Technologies of various kinds were increasingly pervasive features of the late Victorian cultural landscape. The half-century following the Great Exhibition of 1851 witnessed an explosion of technological activity as new industries proliferated. From the 1840s onwards railway and telegraph networks provided new and highly visible sources of inspiration concerning the possibilities of technological progress for revolutionizing the human condition. Jules Verne took a wry look at some of the late Victorians' obsessions with the possible impact of technology on their everyday lives in Around the world in eighty days.' Phileas Fogg, the protagonist, lived his life in accordance with a strictly maintained regime. His faith in technology's capacity to extend a rigorous disciplinary framework over the entire planet was such that he was willing to wager his fortune on the pervasiveness of technological regulation. Fogg's was the epitome of the late nineteenth-century technologized body, fitting into and effortlessly moving through new technological networks. He treated his body as if it too were an item of technology -a machine subject to the discipline and the rigours of machine culture.From the beginnings of the Victorian age, commentators and theorists on the physical sciences and in political economy turned increasingly to the machine as the dominant metaphor for their era.' Machines appeared to provide a concrete way of articulating and making sense of new relationships between natural and political economies, between human labour and the natural forces increasingly being harnessed to power industrial progress. From this perspective the human body itself could be regarded as a machine, embodying the newly articulated doctrine of the conservation of energy in just the same way as did an electric battery or a steam engine. Writers as diverse as Hermann von Helmholz and Karl Marx saw the body in this way. The forces of nature, the productive powers of the factory system and the toiling worker could all be regarded as instances of one overarching law. Chemical action, electricity, heat and labour power were interchangeable manifestations of an underlying universal energy. They could all be regarded as components of an allencompassing network of power.Electricity was becoming increasingly central to this worldview as the century progressed. As has been argued elsewhere, electricity during the second quarter of the nineteenth century was becoming increasingly embedded in networks of