by a strain I received in my back some years ago.⁵⁰ Although this friend was the secretary of the Royal Society, he could not seem to help Gray.

Gray’s finances only