Electricity was one of the emblems of enlightened modernity. The “youngest daughter of the sciences,” as the philosopher and theologian Joseph Priestley defined it, offered a vocabulary and a repertoire of embodied sensations with which to articulate visions of human progress. Enlightened moderns turned the page on the nostalgic look to the past that characterized the previous centuries. Electricity was one of the tools they brandished to articulate a historical narrative that positioned them at the beginning of a new age of cumulative knowledge, material progress, and racial superiority. They conceded that the attractive properties that amber—“elektron” in Greek—acquired when rubbed had been known since antiquity but noted that only in the present had experimenters demonstrated that electricity was a universal power of nature.
One of the earliest British writers on the medical applications of electricity, Richard Lovett, regarded the phenomena of the Leyden jar, discovered in 1746, as nothing less than an act of divine revelation. The Italian scholar Ludovico Muratori similarly declared that God “reserved for our times the discovery of a most wonderful phenomenon. I mean electricity.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that if “a person had started up, in the last century, armed with all those miracles of electricity which are now common to the meanest of our experimentalists, it is certain he would have been burnt for a sorcerer, or followed as a prophet.”
The widespread success of the new science was facilitated by a preexisting experimental culture that crossed boundaries between academic and the social realms. Academic journals and popular magazines, along with a vast variety of other texts, popularized the surprising results of a heterogeneous group of self-styled “electricians” or “medical electricians,” many of whom had just a smattering of natural philosophy and often no medical training at all. The Swiss physiologist Albert von Haller remarked in a long article on electricity that was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1747 that electrical demonstrations had awakened the curiosity of those who would not normally pay attention to experimental philosophy. Not only the literate but even the “ladies and people of quality, who never regard natural philosophy but when it works miracles,” became interested in electricity: Everyone wanted to see a “lady’s finger darting flashes of lightning, or her charming lips setting houses on fire.”
All over Europe and its colonies, electrical performances shocked and instructed. They offered sensorial evidence for the existence of an all-permeating natural substance that did not reveal itself unless properly prodded. The spectacle of electricity relied on “electrical machines” that made the newly discovered power of nature tangible. Participants in electrical demonstrations experienced with their own senses the effects of the invisible power that performers initially called “electric fire.” When connected to the electrical machine, audience members’ bodies responded uncontrollably to the passage of electricity: their hands attracted small feathers or pieces of papers without their touching them, their hair stood straight up, and their entire bodies jolted when they underwent the “electric commotion.” Only following Benjamin Franklin’s 1752 kite experiment did the association between lightning and electricity become widely accepted. Before then, there was no clear understanding of the nature of the electric matter. The popular experiments seemed to demonstrate that electricity was an ever-present natural substance, even when invisible.
Electrical demonstrators were eager for their audiences to understand that the electrical machine did not create any effect, since it only revealed the electric matter that existed in nature. However spectacular, their performances were by no means to be confused with magic tricks. In The History and Present State of Electricity (1767), Priestley admitted that the phenomena of electrical attractions and repulsions “looked like the power of magic” and so, without explanation, “and with a little art,” they could very well be used for “a deception of this kind.” However, he underscored, the electrical machine was a “philosophical instrument,” not a magician’s tool, because it exhibited “the operations of nature, that is of the God of nature himself.” Just as the air pump—another philosophical instrument according to Priestley—demonstrated that the vacuum was a natural phenomenon, the electric machine manifested the electric fire, it did not create it.
While experts debated the nature and properties of electricity without reaching consensus, electrified bodies seemed to provide evidence that electricity was an all-permeating, if still largely poorly understood, natural power. In his Essai sur l’électricité des corps (Essay on the electricity of bodies), published in 1746, French physicist Jean-Antoine Nollet offered the first comprehensive theoretical account of all known electrical phenomena, supporting his theory with a description of the physiological responses that any electrified audience member could feel. He believed that streams of electric matter—which shared some features with the substance of fire—issued in and out of electrified bodies. Participants in his lectures could use their own bodies to understand this theory: when they brought their cheeks close to an electrified object, they could feel the stream of electric fire causing a delicate tingling in their faces, and they could also see sparks issue from their fingers, hear cracking noises, and smell sulfuric odors.
Electrified bodies jolted, whooped, and gasped, potentially disrupting the codes of civility and politesse of eighteenth-century sociability. Natural philosophers whose lectures attracted aristocrats, like Nollet in Paris and Georg Matthias Bose in Leipzig, devised strategies to make the uncontrollable electrified body socially acceptable. They turned electrical demonstrations into a new kind of group dance. Lecturers led participants in explosive choreographies that showed that the loss of control caused by electrification was only temporary. Just as men and women in the group dances performed during the social gatherings of elites were assigned different steps, so the most popular electrical demonstrations enacted well-established gender roles, which played with the elite culture of courtship and seduction, along with the sexual allusions connected to the vocabulary and gestures of electrical experiments.
Bose, who performed for the duchess of Gotha, designed an experiment that turned ladies into electric Venuses. For this demonstration, which he called “Venus electrificata” and which Franklin later renamed the “electric kiss,” a lady stood on an insulated stool while a gentleman tried to kiss her, only to receive painful sparks from her lips. Gentlemen, in their turn, could perform their virility by “inflaming spirits,” that is, setting fire to alcohol with electrified swords. For those who preferred a less aggressive model of masculinity, Bose designed an electric “beatification,” which made a luminous halo appear above a person’s head. Nollet’s celebrated “electric commotion,” an experiment where people holding hands experienced an instantaneous electric shock at the same time, borrowed bodily gestures from the cotillion, a dance popular at court and among the aristocracy. The first and most spectacular iteration of such demonstration took place in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the place for special balls, where Nollet invited one hundred eighty people to form a human chain. Not surprisingly, Haller commented in his article that electricity had “replaced the quadrille” in the social gatherings of the time.
Bose also introduced a gendered terminology into his theory of electric attractions and repulsions, which presented an innovative explanation of electrical phenomena based on the distinction between “male” and “female” electric fire. According to this theory, the male fire, emitted by metals and animal bodies, was strong and powerful, and sparks, with their crackling sound, were its visible manifestations. The female fire, on the other hand, was a weak luminous emanation, the kind of light that characterized the aurora borealis. The gendered roles participants were assigned at electrical soirées in which entire families took part turned the potentially indecorous effects of electrification into socially acceptable choreographies.
Electrical demonstrations took place for the most part in the dark and capitalized on the gallantry and innuendo that characterized eighteenth-century sociability. The gestures associated with electrical experiments—the rubbing of a long glass rod that emitted a stream of sparks or the gentle caressing of a globe—elicited the salacious curiosity of the salon goers and captivated the imagination of pornographers and satirists. Theories that connected the electric matter to the principle of life, together with the discovery of animal electricity later in the century, further excited the popular imagination. The Marquis de Sade was profoundly inspired by the violent bodily convulsions caused by the discharge of the Leyden jar and liberally employed electrical vocabulary in his works. The idea that electricity could be used to promote fertility was at the core of the Temple of Health and Hymen, the London extravaganza of the medico-electrical quack George Graham. Among its many prodigious treatments, the temple featured a “celestial bed” surrounded by electrical effluvia, where couples allegedly could successfully conceive. Authors who believed that the electric fire was connected to virility found short-lived confirmation in the rumor that the Leyden experiment did not work on the castrati. Although the rumor was unfounded, the very fact that it spread reveals the pervasiveness of the sexualized interpretations of electricity.
Adapted from In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour by Paola Bertucci.. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press. 2023. .
The
Youngest Daughter of the Sciences : Electrical
performances shocked upper-class eighteenth-century audiences. By Paola
Bertucci. Lapham’s Quarterly, November 1, 2023.
Francis Hawksbee the Elder built his influence machine and people experimented with rubbing glass balls and rods of resin. And then, during the 1740s, the phenomenon of electricity became a subject of popular wonder in the salons of Europe, especially in Germany. Fascinated by Hawksbee’s experiments and Dufay’s writings, Georg Mathias Bose, a young poet and physicist from Leipzig, devised a series of technical feats intended to impress a public of respectable ladies and gentlemen who hurried to admire the spectacle of this new fire, ‘electric fluid’, surging spontaneously from matter.
‘Sanctified by science and frozen with surprise’
What did Bose’s device consist of? He would invite guests to break bread with him. Beforehand, he would insulate all the furniture and his own chair. The apprentice wizard would then discreetly touch a thin copper wire placed under a tray and connected to a hidden generator activated by an accomplice; then, with gravitas, Bose would put his hand flat on the table. The current passed along the guests’ arms, which they would politely rest on this same table, and the crowd, sharing a look of panic, would become overjoyed, surprised, and dishevelled, their hair standing on end as it teemed with thousands of crackling sparks. ‘It’s marvellous!’ one exclaimed. A few months later, Bose invented a machine for mechanical beatification, with the ‘saint’ seated on an insulated chair, the top of his head covered by a little pointy metal hat, under a sort of crown of bits of cardboard and junk. The current was diffused by a long wire that hung just above a metal plate. Situated barely a centimetre higher than the crown, it set off a crackling of sparks that outlined a halo above the head of the person now sanctified by science and frozen with surprise.
‘My mouth twisted, and my teeth almost broke!’
Bose’s imagination was particularly drawn to an attraction called ‘the electric kiss of Leipzig’, which he lyrically describes in his poem ‘Venus electrificata’. Having been insulated from the current beforehand, a beautiful young woman would be connected to Bose’s primary generator, her lips coated with a conductive substance. An honourable audience member was then invited to come up and kiss the girl. The twenty-something-year-old man would bring his quivering lips close to those of the Venus and suffer a violent discharge. The astonished public would then see a surging flash between the mouths of the two young people. The man, having literally received the shock of his life, would be momentarily dazed, the power of the electricity, the fire emanating from the woman, leaving him breathless. ‘The pain came from up close, and my lips were quaking. My mouth twisted, and my teeth almost broke!’
‘A fire of the purest kind’
Bose, the maths professor Hausen, and Winkler, their young colleague in Eastern languages, all set Leipzig ablaze with audacious experiments straddling the line between physics and quackery; in this period, the ‘electric fairy’ (la fée électricité) was still a magical form of scientific entertainment, an irrational promise of reason. Soon enough, the games would be replaced by theories. But, for the time being, the fumes of this subtle fluid sparking a fire in the ether stoked the spirits of Europe and sketched the outline of a new image of human desire. ‘Madame, you are now filled with fire, a fire of the purest kind, one that will cause you no pain as long as you keep it in your heart, but one which will also make you suffer as soon as you communicate it to others.’ Lying latent, perhaps this internal fire is to blame for only revealing itself through contact with her suitor, the man who tries to kiss her. This fire represents the desirability of the young woman; sensual desire is like an electric force and, conversely, electricity is like the natural libido of all matter, just waiting for its suitor, humanity, to reveal itself.
‘The shiver of a new intensity’
In the guise of desire, electricity is not without danger, but it triggers the shiver of a new intensity, that of an ‘unthinkable fluid’. We still did not know the nature of this fluid or its possible uses. The human body served as the principal conductor for these first demonstrations of electrostatic power. Like an electric shiver through the body, something happens that makes manifest the occult power of certain objects to repel or attract others, to heat up, to set off sparks, and to produce a combined discharge of energy and light. But soon the human body was replaced by metal. Flesh, muscles, and nerves were separated from this mysterious impulse. It returned to its place within things, as the first electrostatic generators, Leyden jars, batteries in cylinders, and trays of thousands of jars were constructed.
‘An intoxication cultivated by the modern mind’
But then electricity entered into humanity, where it would always remain as a sort of intoxication cultivated by the modern mind. Like blood coursing through the veins of society, electric light spread through optical science and transported fabulous cinematographic images to the screen. It broke the image into a thousand bits of light, decomposed and encoded it into short pulses capable of being transmitted over distances, and made way for the diffusion of television. It invaded all data, images, texts, and sounds and then placed itself in the service of electronics. It illuminated the street lights of the great capitals as well as the lamps above the beds of children reading late into the night. It fed the indefatigable motor of growth and progress. It demanded that dams, generators, power plants, and windmills be constructed. It set in motion all things or nearly all things to the extent that humanity, without even knowing it, became the living medium between entities (cables, telephones, radios, pacemakers…). Little by little, humanity forgot the electric nature of those entities, but the idea remained in the bloodstream. It was as if Leipzig’s kiss, which sealed the modern alliance of desire and electricity, had never ended.
Extracted from The Life Intense: A Modern Obsession by Tristan Garcia. Edinburgh University press, 2018.
What Electricity Has Done to Thought: an excerpt from The Life Intense by Tristan Garcia. By Naomi Farmer. Edinburgh University Press, October 2018.
The Nature
is generous. By endowing sulfur and glass with the property of attraction, it
has allowed everyone to seize the electrical phenomenon. The simplest stick of
sulfur or the most banal glass tubes already give beautiful effects. But these
materials lend themselves especially to the manufacture of "machines"
which will complete the "cabinets of curiosities", obligatory
attraction of any noble or bourgeois home that respects itself, from the second
half of the 17th century.
Otto de
Guericke (1602-1686)
Among the
builders, a name emerges, that of Otto de Guericke. He is the descendant of a
family of notables from the free city of Magdeburg. His father and grandfather
served as mayor, helping to make it a prosperous and populous city. He studied
first at the University of Leipzig and then joined Leiden to complete his
studies in languages as well as in the art of fortifications and war machines.
In 1626, he
returned to Magdeburg where his knowledge quickly became useful because, in
1631, the Protestant city was besieged by the armies of the German Emperor in
conflict with Sweden whose city is allied.
On May 20,
at dawn, the troops of Catholic mercenaries of warlord Tilly, composed of
Spaniards, Italians, French, Poles and Germans enter the city. The population
resists heroically but fails to repel the attackers. Then begins what has been
remembered as the "massacre of Magdeburg": in four days, twenty
thousand civilians have been killed by the sword or burned alive in the fire of
their house.
Once peace
is restored, Otto de Guericke helps raise the city from its ruins and becomes
mayor. In this position, he represented Magdeburg at the peace congress which,
in 1648, ended this "thirty-year war". Good negotiator, he gets for
his city, the recognition of his old privileges. This mission leads him to sit
on the Imperial Diet. It was at one of these meetings, in Regensburg, in 1654,
that he chose to reveal the capabilities of the vacuum pump he had recently
developed.
The
so-called "Magdeburg hemispheres" experiment is well known. It
follows Torricelli's experiments (1608-1647) on atmospheric pressure.
In 1643, to
respond to the problem posed by the Florence fountain-makers who had difficulty
pumping water into their wells beyond 32 feet (about 10 meters), Toricelli had
spilled a tube full of mercury on a tank containing the same liquid. He could
see that the mercury was falling down the tube to stabilize at a height of 28
inches (76cm) above the free surface. He thus demonstrated the existence of the
atmospheric pressure but also that of the emptiness which, according to his
adversaries, Nature had "horror".
The subject
fascinates Otto Guericke who undertakes successfully, the development of a pump
capable of evacuating air from a
container full of it. After trying to empty a barrel that did not resist the
experiment, Guericke had a copper sphere made up of two contiguous hemispheres
and equipped with a tap. In front of a large audience, he is emptying into this
imposing sphere of a diameter of 1.19 meters. Twenty-four horses hitched to the
hemispheres are unable to break the adhesion between the two parts.
The
experience of the "Hemispheres of Magdeburg" is a landmark in the
history of mechanics. Guericke's place in that of electricity is more modest.
His contribution in this area was, moreover, ignored by most of his
contemporaries. Yet, nearly a century later, several physicists, and in
particular the Frenchman Dufay, note that one would have gained to consider his
experiments with more attention.
Guericke,
in fact, is not realy interested in electricity. He meets it only through the
questions he asks himself about the functioning of the Universe and first of
all about that of the earth. Among the "virtues" he attributes to our
globe, two seem to him fundamental. First a "conservative" virtue:
the earth attracts all the materials that are necessary for its formation,
water, rocks ... Then an "expulsive" virtue: it repels everything
that can destroy it. Fire, for example, whose flame rises to the sky.
Guericke
offers of it a spectacular demonstration. Take, he says, a glass balloon the
size of a "child's head", fill it with finely ground sulfur, heat up
to the fusion of the sulfur, let cool, break the glass and collect the sulfur
globe . Equip the globe with a handle and place it on a wooden support. Rub
this ball vigorously with a very dry hand.
The ball
will then manifest many of the earthly virtues. "Conservative" virtue
first, attracting light objects to her.
More
amazing is the observation of the "expulsive" virtue ! The globe
sometimes repels what it first attracted. A feather, for example, after
touching the globe is repulsed. So suspended in the air, it can be walked
around the room. Better: whatever the movement of the globe it seems to always
present the same face. Exactly like the moon opposite the earth.
Guericke,
who has read Gilbert, can not doubt for a moment that the attraction virtue of
the earth is simply electrical in nature. As for repulsive virtue, no one
before him seems to have noticed it. He attributes to it a different cause and
imagines it only proper to the constituent elements of the earth and among
these to sulfur. It passes, thus, beside a truth which will remain long obscure
until the French Dufay shows that the electricity also has a "repulsive
virtue"!
Guericke's
experiments contain other rich intuitions. To prove that the air is not the
vehicle of the attraction, it shows that this virtue can be transmitted by
means of a linen thread, more than a meter long, stretched from the surface of
the globe. This first observation of the electrical "conduction" will
also remain without a future. It will be up to the Englishman Gray to
rediscover it almost a century later.
Even if its
title of glory remains the famous experiment of the hemispheres and if its
theoretical contribution in the field of electricity remained limited, the
talent of observer and experimenter of Guericke, recognized by his successors,
deserves the place which him is reserved in the Pantheon of electricians.
Hauksbee (
?- 1713)
Electricity
and vacuum works together in the machines devised by Francis Hauksbee.
The first years of his life are not well
known. Self-taught, he is noticed by Newton. In December 1703, the famous
physicist, author of the law of universal gravitation, became president of the
Royal Society of London, the largest English Scientific Academy. He hires
Hauksbee as his lead experimenter. Until 1705, it animates the sessions of the
Academy. In particular by classic vacuum experiments inspired by Guericke.
From this
date he moves towards the study of "mercurial" or
"barometric" phosphorescence. Since 1675, a fortuitous observation
intrigues physicists. When a barometric tube arranged in the conditions of the
Toricelli experiment is jostled in the darkness, a phosphorescent glow appears
in the emptiness released at the upper part of the tube. When Hauksbee tackles
the problem, it is generally accepted that this glow comes from an emanation of
mercury. For his part he chooses to use method and study the respective roles
of emptiness, glass and mercury.
The vacuum
? Hauksbee partially fills a balloon with mercury in which he creates vacuum.
The whole remains dark as long as the liquid remains motionless. It is
therefore clear that the vacuum is not sufficient but that, on the other hand,
the friction caused by the movement is essential.
Friction on mercury or on glass? From November
1705 Hauksbee uses, to answer this question, a montage which ignores mercury.
It is a sphere of glass provided with two diametrically opposed copper pieces
serving as its axis. This sphere can be put in rapid motion by placing it on a
machine inspired by a carpenter's wheel. But its essential property is to have
been conceived so that one can realize the emptiness. Hauksbee took the
precaution of keeping a valve in one of the parts of the shaft that can be
connected to a vacuum pump.
The sphere,
emptied of its air, is set in motion and rubbed by the hand of the
experimenter. Suddenly, in the darkness, the sphere fills with a strong diffuse
glow. A wall ten feet away is illuminated. A book held near the globe can be
read. When a finger approaches the sphere, the light is concentrated in
filaments that seem attracted by this finger. The light gradually decreases
when, little by little, the air is allowed to enter the tube.
Even when the atmospheric pressure is reached,
we can still catch some light from the globe. It is external this time, and
present themselves in the new form of sparks. Hauksbee still hesitates but for
Newton opinion, the light does not come from emptiness, nor from mercury but
from glass!
We now know
that if it is the glass that is electrified, the light comes from the air. In
the "empty" globe, there is still residual gas and it is
"ionized" under the effect of the electric field created by the
friction of the glass. It becomes, by this fact, bright, like neon in a tube of
lighting. Naturally this interpretation was impossible to those who had neither
the knowledge of the nature of the air, nor, still less, of the existence and
constitution of the atoms.
This "electrical phosphorescence" will continue to obsess generations of physicists. His study will lead to cathode-ray tubes, which for some time still equip our televisions and computers screens. The discovery of X-rays, that of electrons, that of radioactivity, will also be at the end of this adventure that we will discuss later.
For the
moment, Hauksbee's spectacular and frightening demonstrations in the darkness
of a cabinet are becoming the star experiences of physics shows.
Tube or
globe?
One thing
is certain: for those who saw glass as a secondary material and with few
electrical effects, and who continued to prefer amber, sulfur or wax, Hauksbee
opposed them a convincing denial.
Glass is
essential, but in what form? Hauksbee himself for his classical demonstrations
renounces his spheres and uses only a tube of flint-glass, the flint-glass used
for optics and of which the English are the specialists. With a tube one meter
long and three centimeters in diameter, it attracts thin sheets of copper
several tens of centimeters apart. These sheets of copper, or better of gold,
more sensitive than pieces of string or paper, will become the classic material
of electrical laboratories. To put them in motion, a glass tube is more than
enough.
The globe, mounted on a tower, will be
forgotten for thirty years until, around 1733, a German physicist, Bose, takes
up the idea.
Bose
(1710-1761)
Georg
Matthias Bose, born in Leipzig, is interested in new physics and mathematics
while pursuing his medical studies. In 1738 he was appointed to a chair of
"natural philosophy" at the University of Wittenberg. From this
position, he establishes a close relationship with all that Europe counts as well-known
people, both scientists and men of letters, religion and politics. The magic
aspect of electricity seduces him. When his readings lead him to meet the
electrical experiments of Gray and Dufay (two persons of prime importance that
we will talk about again), and in particular those on conductors and
insulators; when, moreover, he finds the description of Hauksbee's globe, he
knows that he has found both his vocation and his public.
It first
completes the Hauksbee device with an assembly that will become the standard
for all European laboratories. An iron tube, sometimes in the form of a rifle
barrel, hangs horizontally from two cords of silk. He grazes, without touching
it, the rubbed glass globe. This "first conductor" will then be used
to distribute the "electrical fluid" through various chains or
conductors to the surrounding experimental devices.
Bose then
organizes "electric parties" that are not limited to its student
audience. Imagine a meal where you have invited all the prominent notables in
your city. The legs of the table have been isolated by wax patties as well as
the chair that you have reserved for yourself. From the electric machine you
have operated and concealed, a connecting wire is brought near your hand. At
the moment your guests want to grab their fork, you just have to do the contact
with the table so that an electric shock comes to make them jump on their
chair. At dessert you will set a liquor cup on fire simply by the approach of
one of your fingers from where only the closest spectators will have seen a
spark escape. Your guests will then be ready to follow you in the cabinet of
curiosities where you will transport them in a universe at once wonderful and
terrifying.
Wonderful!
Wafers of thick wax are placed on the floor. Each participant climbs on one of
them and reaches out to his neighbors, forming a chain whose first link firmly
holds the rifle barrel suspended above the globe of the machine. When the globe
is set in motion, the person at the other end of the chain reaches out over
gold leaves placed on a plate. Each one then sees the leaves rise from a light
flight, as attracted by a magic will, towards the open hand of the
experimenter. Let's put out the candles that light up this closed-shuttered
salon and reach for the driver of the machine, we will see sparkling sparks. In
the form of apotheosis we can propose the demonstration of the "electric
beatification". The loveliest person in the assembly is invited to climb
on a cake of wax and to seize the driver. When the machine is vigorously
activated, its hair unfolds in a halo which illuminates, in the darkness, a
thousand gleams of holiness.
Terrifying
! The man who has the courage to run a few drops of his blood sees them glitter
like fire beads in the dark as he grabs the electric conductor. Tense fingers
of a person connected to the machine can kill the poor flies to which the spark
will be directed. Could we not make more serious victims tomorrow? Such
manipulations would certainly have condamned their authors to be burned in the
times, still close, of the Inquisition!
Terrifying and traitor! As beautiful as the
young person haloed by the contact of the machine be, it will not be prudent to
approach his lips for a kiss. The "Electrified Venus" will defend its
virtue by a vigorous electric shock.
L’abbé Nollet (1700-1770)
The news of
these wonders reaches France and in particular to the Abbé Nollet who is then
one of the most prominent European electricians. He said he could not sleep
until he himself had built and perfected a machine.
The globe,
one foot in diameter, used by Nollet, is thick glass. The wheel which drives it
by means of a belt passing by a pulley fixed on its axis, must be at least four
feet in diameter and be provided with a crank which allows two men to activate
it. Nollet prefers to rub the globe by hand but many European physicists have
chosen to add a leather cushion.
The plate machines.
This voluminous machine will fit most physics
cabinets until the Englishman Ramsden (1735-1800) builds the first plate
machine in 1768. The plate machine is perfected quickly and will become really
effective when the first machines appear. " with electrical influence
", ie requiring no friction. The famous machine invented by the English
Wimshurst in 1883, still equips the laboratories of our high schools.
History of electricity. The first electric machines. Le blog d'histoire des sciences, June 3, 2018.
His poetic nature enabled him to describe the process of Beatification in such woolly terms, that he had the monopoly on the demo. No-one could replicate his production of a halo hovering above the cranium. It was trickery, in so much as it required an evacuated crown to be worn, with a highly electrified conductor above that. Rackstrow managed to replicate the process in 1748, as shown in the engraving above. However, the controversy raged for many years....
The High Voltage Beatification of Professor Bose at Wittenburg. Lateral Science Blog, November 23, 2015.
the ambience of such displays match the culture of the libertine century, it also provided new material for erotic literature.
kindled by the electrified bottle; when the healths of all the famous electricians of England, France, Holland, and Germany, are to be drunk in electrified bumpers, under the discharge of guns from the electrical battery .’
newly discovered powers of the ‘electric fire’. In darkened salons demonstrators choreographed simple electrical phenomena – such as attractions, sparks and shocks – so as to turn them into interactive performances that involved the audience and that appealed to the culture of the libertine century.
and chemist Joseph Priestley termed it the ‘youngest daughter of the sciences’ . Indeed, it was in the age of Enlightenment that electricity gained prominence both in the academic world and in the public sphere. Starting from the 1740s, learned audiences in Europe and North America became familiar with a natural power as disruptive as lightning and as enchanting as the aurora borealis, a
phenomenon that also promised sensational new therapies.
Itinerant lecturers toured capitals and provinces with their portable electrical apparatus, offering dramatic demonstrations of the laws effects of the ‘electric fire’ in public squares and aristocratic salons. Their activity made electricity one of the most discussed topics of polite conversations, with the media of the time extolling instruments and inventors. As early as 1745 readers of the
Gentleman’s Magazine would learn of the ‘wonderful discoveries’ recently made in the field, ‘so surprising as to awaken the indolent curiosity of the public’. Not only the literate, but even ‘ladies and people of quality, who never regard natural philosophy but when it works miracles’,
became interested in electrical effects: ‘princes were willing to see this new fire which a man produced from himself, and which did not descend from heaven’ .
hair raise or their hands attract small pieces of paper. Several instruments especially designed for scientific soirees contributed to make a spectacle of electricity (Figure 1). Instrument-makers exploited what we now know as electrostatic induction to make paper puppets dance or metallic bells ring, whereas the livid light of electrical sparks was displayed in the dark in order to increase theatricality. Spectators could so admire spirals of sparks appearing inside glass tubes, luminescent images flashing onto wooden boards, suggestive bluish or greenish glows filling
exhausted glass vessels.
hands, it was possible to provoke an instantaneous electric discharge through one’s body. The ‘Leyden experiment’, as this phenomenon was known from the name of the town where it was first discovered, aroused great curiosity. As Franklin declared, for a number of ingenious lecturers who
showed it for money, it meant ‘meat, drink and clothing’. The French instrument-maker and public demonstrator Jean Antoine Nollet made the Leyden experiment collective by forming chains of people holding hands: they would be shocked simultaneously as the first and the last person
in the circle touched the inside and the outside coating of the jar (Figure 2).
that the newly discovered electric fire might also be a healing agent. Equipped with the most up-to-date electrical instruments, performers readily included ‘medical’ electricity in their repertoire of theatrical demonstrations, offering to administer shocks and sparks for therapeutic purposes in
the course of their performances.
bowels of the earth. As Priestley made clear in his History and Present State of Electricity, by the second half of the eighteenth century electricity was regarded as a natural agent that could account for several disruptive ‘unusual appearances’. Not only lightning, but also earthquakes, whirlpools and whirlwinds were explained in terms of the motion of the electric fire. Several instruments helped
demonstrators illustrate the implications of Franklin’s theory to the public. Thunder houses dramatically demonstrated the difference metallic conductors would make in case lightning struck a building, whereas the ‘aurora flask’ reproduced the aurora borealis which was regarded as an
electrical phenomenon on a small scale (Figure 3). Such demonstrations contributed to the construction of an electrical cosmos: health, sickness, thunderstorm, earthquakes
and aurora borealis, all resulted from the motions of the electric fire.
offered to paying audiences. Educated ladies and gentlemen delighted in experimenting on the natural world and the conversations they hosted in their salons – which can be regarded as one of the cultural spaces of the Enlightenment – often focused on scientific subjects. Instruments
such as the orrery (or planetarium), the air pump, microscopes and telescopes, were familiar items not only for the learned but also for the polite. As icons of natural knowledge, they were included in gentlemanly collections of curiosities and rarities, or exhibited in especially dedicated physics cabinets. As electrical experiments gained the attention of the public, lecturers readily included the
new science in their repertoire of demonstrations while instrument makers promptly added electrical instruments in their sales catalogues.
fire revealed itself to the eyes, the ears and even the nose: its livid light was accompanied by a crackling noise and left a distinctive sulphurous smell. Audiences in search of entertainment and education were particularly impressed by the sensuous experience of the electric fire. Electrical
soirees never failed to satisfy such expectation.
performers throughout Europe. Suspended by silk cords, a young boy was connected to a friction generator by his feet: by this means his hands could attract small pieces of papers.
In the course of the century several variations were proposed: the boy’s electrified hands turned the pages of a book, or transmitted the electric fire to a young girl who would attract light objects herself. Nollet involved the ladies in the audience: as they approached their fingers to the boy’s nose a big spark could be seen and heard (Figure 4).
‘Could one believe that a lady’s finger, that her whalebone petticoat, should send forth flashes of true lightening, and that such charming lips could set on fire a house? The ladies were sensible of this new privilege of kindling fires without any poetical figure, or hyperbole, and resorted from all parts to the public lectures of natural philosophy, which by that means became brilliant assemblies.’
that he dedicated to the princess of Gotha and to the duchess of Brühl-Collowrath, who enjoyed attending his electric demonstrations. In his verses there was of course a reference to his attempt to kiss an electrifying Venus:
I kissed Venus standing on pitch.
It pained me to the quick. My lips trembled
My mouth quivered, my teeth almost broke.’
invisible in the dark, after a few minutes a luminous halo would appear above his head (Figure 6).
innovative explanation of electrical phenomena based, not by chance, on the distinction between ‘male’ and ‘female’ electric fire. The male fire, emitted by metals and animal bodies, was unsurprisingly strong and powerful: sparks, with their crackling sound, were visible manifestations of
this kind of fire. The female fire, instead, was a weak luminous emanation, the kind of light that characterized the aurora borealis.
But this pure electricity,
Divested of all fiction:
Motion makes heat, and heat makes love,
Creatures below, and things above,
Are all produc’d by friction’
Such satirical poems drew freely from the allusions so obviously offered by electrical instrumentation. The globes of the electrical machines, caressed by the operators’ hands
in order to produce electric fire, became the subject of another poem:
To feed the gentle, lambent flame of love,
But most the beauties of the Bosom please,
Nor any female charm can vie with these!
The tempting seat of all that’s sweet and fair,
For Nature’s Electricity is there! ‘
that the power of conducting the electric fire was strictly related to virility. Their opinion was supported by the contemporary rumour that the Leyden experiment did not work on the castrati. The connection between electricity and virility/fertility stood at the core of the Temple of
Health and Hymen, the London extravaganza of a medicoelectrical quack, George Graham. Among the many prodigious cures electricity afforded in the Temple, the most requested was the Celestial Bed, a gigantic bed surrounded by electric vapours that – he claimed – helped couples fight
against barrenness.
salons. Electricity became the craze of the eighteenth century thanks to the thrilling demonstrations choreographed by lecturers and demonstrators that explained the role of the electric fire in the natural world with an eye to the tastes of their audiences. The instrument trade, the marketing of cultural products, the sociability of electrical experiments, all played a crucial role in spreading interest in the ‘youngest daughter of the sciences’.
References
