In the story Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, a mad scientist named Victor Frankenstein is intrested in natural philosophy. One day when Victor was fifteen, he saw lightning strike an oak tree, and blast the oak tree in half, leaving nothing but a stump in its place. This event caused him to begin studying natural phenomena, especially the subjects of electricity and galvanism, two very new and exciting subjects of science in the eighteenth century. From the study of electricity, Victor soon learns the secret of reanimation, and brings a creature to life using old and rotten body parts. Many things influenced what parts of science Mary Shelley used in her story, at the time; electricity was a new thing. It was energy, and it effected non-living things in ways never before seen. The body uses electricity through the nervous system to send signals to muscles, therefore, in the eighteenth century the act of running an electric current through a dead body part caused a reaction that was considered to be "Amazing". Usually the muscle would just simply contract or expand, causing an arm, leg, or any other body part to seem as if it again was alive. People where facinated by this new phenomenon and often it was thought that it was magic because of the fact that it could kill, however, it also seemed to be able to restore life. Galvanism was common practice, and many people applied electric current to objects to see what the reaction was, after it was figured out that if you ran an electric current through dead tissue it would react, the association of life force and electricity was born. The uneducated people of the eighteenth century looked at this and put two and two together, and begain to believe that electricity was the key to life.
             During the eighteenth century and the Industrial Revolution science, chemmistry, and the origin of life were some of the major preoccupations of society. Mary S
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