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Simon’s
APS Fellowship to Support New Book
 Associate
Professor of English Linda Simon has received an American Philosophical
Society (APS) Sabbatical Fellowship for the Humanities and Social
Sciences that will enable her to spend academic year 2002-03 writing
a book about the cultural anxiety surrounding the coming of electricity
during the second half of the 19th century.
Based in Philadelphia, the APS is this nation's first learned society.
It promotes the acquisition of knowledge in the sciences and humanities
through scholarly research, professional meetings, publications,
and community outreach and sponsors several programs that support
faculty research.
By focusing on the 30-year period from the commercial use of the
telegraph in the late 1860s until the discovery of X-rays in 1896,
Simon will consider a wide range of responses to the introduction
of electricity. She explains, “Electricity was a force at once
titillating and dangerous, exciting and morally suspect — a
force of energy that could be generated and manipulated by humans,
yet existed, unfettered, as the most powerful force in nature.”
Because it was such a mystery and yet so interconnected to the spirit,
electricity spoke to the ethical, moral, and religious beliefs of
the population. As a result, said Simon, “You couldn't neutrally
turn on a light bulb.”
Knowledge about electricity and its effect on the body was unsophisticated,
a key reason for consumer resistance to the technology. In addition,
the technology was not perfected before it was marketed. Asked Simon,
“Why have — in your home — something that could crackle,
catch fire, that few people could repair? Gas lamps, which provided
a softer glow and were considered safer, were preferred for home
lighting.”
People needed to be convinced that there were practical aspects
to having electricity in their homes. As a result, the first home
electrical gadgets were doorbells and burglar alarms, because they
were innovative and useful to the growing urban population.
Simon’s book also will focus on electrification's connection
to the mind and the body. During this period, a person’s only
encounter with electricity was likely to be via electrotherapy.
Every hospital had an “electrician” — a physician
trained to do electrotherapy, which was used to treat a wide range
of ailments, including impotence, “female complaints,”
even teething.
According to Simon, “Electricity, as both cause of illness
and cure, was implicated in prevalent assumptions — among physicians,
scientists, and the lay public — about psychology and physiology;
about ways of perceiving and articulating feelings of health and
illness, pain and suffering; about the very nature of the life force.”
X-rays were a popular amusement offered at fairs of this era. People
would exchange them as tokens of affection, because it was widely
believed that X-rays penetrated to the very essence of an individual.
Simon became interested in this topic while researching her 1998
biography on William James, Genuine Reality -- A Life of William
James (Harcourt Brace & Co.). Sources related to psychical
research, neurasthenia, medical education and such philosophical
issues as 19th-century approaches to the mind/body connection provided
a foundation for the project.
Over the past two years, Simon has built upon that foundation by
completing additional research at the Bakken Library on Electricity
and Life in Minneapolis. While a scholar-in-residence at New York
University last year, she continued her research at NYU's Bobst
Library, the New York Historical Society, and the New York Public
Library's Science, Technology, and Business Research Library. Simon
is excited about the project. “I can’t wait to write,”
she said. She hopes to complete the book next year, following additional
research at Harvard University. Harcourt will publish the volume.
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