Professor Ken Catania
speaker
80 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 8 Jul
Professor Ken Catania’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
It's going to end in a bad day for you.
Well, the history of electric eels is very long and interesting and full of twists and turns.
So when people didn't really understand electricity, they were looking for sources of electricity.
And of course, there was static electricity.
Then there was the Leyden jar, which was a capacitor that would give you a big zap of electricity that could store a charge.
And there was electric fish, basically strongly electric eels and strongly electric rays called torpedoes.
But people didn't really understand whether the force, the thing that these weird creatures were giving off was the same thing as electricity.
And that was a huge question because people wanted to understand, is electricity one of the key elements of life?
Is it sort of one of the things that gives life to animals?
And so people went on these epic quests to try to get electric fish and try to get electric eels to try to understand and piece that sort of question together.
But in the 1600s, 1700s, when people were really trying to tease apart what was going on with electricity, there were sort of these famous attempts to try to get electric eels.
And one of the most famous well-known stories is Alexander von Humboldt.
He eventually ran into a group of fishermen who said, oh, we can do this.
Can-do attitude.
They rode off, gathered up a herd of horses, came back with these horses.
So they forced the horses in there, and his account was the electrogeals sort of, it was this epic battle, and the electrogeals shocked the horses.
A couple of the horses drowned.
He thought the other horses were going to die.
It was this really dramatic and kind of upsetting thing to see.
Many people didn't really believe that this could have happened.
Showing 41–60 of 80 · page 3 of 4
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