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The Shock of the New
A Review by Anna Godbersen

New technologies are often met with fear, suspicion, and superstition of medieval proportions. The benefits of scientific invention, even those now taken for granted in our everyday lives, were once passionately debated. This is the story of Dark Light, Linda Simon's fascinating history of the advent of electrification.

Simon examines the American public's reactions to a series of innovations in electricity: the telegraph, the incandescent bulb, the x-ray and, more ominously, the electric chair. She draws vivid characters of the inventors who furthered these technologies. Men such as Samuel Morse and Thomas Edison had to be hucksters as well as inventors, at a time when electricity was viewed as a curiosity and entertainment but not yet suitable for mass consumption. Edison in particular she portrays as larger than life: as a loner and a businessman who inspired reverence and fear in the public. Another personality in Simon's book is George Beard, a medical doctor and onetime collaborator of Edison's. He drew on and promoted the nineteenth-century practice of electrotherapy, in which a variety of common ailments such as fatigue and hysteria were treated with electric shocks. This irony, that people were ambivalent about electricity in their homes and yet allowed electrodes into their bodies (in some cases, into their vaginas or urethras) is somewhat explained by nineteenth-century beliefs such as Spiritualism. This belief held that electricity was the body's natural life force; for those who held it, only artificial electricity seemed threatening. (When Walt Whitman wrote "The Body Electric," Simon asserts, he was not being metaphorical.)

Simon uses newspaper editorials and contemporary fiction to show the awe and deep anxiety with which the public viewed men such as Edison and Beard and the electricity they wielded. Dark Light offers a compelling picture of a society dealing with immense technological change, and it reveals how attitudes toward medicine and science evolve or fade away.

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