Here Are the Real (and Freaky) Experiments That Inspired 'Frankenstein'.

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Giovanni Aldini's experiments with a human corpse.
Credit: Wellcome Collection/ CC BY-SA 4.0
▼ On Jan. 17 1803, a young man named George Forster was hanged for murderat Newgate prison in London. After his execution, as often happened, his body was carried ceremoniously across the city to the Royal College of Surgeons, where it would be publicly dissected. What actually happened was rather more shocking than simple dissection though. Forster was going to be electrified.
The experiments were to be carried out by the Italian natural philosopher Giovanni Aldini, the nephew of Luigi Galvani, who discovered " animal electricity" in 1780, and for whom the field of galvanism is named. With Forster on the slab before him, Aldini and his assistants started to experiment. The Times newspaper reported:
On the first application of the process to the face, the jaw of the deceased criminal began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process, the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion.
It looked to some spectators "as if the wretched man was on the eve of being restored to life."
By the time Aldini was experimenting on Forster the idea that there was some peculiarly intimate relationship between electricity and the processes of life was at least a century old. Isaac Newton speculated  along such linesin the early 1700s. In 1730, the English astronomer and dyer Stephen Gray demonstrated the principle of electrical conductivity. Gray suspended an orphan boy  on silk cords in mid air, and placed a positively charged tube near the boy's feet, creating a negative charge in them. Due to his electrical isolation, this created a positive charge in the child's other extremities, causing a nearby dish of gold leaf to be attracted to his fingers.
In France in 1746 Jean Antoine Nollet entertained the court at Versailles by causing a company of 180 royal guardsmen to jump simultaneously when the charge from a  Leyden jar(an electrical storage device) passed through their bodies.
It was to defend his uncle's theories against  the attacks of opponentssuch as Alessandro  Voltathat Aldini carried out his experiments on Forster. Volta claimed that "animal" electricity was produced by the contact of metals rather than being a property of living tissue, but there were several other natural philosophers who took up Galvani's ideas with enthusiasm. Alexander von Humboldt experimented with batteriesmade entirely from animal tissue. Johannes Ritter even carried out electrical experiments on himselfto explore how electricity affected the sensations.

Actor Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster, 1935.
Credit: Wikimedia
The idea that electricity really was the stuff of life and that it might be used to bring back the dead was certainly a familiar one in the kinds of circles in which the young Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley – the author of Frankenstein – moved. The English poet, and family friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was fascinated by the connections between electricity and life. Writing to his friend the chemist Humphry Davy after hearing that he was giving lectures at the Royal Institution in London, he told him howhis "motive muscles tingled and contracted at the news, as if you had bared them and were zincifying the life-mocking fibres." Percy Bysshe Shelley himself – who would become Wollstonecraft's husband in 1816 – was another enthusiast for galvanic  experimentation.
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