Andrew Crosse

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Andrew Crosse

Andrew Crosse (1784–1855) was a British amateur scientist. A controversy developed around Crosse after he was rumored to have created arachnids with his electrical experiments.^[1]

[edit] Biography

Andrew Crosse was born on June 17, 1784 at Fyne Court, Broomfield, Somerset.^[2] In 1836 he was living in Somerset where he had his own homemade laboratory in his home in the Quantock Hills. He was also a local representative in the British parliament. One day in 1836, Crosse looked into a dish of chemicals in his laboratory. For the last two weeks he had been passing an electrical current through a chemical solution in an attempt to induce crystal formation. On the 26th day of the experiment he saw what he described as "the perfect insect, standing erect on a few bristles which formed its tail."

More creatures appeared and two days later they moved their legs. Over the next few weeks, hundreds more appeared. They crawled around the table and hid themselves when they could find a shelter. Crosse identified them as being part of genus acarus. Crosse sent the results to the London Electrical Society. Otherwise, he told only a couple of people but rumors begun to spread. A local newspaper published an article about the "extraordinary experiment" and named the insects Acarus crossii. Some of the people apparently gained the impression that Crosse had somehow "created" the insects or at least claimed to have done so. He received angry letters in which he was accused of blasphemy and trying to take God's place as a creator. Some of them included death threats. Local farmers blamed him for the blight of the wheat crop and commissioned an exorcism in the nearby hills. Opposition to Crosse was so fanatical and visceral that it had to withdraw to the solitude of his mansion Fyne Court.^{[citation needed]}

Other scientists tried to repeat the experiment. William Henry Weeks took extensive measures to assure a sealed environment for his experiment by placing it inside a bell jar. He obtained the same results as Crosse, but due to the controversy that Crosse's experiment had sparked his work was never published. In February 1837 many newspapers reported that Michael Faraday had also replicated Crosse's results. However, this was not true. Faraday had not even attempted the experiment. Later researchers, such as Henry Noad and Alfred Smee, were unable to replicate Crosse's results. Crosse did not claim that he created the insects; he instead assumed that there were embedded insect eggs in his samples. Later commentators agreed that the insects were probably cheese or dust mites that had contaminated Crosse's instruments.

There is speculation^[3] that this was the inspiration for Frankenstein,^{[citation needed]} despite his most notorious experiments coming almost 20 years after the novel’s publication.^[4] Mary Shelley knew Crosse, through a common friend, the poet Robert Southey.^{[citation needed]} Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin attended a lecture by Crosse in December 1814 in London, in which he explained his experiments with atmospheric electricity. Edward W. Cox wote a report of their visits to Fyne Court to see Crosse's work in the Taunton Courier in Autumn 1836.^[5] This speculation may have arisen after the 198 publication of the book Frankenstein's Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth- Century London.^[6]

His laboratory table on which he carried out experiments stands in the aisle of the Church of St. Mary and All Saints in Broomfield and an obelisk in his memory is in the churchyard.^[7]