The Body Electric & then Some :)

Seems electricity and it's impact on us has a long and storied history as seen by this excellent Aeon essay penned by Iwan Rhys Morus titled Bodies Electric.

Let’s start with Sir Isaac Newton. In successive editions of his Opticks (first published in 1704), Newton was in the habit of adding what he called ‘queries’, or questions, that in fact tended to be rather more like magisterial statements of his views on contentious issues in science. ‘Is not Animal Motion perform’d by the Vibrations of this Medium,’ Newton ‘asked’ in one of these, ‘excited in the Brain by the power of the Will…?’ He meant the ether, but to many of his followers that meant electricity too. Experimenters playing with this mysterious new power knew that it did strange things to their bodies as well. It could make their hair stand on end and attract bits of feather or scraps of cloth to their fingertips. The natural philosopher Stephen Gray demonstrated how this strange power of attraction and repulsion could act at a distance by suspending a child in the air and passing the electricity from his generator through its body.

It gets better.

Electricity was about sex as well. In one popular demonstration, a young woman stood on a stool holding the chain from an electrical machine. As long as no one touched her all was fine, but when a gentleman was challenged to give her a kiss the sparks flew. Then there was medical entrepreneur James Graham’s Celestial Bed. In 1781, based at his Temple of Hymen on fashionable Pall Mall in London, Graham charged wealthy childless clients £50 a night to have sex in the electrified dome and forged a link between electricity, sex and fertility that would persist throughout the Victorian era.

Read the article, you'll learn a lot about juice and how it relates to us rubes. :)