Andrew Crosse

From Freepedia

Andrew Crosse (1784-1855) was a British amateur scientist who is famous mainly for supposedly creating insects with his electrical experiments.

Andrew Crosse was born on June 17 1784. In 1836 he was living in Somerset where he had his own homemade laboratory in his home in the Quantock Hills. He was also a local representative in the British parliament.

One day in 1836 Crosse looked into a dish of chemicals in his laboratory. For the last two weeks he had been passing an electrical current through chemical solution to induce crystal formation. At the 26th day of the experiment he saw what he described as "the perfect insect, standing erect on a few bristles which formed its tail".

More creatures appeared and two days later they moved their legs. Over the next few weeks, hundreds more appeared. They crawled around the table and hid themselves when they could find a shelter. Crosse identified them as being part of genus acarus.

Crosse sent the results to London Electrical Society. Otherwise he told only couple of people but rumors begun to spread. Local newspaper published an article about "extraordinary experiment" and named the insects acarus calvanicus.

Some of the people apparently received an impression that Crosse had somehow "created" the insects or at least claimed to have done so. He received angry letters in which he was accused of blasphemy and trying to take God's place as a creator. Some of them included death threats. Local farmers blamed him from the blight of the wheat crop and commissioned an exorcism in the nearby hills.

Some other scientists tried to repeat an experiment. One of them was Michael Faraday who 1867 stated that he had also seen mites that had appeared during some of his experiments. Crosse did not claim that he had somehow created the insects but assumed that there were embedded insect eggs in his samples. Later commentators have agreed that the insects were probably cheese or dust mites that had infested Crosse's instruments.