How electricity came to be: its innovators and their sparks

FLEET FIRE; THOMAS EDISON AND THE PIONEERS OF THE ELECTRIC REVOLUTION

By L.J. Davis

Arcade, $25.95, 360 pages

REVIEWED BY WOODY WEST

And then there was the time Thomas Alva Edison electrocuted an elephant. Intentionally.

Edison’s zapping of the elephant followed an associate’s electrocution of a dog, then a calf and then a horse. The quadruped slaughter was intended by Edison to demonstrate the lethality of Alternating Current, which his competitor, the talented George Westinghouse, was using in his lighting systems; Edison was a proponent of less economically efficient Direct Current to which he had committed resources and reputation, and he was frantic to discredit Westinghouse.

The lurid electrocution episode in the late 1880s is but one of the many illuminating waysides in L.J. Davis’s “Fleet Fire” about the coming of electricity. The book relies on secondary sources and, as a signpost of the writerly future, also lists two pages of websites he has used. The literature on the principals in these pages is vast, and this book could have been a cut-and-paste job in the hands of a less competent writer.

Mr. Davis, however, brings to the account the novelist’s grasp of character and context and the journalist’s eye for the pungent and anecdotal — in both of which callings he has credentials. As a result, this is a coherent and informative narrative.The author provides a primer for those of us who are toward the doltish end of scientific literacy:

The ancients were aware only of magnetism, one of the four basic forces of the universe ? along with gravity, weak force and electricity. Eventually, in 1600, William Gilbert, the personal physician to Elizabeth I, published”De Magnete,” coining the terms magnetism and electricity.

A century and a bit later, Londoner Stephen Gray managed to transmit electricity along 765 feet of thread. At mid-century, a Dutch physicist named Pieter van Musschenbroek was able to store electricity in a foil-wrapped jar of water, a device that become known as the Leyden Jar — the first battery. “For years thereafter, French kings amused themselves by using the Leyden jar … to shock long lines of hand-holding clergymen, courtiers, and guardsmen, all of whom gratifyingly leapt into the air at the same time.”

It is a crowded cast of often improbable characters: There were inspired tinkerers, geniuses half-demented in their obsessions; there were entrepreneurs who barely understood the principles with which they were wrestling; there were theoreticians and engineers, not often embodied in the same individual duringthe “golden age of invention.”

The modern era begins with Ben Franklin, that indefatigably curious fellow and one of the sanest in the pantheon of what Mr. Davis calls the “Electric Revolution.”The mythic tale of kite, key and lightning in 1747 is reprised in sophisticated detail. Franklin both “reflected and shaped the intense practicality that was becoming an American national characteristic,” writes Mr. Davis.

Electricity “made nothing,” so Franklin abandoned his experiments; electricity baffled him, writes Mr. Davis, and he didn’t realize its possibilities.

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