'Lectrical!

I just finished reading David Bodanis' Electric Universe, a wonderfully entertaining history of the discovery of electricity (or, as the subtitle has it, "The Shocking True Story of Electricity"). It starts with the early attempts at batteries (leyden jars of Ben Franklin's time and such) and continues with Faraday's postulation of electromagnetic fields, pointing along the way to technological innovations such as telegraphs, telephones, computers, and Prozac. The story is great, but what makes it is Bodanis' sly, knowing commentary. For instance, here's a passage from the section on electrical impulses in our brain:

Nancy Ostrowski was a young American who'd once considered being a nun, and by the 1970s she had switched to research. But she seems to have channeled some of the moral strictures from her previous life into her new work. In her laboratory outside Washington, D.C., she would get something like a small guillotine ready, then encourage mice to have sex, and then decapitate them while they were thus engaged.

(She was searching for endorphins, not just chopping happy mice's heads off.) Or my favorite, in a footnote to a chapter on Alan Turing and "the British government's codebreaking group":

Actually a "cipher-breaking" group. A code is a direct-substitution system, where one word is used to stand for another, as with a child's code in which, for example, the words national embarrassment are substituted wherever the word shrub has been written.