Giovanni Aldini, Luigi Galvani’s Nephew And Protégé
Wikimedia CommonsGiovanni Aldini, the nephew of Luigi Galvani.
By the time Volta was building his first voltaic piles, Galvani was too old to start a verbal war over his theory. Instead, the task of defending his ideas fell to his nephew, Giovanni Aldini.
On Jan. 18, 1803, a criminal named George Forster was hanged at Newgate in London. The court had found him guilty of drowning his wife and child in a canal. After his death, Forster’s body was delivered to the workshop of Giovanni Aldini, who had allegedly moved to the Newgate neighborhood specifically to be close to the executions that took place there. Quickly, Aldini summoned an audience of medical students and curious onlookers and began to experiment on the corpse.
Wikimedia CommonsA depiction of Giovanni Aldini’s experiments.
First, he moved Forster’s limbs to demonstrate that he was truly deceased. Then, he applied electrodes to each of Forster’s ears and passed a current through the dead man’s head.
In the words of a horrified reporter who witnessed the demonstration:
“On the first application of the process to the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and 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.”
To anybody watching, it must have seemed that Aldini was raising the murderer from the dead. This was, predictably, a disturbing thought for many people. Questions were even asked in government circles about what the law would require if Forster had actually come back to life. The consensus was that he’d have to hang a second time.
Aldini’s real Frankenstein experiments became the talk of London, and his uncle’s ideas about animal electricity started to seem credible after all.
