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This is the infographic from the first lesson (02/04/22), in case you'd like to review it

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HISTORY CRUNCH - History Articles, Biographies, Infographics, Resources and More

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Industrial Revolution Overview Infographic - The Industrial Revolution is one of the most significant events in all of world history and had a profound impact on the modern world. It began first in Britain in the 1700s but soon expanded to the rest of Eu

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This video, published by the British library, includes quite a good overview of Gothic literature.

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In case any of you are interested in biographical approaches or the love life of the author, here's an article about just that.

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ary Shelley is a queen. Daughter of modern feminism's founder, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the radical thinker William Godwin, this rebellious woman wrote one of the earliest and most influential gothic horror novels: Frankenstein. Published in 1818, when Shelley was just 20 years old, it remains a work of genius that can still horrify readers with the depths of man's depravity and pursuit of knowledge at all costs. It is also a novel that places love, and the desire for love in its absence, at the heart of life. For this, and many other reasons, Shelley has become an idol for those whose souls search for belonging in dark times.

She's also someone who I thought couldn't really become any cooler. After all, this is the woman said to have married her lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, after losing her virginity to him at the graveside of her mother. And then, after he drowned in a storm in 1822, carried his calcified heart - the only thing to survive his cremation - with her, wrapped in a silk shroud, until her death in 1851. (It was found in her desk, wrapped in the pages of one of his last poems.) But this week, Fiona Sampson, author of In Search of Mary Shelley, taught me something new: Shelley was bisexual.

Writing to her close friend Edward Trelawny in 1835, Shelley recalled the years of loneliness and longing that followed Percy's death, saying: "I was so ready to give myself away - and being afraid of men, I was apt to get tousy-mousy for women." Reading this as a historian of sexual culture, I recognised this as sexual slang - but did this allude to masturbation, or actual relationships?

When I tweeted the quote above, revelations flooded in thick and fast. Jonathon Green, one of our most important historical lexicographers, was able to tell me that "tuzzy-muzzy" as slang for the vagina dates back to 1642. There are also stories of Shelley having a love affair with Jane Williams not long after Percy's death. She was also instrumental in procuring fake passports for two friends, Isabel Robinson and Mary Diana Dods, to flee to Paris and live there disguised as man and wife.

It wasn't unusual for women to live or travel together at this time, so they didn't need to disguise themselves. Rather, there may have been more at play here in terms of sexual and gender identities than you might expect to find in 19th-century history. Which is why it matters that we recognise that Shelley, by her own admission, was bisexual.

As soon as I sent out my tweet, amongst the celebration and excitement that others shared came a consistent push back. Some people saw the acknowledgement of Shelley's bisexual life as crude and unnecessary, something that detracts from her achievements as a writer.

We know that a socially conditioned, deep and destructive self-loathing is still often suffered by those who grow up knowing that to be gay, queer, trans, bisexual, or anything other than heterosexual, has historically been seen as evil and wrong. What I have found time and again in the archives, is incredible evidence of queer lives being lived throughout the centuries. In the 1880s, science and medicine perfected pathologising sexuality and defined anything outside heterosexuality as a mental disease. But before this, sex, love and identity were very much individual choices. Shelley's admission that she turned to women for sexual gratification shows us that to her, and many like her, sexuality did not fit the binary boundaries we have projected on to those in the past - and ourselves today. Acknowledging Shelley's sexuality is very important for bi-visibility, something we still struggle with. But bi-history is everywhere, and now it has a new icon. Long may she reign.

* Dr Fern Riddell is a historian specialising in sex, suffrage and culture in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

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Does it matter if Mary Shelley was bisexual?

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ary Shelley is a queen. Daughter of modern feminism's founder, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the radical thinker William Godwin, this rebellious woman wrote one of the earliest and most influential gothic horror novels: Frankenstein. Published in 1818, when Shelley was just 20 years old, it remains a work of genius that can still horrify readers with the depths of man's depravity and pursuit of knowledge at all costs.

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We've read quite a bit about Walton's explorations in the Arctic - of course, there are still research expeditions today. In case you're interested, here's a short video about a recent (and famous) one, which includes interesting vocabulary.

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In case you're looking for a movie version, here's a (subjective, but interesting) ranking of some of them. By the way, presenting one of the movie versions would make an interesting (entirely optional) presentation later in this semester.

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Doctor Stein injects "DNA solution" into an African American multiple amputee (he is a Vietnam veteran), but there is an "RNA problem" and things go horribly wrong. This Blaxploitation attempt to do for Frankenstein what Blacula did for Dracula edges into this list only because its sheer ineptitude entertained me more than competently filmed snoozefests such as Victor Frankenstein and I, Frankenstein.

19. Igor (2008)

All evil scientists have hunchbacked assistants called Igor in this sub-Tim Burton animation full of Frankenstein references. One Igor (John Cusack), smarter than his master, creates a female monster for an evil science fair. If you can put up with the tired adages ("It's better to be a good nobody than an evil somebody"), there is some lovely Louis Prima on the soundtrack.

18. Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965)

The Nazis present the heart of Frankenstein's monster to Japan, where it ends up being studied by scientists in ... Hiroshima. One atomic bomb and many years of radiation later, it grows into a giant, feral boy-kaiju who can't help destroying things. Luckily, he also steps up to bat when the country is threatened by a Godzilla wannabe called Baragon.

17. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994)

Kenneth Branagh directed and stars in this po-faced gothic tosh as a mittel-European medical student who strips down to reveal unfeasibly well-toned abs as he leaps around his lab, marinading his monster (Robert De Niro with skin no worse than your average 18th-century smallpox patient) in a giant fish kettle.

16. Frankenstein Unbound (1990)

John Hurt plays a 21st-century weapons inventor who is sucked through a time rift into 19th-century Geneva, where Frankenstein's monster is running amok and killing people (like, er, an out-of-control weapon). Roger Corman's last film as director is daft as a brush, but it is hard to resist Raúl Julia as the mad doc and Michael Hutchence as Shelley.

15. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

This omnisexual cult mashup of horror and sci-fi cliches doesn't do justice to Richard O'Brien's stage show, but the songs still hit the spot. We must be thankful, too, that Tim Curry's definitive performance as the cross-dressing Dr Frank-N-Furter has been preserved for posterity: "In just seven days, I can make you a man!"

14. Frankenstein's Army (2013)

A found-footage picture set in Germany at the end of the second world war. Luckless Soviet soldiers encounter an army of "zombots" equipped with choppy, slicey, drilly appendages. Meanwhile, their creator, a descendant of Frankenstein, is trying to achieve world peace by fusing Soviet and Nazi brains. Thin plot, spiffing creature design.

13. Frankenweenie (2012)

Young Victor reanimates the corpse of his bull terrier in Burton's stop-motion remake of his 1984 short. But Victor's classmates use the reanimation formula on other dead pets, unleashing a medley of frankenmonsters. What could have been a moving lesson in mortality, though, is marred by a regrettable anti-cat bias.

12. Depraved (2019)

The indie horror honcho Larry Fessenden's take on the Frankenstein story begins with an amnesiac stabbing victim waking up in a makeshift Brooklyn lab with a stitched-together body. The PTSD-afflicted ex-military medic who revived him tries to educate his creation in all things beautiful, but his partner has less elevated plans for the creature. Good characters, lo-fi psychedelia, sadness, doom.

11. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

As American horror cinema neared the end of its first great flowering, Universal tried to inject life into the formula by teaming classic monsters with their top comic twosome. The first in the series holds up thanks to the Wolfman, Dracula and Frankenstein's creature being treated with respect, although some of the comic set-pieces now seem more anxiety-inducing than funny.

10. The Bride (1985)

Not as bad as its reputation suggests, this starts off with a bang (torso in a jar! Quentin Crisp! Exploding lab!) before settling into a quasi-feminist hybrid of The Bride of Frankenstein and Weird Science in which the baron decides not to give his DIY woman (Jennifer Beals) to the male creature, but to mould her into the perfect girlfriend for himself. Young Sting is pretty but anaemic as the quack, while Clancy Brown gives a smashing performance as the childlike male monster, whose misadventures in the outside world nicely counterpoint the Pygmalion-esque developments at Castle Frankenstein.

9. Edward Scissorhands (1990)

Burton's Frankenstein obsession bubbles to the surface in this cocktail of traditional fairytale and modern American gothic, with a lovely score by Danny Elfman. Johnny Depp, in the first of many collaborations with the film-maker, is unrecognisable under scar makeup as a walking Swiss army knife, the result of an experiment by a disturbed but kindly scientist (Vincent Price in his final role) who died before he could give his creation arms. The freakish boy takes suburbia by storm with his topiary and hairdressing skills, but - metaphor alert! - can't embrace the girl he loves for fear of cutting her.

8. Frankenstein Created Woman (1967)

Peter Cushing is his usual magnificent self as the brilliant but embittered Frankenstein, for whom stitching body parts together has lost its magic. Instead, he decides to transfer the soul of unjustly executed Hans into the corpse of the young man's disfigured girlfriend, who drowned herself after he died. Terence Fisher conjures up his customary dark fairytale atmosphere in one of Hammer's best Frankenstein sequels. The baron's arrogance is hilarious; as his beautiful creature sets about seducing and murdering the upper-class miscreants responsible for Hans's death, you can't help cheering her on.

7. Frankenstein (2015)

Bernard Rose's superb rethink of the Frankenstein story relocates it to modern Los Angeles and adopts the point of view of the monster. The beautiful boy, created with a 3D printer, is rejected by his scientist "parents" (Danny Huston and Carrie-Anne Moss) when he develops a disfiguring skin condition. Xavier Samuel is credible and touching as the tragic creature: unaware of his own strength, forced to live life on society's margins, cruelly treated by cops and vigilantes. He learns kindness from a blind busker (Candyman's Tony Todd), but it all ends in carnage - as always.

6. Flesh for Frankenstein (1973)

"To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life in the gall bladder!" The former Andy Warhol collaborator Paul Morrissey directed this screamingly camp yet visually exquisite slice of Grand Guignol, originally screened in 3D so that spectators had severed heads and dripping entrails thrust in their faces. Udo Kier leads an imbroglio of wild accents as the baron (he pronounces "laboratory" like "lavatory"), whose scheme to create a superstud to breed a Serbian master race hits a speed bump when he accidentally gives his creation the head of a chaste novice monk instead of the randy Joe Dallesandro.

5. The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

Víctor Erice's directorial debut is a beautiful study of childhood in rural Castile just after the Spanish civil war. Little Ana is so impressed by a village screening of James Whale's Frankenstein that when she encounters a fugitive soldier in a barn, she thinks he is the monster and tries to shield him from the authorities. Meanwhile, her father tends the beehives and her elder sister decides to strangle the cat. Fortunately, the cat has other ideas. A beguiling blend of childlike fantasy and historical realism, it was an influence on Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth.

4. Frankenstein (1931)

"It's alive!" No sooner has Henry Frankenstein (not yet a baron) cobbled together a creature from bits of cadaver than he wanders off to get married - apparently suffering from mad-scientist ADHD - leaving the monster to throttle Frankenstein's assistants and drown a little girl before a fiery finale. Boris Karloff, of course, does wonders in a wordless role beneath Jack Pierce's quintessential makeup. Whale's Frankenstein movie was not the first (there were at least three silents, including a 1910 short from Edison Studios), but it interpreted Shelley's story with a visionary magic that casts its spell over the horror genre to this day.

3. Young Frankenstein (1974)

"Please, I beg you, for safety's sake, don't humiliate him!" Mel Brooks's affectionate pastiche of old Universal horror movies is his most consistently funny film, but also charms in its own right as a black-and-white fairytale. Gene Wilder is the doctor trying to play down his infamous ancestry ("It's pronounced Fronkensteen"), Peter Boyle the monster with the zip in his neck (Universal held the copyright to the neck bolts), Marty Feldman the hunchback. Also delightful: Gene Hackman as the blind hermit, Cloris Leachman as Frau Blücher, Madeline Kahn's operatic skills andPuttin' on the Ritz.

2. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

Hammer's reworking of Frankenstein, directed by Fisher, adds gory colour and restores the crazed scientist to the centre of the story bearing his name (with a new creature for each sequel). Cushing relishes the role of his career as the sociopathic dandy whose passion for science overrides all moral considerations, while Christopher Lee conveys the dire plight of the creature through body language alone. Critics found it "depressing and degrading", but the film was a huge hit and spawned six sequels, five of them starring Cushing, whose baron became increasingly arrogant and amoral with every film.

1. The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Weird and wonderful ... Boris Karloff and Esla Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein.

Directed, like its 1931 predecessor, by Whale, this tragicomic sequel takes up where the first film left off, but surpasses it in weirdness. Karloff's creature is more poignant than ever as he learns to speak and tries to make friends, but only succeeds in wreaking havoc. Ernest Thesiger joins the cast as Doctor Pretorius, camp as a row of tents with his collection of miniature people, who talks the baron into building a girlfriend for his lonely monster. Elsa Lanchester plays the shock-headed mate, as well as appearing as Shelley in the film's literary prologue. Those eyes! Those teeth! What a woman.

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The 20 best Frankenstein films - ranked!

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Doctor Stein injects "DNA solution" into an African American multiple amputee (he is a Vietnam veteran), but there is an "RNA problem" and things go horribly wrong. This Blaxploitation attempt to do for Frankenstein what Blacula did for Dracula edges into this list only because its sheer ineptitude entertained me more than competently filmed snoozefests such as Victor Frankenstein and I, Frankenstein.

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For those of you who enjoy listening to the novel (or reading along), here's a full text version in one file.

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Frankenstein [Full Audiobook] by Mary Shelley

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If you prefer a version that's divided into chapters (and can tolerate tons of ads), this might be for you.

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For those who have given up (or need the info)

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For those who have given up (or need the info)

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If you know you can't read the novel without knowing what's going to happen, here's the (in)famous M.Sommer with a summary. In German. CONTAINS ALL THE SPOILERS.

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Frankenstein to go (Shelley in 8,75 Minuten)

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This page is meant for students to revise Frankenstein - it contains a useful summary, information about the characters, important themes and quizzes. I definitely recommend it once you're done reading or if you need to catch up.

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Frankenstein - GCSE English Literature Revision - AQA - BBC Bitesize

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GCSE English Literature Frankenstein learning resources for adults, children, parents and teachers.

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If you don't want to go through the weird youtube-rabbithole, this video is definitely for non-scientists and offers an overview.

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An interesting article about exploration at the time

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By Daniel K. Benjamin
Government-sponsored polar
expeditions made fewer
major discoveries
introduced fewer
innovations, lost more ships,
and had more explorers die.
T hroughout the nineteenth century, Arctic exploration dominated popular culture in Europe and America, much as space exploration did in the twentieth century. Both quests involved competitive races for major geographic prizes; both led to fame and honors for the returning explorers; and both had their share of death and disaster, sometimes leading to calls for cessation of the efforts.

Yet there is a key difference between the two waves of exploration. The twentieth century space race involved primarily the bureaucracies of two national governments, while the nineteenth century polar expeditions were undertaken by both private organizations and national governments. Because the expeditions all involved common goals, prospective rewards, and penalties, we are immediately led to a question familiar to readers of this column: How well can the private sector perform a function traditionally conceived as the natural province of the government? According to recent research by Jonathan Karpoff (2001), the answer for Arctic exploration appears to be: Better than the government itself.

Government-sponsored polar expeditions tended to be larger and better funded than private expeditions. Yet by most measures, the government expeditions fared poorly. They made fewer major discoveries, introduced fewer technological innovations, were subject to higher rates of scurvy, lost more ships, and had more explorers die.

There were four major goals of nineteenth century polar exploration: the discovery and navigation of the Northwest Passage (connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans via a northern route); reaching the North Pole; traversing Greenland; and discovering the fate of the lost John Franklin expedition of 1845. A private expedition was the first to navigate the Northwest Passage and another private group was the first to cross Greenland. Yet another private venture discovered the fate of the Franklin expedition.

The sole portion of a major Arctic prize that can be credited to a publicly sponsored expedition is the initial verification that a Northwest Passage exists. And even in this case, four of the 66 crew members died, and the rest were near starvation when rescued by another expedition.

Not only did private expeditions yield more success; they did so more safely and at lower cost. For example, an average of six crew members died on each public expedition, compared to an average of only one on private expeditions. Moreover, public ventures lost ships at twice the rate of private ventures, and suffered from debilitating scurvy at nearly four times the rate of private expeditions. And private expeditions used far fewer crew members and less vessel tonnage.

It might be thought that these differences were due to confounding factors. It is possible, for example, that public expeditions concerned themselves more with "minor" discoveries that yielded less spectacular, but still socially important outcomes. Alternatively, public ventures might have been directed at the riskier, more difficult challenges eschewed by private expeditions. Neither of these conjectures is borne out by the facts.

Karpoff uses the records of 92 different expeditions to examine statistically a wide variety of success measures. He finds that private expeditions were more effective-indeed, about five times as successful-regardless of the measure used. Moreover, he is unable to find any evidence that public expeditions undertook riskier or more difficult projects than did private.

What, then, accounts for the superior performance of the private sector? The fundamental-and often fatal-disadvantage of public expeditions was that they were often initiated and organized by individuals different from those ultimately appointed to command them. Thus, the key planners often lacked the incentives to plan correctly. And even though the actual leaders of public expeditions had strong incentives to do well (if only to survive), they were often saddled with crews, ships, or plans that made success unlikely. In contrast, private organizers generally led the expeditions themselves-and so bore the full brunt of the decisions they had made.

The consequences showed up in a variety of contexts. First, private leaders undertook far more extensive preparations. Second, they uncovered and exploited information that was crucial to success. For example, private explorers routinely utilized native sealskin clothing, while public ventures stuck with far less protective wool garments. Private ventures also learned native techniques of shelter construction and overland travel, while public expeditions used tents and largely eschewed dogsleds, skis, and snowshoes. Third, the privately funded expeditions acted on the widely recognized fact that small parties were better able than large parties to move quickly and support themselves in the Arctic. Governments, in contrast, continued to mount fatally large expeditions up until 1875.

Overall, Karpoff concludes that "men died and ships were lost not because of the public nature of the funding per se, but rather because of the perverse incentives, slow adaptation, and ineffective organizational structures that frequently accompanied public funding." Of course all of this refers to events of a century or more ago. I shall leave it up to the reader to decide whether there is a message here for today.

REFERENCE
Karpoff, Jonathan M. 2001. Public versus Private Initiative in Arctic Exploration: The Effects of Incentives and Organizational Structure. Journal of Political Economy 109(11): 38-78.
Daniel K. Benjamin is a PERC senior associate and professor of economics at Clemson University. His regular column, "Tangents-Where Research and Policy Meet," investigates policy implications of recent academic research. He can be reached at: wahoo@clemson.edu

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By Daniel K. Benjamin Government-sponsored polar expeditions made fewer major discoveries introduced fewer innovations, lost more ships, and had more explorers die. Throughout the nineteenth century, Arctic exploration dominated popular culture in Europe and America, much as space exploration did in the twentieth century. Both quests involved competitive races for major geographic prizes; both led ...

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​To contemporary readers of Frankenstein, there appears to be a clear link between Walton's fascination with magnetism and Frankenstein's experiments with electricity.

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Discovery of magnetic north features significantly in Walton's narrative.

​The principles Walton was desirous of finding were not in fact identified until 1829, ten years after the publication of Frankenstein. Discovery of magnetic north had been one of the key objectives of the failed British expedition of 1818-19, and the topicality of the pursuit is perhaps one reason why it features so significantly in Walton's narrative. The discovery itself was made by James Clark Ross (1800-1862), a nephew of the explorer, John Ross, when his expedition lay trapped in the pack-ice. Operating on an intuition that magnetic north was in his vicinity, James Clark Ross used the opportunity to localize its position. In doing so, he used one of the instruments that the ship was carrying on board in order to facilitate magnetic observations, the dip circle. This instrument also appears in James Clark Ross's portrait, highlighting the significance of his discovery that magnetic north lay at 70° 5'N, 96°47'W.

Photo:
Thomas Charles Robinson, Dip Circle, 1840, iron; silver; brass, 286 x 216 x 216 mm, Royal Museums Greenwich. Photo credit: Royal Museums Greenwich.

Painting:
John Robert Wildman, Portrait of Commander James Clark Ross, 1834, oil on canvas, 1442 x 1120 mm, Royal Museums Greenwich. Photo credit: Royal Museums Greenwich.

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Discovery of magnetic north features significantly in Walton's narrative. ​The principles Walton was desirous of finding were not in fact identified until 1829, ten years after the publication of Frankenstein. Discovery of magnetic north had been one of the key objectives of the failed British expedition of 1818-19, and the topicality of the pursuit is perhaps one reason why it features so significantly in Walton's narrative.

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A nicely compact article explaining the background to the novel.

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(Inside Science) -- It has all the makings of a great monster story: an attempt to draw lightning from the sky, a scientist passionate to show that electricity held the secret of life, body parts and, of course, reanimation of the dead.

The science that inspired Mary Shelley to write "Frankenstein" is nearly as strange as the novel itself. Written in 1818, the book was influenced by a scientific feud that ushered in the first battery and our modern understanding of electricity.

The story begins in the mid-18th century. Electricity had captured the imaginations of many of Europe's top scientists, and at that time very little was understood about the nature of electricity. Scientists could generate static electricity using spinning machines, but it was not until Benjamin Franklin's famous kite experiment in 1752 that they proved that lightning was of the same essence.

At the University of Bologna in Italy, noted surgeon Luigi Galvani was investigating the effects of electricity on animals. It was not an unusual line of inquiry. Researchers knew electrical shocks produced violent spasms and speculated that electricity might cause muscular contractions.

On January 26, 1781, while dissecting a frog near a static electricity machine, Galvani's assistant touched a scalpel to a nerve in its leg, and the frog's leg jumped. Galvani repeated this and several other experiments, observing the same violent muscle spasms. He also noticed that frog legs occasionally twitched when they were hung from a brass hook and allowed to touch an iron trellis, so Galvani joined a length of each metal together to form a brass and iron arc that made the leg muscles contract when touched.

But where did the electricity come from?

Galvani, who called it "animal electricity," believed it resided in the frog itself. He thought that the bimetallic arc merely conducted the electricity from one part of the frog to the nerve, causing the leg to jump. He published his findings in 1791 and, as the story goes, came to be known as the frog dancing master.

One of Galvin's earliest readers was Italian physicist Alessandro Volta. Volta already had earned an imposing reputation as the discoverer of electrical capacitance, potential, and charge, and also discovered and was the first to isolate methane gas. He replicated Galvani's experiments and helped popularize his work.

Yet Volta reached very different conclusions. He believed the electricity came from the two metals used in the arc, and that the frog was acting as the conductor. Within the year, he replaced the frog's leg with brine-soaked paper, detected a current, and challenged Galvani.

The scientific world divided into two camps, animal electricity versus dissimilar metals. The feud became bitter. At one point, Volta wrote to a friend that his opponents wanted him dead. "I'll be damned if I'll oblige them," he added.

In 1799, Volta invented the voltaic pile, a stack of discs of two different metals separated by brine soaked paper. The galvanic or voltaic cell was the world's first battery, and the progenitor of automotive lead-acid batteries.

Today, we know that Volta's stack worked because dissimilar metals transferred electrons in an oxidation-reduction reaction, and the frog legs moved because electricity plays a role in muscular contractions. Of course it would take many decades to work out the details to reach this level of understanding.

More spooky articles from Inside Science:

So how did this influence a young Mary Shelly and lead her to compose one of the most widely read novels of all time, "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus"?

Galvani's nephew, Giovanni Aldini, was a fierce partisan of animal electricity, yet he did not ignore Volta's pile. Aldini used it to tour the capitals of Europe and demonstrate the medical benefits of electricity -- or not. His demonstrations involved jolting corpses with electricity and making decapitated criminals sit upright.

Aldini's most famous exhibition took place in 1803 at the Newgate Prison in London, U.K. He inserted metal rods into the mouth and ear of the recently executed corpse of murderer George Foster. "The Newgate Calendar," a book about the criminals of Newgate Prison, described what happened next: "On the first application of the process to the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion."

Not surprisingly, some observers thought Aldini was bringing Foster back to life.

Mary Shelley knew all about Galvani, Volta and Aldini. Humphry Davy and William Nicholson -- the era's leading electrical researchers -- were friends of her father. In 1816, at age 19, she spent the summer in Geneva, Switzerland with Lord Byron and her future husband, Percy Shelley. The season was cold and rainy, and they spent many evenings around the fire, reading German ghost stories and discussing electricity's potential to reanimate corpses.

It must have seemed like she was merely peering into the near future to imagine that one day, a Victor Frankenstein might succeed in reanimating an assembly of body parts.
Alan S. Brown is a long-time freelance writer who has written extensively about science, engineering, technology-related businesses and technology policy.

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(Inside Science) -- It has all the makings of a great monster story: an attempt to draw lightning from the sky, a scientist passionate to show that electricity held the secret of life, body parts and, of course, reanimation of the dead.

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This is a long read, but fascinating!

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As Mary Shelley described it, the inspiration for Frankenstein came to her all at once in a nighttime apparition: "I saw-with shut eyes, but acute mental vision-I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together," she wrote in the preface to the novel's 1831 edition. "I saw the hideous phantom of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion."

Shelley's version of events has been largely disputed in the years since Frankenstein's publication, with some scholars arguing she invented a dramatic moment of inspiration to please her readers. But regardless of the truth of its origin story, Frankenstein was as much a product of the science of the day as it was of any nightmare.

At the time she began to write it, Shelley was vacationing outside Geneva with a group of intellectuals that included Lord Byron, physician John Polidori, and her husband, the poet Percy Shelley. Often, as she noted in the preface, the group's evening discussions would turn to galvanism, the contraction of muscles stimulated by electricity-a newly-discovered phenomenon that captivated the scientists of the early 19th century. It captivated Shelley, too: "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things," she wrote. "Perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth."
When so much of Halloween is based on the supernatural, why are scientists so often lumped in with the rest of the haunted-house cast?
Shelley's work-with dozens of movie adaptations and who knows how many Halloween costumes-is one of the most well-known examples of the intersection of science and horror, but her Dr. Frankenstein is far from the only scientist created specifically to scare. In H.G. Wells' 1896 horror novel The Island of Doctor Moreau (and the 1996 Hollywood flop starring Marlon Brando), the titular character lives alone on a private island where he surgically reshapes humans into animals. Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has a mild-mannered scientist create a potion to curb his darker urges, only to have the drink strengthen his homicidal alternate personality. And in the film The Fly, made in 1958 and then again in 1986, a botched lab experiment on matter transportation transforms a researcher into a man-fly hybrid.

Today, many of the things that would once have seemed like horror-story fodder are scientific reality: Animals have been cloned, for example, and human faces have been transplanted. Surgical robots are trusted with human lives. But still, as the boundaries of human knowledge are continually pushed, the trope of the mad scientist endures. What is it about the character that makes it so chilling? When so much of Halloween is based on the supernatural-the ghosts, the goblins, the vampires-why are scientists so often lumped in with the rest of the haunted-house cast?

"Science and reason are supposed to be the antidote to paranormal beliefs, and yet fictional scientists often appear as villains of paranormal horror films," psychologist Stuart Vyse recently noted in Psychology Today, and mad-scientist-themed decorations abound in seasonal aisles as October 31 approaches. "Halloween is a kind of Rorschach test of our common fears, " he wrote.

I spoke to Vyse, a professor at Connecticut College who specializes in the psychology of superstition, about why the mad scientist is one of them.

Cari Romm: What are some of the differences between the mad scientist and the typical horror villain?

Stuart Vyse: The typical horror villains, like Michael Meyers in Halloween and [Freddy Kreuger in] Nightmare on Elm Street, those are just sort of homicidal maniacs. They are mentally ill, psychopathic. They often have an overblown or misguided revenge motive to them. And they often seem to be superhuman-they survive under circumstances when others would not, or they have superhuman strength. So you have great power, and you have behavior that's frightening because it's so unpredictable and beyond the realm of normal experience. And then, of course, the basic thing, which is that they're out to kill people.

In the case of the mad scientist, it's interesting-only in some cases the scientist is truly described as being mad. Sometimes they are, which means they're not going to share the same predictable forms of behavior or the same goals as others.
"In the 50s there was this fear, because of the bomb, of the power of science to create fearful creatures or to harm us in some way."
But other times it's not so much that they're mentally ill or psychopathic or even evil, but simply that their goals are wrong according to the moral structure of the story. They are too driven by curiosity to know-almost in a Garden of Eden sort of way-certain knowledge that shouldn't be theirs, and yet they want it. And so you have that same sort of scene that goes through the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. There's also the Faust legend, where Faust wanted to know things and experience things that were not supposed to be within his realm, and actually sold his soul to the devil in order to experience them. They're almost infatuated or intoxicated by motivations that get us all in trouble.

Romm: What's so frightening about that sense of curiosity?

Vyse: It's the unintended consequences. For example, the motives for making genetically modified foods may be very good, and they may have a good end, but people fear that there are unknown side effects-that the foods that are made this way will have some other effect on them. So many of the advances of science have been shown to have side effects. They're a mixed bag, and people worry about the downside of these achievements.

Romm: What would be an example of that?

Vyse: A contemporary example-it's an old movie, but it's been remade a number of times-is The Fly. He's a scientist, he's interested in learning how to transport objects from one place to another, but it goes awry. It's a very sort of Faustian thing, where he ends up with knowledge that has an unintended consequence that's scary. Even Frankenstein's goals are not really evil. He may be sort of an egomaniac, taking on more power than he should be taking on. But he's driven by an interest in science and wanting to see if he can do this-in some ways, it's maybe even a positive goal, of wanting to cheat death.

But science is this powerful force that can produce unpredictable results. I grew up in the 50s and 60s, and back in that black-and-white horror film era, the great fear came from atomic energy. And Godzilla and all these sort of giant caterpillars and other things were supposed to have happened because of atomic energy. There was this fear, because of the bomb, of the power of science to create fearful creatures or to harm us in some way. That's the equivalent of the typical villains, Halloween movie villains' superhuman strength or unusual power. Science has that too. And so I think that's part of the reason why scientists are sometimes placed in that fearful role.

Romm: Is there an equivalent modern fear? Something that's taken the place of the giant radiation-infused monsters?

Vyse: I think that at the moment, the main fear is that science has an unholy alliance with profit motives-that with pharmaceutical companies and vaccines and GMOs, that science is being used in that way. There are a number of contemporary science-fiction films in which corporate interests [play a role]-for example, the first Alien movie, in which the corporation wants to keep the creature alive in order to see if there's some commercial benefit to it. That's the kind of thing that's going on now.

Romm: In other realms, we don't find the combination of genius and mental illness to be as threatening-there's no "mad artist" trope, for example. Van Gogh isn't scary. What is it about science in particular that makes the mad scientist frightening?

Vyse: It's the idea that they have powerful knowledge. As an example, I'm an experimental psychologist. I'm a scientist. But if I'm traveling on an airplane and somebody asks me what I do for a living, if I say I'm a psychologist, they sort of become nervous and worried that I'm going to analyze them. There's this sense that you have knowledge, that you'll be able to find out things about me that I don't want you to find out. And I think in the case of science, that's exactly the case-that genius, combined with the power of science, is frightening, is potentially something that could be used against you in an evil way. If you think about it, there are a number of horror films in which the villain is a psychiatrist or a psychologist. It's combining this idea of special knowledge that can be used powerfully to make that person frightening.

I would put Hannibal Lecter in a similar category. He's not really a mad scientist, but part of what makes him so scary is that he's so brilliant, and his great intelligence is in fact used against people.

Romm: You've done a lot of research on the psychology of superstition. How does the idea of the mad scientist fit in with that?
"Horror movies play upon aspects of science that are genuinely worthy of concern."
Vyse: Part of the fear of science comes from people who are not rational thinkers, who are motivated by emotion and fear and don't have a good understanding of scientific processes. So for example, the evidence is there that the vaccines are safe, that there's no great harm in taking them. There's great benefit in taking them. In the scientific world, there's no ambiguity about that. But people are just refusing to believe that and to accept that evidence, and instead are clinging to other ideas. And I do believe that one of the common threads in [superstition and fear of science] is a poor understanding of critical thinking, of the role of evidence in logic, in debate.

But here's the irony: I know lots of people who are scientific thinkers who love those movies. And I grew up on them. So I'm not sure there's any cause and effect relationship. It's true that horror movies play upon aspects of science that are genuinely worthy of concern, and it's easy to create a fearful character by mixing a little bit of unexpected scientific effect and maybe an unstable character who can't be trusted. It makes for good drama. I would be hesitant to say that the real-life problem we have with acceptance of scientific thinking is encouraged or discouraged by movies, but it's clear that the things people are afraid of in one domain also work in the movie domain.

Sometimes, as was the case of Mary Shelley, science inspires art-and sometimes, art inspires science.

In Minnesota in 1931, a hundred years after Shelley described her inspiration for Frankenstein, Minnesota, a boy named Earl Bakken was captivated by actor Colin Clive's portrayal of the mad scientist. "What intrigued me the most, as I sat through the movie again and again," he later recalled, "was the creative spark of Dr. Frankenstein's electricity. Through the power of his wildly flashing laboratory apparatus, the doctor restored life to the unliving."

Decades later, Bakken-the founder of medical-device company Medtronic-would, through a creative spark of his own, invent the wearable, portable pacemaker.

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