Spark from the Deep: How Shocking Experiments with Strongly Electric Fish Powered Scientific Discovery by William J. Turkel (review)

In Spark from the Deep, William J. Turkel sets out to convince us that the roots of our modern electrified world are to be found not amid the magnets, wires, and batteries of physicists’ laboratories or engineers’ workshops, but instead in the bodies of electric eels, rays, and catfish. He does not quite succeed, but along the way he leads us into some fascinating byways of electrical history.

Turkel is a practitioner of digital history, and he writes that he built his book entirely from digital materials; if a source came to him in analog form, he promptly digitized it (p. xi). He is part of the team behind the website The Programming Historian, and on his personal website he declares “I write code every day.” Such methods clearly were central to the process of researching and writing Spark from the Deep, but it is a striking fact, and one worthy of reflection by historians of technology, that the final product is a monograph that looks and reads very much like ones produced the old-fashioned way. There are many signs that scholarly publishing is changing in fundamental ways, but so far this seems to have affected the production process far more than the finished product. Nor did Turkel’s digital methods keep him from falling into the sort of errors that have long bedeviled more traditional scholars, as when he tells us on page 46 that Robert Boyle worked in “the late eighteenth century,” and on page 104 that Antoine Lavoisier taught that water consists of oxygen combined with “nitrogen (formerly phlogisticated air).”

Turkel is also a proponent of Big History, and he begins his account by reconstructing our distant hominin ancestors’ encounters with electric catfish in African rivers. It is these encounters, he says, that eventually “inspired” humans “to colonize an electric world” (p. 18), though if so, the effect appears to have been delayed and displaced to a remarkable degree. After some discussion of ancient ideas about how electric fish produced their effects, Turkel turns to the heart of his story, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, recounting Europeans’ repeated attempts either to study strongly electric fish in their native habitats or to bring them back alive for laboratory experimentation. He also takes up an interesting evolutionary puzzle. How, Charles Darwin asked, could the ability of electric fish to deliver strong shocks have arisen by the gradual steps of natural selection when it seemingly could not have been of use, either to stun prey or ward off attackers, until available at full power? The answer was not found until the twentieth century, when Hans Lissmann and others showed that some fish were able to generate weak electric fields that they used to detect nearby objects; only after these electric organs had grown stronger over many generations were they repurposed to produce offensive and defensive jolts.

The most consequential episode Turkel discusses grew out of attempts in the late eighteenth century to construct an artificial electric fish. Henry Cavendish built a convincing one out of pewter and leather, powered by Leyden jars, while William Nicholson later proposed a different charging mechanism based on the electrophorus. Following Giuliano Pancaldi, Turkel argues that Nicholson’s proposal helped spark Alessandro Volta’s invention of the electric battery in 1799. By providing a source of steady current, Volta’s battery revolutionized electrical science and technology in the nineteenth century, and that its invention grew in part from a desire to mimic electric fish deserves our attention. But it is also important to recognize that this came only after the first electrostatic generators had been devised, and the Leyden jar invented, without reference to electric fish. It was not so much that encounters with electric fish inspired humans to “colonize the electric world” as that encounters with other—largely inanimate—electrical phenomena contributed to humans’ fascination with...