The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (review)

The cultural history of the body has a historicizing tendency: maybe during the Paleolithic people began to think of themselves as creatures of stone, chipping away to attain a perfect self; in the Bronze Age, they heated themselves, poured the mixture into casts and then hardened, a metallurgical conception of self; and so on. In the last twenty years, cultural historians have produced rich empirical studies of self and body in the era of industrial technology—the modernity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The landmark works in the field, Anson Rabinbach's Human Motor (1990), Mark Seltzer's Bodies and Machines (1992), Cecelia Tichi's Shifting Gears (1987), and David Nye's Electrifying America (1992), describe a cultural transformation. In a world of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, electric lights, dynamos, assembly lines, automobiles, motion pictures, airplanes, and all sorts of industrial machines—where mechanization was increasingly a part of everyday life—the human body, the workplace, and society itself increasingly came to be conceived of as mechanical or electrical entities. This reconceptualization took place in scientific and popular discourse, and in a variety of cultural practices. The Body Electric builds on this scholarship by showing how people applied the transformative new science and technology of the industrial era—fitness machines, electrical vitalizers and stimulators, and radioactive tonics—to the human body.

Industrial technology vastly expanded human agency. With steam, electrical, and fossil-fuel-powered engines, humans could travel vast distances quickly, lift heavy objects, see in the dark, make themselves heard instantaneously over thousands of miles, crush hard and obdurate substances. And this increase of agency corresponded to an overall quickening of commercial and industrial activity. At the same time, in comparison to the machine and the careening economy built on machine production, the human body was weak. For those who did manual labor, machines increasingly set the pace, one that ill-fed and exhausted workers struggled to match. For those who did not work with their hands, the body was subject to atrophy, a steady weakening—or rather, cultural anxiety about the same—amidst a pervasive sociocultural speed-up.

We are the inheritors of that world: our lives run fast; we improve ourselves through technology by working out on machines, taking dietary supplements and steroids, getting electrostim, and so forth. The Body Electric, then, is our story, a genealogy of the body in modernity. The first part of the book is devoted to the invention of the weight and endurance machines that are the ancestors of the treadmill, stairmaster, and bicep and leg builders found in every gym in America. The second part is devoted to electrical devices, mainly "vitalizers," enhancers of sexual potency, and cures for "nervous debility." A final section deals with the radium craze, in which products containing radium were sold for much the same purpose—in some cases, with tragic results.

The story is in many respects one of markets and marketing, and Carolyn Thomas de la Peña does a fine job of narrating the careers, cultural projects, and strategies of her quirky entrepreneurs. "Strange machines" had specific properties: fitness machines were all about developing physical strength and transforming the body to make it resemble the aesthetic and anatomical ideals depicted in art and medical texts. Electrical belts and radium concoctions were offered as cures for impotence, "frigidity," and nervous debility. The entrepreneurs who peddled these nostrums were certainly responding to cultural anxieties about masculinity, femininity, social status, and modernity itself—and their customers had plenty to be anxious about.

But Thomas de la Peña sometimes loses sight of the larger dynamic: the incitement and alleviation of anxiety through the sale of commodities and services was a package deal. Entrepreneurs did not just respond to insecurities and worries, they cultivated them. In the late nineteenth century, the incitement of anxiety became a technology of marketing, a tried-and-true...