The Extraordinary Electrician: One Man’s “Little Creatures”

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Soon Crosse was growing a wide variety of crystals in his laboratory and could eventually claim that he had produced about 200 varieties of minerals, exactly resembling in all respects similar ones found in nature, as well as some others never before discovered in nature of formed by art.

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In 1837 Crosse began still another crystal-growing experiment using an electrified stone and a chemical solution. After two weeks he noticed “a few small whitish excrescences, or nipples, projecting from about the middle of the stone.” During the next few days the projections grew until, on the 26th day of the experiment, they “assumed the form of a perfect insect, standing erect on a few bristles which formed its tail… On the 28th day these little creatures moved their legs. I must now say that I was not a little astonished. After a few days they detached themselves from the stone, and moved about at pleasure.”

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Within a few weeks some 100 insects appeared on the stone. The creatures turned out to be acari, or tiny mites. But what puzzled Crosse was how they had gotten there.

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Had they been present in the water he had used in the experiment? Or has the eggs of passing insects fallen into his apparatus and then hatched? Neither explanation seemed likely. He had somehow created the mites himself? The implications were staggering and disconnecting. So the determined scholar decided to try the experiment again.

Life in the Laboratory

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The next time Crosse set up seven glass cylinders, each with a different chemical solution. He passed an electric current through them. Then he waited.

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After many months his patience was rewarded. Mites had developed in all but two of the cylinders. By now, confused and rather frightened by his findings, Crosse sought a rational explanation. But then another scientist, W.H. Weeks, repeated the experiments and confirmed Crosse’s results. Even the physicist Michael Faraday claimed that he produced insects by following Crosse’s method.

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Despite the support of his fellow scientists, publication of his results brought Crosse only scorn and ridicule. Accused of meddling in God’s work, he became the center of a bitter controversy and retired to the seclusion of his laboratory. Although he continued his study of electricity, he restricted his experiments to purifying seawater and preserving food with “electric water.”

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Had Crosse somehow stumbled upon a recipe for the creation of life? The possibility of a hoax can be ruled out: such behavior was not in his character. Crosse himself put forward, then dismissed, another explanation: “The simplest solution of the problem…was that they arose from ova deposited by insects floating in the atmosphere and hatched by electric action. Still, I could not imagine that an ovum could shoot out filaments, or that these filaments could become bristles, and …I could not detect…the remains of a shell.”

The question still has not been answered.