For the Victorians, electricity was the science of spectacle and of wonder. It provided them with new ways of probing the nature of reality and understanding themselves. Luigi Galvani's discovery of 'animal electricity' at the end of the eighteenth century opened up a whole new world of possibilities, in which electricity could cure sickness, restore sexual potency and even raise the dead. In Shocking Bodies, Iwan Rhys Morus explores how the Victorians thought about electricity, and how they tried to use its intimate and corporeal force to answer fundamental questions about life and death. Some even believed that electricity was life, which brought into question the existence of the soul, and of God, and provided arguments in favour of political radicalism. This is the story of how electricity emerged as a powerful new tool for making sense of our bodies and the world around us.

For the Victorians, electricity was the science of spectacle and of wonder. It provided them with new ways of probing the nature of reality and understanding themselves. Luigi Galvani's discovery of 'animal electricity' at the end of the eighteenth century opened up a whole new world of possibilities, in which electricity could cure sickness, restore sexual potency and even raise the dead. In Shocking Bodies, Iwan Rhys Morus explores how the Victorians thought about electricity, and how they tried to use its intimate and corporeal force to answer fundamental questions about life and death. Some even believed that electricity was life, which brought into question the existence of the soul, and of God, and provided arguments in favour of political radicalism. This is the story of how electricity emerged as a powerful new tool for making sense of our bodies and the world around us.

She was personable, bright, attractive, and capable--of murder. Born Ann Lou Welty, she changed her name to Judias Buenoano, and under that name she was indicted for murder. Bodies of Evidence is a page-turning account of this woman's life and murderous "career", as well as the story of detective Ted Chamberlain, responsible for her arrest and conviction. 8 pages of photographs.

The theory developed by G.B. Whitham (Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, August 1952) for the supersonic flow about bodies in uniform flight in a homogeneous medium is reviewed and an integral which expresses the effect of body shape upon the flow parameters in the far field is reduced to a form which may be readily evaluated for arbitrary body shapes. This expression is then used to investigate the effect of nose angle, fineness ratio, and location of maximum body cross section upon the far-field pressure jump across the bow shock of slender bodies. Curves are presented showing the variation of the shock strength with each of these parameters. It is found that, for a wide variety of shapes having equal fineness ratios, the integral has nearly a constant value. Hence, to a first order, the pressure jump in the far field is independent of the shape and depends only upon the fineness ratio.

Transient pressures, induced by wind-tunnel simulated head-on blast wave interactions, have been measured on a hemisphere and on cones of 9-, 15- and 30-degree semivertex angles. Blast wave Mach numbers of 1.6 to 2.2, 2.2 to 5.85 and 2.7 to 4.4 were simulated at the free-stream Mach numbers of 3.1, 5.1 and 7, respectively. Measured pressure-time histories for the hemisphere were compared and found in agreement with histories predicted by McNamara's FLAME code. Peak overpressures for the cones were tested for agreement with values predicted by a simple theoretical method in which an assumption is made that the blast wave forms a Mach stem moving along the surface at a velocity whose axial component equals the velocity of the main blast wave. The effects of angle of attack and of nose blunting were also investigated with the nine-degree cone at a free-stream Mach number of 5.1. (Author).