Another good article from the ACEEE.
http://aceee.org/pubs/e094.pdf?CFID=3710536&CFTOKEN=49469457
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Stay Tuned for the Publication of My Book
I have decided to rename it. It is with the publisher. I will post as soon as it is released.
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Electrotherapy and the Early Uses of Electricity
The public had to be convinced of the safety and reliability of electricity. They worried about the physical repercussions of this unproved technology. They read about electrocutions in the papers, worried about the effects of electricity on their bodies, and the effect of electric light on their eyesight. They wondered if they were upsetting nature by harnessing electricity for the purpose of their own material gain and if they were being foolhardy to invite such a powerful force into their homes. They also had trouble finding electricians.
Edison and other inventors of that time struggled to find purposes or uses for their inventions. For example, they wondered what one would do with a telephone. It is so seamlessly integrated into our lives today that this seems a strange question; but shortly after its original invention, people couldn’t imagine needing one. They already had the telegraph for communicating with others over long distances. Why would they need a phone? For some time, it failed to capture the public’s imagination. Some people believed that the phone would work like the telegraph with operators forwarding voice messages, receiving them back, and then passing them on to the customer. Some saw them as a kind of intercom system with which to summon the servants. But, generally, a phone in the home seemed frivolous and potentially invasive. By the time the first 50,000 phones were installed they were mostly located in businesses.
Edison had a similar dilemma imagining uses for the phonograph. He struggled to think of occasions for which people would need one. Of course, he was near deaf; so it might have been harder for him to imagine than most. And as for electricity, if its purpose was simply to provide people with a replacement for gas lighting, many people wondered, why they should bother. Throughout the late nineteenth century, electric stoves and sewing machines were simply futuristic visions. Without a purpose for electricity, the public was slow to adopt it. More than thirty years after Edison invented the incandescent light bulb in 1879 and soon after installed a lighting system in a business section of Lower Manhattan, barely 10 percent of American homes were wired. Even after World War One, that percentage rose to only 20 percent.
Mostly, the press led public thought regarding these new inventions. For the newspapers, electricity and light were ways to draw readers to their pages, a curiosity about which they would want to read; but for the readers, electricity was not for everyday life. Stoking these misgivings, newspapers frequently reported electric fires and accidental electrocutions. They also published long lists of precautions for people who tried to install electricity. The journal Science wrote about a disease called photo-electric opthalmia, a disease of the eye that people got from the action of electric lights on the eyes.
Oddly, for all that it was feared as a source of energy and light, the application of electricity as a medical therapy spread rapidly, embraced enthusiastically by physicians and patients alike. They accepted electricity as a positive force in healing. “Is Electricity Life?” asked Henry Lake in the Popular Science Monthly in 1873. The question was hardly new and neither was his answer—an enthusiastic and lyrical yes. Like generations of writers who claimed that electricity was the essential animating force, Lake characterized electricity as nurturing, benign, generous, and protective. “It is the very soul of the universe,” he declared. “It permeates all space, surrounds the earth, and is found in every part of it.... It is naturally the most peaceful element in creation. It is eminently social, and nestles around the form it inhabits. Unlike many human specimens, it never desires to keep all its good to itself, but is every ready to diffuse its beneficence.”
Electrotherapy was a popular treatment for various human maladies in the 1800s. Skeptical of drugs, patients were eager to find other ways to cure illness and feel better. Physicians looking to build their practices positioned themselves as being the best professional option for administering electrotherapy, which was claimed to replenish depleted nervous systems and to cure neurasthenia, which appeared to be their terminology for depression and anxiety. One form of electrotherapy was the “electric hand” by which the physician administered electricity that flowed through his body into the patient’s body via the physician’s hand. The patient’s feet rested on a piece of copper attached to a negative electrode; the physician held the positive electrode in a sponge and moved the sponge over the patient’s body, squeezing water out of the sponge periodically to vary the current. Other treatments included baths that involved submerging patients in electrified water, after which patients attested to increased appetites, decreased digestive problems, and a feeling of tranquility. Since the physician controlled the levels of electricity, patients rarely were “cured” in one session and usually had to visit the physician frequently over a prolonged period of time to garner the results sought.
Society also saw a link between electricity, magnetism, and sexuality. The language of electricity became a rich source of metaphor for sexual prowess and erotic feelings. It was believed that electricity animated the body and the mind—that emotions, thought, and will were all somehow driven or affected by electrical energy. All the new inventions of the time, particularly electricity, threatened society’s beliefs, causing people to turn to them more fervently. Spiritualism in the later 1800s in the U.S. was strong, many believe, as a way for people to deal with the grief from losses they experienced in the aftermath of the Civil War. In their spiritual zeal, people rejected science and its discoveries.
Edison and other inventors of that time struggled to find purposes or uses for their inventions. For example, they wondered what one would do with a telephone. It is so seamlessly integrated into our lives today that this seems a strange question; but shortly after its original invention, people couldn’t imagine needing one. They already had the telegraph for communicating with others over long distances. Why would they need a phone? For some time, it failed to capture the public’s imagination. Some people believed that the phone would work like the telegraph with operators forwarding voice messages, receiving them back, and then passing them on to the customer. Some saw them as a kind of intercom system with which to summon the servants. But, generally, a phone in the home seemed frivolous and potentially invasive. By the time the first 50,000 phones were installed they were mostly located in businesses.
Edison had a similar dilemma imagining uses for the phonograph. He struggled to think of occasions for which people would need one. Of course, he was near deaf; so it might have been harder for him to imagine than most. And as for electricity, if its purpose was simply to provide people with a replacement for gas lighting, many people wondered, why they should bother. Throughout the late nineteenth century, electric stoves and sewing machines were simply futuristic visions. Without a purpose for electricity, the public was slow to adopt it. More than thirty years after Edison invented the incandescent light bulb in 1879 and soon after installed a lighting system in a business section of Lower Manhattan, barely 10 percent of American homes were wired. Even after World War One, that percentage rose to only 20 percent.
Mostly, the press led public thought regarding these new inventions. For the newspapers, electricity and light were ways to draw readers to their pages, a curiosity about which they would want to read; but for the readers, electricity was not for everyday life. Stoking these misgivings, newspapers frequently reported electric fires and accidental electrocutions. They also published long lists of precautions for people who tried to install electricity. The journal Science wrote about a disease called photo-electric opthalmia, a disease of the eye that people got from the action of electric lights on the eyes.
Oddly, for all that it was feared as a source of energy and light, the application of electricity as a medical therapy spread rapidly, embraced enthusiastically by physicians and patients alike. They accepted electricity as a positive force in healing. “Is Electricity Life?” asked Henry Lake in the Popular Science Monthly in 1873. The question was hardly new and neither was his answer—an enthusiastic and lyrical yes. Like generations of writers who claimed that electricity was the essential animating force, Lake characterized electricity as nurturing, benign, generous, and protective. “It is the very soul of the universe,” he declared. “It permeates all space, surrounds the earth, and is found in every part of it.... It is naturally the most peaceful element in creation. It is eminently social, and nestles around the form it inhabits. Unlike many human specimens, it never desires to keep all its good to itself, but is every ready to diffuse its beneficence.”
Electrotherapy was a popular treatment for various human maladies in the 1800s. Skeptical of drugs, patients were eager to find other ways to cure illness and feel better. Physicians looking to build their practices positioned themselves as being the best professional option for administering electrotherapy, which was claimed to replenish depleted nervous systems and to cure neurasthenia, which appeared to be their terminology for depression and anxiety. One form of electrotherapy was the “electric hand” by which the physician administered electricity that flowed through his body into the patient’s body via the physician’s hand. The patient’s feet rested on a piece of copper attached to a negative electrode; the physician held the positive electrode in a sponge and moved the sponge over the patient’s body, squeezing water out of the sponge periodically to vary the current. Other treatments included baths that involved submerging patients in electrified water, after which patients attested to increased appetites, decreased digestive problems, and a feeling of tranquility. Since the physician controlled the levels of electricity, patients rarely were “cured” in one session and usually had to visit the physician frequently over a prolonged period of time to garner the results sought.
Society also saw a link between electricity, magnetism, and sexuality. The language of electricity became a rich source of metaphor for sexual prowess and erotic feelings. It was believed that electricity animated the body and the mind—that emotions, thought, and will were all somehow driven or affected by electrical energy. All the new inventions of the time, particularly electricity, threatened society’s beliefs, causing people to turn to them more fervently. Spiritualism in the later 1800s in the U.S. was strong, many believe, as a way for people to deal with the grief from losses they experienced in the aftermath of the Civil War. In their spiritual zeal, people rejected science and its discoveries.
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