Electricity: The Spark of Life at the Wellcome Collection is an informative history of everyone’s favourite form of energy
Frogs appear at several major junctures in the history of electricity. I know, right? I was surprised too, but our amphibian friends are dotted throughout the Wellcome Collection’s new exhibition about everybody’s favourite form of energy, electricity.
The very first object you see, in fact, is a frog-shaped amber pendant from Ancient Greece. Long before it was ever used to power a Nintendo DS, electrical charges could be spotted leaping about in sparks whenever amber was rubbed with animal furs.
It is purely a fluke of history, then, that frogs were once again at the forefront of our understanding of bioelectricity in the 18th century, when Luigi Galvani ran currents through their tiny amputated legs, causing dead muscles to twitch.
A frog also stars in the first of three new commissions for the Wellcome Collection, a live on-screen simulation by Irish artist John Gerrard that merges Galvani’s work with a more recent experiment aboard the space shuttle Endeavour. A fitting tribute to the sacrifices of frogs throughout history.
Elsewhere the exhibition is littered with the diverse artefacts of celebrated “electricians” – the eccentric pioneers of electrical science in the 18th and 19th centuries – whose inventions began to harness, convert and store the stuff.
Voltaic piles (one of the earliest forms of battery) and friction-based electrostatic conductors are then contrasted with works of fiction and film inspired and intrigued by this apparently magical new technology. Cries of “it’s alive, it’s alive!” echo throughout the rooms.
Besides the frogs, perhaps the exhibition’s best surprise is a curious series of teatowels featuring electrical diagrams and instructions. Designed by the Electrical Association for Women in the 1930s, it shows how electrifying the home with this “silent servant” was a benefit almost exclusively marketed to housewives. A lesser known part of feminist history, it also marks the point at which electricity came to define almost every aspect of the modern world.
Such a broad-ranging topic could have yielded a few more interesting objects to look at, but Electricity: The Spark of Life is nonetheless fascinating for its trivia. An informative, if not very energised, history of zap.