Johann Konrad Dippel – Frankenstein Castle and Dippel’s Oil
Was “mad scientist” and alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel the inspiration and original model of Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein? Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley never mentioned Dippel or a castle in Germany in any of her previously known writings, but the ties and contacts are rife with connections.
Johann Konrad Dippel was born in 1673 and died in 1734. He wrote over seventy works and treatises on mathematics, chemistry and philosophy, most written under the pseudonym of Christianus Democritus, with his texts now buried in various academic collections. He went to University in Giessen, Germany and lectured at a number of universities, ultimately at Strasbourg University in France, where Johann Goethe also studied in the city where Gutenberg first printed before establishing his press in Mainz, and just down the Rhine River from Darmstadt University in Germany, with many students travelling between them.
A contemporary professor who complained bitterly about Dippel’s ideas of theology also praised him with a bit of ironic shade, “Dippelius was an excellent chemist and a good physician; and this procured him many friends and admirers, as all men are fond of riches.”
This perhaps alludes to Dippel’s more commercial ventures and reputation as bit of the charlatan, though perhaps not intentially. He was an alchemist, trying to turn base metals to gold, and searching especially for the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixer Vitae, the secret to extended, if not eternal life.
Dippel was an early chemical manufacturer. He created a concoction called “Dippel’s Oil” or “Dippel’s Animal Oil” used primarily as an agent in the tanning of animal hides, from where it most likely gets its name, and in cloth colouring. but also having some animal based in ingredients. It was also said locally around to be useful in calming the pangs and distempers of pregnancy. Whether it was to be used topically, digested, or as an aromatic, is unclear. Its chemical composition with ingredients like Butyronitrile Methylamine and Dimethylpyrrole Valeramide would suggest that ingesting any significant amount would not be very healthy. It was reputed to be a foul smelling business and this form of use may have also been a local joke around Darmstadt.
Dippel’s connection to Frankenstein comes from his days at the castle on the hilltop near Darmstadt above the Rhine River Valley below Mainz. Johann Dippel was resident there for a time when the castle had fallen vacant of its lordly Franckenstein family owners after the Reformation and the War of European Succession. Dippel tried unsuccessfully to induce the Landgrave of Hesse to deed him the castle in exchange for Dippel’s providing the duke with the secret of everlasting life, the infamous elixir.
He never did come up with a successful Elixir of Eternal Life while at Darmstadt and eventually moved on, with the locals rather chasing him away like those pitchfork wielding villagers in the Universal Frankenstein movies. His permanent acquisition of the castle was opposed and the legends of his making his oil and formulas from the body parts of human corpses was likely an early form of conspiracy theory, born from his boiling animal bones to get ingredients, mixed with the castle’s time as a prison where prisoners were buried in pauper’s graves, and it was hinted that he dug them up to make his concoction, and therefore an easy connection to digging up the dead to bring eternal life.
Curiously, there is another connection between Dipple and the world of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein story, though indirect. John Polidori, Lord Byron’s companion that summer of ghost stories on the shores of Lake Geneva, is reported to have committed suicide by drinking Prussic Acid, more commonly known as Hydrogen Cyanide, which Sherlock Holmes always managed to deduce from its smell of bitter almonds. Prussic Acid gets its name and is derived from the painting pigment called Prussian Blue, which is now sometimes used as an anti-radiation medicine.
Prussian Blue was created by a Berlin paint-maker named Johan Diesbach, who reportedly made it from potash, from which potassium chloride is derived, that he got from Johann Konrad Dippel, one of the chemical ingredients at the core of Dippel’s work and a common chemical manufacturing compound today.
Dippel moved on from the castle at Darmstadt, still ever seeking his life sustaining elixir, but in the end it may have had the opposite effect. He died of complications of chemical poisoning, either from his close work with some very toxic substances over time, or perhaps sampling his own elixir formula, which may have had the opposite effect than the one intended.
Mary Shelley encounters Dippel’s Oil and the story behind it on the Rhine Trip in 1814 as told in the “Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley” when she was feeling the sensations of her first pregnancy.
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Woe to thee, ye of flesh and soul, the End is Nigh!
In the novel of Frankenstein, the protagonist Victor Frankenstein, while a student at Ingolstadt University brings a “creature” to life. But how did he do it? What is the secret to life and death he discovered? In telling his tragic story in the book, he says he made meticulous notes on his path to reanimating the dead tissue of assembled parts to life, but he insists his notes were taken by his monster, and he will not reveal the secret, as he now believes it would bring horror upon society.
Mary Shelley had been introduced to the magical powers of the battery through her later husband, Percy Shelley, who had told her tales of his own fascination with electricity. While a student at Oxford University, bullied by others, Shelley had devised a revenge by attaching wires from a hand cranked battery to the doorknob of his room and when pranksters would try to enter, he would give them a shock. Shelley was so enamored of the power of batteries, he imagined a future utopian world where fields of batteries would provide the power to replace the dirty steam engine, and man would be freed from labor by machines, with the freedom to contemplate the arts and philosophy in the clear air. We’re still working on that one.
The events of creation did not happen in an elaborate laboratory of flashing movie studio devices, but in his student rooms. Victor Frankenstein’s lab would have to fit within the confines of a residential house in Ingolstadt. The available technology of the voltaic battery and visions of lightning suggest he might have stored energy in some collection of batteries from the use of a lightning rod, which could be applied at the necessary moment. Where alchemists before him had failed in the Elixir of Life, Victor’s application of electricity would have lent it a power unknown before. His studies of Paracelsian treatments of individual body organs may have provided the clues to a connecting mechanism for a being assembled from different dead bodies preserved and applied in a solution of whale oil, gunpowder, human blood, ground worms, electrostatic chemicals to provide the bonding, and his own discovery of the Philosopher’s Stone in a mixture of proprietary proportions.
Did Mary Shelley see the future we couldn’t? For 200 years, the speculative novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley seemed to pose for science fiction the futurist dilemma of could a living being be created from parts of the dead. But as the two century anniversary of its publishing is upon us, it is the philosophical content of the story that is more prescient in its existential quandary. What rights does the creation have over the creator?
A business magazine and a few others have reported a story about an upcoming attempt at the first human head transplant. An Italian neurosurgeon, Sergio Canavero, intends sometime in 2017 to attempt to sew the head of a living patient onto the body of a brain dead patient. The procedure is to be in China.
December 17 marks the birthday in 1778 of Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet and President of the Royal Society, and October 28 may mark the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein’s scientific birth in 1816. Sir Humphry Davy was a chemist and inventor from Cornwall who is most noted today as the originator of the scientific field of electrochemistry and for isolating several elements of the periodic table, calcium, strontium, barium, magnesium and boron. Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the commercial incandescent light bulb, but it was Davy who in 1802 first demonstrated the principle of passing electric current from a battery through metal to create a light source. The first demonstration using platinum was very short and impractical. In 1806 he used two rods of carbon passing electricity across the gap to create the first arc light.
Davy had a close working friendship with James Watt, the inventor of the practical steam engine from whom we get the word for power, wattage. Davy was also an amateur poet and friends with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and England’s Poet Laureate, Robert Southey. Davy and Watt were the creators of Nitrous Oxide “Laughing Gas”, first thinking it might be a cure for a hangover, but then envisioning its use as an anesthetic for surgical procedures. The gas became popular among the romantic poets for its more hallucinogenic properties.
So what does Davy have to do with the birth of Frankenstein? Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a familiar participant to the company of the intellectual discussions of William Godwin and his circle of philosophers and poets. Mary Shelley was introduced at a youthful age to the theories of electrochemistry and Galvanism. It was Coleridge who told of experiments he witnessed using Galvani’s theories on executed prisoners at Newgate Prison. Percy Shelley was an enthusiastic acolyte to the use of batteries and electricity. In his days at Oxford as a reaction to bullying he created a hand-cranked battery to shock entrants to his room who would touch the doorknob. He passed his enthusiasm for the ideas of Davy, proposing that giant farms of electric batteries would power utopian cities of the future, onto Mary in their early courtship. It was likely these concepts which initially excited Mary’s imagination to the possibility bringing to life to the dead. While formulating the first chapters of Frankenstein while residing in Bath, Mary reread and referred to Sir Humphry Davy’s reference work on chemistry.
Davy’s other connection to Frankenstein may be only coincidental, though perhaps a bit more than that. In his later life, Sir Humphry Davy left England and traveled, eventually settling in Geneva, Switzerland, spending his later days a short distance from the Villa Diodati, and strolling the lake shores haunted by Mary Shelley’s creation in her novel. Sir Humphry Davy is buried in the cemetery of Geneva’s PlainPalais, where the murder of Victor Frankenstein’s son took place and just a few steps from where the modern statue of “Frankie” commemorating the Geneva connection to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein still stalks, looking for a reconnection to the scientific father who turned from him.
Dr. Stephen Hawking and others have warned about a future where AI could reach a point of existential risk where humans are at danger from machines that out compete human intelligence. This is an idea expressed in movies like “The Terminator”, and have been around since the deep themes of man verses science in the first appearance of Frankenstein. But just in time for Halloween, the geeky researchers at the Media Lab of MIT are asking you to decide if AI machines can figure out how to scare you out of your candy, in what they call the Nightmare Machine of “Haunted Faces” and “Haunted Places”, computer generated scary visions powered by deep learning algorithms.
The concept is to hand the computer algorithm a photograph, it could be a bucolic scene of sunsets and landscapes or a happy smiling face and the program will hand back a creepy manipulated vision intended to give you the shivers. So far, this nightmare device only offers demonstration versions and does not let visitors submit their own images. Currently, they have provided a set of demo photographs that have been morphed from a standard photo to the machine’s idea of what is unsettling to the human eye. For the demonstration they have landscaped settings with various themes like “slaughterhouse” or “alien invasion”. Faces have been twisted into screaming maws of twisted teeth and haunting soul-forsaken eyes. Some of the imagery is perhaps no more scary than a Vincent Van Gogh painting of flowers on Clozapine, but others are decidedly chilling creep outs. The AI machine learning comes in as visitors to the Nightmare Machine are asked to choose which images frighten and which don’t, so the computer algorithm can learn what truly frightens you.
Mary Shelley’s story explored the theme of the unintended consequences of scientific advancement and curiously by a degree of separation was connected to what might be called the first step in artificial intelligence. Lord Byron, now forever connected in literary mythology to the origin of Frankenstein from the stormy summer on Lake Geneva is also the connection to the origins of AI. Ada Lovelace (Augusta Ada Byron King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace), George Gordon Byron’s only legitimate child by his wife, Anne Isabella Milbanke, found an interest in mathematics, and in 1840 wrote the first computing algorithm for Charles Babbage’s Analysis Engine.
Ever since Mary’ Shelley’s novel of Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus was published in 1818 the idea of human life created from inanimate flesh has held a fascination for the imagination, and recounted in innumerable fictional versions and speculations. In her novel, science student Victor Frankenstein sutured together parts of dead bodies and in some fashion she never really explained, infused the connected parts with a life force, and tragedy ensued.