Looking back to Brian Wright's book on Andrew Crosse

Andrew Crosse installed 3,000ft of copper wire from poles and trees at Fyne Court, Broomfield, on the Quantock Hills, where he was born.

And while neighbours were terrified by the sounds and lights emanating from the house he had turned into a laboratory, it had the added benefit of keeping poachers off his estate.

Taunton author and historian Brian Wright had written a biography of Crosse, who was born in 1784 and became a scientist, eccentric, republican landowner and poet.

His main, but by no means only, interest was in electricity and many of his discoveries in that field are still valid.

He once startled guests at a dinner party in 1816 by saying: “By means of the electric agency, we shall be enabled to communicate our thoughts instantaneously with the utmost parts of the earth.”

While we owe a lot to the early scientists who laid the foundations of our modern comfortable existence, we often know little about their private lives.

This is not the case with Crosse and Mr Wright uncovered a lot about him, including odd facts such as he was involved in an armed rebellion as a schoolboy, and accompanied the great scientist Michael Faraday to a seance.

The book also explained what sparked Crosse’s interest in electricity from the age of eight, which lasted until his death in 1855 in the same bedroom where he had been born.

However, most people know of Crosse because of the belief that he inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein, and that he accidentally created life in the form of mites during an experiment, which

shook the world of science to its very foundations.

The story of the mysterious mites was detailed for the first time in the book, and an attempt made to explain what they were.

The book included the many ups and downs of his life, with much humour and a bit of scandal.

The book, Andrew Crosse and the Mite that Shocked the World, was launched at the Taunton Literary Festival in 2015.