Electric Universe Read online

  Metals such as copper, iron, and silver were born.

  For eons these metals, too, floated through space. In time they fell toward a new solar system, and became part of ore deposits on the North American continent. They were joined by metal atoms that had been created in other distant starbursts. Hidden deep inside each atom, as the ore lay buried, powerful electron charges remained.

  Mountains rose and fell. Giant reptiles hunted in fern forests; ecosystems changed, and giant mammals hunted in coniferous and broad-leaf forests. Small groups of arrow-using humans arrived from Asia; thousands of years later, more humans arrived, on giant floating vessels from Europe and Africa. There were cruel frontier wars, and new settlements arose. The soil was turned over for planting, and probed for metal ore. The hidden electrical charges, unchanged for billions of years, were about to be released.

  1

  The Frontiersman and the Dandy

  ALBANY, 1830, AND WASHINGTON, D.C., 1836

  Joseph Henry was a strapping, rawboned American from the distant reaches of the frontier state of New York, who by the age of thirty had left jobs as a handyman (too boring), a builder (too low paid), a metal worker (too hot), and then, most disastrously, a surveyor, where he’d let himself be talked into leading a crew for several winter months through the forests toward the Canadian border (far, far too cold). In 1826, freshly back from the surveying and miraculously undamaged by frostbite, he heard about a position at a school in his native town of Albany. The salary would be low, and as a new hire Henry would be stuck with teaching elementary arithmetic along with other topics. But the classrooms would be warm—so he nabbed the new job in an instant.

  He had dozens of farm boys to keep quiet—boys expert at spitballs and pencil jabs—but he knew what would keep them happy. Boys like building stuff, and the bigger the better. He’d just give them something really, really big to build.

  The new field of electricity would be a good place to hunt for an idea, he decided, for it was an area he’d long been intrigued by in a casual, self-educated way. The word covered a whole range of effects, from small sparks of static to the giant lightning bolts investigated, famously, by Philadelphia’s best-known retired printer, Benjamin Franklin. It was interesting stuff, for it always seemed to involve a strange sort of sparking substance. No one knew much more about what it actually was, though—but Henry had just heard an intriguing hint.

  Not many European science journals made it to Albany, but one that did, months late—after the usual long ocean voyage and the wait for the ice on the Hudson to melt—described the extraordinary experiment of a recently demobilized British artillery officer, William Sturgeon.

  When Sturgeon had taken a piece of iron and wrapped a coil of wire around it, nothing much had happened. That was fair enough. But when he’d gone on and connected the wire to a battery so that Volta’s mysterious “electric” current sparked through the wire, the ordinary iron had seemed to come alive. It had turned into a strong magnet that pulled other pieces of iron toward itself, as if an invisible force were jumping from the wire into the iron. Switch off the battery and everything stopped; the original lump of iron became inert, and what it had lifted toward itself fell off. It was no longer magnetized.

  Sturgeon didn’t know what to make of this discovery, but Henry knew exactly what to do with it. His boys were suffering a general winter restlessness, and this amazing toy is what he could use to keep their attention. The boys were good with their hands, and liked solid physical things, as their parents did too: most of the wooden houses around Albany were newly built, and it was often the settlers themselves who had done the building. If he could make the electrical magnet really huge, he’d have them all on his side.

  Creating one of Volta’s batteries to power the whole contraption wasn’t too hard, for there was plenty of metal ore available, either locally or from the big ports to the East. Henry was a fast worker, and by 1827 he had duplicated Sturgeon’s work, creating an electromagnet that could lift nine pounds. The boys in his classroom wrapped still more coils of wire around the lump of iron. The battery was switched on. The wrapped chunk of iron could now lift more than twenty pounds. Henry did yet more wrapping, and when the coils of wire got so close together that they touched and start crackling, he simply asked his new bride for her petticoats, enlisted her to help cut them into strips, and used the cloth to insulate the copper wires so they could be wrapped even more tightly together.

  By 1830, there on the edge of the American frontier, he had succeeded in building a small electromagnet that could lift 750 pounds. The schoolkids loved it, and no doubt asked some of their friends—still out on the farms—to come by to watch this marvel. Henry was proud of it too, but for a deeper reason. He was a deeply religious man and had always suspected that God had created marvels not visible to ordinary eyes. With enough ingenuity, though, we could magnify and reveal God’s hidden work.

  Henry kept on going. Before he was done, he had wrapped a small chunk of iron so tightly with wire that when the battery was switched on, that small chunk lifted more than 1,500 pounds—the weight of several big blacksmith anvils. Just so everyone could see, he hoisted the whole thing up on a sturdy scaffolding. Disconnect the battery, and with an almighty crash—“This never fails to produce a great sensation,” Henry wrote—all that weight would come plummeting down.

  There are times when it pays to worry about underlying explanations, and there are other times when good honest tinkering is the best way forward. Future researchers would learn that the atoms we’re made of aren’t solid little ball bearings, but that parts of them are electrically charged and can be torn off. Those torn-off bits are called electrons, and researchers by the end of the 1800s came to believe that they were what rolled forward inside a wire, and it was the power of those charged electrons that gave an electric current its strength. When an electric cable gets cut open in a storm, the sparks that spray out are a sign of the streams of electrons that were inside the cable. Within a phone wire, electrons are rolling forward, and inside a powerful searchlight, even more electrons are moving.

  Henry himself would become a big part of the research leading up to those findings: in years to come he became recognized as one of the greatest American physicists of the nineteenth century, ending up as director of the Smithsonian. But at this point, fairly young and still stuck in Albany, he knew he wasn’t going to arrive at much of an explanation of all the lifting and banging his electromagnets could produce.

  Instead he invented the telegraph. It was easy enough. He just lengthened the wire that stretched from his battery to the electromagnet. The electrons that poured out from the metals in the battery were powerful enough to seemingly hurtle themselves along. Rather than keep the battery right next to the electromagnet when he turned it on, he could carry it to the next room, or down the hall, or even downstairs. The mysterious electric force would squirt along from his battery through the wire, and turn on the electromagnet waiting at the end of the wire. Any lump of iron next to it would be tugged close.

  It would have been a pretty galumphy telegraph if he’d had it lift up and then drop giant chunks of metal every time he wanted to send a single letter of the alphabet. Instead, Henry went back to using a tiny electromagnet, even slimmer than the ones the British officer had created. Right next to it he put something resembling a small, clickable castanet, like a little metal tongue. Turn on the battery and a current ran down the wire, the electromagnet powered up, and it pulled the castanet toward itself. You heard a click. Turn off the battery and the electromagnet let go. You heard another click as the castanet went back. Henry realized it would be easy to communicate just by agreeing that different arrangements of clicks would represent different letters. The electric charges that had been dormant so long in the ancient metals was now coming out, to power this “click.”

  The Albany schoolboys loved the new invention, especially when Henry let them get rid of the castanet and use the ringer of a bell inst
ead. When one of the kids switched the battery on and off, his friends in the next room or even down the hall would hear the ringer sound in short bursts, just as fast as his hand could move.

  At this point a very different sort of individual entered the field, someone who would have his own ideas about how these electric discoveries could be used. Samuel Morse had studied fine arts at Phillips and Yale, and in his early twenties he was living off his parents’ money in London. He seemed to be just another ethereal art student, explaining, in one of his many letters home, that he was asking for more money not because of his difficulties in painting a portrait that actually looked much like any of his sitters, but rather because—and one has to be honest here—he was too good for even the refined British to recognize: “…had I no higher thoughts than being a first-rate portrait-painter,” he explained to his mother, “I would have chosen a far different profession. My ambition is to be among those who shall revive the splendor of the fifteenth century; to rival the genius of a Raphael, a Michelangelo, or a Titian….”

  But underneath that genteel pose, Morse was raving. His father, an evangelical Calvinist, had brought him up to believe that America was being destroyed by secret conspiracies, and when Morse returned to America and found he still couldn’t make a living, he took his father’s ideas and went further. The awful powers that were attacking America—and keeping deserving artists from commercial success—were ones he alone had now identified. There were Negroes and Jews and other undesirables, of course, but behind them all were the Catholics, and behind them were the Jesuits—secret, armed Jesuits, fanning out from their missions across the United States, storing guns in Irish nunneries, and all under the control of the Emperor of Austria.

  When his pamphlets were ignored, he took it as a further sign of the conspiracy, so in 1836 Morse ran for mayor of New York, with straightforward slogans to persecute Catholics. “We have to resist the MOMENTOUS evil that threatens us,” he wrote. “Will you not awake to the reality of your danger? Up! Up! I beseech you. To your posts!”

  He lost, of course, and then he started sulking, and then—holed up in an isolated aerie in one of the highest buildings overlooking the recently founded New York University—he worked out what needed to be done. The Jesuits were controlling America through invisible forces, so it was necessary that Morse—and all other good Americans—develop a similar means of fighting back. Something that could stretch everywhere and flash information along at the speed of electricity would be just about ideal.

  Luckily, on a ship voyage from London not long before, he had overheard one passenger discuss some of the ways electricity was being used for such long-distance contacts. It was pretty well known. Joseph Henry was teaching at the College of New Jersey (soon to be renamed Princeton University) by then, and some news of his work had been publicized. There also had been similar trials in Europe. Charles Wheatstone and William Cooke in England, for example, had stretched a wire from the train terminal at Euston in London to a train depot at a strange round building in Camden, over a mile away. When they connected the Euston end of the wire to a battery, an electromagnet in Camden got switched on. (The local residents loved it, for the single telegraph wire replaced the piercing whistle and whappingly loud drums that had been used to communicate arrivals and departures before.)

  Now in his New York retreat, after struggling to make a telegraph of his own work efficiently—he suffered from as great a lack of ability in his mechanical tinkering as in his artistic efforts—Morse almost gave up in frustration. He was certain that there had to be an easier way, so he decided to get help from someone who actually knew how these mysterious electrical substances operated and could explain it to him.

  Which is how, probably on a spring day in 1838, Joseph Henry found a surprisingly impassioned ex-painter at the door of his Princeton office.

  Henry was as easygoing at Princeton as he had been in Albany. The students liked him. By now he was stretching telegraph cables for more than a mile around the Princeton campus, and students regularly helped him in the work. Henry had often declared that patents were the sort of thing that had held Europe back. He happily explained to Morse how his system worked—the batteries and the electromagnet and the spools of wire. In America, a young and growing country, it was right and proper, Henry believed, for all good citizens to share what they learned.

  When Morse left Princeton, he knew what was best for one good citizen at least. He’d always been keen to patent anything he could—while still an artist he’d struggled with an impractical marble-carving device—and he patented the information he’d picked up from Henry’s work, as well as techniques he’d learned from reading European reports.

  The idea of using a simple code for the telegraph was already surprisingly widespread. The great German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who’d strung a telegraph along his Göttingen campus in 1833, had set up his receiving electromagnet to tug a needle either to the left or the right. If it shifted to the right, that meant a letter such as e was intended. If it shifted to the left, that could mean the letter a. Two shifts to the right might signify an i, while other combinations of left and right signified other letters, all the way to the least common letters, such as x and z. Other researchers regularly came up with similar codes, for it made sense to have the simplest signals stand for the most common letters, and more-complex signals stand for rarer letters. (It was possible to find which letters were most common simply by going to a print shop and looking. Typesetters tended to accumulate big boxes of type bearing the letter e, since they had to use them so often; they had only smaller boxes for the rarely demanded q, x, and z.)

  It took Morse several years—and judicious financial involvement with key members of Congress—before he secured enough government funds actually to build a large, working prototype of his telegraph device. In its first week of commercial operation in 1844, connecting Washington with Baltimore, it took in just thirteen and a half cents in paid traffic, but in the next year an expanded line was taking in over a hundred dollars each week, and within a decade Morse was one of the wealthier men in North America.

  Did it matter that he had largely stolen the idea for his invention? Telegraphs were already operating in England and Germany, and in America other inventors were close behind them. Someone else would no doubt have helped jump-start the American system if Morse hadn’t done it.

  Although divine justice didn’t keep Morse from earthly riches, it did strike in another way. Joseph Henry had a satisfying life, at ease with his students and respected by his peers. Morse, however, having engaged in so much subterfuge, spent much of the next three decades stuck in litigation trying to defend the patents he’d railroaded through in his name. (There was one embarrassing moment when his lawyer was forced to announce to the Supreme Court that a notebook which honestly, truly, had Morse’s original handwritten notes on the telegraph, had mysteriously disappeared in a fire to which there were no witnesses—shortly before it was supposed to be shown to the court.)

  The invention had other unexpected consequences as well. Before the telegraph, a horseman carrying a message between two cities had to transport the bulk of perhaps one thousand pounds of animal over rocks, muddy ruts, and the occasional fallen tree. That took plenty of food for the two mammals involved, as well as the bulky technologies of saddle, stables, horseshoes, and the like. With few exceptions, information at the start of the nineteenth century traveled at about the same rate it had managed in ancient Sumer.

  A thin copper telegraph wire, however, carrying the same message, merely had to move an electric current composed of those mysterious “sparks.” No one in Henry’s day knew that those sparks had something to do with electrons, which weigh less than a millionth of an ounce each. But his contemporaries did realize that what was in the wires was much smaller—and moved a lot faster—than anything in the ordinary world. A battery small enough to fit in a thimble could power a message great distances and at great speed.

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nbsp; The world changed. Financial news could now be sent instantly between cities, and—along with enhanced opportunities for insider trading—a new style of corporation arose. Offices in far distant cities could be easily linked. Train networks became more complex, for telegraphs strung beside the rail lines could synchronize departures and arrivals across entire countries.

  There were psychological shifts as well. Before electricity became widespread, time had been something local, changeable, personal. New York and Baltimore, for example, had kept their clock systems several minutes apart, since they were at slightly different longitudes, and noon arrived a few minutes later in Baltimore than it did in New York. Each city was a separate world, so it was fair to think that each individual, strolling here or there, or working on this or that isolated farm, was part of a similarly separate world. But now those worlds could be synchronized and, wherever you were, you knew where you fit in the tight, universal “control” of clocked time.

  It was an early form of globalization. As the telegraph spread into central and eastern Europe, millions of peasants were forced to take on last names, the better for newly enlarged government bureaucracies to educate, tax, or enlist them. In the past, the quick movement of mass armies had been possible only through the occasional genius of a Napoleon or the temporary enthusiasm of revolutionary citizens. By the mid-1800s, however, tens of thousands of bewildered military recruits regularly found that their marches or train transport, synchronized by telegraph, delivered them as close as possible to where thousands of armed enemy soldiers were, unfortunately, similarly being assembled.

  Newspapers stopped being journals of slow discussion or courtly gossip, and started depending on featured foreign correspondents. Diplomatic crises had less time to calm down, as foreign-office lassitude was regularly broken by “urgent,” just-arrived messages. Mass political movements sprang up faster than before; new factory techniques spread more quickly as well.