“Bovril by Electrocution”
Electricity occupied an ambiguous place in the public imagination as both a life-giving and death-dealing technology. A century that had commenced with speculation concerning electricity’s power to overcome death had ended with the electric chair and the drawing up of…
Fun with Radio, by Hugo Gernsback
My initiation to media history methodology started a week ago, with this book: I found How to Have Fun with Radio on November 8, when I accessed Ebay’s website and selected the “Electronics category”, then specified my search in the…
Galvanic ideology
Electricity also played an important role in redefining a number of seemingly well-established and inviolable bodily boundaries. Natural philosophers could use electricity to chip away at previously clearly defined categories. Whilst the gap between mind and body was widened and…
Life on Mars
Both fantasies of communication with intelligent aliens at interplanetary distances and fantasies of global communication titillated the collective capacity for imagining the social limits of new media. They likewise instructed collective imagination to explore the possibility of dramatic shifts in…
“When Old Technologies were New”
Discomfort with the menace of electrical technology was elsewhere manifested in apocalyptic theories of disaster. One of the most popular was that excess charge accumulating in the world posed a growing danger to man and nature. “What would that class…