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William J. Turkel

How encounters with strongly electric fish informed our grasp of electricity.

Spark from the Deep tells the story of how human beings came to understand and use electricity by studying the evolved mechanisms of strongly electric fish. These animals can shock potential prey or would-be predators with high-powered electrical discharges.

William J. Turkel asks completely fresh questions about the evolutionary, environmental, and historical aspects of people’s interest in electric fish. Stimulated by painful encounters with electric catfish, torpedos, and electric eels, people learned to harness the power of electric shock for medical therapies and eventually developed technologies to store, transmit, and control electricity. Now we look to these fish as an inspiration for engineering new sensors, computer interfaces, autonomous undersea robots, and energy-efficient batteries.

Praise for Spark from the Deep

“This beautifully written and exhaustively researched book traces the links between experiments on strongly electric fish and scientific understanding of electricity … Turkel’s book is a joy to read; it will entertain and educate scientists, historians, and anyone with an interest in the natural world.” —Choice

“Turkel’s book convincingly reminds us that all the laptops and gadgets we surround ourselves with are remixes; altered versions of strongly electric fish. For that strange and insightful observation, this book ought to be widely read and enjoyed.” —Chris Conway, Endeavour

“It is refreshing to explore a book which takes seriously ancient encounters with manifestations of natural electricity as precursors to more recent innovations.” —James F. Stark, The British Journal for the History of Science

Johns Hopkins University Press

Animals History Culture

Spark from the Deep: How Shocking Experiments with Strongly Electric Fish Powered Scientific Discovery

Charlotte Sleigh

This “provocative, complex” cultural history examines how the study of ants influenced shifting perceptions of humanity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Times Literary Supplement, UK).

Ants long have fascinated linguists, human sociologists, and even cyberneticians. At the end of the nineteenth century, ants seemed to be admirable models for human life and were praised for their work ethic, communitarianism, and apparent empathy. They provided a natural-theological lesson on the relative importance of humans within creation and inspired psychologists to investigate the question of instinct and its place in the life of higher animals and humans. By the 1930s, however, ants came to symbolize one of modernity’s deepest fears: the loss of selfhood. Researchers then viewed the ant colony as an unthinking mass, easily ruled and slavishly organized.

In this volume, Charlotte Sleigh uses specific representations of ants within the field of entomology from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries to explore the broader role of metaphors in science and their often unpredictable translations. Six Legs Better demonstrates the remarkable historical role played by ants as a node where notions of animal, human, and automaton intersect.

Six Legs Better: A Cultural History of Myrmecology

Louise E. Robbins

This lively history “adds a new dimension to our understanding of 18th-century France” by exploring the Parisian fashion of importing exotic animals (American Historical Review).

In 1775, a visitor to Laurent Spinacuta’s Grande Ménagerie at the annual winter fair in Paris would have seen two tigers, several kinds of monkeys, an armadillo, an ocelot, and a condor—in all, forty-two live animals. In the streets of the city, one could observe performing elephants and a fighting polar bear. Those looking for unusual pets could purchase parrots, flying squirrels, and capuchin monkeys. The royal menagerie at Versailles displayed lions, cranes, an elephant, a rhinoceros, and a zebra, which in 1760 became a major court attraction.

For Enlightenment-era Parisians, exotic animals piqued scientific curiosity and conveyed social status. Their variety and accessibility were a boon for naturalists like Buffon, author of Histoire naturelle. Louis XVI use his menagerie to demonstrate his power, while critics saw his caged animals as metaphors of slavery and oppression. 

In her engaging account, Robbins considers nearly every aspect of France’s obsession with exotic fauna, from the animals’ transportation and care to the inner workings of the oiseleurs’ (birdsellers’) guild. Based on wide-ranging research, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots offers a major contribution to the history of human-animal relations, eighteenth-century culture, and French colonialism.

Elephant Slaves & Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris