Between the years 1850 and 1950, Americans became the leading energy
consumers on the planet, expending tremendous physical resources on
energy exploration, mental resources on energy exploitation, and
monetary resources on energy acquisition. A unique combination of
pseudoscientific theories of health and the public's rudimentary
understanding of energy created an age in which sources of industrial
power seemed capable of curing the physical limitations and ill health
that plagued Victorian bodies. Licensed and "quack" physicians alike
promoted machines, electricity, and radium as invigorating cures,
veritable "fountains of youth" that would infuse the body with energy
and push out disease and death.
The Body Electric is the first book to place changing ideas about
fitness and gender in dialogue with the popular culture of technology.
Whether through wearing electric belts, drinking radium water, or
lifting mechanized weights, many Americans came to believe that by
embracing the nation's rapid march to industrialization,
electrification, and "radiomania," their bodies would emerge fully
powered. Only by uncovering this belief's passions and products, Thomas
de la Peña argues, can we fully understand our culture's
twentieth-century energy enthusiasm.