Electric Universe Read online

  ALSO BY DAVID BODANIS

  The Body Book

  The Secret House

  Web of Words

  The Secret Garden

  The Secret Family

  E=mc2

  Copyright © 2005 by David Bodanis

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com

  Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc., New York, in 2005

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bodanis, David.

  Electric universe : how electricity switched on the modern world / David Bodanis.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: New York : Crown Publishers, c2005.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Electricity. 2. Force and energy. I. Title.

  QC522.B64 2006

  537–dc22  2005052916

  ISBN-13 9780307335982

  ISBN-10 0307335984

  Ebook ISBN 9781400050604

  v3.0_r1

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  ALSO BY DAVID BODANIS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  INTRODUCTION

  PART I

  WIRES

  1. The Frontiersman and the Dandy

  Albany, 1830, and Washington, D.C., 1836

  2. Aleck and Mabel

  Boston, 1875

  3. Thomas and J.J.

  New York, 1878

  PART II

  WAVES

  4. Faraday’s God

  London, 1831

  5. Atlantic Storms

  HMS Agamemnon, 1858, and Scotland, 1861

  PART III

  WAVE MACHINES

  6. A Solitary Man

  Karlsruhe, Germany, 1887

  7. Power in the Air

  Suffolk Coast, 1939, and Bruneval, France, 1942

  8. Power Unleashed

  Hamburg, 1943

  PART IV

  A COMPUTER BUILT OF ROCK

  9. Turing

  Cambridge, 1936, and Bletchley Park, 1942

  10. Turing’s Legacy

  New Jersey, 1947

  PART V

  THE BRAIN AND BEYOND

  11. Wet Electricity

  Plymouth, England, 1947

  12. Electric Moods

  Indianapolis, 1972, and Today

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

  MR. AMP, MR. VOLT, AND MR. WATT

  NOTES

  GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  To Sam and Sophie, my beloved children

  To the city of Chicago, where what wisdom I’ve been able to grant them long ago began

  And to Natasha, who taught me—when I needed it most—how to navigate without a map

  “Mysterious affair, electricity.”

  —SAMUEL BECKETT, “Theatre II”

  INTRODUCTION

  When my father was a little boy, in a village in Poland before the First World War, an electricity blackout wouldn’t have been especially important. There were no cars, which meant there were no traffic lights to fail, and there were no refrigerators—just blocks of ice or cool rooms—so food wouldn’t suddenly spoil either. A very few rich people would find their electric lights failing if the generators stopped working in their homes, and the single telegraph line that passed through the town might stop operating, but by and large daily life would continue as it had before.

  By the time my father’s family had migrated to Canada, and then to Chicago in the early 1920s, a big power outage would have been different. People would still have been able to buy things—there were no credit cards that depended on computer verification—but the streetcars that workers rode to the factories wouldn’t run. The telephones that offices depended on wouldn’t work either, and the skyscrapers that the city was so proud of would quickly have become inaccessible, or at least their upper floors would have, as their elevators failed too. It still wouldn’t have been a complete catastrophe. Farm crops could still be raised—there weren’t many tractors—and coal-fired trains and steam-driven ships would have kept the city pretty well supplied.

  Today, though? I live in London now, where people can be pretty phlegmatic, but I still wouldn’t want to be around for a complete blackout. Most radios and TVs plug in these days, so it would be difficult to find out whether your kids’ school was still open. Your cell phone might still operate, but with no way of recharging your battery you’d be pretty careful about using it. Driving the kids to school on the off chance it was open would be too much of a gamble, for gas stations depend on underground storage tanks, and until the blackout ended, stations wouldn’t be able to use their electrically operated pumps to bring up more fuel to sell to anyone in the city. You couldn’t stock up on groceries—no credit cards working—nor could you get more cash, for ATMs depend on electrically run computers too.

  Within a week the city would really have broken down. Police stations would be isolated with their phones not working, and pretty soon their radio batteries would lose their charge as well; no one could call ambulances, for their radios or phone links would be out too. A few people might try walking to hospitals, but there wouldn’t be much there: no X rays, no refrigerated vaccines, no refrigerated blood, no ventilation, no lighting.

  Going to the airport to try to escape wouldn’t help, for with backup generators not working, the airport’s radars would have shut down, nor could planes take off on manual control, for any fuel that remained in underground tanks couldn’t be pumped up. As the blackout spread, the nation’s ports would have closed, with no electricity to run the cranes that moved their large containers and no way to check electronic inventories. The military might try to guard fuel convoys, but with their own vehicles running low on fuel, that wouldn’t last long. If the blackout was worldwide, isolation would intensify. The Internet and all e-mail would have gone down very quickly; next the phone lines; finally, the last television and radio broadcasts would end.

  Starvation would probably begin in the dense cities of Asia, especially with no air conditioning at food warehouses; within a few weeks of a complete blackout almost all the world’s cities and suburbs would be unlivable. There would be fighting, pretty desperate, for food and fuel, and with a world population of 6 billion, few people would have a chance of surviving.

  But what if it were not only our supply of electricity that failed? What if the very existence of electrical forces stopped? All the Earth’s oceans would gush upward and evaporate as the electrical bond between water molecules broke apart. DNA strands within our body would no longer hold together. Any air-breathing organism that was still intact would begin to suffocate, for without electrical attraction, the oxygen molecules in air would bounce uselessly off the hemoglobin molecules in blood.

  The ground itself would open up and begin to melt as the electrical forces that hold the silicates and other substances of our planet together let go. Mountains would collapse into the voids left where the continental plates had torn apart. In the last moments, a few living beings would see the sun itself switch off, as our star’s electrically carried light abruptly stopped and the world’s very last day turned to night.

  Why doesn’t any of this happen? The force of electricity is very powerful, and has been operating nonstop for more than 13 billion years. But it’s also utterly hidden, crammed deep with
in all rocks and stars and atoms. The force is like two Olympian arm-wrestlers, whose struggle is unnoticed because their straining hands barely move. There are almost always equal amounts of positive and negative electric charge within everything around us—so well balanced that although their effects are everywhere, their existence remains unseen.

  For long eons it remained like this—as galaxies evolved and planets formed, as continents and trees and grasses appeared on Earth. Occasionally there must have been brief sightings in the past. Our australopithecine ancestors would have noticed abrupt bursts of lightning, as would early humans. But as soon as it appeared, this force would quickly have returned to the invisible realm from which it had come. For most of history, humans simply stumbled around it, unaware.

  In one of his writings, Isaac Bashevis Singer imagines a peasant in medieval Ireland who takes off his flaxen tunic one night and notices bright sparks leaping from the fabric. If Singer’s peasant called in the village priest and other wise elders to see it happen the next night, they would be unlikely to notice anything: static electric sparks usually appear only in dry air, and Ireland is wet. No one would believe what he’d seen; no one would have been able to examine it further. Even in dry desert countries, dust or sand could make scattered sparks seem to appear and disappear in purely random ways.

  There were many fragmentary efforts to penetrate this hidden world, from classical Greek times on, but even into the mid-1700s there was little true knowledge. The breakthrough came with the work of a conveniently vain Italian investigator, Alessandro Volta, in the 1790s. It would be a great honor, he felt, to locate the portal from which this mysterious “electricity” emerged, and after much effort he realized where he should search. He found that if he pressed a coin-shaped copper disc against one side of his tongue, and a zinc disc against the other, and then touched the tips of the two coins together, a tingling sensation would race across his tongue. He’d located the world’s first steadily operating “battery”—in his mouth.

  Volta soon found that any two metals would do the trick so long as they were separated by a small amount of saliva, brine, or other corrosive liquid. He didn’t know why this worked, or how the brine was making extra electrons appear on one of the metals, but he could send the tingling spray of electrons along a laboratory bench through a wire and was getting famous just for describing it, and that was enough. The stuff that came out of this battery rushed forward like water in a river, so it was called an “electric current.”

  As the Victorian era dawned, that was still most of our knowledge: two metals, when positioned near each other, could sometimes produce a sparking current within a wire connecting them. It seemed a weak, merely curious phenomenon. But it was the first useful door into a world that had been sealed and hidden.

  In this book I show what has happened in the two centuries since humankind opened that door, which took a mere two centuries. The first part looks at the Victorian researchers who had only a few tenuous glimpses of electricity, yet created devices never before imagined. There were telephones and telegraphs and lightbulbs; roller coasters and fast streetcars—and ever more electric motors powering them all. There was even an electrical fax machine operating efficiently in France in 1859—before the American Civil War.

  The world started to change. The new wave of electrical technologies helped lead to the modern corporation and to votes for women, to suburbs stretching far from cities, and tabloid newspapers, and, influenced by crisp telegraph messages, to a new Hemingway-style prose. One exuberant telephone executive apparently remarked that Americans had become the first people who would interrupt sex to take a phone call.

  Things might have stopped there, but in the mid-1800s two of England’s greatest scientists opened the door to electricity’s domain a crack wider. They found that the electricity sizzling through wires doesn’t move along on its own. There’s something else, a pervasive rush of unseen waves, that pushes it along. In the second part of the book, I show that all the space around us—from the air above to our flesh within—is filled with millions of such flying, invisible waves.

  Several researchers who heard of these waves were so awed by this knowledge that they became more confirmed than ever in their religious faith; others saw in these hitherto unsuspected waves a mechanism by which extrasensory perception and other psychic phenomena could take place.

  The idea that our world is permeated by invisible waves was so strange that it took a giant engineering project, deep under the cold waters of the Atlantic, to begin to convince the majority of researchers that it was true. Before the nineteenth century was out, a determined experimentalist found ways to release these waves from inside copper wires and send them flying free. This discovery led to the first experiments with cell phones (and a primitive mobile phone was operating on London’s Portland Place in 1879, outside the present-day BBC Broadcasting House). A few decades afterward, television and radar took shape as well, hitching a ride with the same invisible waves. In the second and third parts of the book, I show how those waves were used: first for peace, then for war.

  In the twentieth century the door opened even further. A few physicists were finally able to look directly at the face of electricity. The younger ones were awed by what they saw; many of the older ones—including even the great Einstein—pulled back, saying that what was now revealed was something they could never accept.

  What the researchers had found was that the atoms inside us don’t really look like miniature solar systems, with electrons orbiting like miniature planets around a tiny sun. Rather, these electrons—which are central to how electricity affects us—can wildly teleport from one location to another. It was the only partially predictable nature of these jumps that Einstein was thinking of when he famously said, “God does not play dice with the universe.” (And it was to that dictum that his friend Niels Bohr exasperatedly replied, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do!”)

  That jumping of electrons within us would be as if the Earth were an electron that could instantly shoot away from the sun and take up a position hovering above the planet Jupiter. Families having breakfast in Duluth, Minnesota, would look out their window, see an Extremely Large Red Spot, and groan as they grabbed hold of the table, knowing what was likely to happen next. As they held the plates down, they’d suffer through another series of jolts, as the Earth leaped elsewhere in space—possibly returning them to their original orbit, but possibly flinging them to a distant solar system for more adventures and shattered crockery.

  These new findings might have remained just a laboratory curiosity, but the twentieth century brought the world’s gravest wars, and in those times of emergency anyone who promised to explain how charged electrons moved stood a chance of receiving extra funds for his investigation. In the fourth part of the book I show how these wild teleporting jumps came to be used in the century’s first huge thinking machine, and ultimately in the microchips now operating daily inside mobile phones, passenger jets, oil well pumps, and all the other devices that our imagined blackout showed are so important.

  Electricity also operates in our own private thinking machines—the human brain—and the book ends with a section showing how this was discovered, and how it led to pills such as Prozac, which, when swallowed, actually turn into liquid electricity that can shape our very mood. We use electricity to sense every person and sight around us; anyone we touch or kiss is forever beyond our reach, with glowing electrons from our fingers or lips always getting in the way of direct contact.

  It’s a wondrous topic, but a complex one. To keep the main text from being loaded with details and qualifications, notes at the end of the book give more backing for the various explanations, as well as derivations of such curios as the fact that invisible waves stream out from our brains with a wavelength of about 200 miles; beyond that, there’s a website—davidbodanis.com—that looks into the science and history a little further.

  The stories along the way are as much about rel
igion, love, and cheating as they are about impersonal science or technology. They take us from Hamburg cellars during a World War II firestorm to the mind of Alan Turing, brilliant computer inventor, hounded by the authorities of the very country he’d saved; from the slum-born Michael Faraday, slurred by his contemporaries because of his religious faith (yet who used his faith to become the first to see electric forces weaving invisibly through space); to a pampered artist, Samuel Morse, who eagerly ran for mayor of New York on a platform of persecuting Catholics, and who learned more about how telegraphs operate than he ever cared to admit, from a frontiersman who couldn’t believe anyone would wish to patent such an obvious idea.

  There’s an exuberant twenty-something immigrant to America, Alexander Bell, desperate to capture the love of a deaf teenage student, and there’s the forty-something Robert Watson Watt, desperate to escape from a boring marriage and the tedium of 1930s Slough. There’s Otto Loewi, who wakes up one Easter eve realizing he has solved the problem of how electricity works in our body, yet in the morning, agonizingly, can’t read the scrawled explanations he jotted beside his bed during the night; there’s the boy from rural Scotland, James Clerk Maxwell, who was treated as a fool for years by bullies at his elementary school, yet who became the nineteenth century’s greatest scientific theorist, able to envision the inner structure of the universe in a way that scientists of a later era would realize was profoundly true. All of these stories illuminate how the immense force of electricity was gradually seen: how it was led out from its hidden domain—and what we, imperfect humans, have made of the enhanced powers it has granted.

  PART I

  WIRES

  When the universe was very young, in the first moments after the Big Bang, powerful charged electrons began to pour out of the swirling furnace that filled empty space. Many became part of simple hydrogen atoms that tumbled through the cosmos and ended up within huge stars.

  In their long sojourn within the stars, and then even more when the stars blasted apart, multitudes of those simple atoms were squeezed together with such force that larger atoms were created.