Electric Universe: The Shocking True Story of Electricity [Hardcover]

David Bodanis (Author)

Book Description

Release date: February 15, 2005

In his bestselling E=mc2, David Bodanis led us, with astonishing ease, through the world’s most famous equation. Now, in Electric Universe, he illuminates the wondrous yet invisible force that permeates our universe—and introduces us to the virtuoso scientists who plumbed its secrets.

For centuries, electricity was seen as little more than a curious property of certain substances that sparked when rubbed. Then, in the 1790s, Alessandro Volta began the scientific investigation that ignited an explosion of knowledge and invention. The force that once seemed inconsequential was revealed to be responsible for everything from the structure of the atom to the functioning of our brains. In harnessing its power, we have created a world of wonders—complete with roller coasters and radar, computer networks and psychopharmaceuticals.

A superb storyteller, Bodanis weaves tales of romance, divine inspiration, and fraud through lucid accounts of scientific breakthroughs. The great discoverers come to life in all their brilliance and idiosyncrasy, including the visionary Michael Faraday, who struggled against the prejudices of the British class system, and Samuel Morse, a painter who, before inventing the telegraph, ran for mayor of New York City on a platform of persecuting Catholics. Here too is Alan Turing, whose dream of a marvelous thinking machine—what we know as the computer—was met with indifference, and who ended his life in despair after British authorities forced him to undergo experimental treatments to “cure” his homosexuality.

From the frigid waters of the Atlantic to the streets of Hamburg during a World War II firestorm to the interior of the human body, Electric Universe is a mesmerizing journey of discovery by a master science writer.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Despite the fact that our lives are powered by electricity to an astonishing degree, most of us have little or no understanding of how or why it works. Instead, we rely on a blurry notion that it flows--like water--through wires to turn on our appliances. In Electric Universe, David Bodanis fools readers, by keeping them entertained and intrigued, into learning the science behind electricity. He does this by telling a series of stories, starting with how a backwoods American really invented the telegraph and how Samuel Morse stole the credit for it. From there, he works through the lives of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Michael Faraday, and other pioneers. He shows how their experiments affected their lives--never more poignantly than with the tragic story of Alan Turing, whose early work designing computers wasn't enough to prevent him from being driven to suicide. It's surprisingly easy to identify with some of these brilliant scientists, because Bodanis relates their failures as well as their successes. In the end, although we may continue using words such as "current" to describe the "flow" of electrons, Bodanis makes certain that we see electrical energy for what it really is, at a subatomic, quantum level. Even so, there's not a single boring bit in the book. Electric Universe is an excellent scientific history, one that reveals both the progress of knowledge and the strange science of the wiggling electrons that run our lives. --Therese Littleton

From Publishers Weekly

This entertaining look at how electricity works and affects our daily lives is highlighted by Bodanis's charming narrative voice and by clever, fresh analogies that make difficult science accessible. Bodanis examines electricity's theoretical development and how 19th- and 20th-century entrepreneurs harnessed it to transform everyday existence. Going from "Wires" to "Waves" to computers and even the human body, Bodanis pairs electrical innovations with minibiographies of their developers, among them Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, Heinrich Herz and Alan Turing. In each case, Bodanis deepens his narrative by charting early failures—Edison's difficulty in finding a workable filament for the electric light bulb, for example—and financial struggles. And Bodanis can be a wry commentator on his subjects, noting, for example, how bedeviled Samuel Morse was by his telegraph patents—when the telegraph was actually invented by Joseph Henry, who refused to patent it. Surprisingly, Bodanis goes beyond the inorganic world of devices, delving deeply into the role electricity plays in the seemingly inhospitable "sloshing wet" human body, such as why being out in the cold makes us clumsy, or how alcohol works in the nervous system. Those who don't generally read science will find that Bodanis is a first-rate popularizer—as he also showed in his earlier E=MC2—able to keep a happy balance between technical explanation and accessibility.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Crown; First Edition edition (February 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400045509
• ISBN-13: 978-1400045501
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #513,145 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Only Presents Half the Story of Electricity!! May 24, 2005

By Stephen Pletko TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

+++++

In this book author and former professor David Bodanis presents "the shocking true story of electricity." Actually this book is more about electrical devices through history and the scientists who created them. The electrical devices investigated are as follows: telegraph, telephone, light bulb, electric motor, radio, radar, and computer. Even human biological devices are looked into-specifically the nervous system and brain. Bodanis says this more eloquently:

"The world is made of electric charges and our technologies operate through electric charges, and even our brains are powered by electric charges."

The author does present some of the science behind electricity. (Electricity is a general term used for all phenomena caused by electric charge.) But he seems to concentrate only on DC or Direct Current (a term he never uses). (Direct Current is electric charge always flowing in the same direction.) Nothing (not one word!!) is said about the more important AC or Alternating Current and its colorful scientific history. This I feel was a major, major oversight. (Alternating Current is a flow of electric charge that periodically reverses its direction.)

Chapter 1 to chapter 6 of this 12-chapter book presents the scientific history of direct current. I feel Bodanis does a decent job here with his explanations and portraits of major scientists. In fact, I feel that his writing style is very engaging throughout the book.

The next two chapters discuss radar. Unfortunately, the author goes into way too much detail about the war effort and strays significantly off topic. I feel all this information was not needed.

Chapter 9 and chapter 10 discuss the idea of a "thinking machine" (what we now call the computer) and the man behind this revolutionary idea. As well, this man's legacy is explained. This information is well presented.

The last two chapters look into human biology. Here we learn that "our entire body operates by electricity." I found this information very interesting but felt that most of it was not relevant to the theme of the book.

There are two more brief sections at the end of this book. They are entitled as follows:

(1) "What happened next." This section profiles what happened to the major people mentioned in this book. Some of these people include Samuel Morse, Alexander G. Bell, Edison, Faraday, Hertz, and Turing. I found this section interesting.

(2) "Mr. Amp, Mr. Volt, and Mr. Watt." These units (amp, volt and watt) describe, according to Bodanis, "what's happening inside all...electric devices." What happened to Mr. Ohm? An ohm is a measure of electrical resistance. I thought not mentioning this unit was a major oversight.

Finally, there are no illustrations in this book. I felt simple diagrams would have reduced the book's wordiness. As well, pictures of some of the major people mentioned would have been nice.

In conclusion, this is a well-written book about electricity that has some major oversights and that, in some cases, presents irrelevant information.

(first published 2005; introduction; 6 parts or 12 chapters; 2 concluding sections; main narrative 235 pages; notes; further reading; acknowledgements; index)

+++++

50 of 59 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Very well written, but with serious omissions July 28, 2005

By James

Format:Hardcover

This book is written clearly and is an excellent read, as far as the writing style goes. It's a great shame that the book has serious omissions which make it unsuitable for the telling the "shocking true story of electricity."

As other reviewers have pointed out, there is no mention of the great Nikola Tesla, who far outshined engineers and physicists of his time. Nikola Tesla was responsible for the electricity industry, not Thomas Edison. Tesla was also responsible for radio, not Marconi. This was an enormous issue of its day and resulted in a court case that awarded recognition to Nikola Tesla for his work on wireless (radio).

I also find it strange how that horrible character Edison is given so much praise. He was a nasty individual who took Tesla for a jolly ride and twice refused to pay Tesla for work that probably saved his [Edison's] company. Edison also organized the public electrocution of live animals to shock the public into support for his inferior DC electricity distribution (as opposed to Tesla's AC system, purchased by Westinghouse). Edison was a marketing, business and propaganda master, not a scientist. (He was a gifted inventor however).

Further, Tesla made great improvements to the lighting systems of the day, was the first to light up a massive stadium, winning the job over Edison's DC proposal, single-handedly designed and built the Niagara Falls plant (where a statue of Tesla stands to this day), and built the first radio-controlled device. Tesla also had the first patents on anything resembling modern digital electronics (the AND gate). There is speculation that this might be why IBM and DEC failed to patent logic circuits.

The entire twentieth century was practically invented (certainly "illuminated!") by Nikola Tesla, and yet he is given no credit in this book. That destroys the credibility of this book in my view, unless you use this book as a history of electricity until 1880 or thereabouts.

There is an explanation for the omission of Nikola Tesla in most books on electricity and electronics. Tesla arguably went "slightly funny" in his old age, and lost the credibility he had as a younger man. Tesla was nearly as famous as Albert Einstein in his prime. Einstein personally sent Tesla a telegram for his birthday.

Tesla is also strongly associated with conspiracy theories about the US government covering up cheap wireless generation and distribution of electricity. This is almost certainly nonsense. Tesla's wireless and electricity patents are available for all from the US patent office and Tesla patent collection CDs can be purchased cheaply over the Internet. Nobody has yet built one of his wireless "free energy" gizmos and made it work. Tesla was therefore almost certainly mistaken in his belief about the potential of his wireless research.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars What does the Book try to Accomplish? May 3, 2005

By Normand Dion

Format:Hardcover

I read E = mc2 by David Bodanis and was thouroughly impressed with the book from cover to cover. This was a truly enjoyable and imformative treatment of the subject.

On the basis of my most favotable impression of E = mc2 I was eager to engross myself in Electric Universe. After the second chapter I bacame confused about the intent of this new Bodanis book. Is Electric Universe a history? Is it a science book dealing with biographies? Is the intent to scientifically explain the development of electricity? Electric Universe fails in all these purposes.

The author makes no distinction between scienctfic discoveries and technological advances. Perhaps mixing of the two is appropriate in a general book such as this, but somehow distinctions between the two must be made. An entire chapter is devoted to Edison and the development of electric motors and the light bulb. Yet, in regard to J.J. Thomson, he writes, "The quietly bumbling JJ ....". Every chemistry and physics book that I know of gives credit to J.J. Thomson for making his important discovery. Yet, in Bodanis' opinion, Thomson's discovery of the electron is considered to be a bumbling accident.

The discoveries of Hans Christian Oersted and Michael Faraday go together like hand and glove. The consideration of both Oersted and Faraday to explain that magnetism and electricity are two aspects of the same force is indeed basic. Yet, Bodanis does not mention Oersted. Is this because his biography is not spiced with the unusual?

The powerful electric motors, described in the chapter giving praise to Edison, utilized DC current which was problematic if the use of electricity was to become widespread over great distances. Not one word was written about Nikola Tesla who promoted the use of AC motors and AC current which addesssed this critical concern. What about Tesla's other many fascinating inventions? This omission is strange given that Tesla was one of the more fascinating characters of his day.

This is just a sampling of my concerns. Enough said. In short, I have no idea what the author intended to accomplish. Although the writing style is pleasant and the anecdotes interesting, they do not weave themselves into the story of electricity.