As a young man, he wanted nothing more than to discover the fabled elixir of life. However, as he grew older, his interests turned to science after seeing the remains of a tree struck by lightning. Attending college, he began to learn chemistry and soon became obsessed with the idea of bringing inanimate matter to life, through artificial means. He began to create a humanoid creature, eager to see if he could bring it to life.
Sound familiar? That’s because the young man is Victor Frankenstein. But would you believe it if I told you that there once was a real man, who tried to do the same?
Giovanni Aldini was born on April 10, 1762 in Bologna, Italy. Growing up, he spent a lot of time with his uncle, Luigi Galvani, an Italian physician, physicist, biologist and philosopher.
Luigi devoted his studies to frogs, specifically dead frogs. He discovered, through his experiments, that the muscles of dead frogs’ legs twitched when struck by an electrical spark. In his essay, De Viribus Electricitatis in Motu Musculari Commentarius, published in 1791, Luigi concluded that animal tissue contained a vital force, which he termed “animal electricity.” This electricity activated nerve and muscle when spanned by metal probes. He considered the brain to be the most important organ for the secretion of this “electric fluid” and the nerves to be conductors of the fluid to the nerve and muscle. The flow of this electric fluid provided a stimulus for the irritable muscle fibers.
Giovanni grew up to become professor of physics at Bologna in 1798, in succession to his uncle. His scientific work was chiefly concerned with galvanism, the contraction of a muscle that is stimulated by an electric current, named after its founder Luigi Galvani, Giovanni’s uncle. He worked with anatomy and its medical applications, and with experiments for preserving human life and material objects from destruction by fire.
Giovanni started with reanimating dead frogs, but after his uncle’s death, he began to crave something more exciting. He moved on to larger animals with more sophisticated nervous systems. As he worked, he began to draw crowds to his laboratory, eager to see him reanimate sheep, pigs, cows, and oxen.
For the most part, he was successful. Animal heads would shake from side to side, eyeballs would roll, and their tongues would roll out of their mouths. Although viewing one of these experiments became a popular event for the masses, Giovanni became bored. He wasn’t making any new achievements, and it was time to move on.
He turned to humans. During that time, gaining access to a recently dead body was fairly easy. All he had to do was head over to Piazza Maggiore and wait for an executioner to behead his next victim. However even these bodies began to present a problem, as they were often drained of blood. Without blood in the veins, the electrical impulses had nothing to travel through.
Thinking logically, however, he discovered that England was still using the gallows to execute their criminals, which would give him a much better specimen. In 1803, he traveled to London, and ordered himself a freshly hanged criminal to be delivered to the Royal College of Surgeons.
Giovanni Aldini had procured the body of George Foster. In front of a large medical and general audience, he took a pair of his conducting rods, which he had linked to a powerful battery, and touched the rods to various parts of the body. When the rods were applied to the mouth and ear, “the jaw began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the left eye actually opened.” He moved one rod to touch the rectum, and the whole body convulsed: indeed, the movements were “so much increased as almost to give an appearance of re-animation.”
The demonstration continued, the rods being placed in different combinations around the body, resulting in different movements. Although Giovanni made no indication that he believed the body would ever return to life, the onlookers believed it would happen at any moment.
In recognition of his merits, the emperor of Austria made him a knight of the Iron Crown and a councilor of state at Milan, where he died on the January 17, 1834.
Only 5 years old when Giovanni Aldini conducted his experiment on George Foster, Mary Shelley would go on to write the famous novel, Frankenstein. Many would claim that he was her inspiration, however in reading her introduction of the 1831 edition of her novel, she makes no mention of him. However, she did mention that “galvanism” was among the evening discussion topics before she experienced her “waking dream” that ultimately led to her writing.
Another man, credited with being the real Frankenstein is Andrew Ure. Read his story here.
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