Dark Light Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-ray [Paperback]

The modern world imagines that the invention of electricity was greeted with great enthusiasm. But in 1879 Americans reacted to the advent of electrification with suspicion and fear. Forty years after Thomas Edison invented the incandescent bulb, only 20 percent of American families had wired their homes. Meanwhile, electrotherapy emerged as a popular medical treatment for everything from depression to digestive problems. Why did Americans welcome electricity into their bodies even as they kept it from their homes? And what does their reaction to technological innovation then have to teach us about our reaction to it today?

In Dark Light, Linda Simon offers the first cultural history that delves into those questions, using newspapers, novels, and other primary sources. Tracing fifty years of technological transformation, from Morse's invention of the telegraph to Roentgen's discovery of X-rays, she has created a revealing portrait of an anxious age.

PRAISE FOR DARK LIGHT
An utterly idiosyncratic romp, a poetical humanist's inquiry, a chronicle not so much of gizmos and inventors but of their effects on the public imagination . . . Hypnotic. -NEWSDAY

Working Great Mischief

The electric telegraph is the miracle of modern times . . . a man may generate a spark at London which, with one fiery leap, will return back under his hand and disappear, but in that moment of time it will have encompassed the planet on which we are whirling through space into eternity. That spark will be a human thought!

The Times, London, October 1856

When he was twenty-three, Samuel Finley Breese Morse wrote to his parents from England, where he had been studying and practicing art for two years, defying their wishes that he become a bookseller at home in Massachusetts. Morse had just received an Adelphi Gold Medal for a statuette of Hercules, and Dying Hercules, his painting of the same subject, recently had been exhibl£J