Bells, Nobels,More Bells and Prizes

Our age is drunk on prizes. There are awards for telemarketing and for estate agents, for gadgets and startups and the local newspaper. There is, remarkably, even an annual award for the best award ceremony, with its own nominations for best venue, best script, and best host. To be shortlisted as best host at the award-ceremony awards, and lose, must be a special kind of agony.

We all know the grand ones. The Oscars, the Golden Globes, the Emmys, and the BAFTAs. The Palme d'Or at Cannes, the bears and lions of Berlin and Venice, the Grammys and the Brits, the Booker for novels, and prizes for architecture, poetry, cooking, and still being alive at ninety.

The grandest of all are the Nobel Prizes.

A prize does not only reward. It incentivizes, which is the usual justification for all the attendant fuss and folderol. But the Nobel Prizes were founded for a stranger reason than either. They were founded, in effect, as an apology.

Alfred Nobel made a great fortune from his industrial holdings, the most notable being the Bofors iron and armaments company, which produced cannon and general artillery. Among his three hundred and fifty-five patents, the best known was for dynamite, the explosive that powered the mining and quarrying industries, and, less respectably, the train-robbing and safe-cracking ones too.

Then, like Mark Twain, Nobel suffered a peculiar misfortune. He woke one morning to find that a newspaper had printed his obituary. The verdict was not kind. Nobel read that he would go down in history as a dealer in death on an industrial scale, a man who had grown rich from the sale of weapons, to the detriment of humanity. He did not care for the sentence one bit.

There is an older prize than any of these, and a stranger one, though almost no one remembers it now. It was founded exactly one hundred years before the first Nobels, by a man with a far better claim than Nobel to the title of merchant of death. His name was Napoleon Bonaparte, general, first consul, and emperor of France.

The award was Le Prix Volta, established to honor Alessandro Volta, the man whose name still lives in the SI unit of electrical potential, and in its cognates, voltage and voltaic.

Like many restless minds of his day, Napoleon had been captivated by a newly harnessed force then being conjured in laboratories all over Europe. Without it, you could not read these words, or send them, or store them. It is everywhere, and it touches everything, and yet for most of human history no one could say what it was. To find out, we have to go from green to amber.

Amber has always attracted stories. The Greeks made it the petrified grief of a myth. Michael Crichton, in Jurassic Park, made it a vault for the deep past. Both imagined something sealed in it forever.

They noticed something else about it. An amber bead, polished to a shine and then rubbed, would attract small particles: dust, pollen, hair, feathers, and threads. It reminded them of the stones from the region of Magnesia, the lodestones, which they called magnetite. But the two attractions were plainly different. Magnetite pulled hard, and only on iron. Rubbed amber pulled gently, and on almost anything light enough to move.

The Greek word for amber is elektron. So they named the strange property after it, and the name stuck. Across the centuries the force itself came to be called electricity.

Action at a distance is perhaps the most mysterious and exciting thing a human being can contemplate. A lodestone moves a nail without touching it. The magnetic pole swings a compass needle from thousands of miles away. But you and I cannot tidy a room, or roll a coin out from under the sofa, with our minds alone. We must be in contact. It is a damnable nuisance to be so dependent on our own muscle for every act of hefting.

Perhaps that is why so much fantasy, like so much real science, is obsessed with acting at a distance. Mary Poppins clicks her fingers and the nursery tidies itself. Superman lifts a car with a thought. Hermione, Gandalf, Merlin, and Carrie are masters of it, as, in subtler ways, are the mesmerists and hypnotists. The rest of us are not.

Unless, that is, we count information. Thanks to Gutenberg and his press, persuasion and rhetoric, news and propaganda, truth and the lie can all act at a distance now. A sentence set in type, or fired off as a tweet, can save a life or cost one, remotely, at the speed of reading. The taming of amber's force would soon make that action faster still, and carry it further than any page.

Electricity, magnetism, gravity, and the nuclear force that binds the particles inside an atom: these are the primary colors of physics, each a power that reaches across empty space.

Newton had already found it in gravity. The taming of the rest begins with the man whose name the prize would carry.

Alessandro Volta was born to a grand family in Como and, still in his twenties, was made professor of physics at the town's Royal School. At thirty he improved a curious gadget he called the electrophorus, a device for raising and holding an electrostatic charge, the very kind the Greeks had coaxed from rubbed amber.

It ran on what we now call the triboelectric effect, the plain fact that friction makes static.

Static electricity is charge that builds up and sits on the surface of a material, at rest, insulated in place. Some atoms give up electrons easily and turn positive. Others gladly take on the surplus and turn negative. Rub two such materials together, and the separation of positive from negative creates the potential for static. That potential, measured in volts, can be enormous, thousands or even millions of volts. Its most spectacular expression is lightning.

Current, or dynamic, electricity is a different animal. Here the electrons are drawn along in a stream. The Latin for drawn along is conducted, so we say the material conducts.

Static is accumulated and held. Current is conducted, in what we call the flow, a metaphor borrowed from rivers and mill streams. It may not capture the ultimate quantum truth of what happens when you flick a switch. But as a working model, it does well enough.

The difference that matters most is this. Static cannot be sent anywhere useful, and it will not stay put. Even in Volta's electrophorus the charge soon drained away, the electrons finding their way home.

Current is the opposite. It runs through conductors happily, because running through conductors is exactly what it does, and storing it, a trick called capacitance, turns out to be solvable. Lay out a circuit of conductors and insulators, and you can herd the electrons like marbles on a ramp, or water in a race, directing them, slowing them, boosting them, damming and sluicing at will.

All of which matters because electricity powers our world, and even the technologies that seem to have nothing to do with it lean on it entirely. The internal combustion engine is started and governed by electrical sparks. A skyscraper is a filing cabinet without its electric elevators. Air travel is unthinkable without radio for navigation. To go on a zero-volt diet, truly off the grid, is, as they say in Germany, nicht unmöglich. Not impossible. But a tad unlikely.

If the Greeks first rubbed the lamp, it was Volta who let the genie out. Restless with the feeble charge his electrophorus could hold, he set out to settle a friendly argument with an older rival and fellow Italian, Luigi Galvani.

Galvani had made a dead frog's legs twitch. The story goes that as he skinned a frog at a bench where he had lately been raising static, an assistant touched an exposed nerve with a charged metal scalpel. There was a spark, and the dead leg kicked as if alive.

The demonstration caused a sensation. Galvani and many others leapt to a theory they called animal electricity, the belief that living creatures hold some animating electrical fluid. Volta, an early convert, even gave it the name, after his friend.

Galvanism, galvanic, galvanized: all entered the language, from being galvanized into action to the galvanized steel that has been dipped in zinc. And it was animal electricity that lent Victor Frankenstein his method for jolting the monster into twitching life.

But Volta began to doubt that the frog's muscle was generating anything at all. What caught his eye was a detail: the surest way to make the leg kick was to use two different metals, with the leg between them.

In 1794 he proved the point. Two metals and a scrap of brine-soaked cloth, wired into a circuit with no frog at all, produced a current on their own.

Six years later he stacked that idea into history. He piled up alternating discs of copper and zinc, each pair divided by cardboard soaked in brine, and joined the top and bottom with a wire. A current flowed, and kept flowing.

He gave us the vocabulary too. The discs were electrodes, from the Greek hodos, a way or a path, as in Exodus, the way out. The positive one he called the anode, the negative the cathode, and the salty liquid between them the electrolyte.

The truly wonderful thing was that the charge stayed. His pile did not merely raise electricity, it held it. And pile, or pila, is the French word for a battery to this day. For that is exactly what Volta had built.

As soon as his first wet pile worked, in 1800, Volta carried it to London to show the Royal Society, and the next year to Paris to show Napoleon, who gave him a gold medal and founded the prize.

He had done what many Enlightenment minds dismissed as superstition, a feat on a par with the philosopher's stone. He had caught lightning in a bottle. For the first time, not by rubbing but by chemical reaction, electricity could be both made and stored. The emperor was so beguiled that he later made Volta a count of the Empire.

The first great use of the battery was not to light a room or turn a wheel. It was to take matter apart.

Ever larger piles let chemists run electrolysis and isolate elements no one had ever seen pure. Volta himself, prompted by Franklin's notes on a flammable gas, discovered methane. His British admirer Humphry Davy built a monstrous pile of two thousand pairs of discs, struck the first blazing carbon arc, and split compound after compound, drawing out one new element after another.

Electricity, in other words, was a tool for research as much as a subject of it.

For the early winner of the Volta Prize was Humphry Davy himself. It is rather astonishing. At the height of the war between France and Britain, while Nelson harried French ships and Wellington chased French marshals out of Spain, Napoleon and his prize committee were open enough to the shared virtues of science to send the award to an Englishman.

It might seem perverse to dwell on electricity at all. In the very years Volta was stacking his discs, a Scottish engineer named James Watt, of the watt, was doing something far more immediately useful.

Watt was refining the steam engine until it turned heat into motion at least three times more efficiently than anything before. A crankshaft gave it rotary power, so it could drive machinery directly. Work once done by muscle, beast, water, or wind could now be done by burning coal to boil water into steam. With that, our species changed how it lived for good.

None of which is in doubt. But steam belongs to the history of manufacture, and this is a history of communication. And there could have been no Watt in any case without the printed page that Gutenberg had given him. The thread worth following here is a thinner, stranger one: the spark that arced eighty years, from Volta and Napoleon in 1800 to another Scotsman in 1880. Before we can follow it that far, we have to meet the man who made electricity worth taking seriously.

Humphry Davy's laboratory assistant was a self-educated genius, the son of a London blacksmith and once apprenticed to a bookbinder. His name was Michael Faraday, and he is worth an entire series of his own.

Faraday overturned two thousand years of assumption in a single stroke. Electricity and magnetism, he showed, are not two forces but one. Move a magnet through a loop of wire, and a current flows in the wire.

Inside that plain fact lay the dynamo, the electric motor, and the transformer. Electricity need no longer be a parlor trick or a splitter of compounds. Through a motor, it could do real work.

The peace and prosperity after Waterloo set off an eruption of invention in Britain, and two advances mattered above the rest. One was the railway. The other was the electric telegraph. Together they would be called a nervous system for commerce.

In a single bewildering stretch, Britain went from no railroads at all to thousands of miles of them, moving goods and people at speeds no one had ever known. But Volta's work hinted at something faster still. Words and numbers, sent as pulses of electricity, would travel not at the speed of steam but at the speed of light.

A remarkable Briton named Francis Ronalds built the first working telegraph in 1816, the year after Waterloo, at the age of twenty-eight. He strung half a mile of wire around his garden and sent a signal down it.

When he offered the idea to the Royal Navy, the Admiralty waved it away. In the words of its secretary, Sir John Barrow, the thing was wholly unnecessary. Few judgments have aged worse. Ronalds was knighted for that telegraph in the end, more than fifty years too late.

From that single half-mile of garden wire, over the next fifty years, a whole nervous system branched into being.

A garden curiosity in 1816 had become, in a single lifetime, the spine of a continent's commerce. What it did to distance is best measured not in miles but in days.

After Waterloo and Napoleon's exile, the Volta Prize was all but forgotten. It was revived in the 1850s by the first emperor's nephew, Louis Napoleon, who topped up the fund until it was worth, in today's money, more than a quarter of a million.

In 1880 it went to yet another Scot: a former teacher of the deaf, lately of Boston, named Alexander Graham Bell. The achievement, of course, was the telephone. Bell had reached the patent office roughly an hour ahead of his rival Elisha Gray. Decades of lawsuits followed, but he had won, and history remembers him as the inventor of the phone.

William Orton, who ran Western Union after Cornell and who coined the phrase nervous system of commerce, had offered Bell a hundred thousand dollars outright for the patent. Bell preferred not to sell. Two years later Orton admitted that even at twenty-five million it would have been a greater bargain than the Louisiana and Alaska purchases combined.

What Bell did next is the heart of the whole story. He did not simply pocket the prize. He set it aside to fund research laboratories whose one job was to feed new inventions back into his company.

Then he split Bell Telephone in two. The network of exchanges and subscribers became the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, better known as AT&T. The making of the hardware, the phones and cables and switchboards, became Western Electric. And at what would grow into Bell Labs, scientists and engineers were put on the payroll simply to invent things the company could patent.

Bell was no braggart, but he was proud of his machine. Soon after placing the first famous call to his assistant, Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you, he risked a prophecy about how far it might one day reach.

It was a bold guess, and a shy one. But almost everyone in this story undersold what they had made.

Less than a decade later, a new figure appeared, half Italian like Volta, half Scots-Irish like Bell, of the Jameson whiskey family on his mother's side. Guglielmo Marconi called his invention wireless telegraphy. Bell had called the telephone harmonic telegraphy. The world, lazily, would call Marconi's version radio.

In 1901 he flung the first signal clear across the Atlantic, from Cornwall to Newfoundland. Within a few years the same invention was summoning the Carpathia to the survivors of the Titanic, and running down the murderer Dr. Crippen, who fled London by liner believing himself safe and was overtaken by a wireless message, arrested as he stepped ashore in Canada.

The nervous system was now complete: railroad, telegraph, telephone, and radio. The terms and conditions of twentieth-century life had, in effect, been drawn up.

Laid end to end, the names make a single picture: Volta, Watt, Davy, Faraday, Maxwell, Morse, Cornell, Stanford, Bell, Marconi.

The Industrial Revolution and the discoveries of science, above all Faraday and Maxwell on electromagnetism, let human society rebuild itself into one where infrastructure could carry information at the speed of light. It happened because Volta's work was seized on by a crowd of engineers, inventors, entrepreneurs, chancers, and visionaries.

And the spark Napoleon sent across the century, from Paris to New York, in the prize fund that seeded Bell Labs, would light the twentieth in ways the emperor could never have dreamed.