Circuit Listening

Abstract

Giacomo Puccini was enthusiastic about electricity. To begin with, there were the modern luxuries it made available: electric lighting, the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the refrigerator – he made use of them all. When he sailed westward across the Atlantic in 1907, on board the SS Kaiserin Auguste Victoria, he made a point of counting the electric light bulbs in his cabin – ‘I have seventy’ – and noting all the other extravagances powered by electricity. There were electric devices on board that he intended to enjoy (heated water, cigar lighters, a Marconi telegraph to supply passengers with news from around the world); and ones he didn’t, like the mechanical wooden exercise horses, ‘onto which American women climb each day to jostle the uterus’