An Entertainment for Angels (Icon Science) E-Book

Patricia Fara

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Serie: Icon Science
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 154

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Electricity was the scientific fashion of the Enlightenment, 'an Entertainment for Angels, rather than for Men'. Lecturers attracted huge audiences to marvel at sparkling fountains, flaming drinks, pirouetting dancers and electrified boys. Enlightenment optimists predicted that this new-found power of nature would cure illnesses, improve crop production, even bring the dead back to life.  Benjamin Franklin, better known as one of America's founding fathers, played a key role in developing the new instruments and theories of electricity during the eighteenth century. Celebrated for drawing lightning down from the sky with a kite, Franklin was an Enlightenment expert on electricity, developing one of the most successful explanations of this mysterious phenomenon. But Patricia Fara, Senior Tutor of Clare College Cambridge, reveals how the study of electricity became intertwined with Enlightenment politics. By demonstrating their control of the natural world, Enlightenment philosophers hoped to gain authority over society. And their stunning electrical performances provided dramatic evidence of their special powers.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

About the Author

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Picture Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I Illuminations: The Light of Reason

Chapter 1: Interpretations

Chapter 2: Electricity and Enlightenment

Part II Shocking Inventions: Instruments

Chapter 1: Robert Boyle and the Air-pump

Chapter 2: Francis Hauksbee and the Electrical Machine

Chapter 3: Stephen Gray and the Charity Boy

Chapter 4: Pieter van Musschenbroek and the Leyden Jar

Part III Lightning Cures: Applications

Chapter 1: Benjamin Franklin

Chapter 2: Knobs or Points?

Chapter 3: The Business of Medicine

Chapter 4: Therapeutic Shocks

Part IV Sparks of Imagination: Theories

Chapter 1: Problems

Chapter 2: Fluids and Atmospheres

Chapter 3: Theological Aethers

Chapter 4: Measurement and Mathematics

Part V The Flow of Life: Current Electricity

Chapter 1: Henry Cavendish and the Torpedo

Chapter 2: Luigi Galvani and his Frogs

Chapter 3: Alessandro Volta and his Pile

Chapter 4: Resuscitation

Further Reading

Notes

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPEmail: [email protected] 

ISBN: 978-178578-217-6

The author has asserted his moral rights

Text copyright © 2002 Patricia Fara

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

For Helen and Katherine

About the Author

After gaining a degree in physics at Oxford University, Patricia Fara ran a company producing audio-visual material on computing before switching to the history of science. A specialist in 18th-century England, she now teaches at Cambridge University and is a Fellow of Clare College. A regular contributor to radio and TV programmes such as In Our Time, she has published widely on the history of science. Her prize-winning Science: A Four Thousand Year History was translated into nine languages, and other highly acclaimed books cover diverse topics including Isaac Newton, women in science, electricity, Erasmus Darwin and the First World War.

List of Illustrations

1 Benjamin Franklin

2 A New Electrical Machine for the Table

3 Robert Boyle’s first air-pump

4 Wright of Derby, ‘The Alchymist’

5 The hanging boy

6 Benjamin Rackstrow’s beatification

7 The Leyden experiment, and the flow of electrical matter

8 Adam Walker’s electrical experiments

9 Benjamin Wilson’s experiment at the Pantheon in 1777

10 ‘The Quacks’: James Graham and Gustavus Katterfelto

11 Monitoring electric therapy with Timothy Lane’s electrometer

12 Charles Coulomb’s torsion balance

13 Henry Cavendish’s artificial torpedo

14 Luigi Galvani’s frogs

15 Alessandro Volta’s pile

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank Simon Flynn and Jon Turney for their very helpful editorial suggestions. I am also extremely grateful to Jim Secord and Simon Schaffer, who have made it possible for me to write this book.

Picture Acknowledgements

The illustrations: Illustration 2, Illustration 3, Illustration 5, Illustration 6, Illustration 7, Illustration 8, Illustration 9, Illustration 11, Illustration 12, Illustration 13, Illustration 14 and Illustration 15 are reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Introduction

What gave my Book the more sudden and general Celebrity, was the Success of one of its propos’d Experiments … for drawing Lightning from the Clouds. This engag’d the public Attention every where.

Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, 1788

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was fascinated by scientific experiments. One of his friends described how he would pull out an electrical machine from the clutter on his desk, and charge himself up ‘so that the fierce, crackling sparks flew forth; and … his long, wild locks bristled and stood on end’. His eyes gleaming with enthusiasm, Shelley prophesied that science would find a way to keep poor people warm during the coldest winters. ‘What a mighty instrument would electricity be’, enthused Shelley, as he envisaged a future when ‘by means of electrical kites we may draw down the lightning from heaven! … an immense volume of electricity, the whole ammunition of a mighty thunderstorm; and this being directed to some point would there produce the most stupendous results.’1

Drawing ‘Lightning from the Clouds’: this visionary dream had been converted into reality by an American printer, Benjamin Franklin. Like Shelley, Franklin valued electricity for its potential benefits as well as its exciting effects. He was one of the eighteenth century’s leading diplomats, internationally acclaimed for his enlightened attitude and democratic ideals. Yet he was also a prominent electrical researcher, famous for his numerous inventions and groundbreaking theories that had helped to establish the new science of electricity. Although he did not embark on his electrical career until he was forty, Franklin’s scientific eminence paralleled his political reputation.

Electricity was the greatest scientific invention of the Enlightenment. Shelley was showing off his skills in 1810, but only a hundred years earlier, electrical science had not existed. Virtually the only way to produce electricity was by rubbing amber or a compliant cat, and even experts knew little that had not been familiar to the Greeks. Yet by the middle of the eighteenth century, electrical experiments were being performed all over Europe with new, powerful instruments that could produce, store and discharge static electricity.

Far from being an arcane preoccupation reserved for privileged intellectuals, electricity rapidly became a topic of conversation throughout society. Superlatives abounded: electricity was ‘replete with wonders’, ‘as surprising as a miracle!’, ‘favourite object and pursuit of the age’. It was, one admirer exclaimed, ‘an Entertainment for Angels, rather than for Men’.2 Lecturers held their audiences spellbound as feathers jumped through the air, water jets glowed, and glasses of spirits were set aflame by the touch of a sword.

Many wealthy families bought their own apparatus, and aristocratic women produced miniature lightning flashes from their fingers and their whalebone petticoats, or titillated their admirers with a sensational – if rather painful – electric kiss. At the Hanoverian court, electric entertainment replaced dancing; in Edinburgh, myrtle trees were found to blossom earlier after a dose of electricity; while in Paris, electrified animals were found to lose weight (this was attributed to increased perspiration).

One early enthusiast was John Wesley, the Methodist preacher, who had learnt about electricity from reading a book by Franklin. As Wesley travelled around England with his own electrical machine, he marvelled: ‘What an amazing scene is here opened, for after-ages to improve upon.’3 Journals like The Gentleman’s Magazine echoed this enthusiasm, printing utopian suggestions of future applications for electricity. This new wonder power could, adherents claimed, be used for preserving hops and gunpowder, hatching eggs, or disinfecting bed linen; by impregnating food electrically, digestion might be improved – along with gout, the other major health preoccupation of valetudinarian gentlemen during the eighteenth century.

In his Oxford study, the electrified Shelley balanced on an insulated stool with his hair flying up, preaching about the most recent equipment to be invented – galvanic batteries that could produce electric current. Franklin and his contemporaries had only experimented with static electricity, but as the century drew to a close, Italian researchers discovered how to produce a flowing current. Shelley was enthralled. What further secrets of nature might be unlocked, he wondered, as science marched ever onwards? What new ways might be found of improving human welfare? Even in his wildest dreams, Shelley could not have known that he was indeed standing at the beginning of a new era, when electricity would come to run the world. It is hard for us to imagine life without electric power: Franklin and his Enlightenment colleagues made it possible.

Part IIlluminations:The Light of Reason

Why are the nations of the world so patient under despotism? Is it not because they are kept in darkness and want knowledge? Enlighten them and you will elevate them.

Reverend Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country, 1789

For many years, Franklin’s favourite portrait of himself was the one shown in Illustration 1, which had been painted in London in 1762 and engraved the following year. Following English conventions for portraying Enlightenment men of letters, Franklin is shown working in his study, his quill and paper prominently displayed to advertise his intellectual solidity. Clearly absorbed, he is listening to the electric bells behind his right shoulder, from which hang two electrified, mutually repellent cork balls. To his left, the traditional draped curtain is drawn back to reveal an imaginary composite scene, in which the devastating effects of lightning are contrasted with the protective security afforded by Franklin’s most famous invention, the lightning rod.

Illustration 1: ‘Benjamin Franklin’, mezzotint by Edward Fisher after Mason Chamberlin, 1763. (Wellcome Institute)

It was this picture that Franklin chose as a gift for his close friends and colleagues, and to impress remote government contacts in America. With the help of his son William, he sent out over one hundred copies, carefully rolling each one up in a protective tin case. Distributing pictures in this way enabled Franklin not only to boast about his electrical prestige, but also to solicit political support and consolidate personal friendships.

Beneath the engraving, the inscription ‘B. Franklin of Philadelphia LLD FRS’ makes it clear that Franklin was a distinguished scholar; moreover, it advertises that he was an American, the first President of the American Philosophical Society. As the colonies struggled for independence, nationalists enthusiastically vaunted specifically American achievements, hymning Franklin as the new nation’s challenge to Isaac Newton. Poets gushed about this electrical expert whose political initiatives had guaranteed the political freedom necessary for scientific rationality to flourish:

… we boast

A Franklin, prince of all philosophy,

A genius piercing as the electric fire,

Bright as the lightning’s flash, explain’d so well

By him, the rival of Britannia’s sage.–

This is the land of every joyous sound,

Of liberty and life, sweet liberty!4

1 Interpretations

Franklin has become a hero not only for patriotic Americans, but also for scientists who want to tell dramatic stories about the discovery of electricity. Modern society depends on scientific and technologic achievements, but there are several different ways of describing how science has become so important.

Many historians envisage science as a progressive success story, a continuous march towards learning the truth about the natural world. They construct heroic models of the past in which exceptionally gifted men (and the occasional woman) build on the insights of their predecessors to make great advances. Achievements that may have taken years of effort are converted into picturesque adventures – Archimedes shouting ‘Eureka!’ from his bath, Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree, James Watt watching a kettle boil. In these versions of science’s history, Franklin appears as the great electrical champion who bravely conducted electricity down to earth by flying a kite.

Such memorable tales are appealing because they glamorise scientific research, but they present a misleading and over-simplified picture. Writers often smooth away conflicts, confusion and ambition, portraying scientists as disinterested searchers after truth, dedicated investigators who are unaffected by the normal demands of human life. Many scientists are, of course, genuinely concerned not only to discover more about the world, but also to bring about useful improvements. But they can also be competitive people who want to earn money, become famous and defeat their rivals. Despite the enthusiastic claims of Enlightenment experimenters, there was no easy upward path of progress, and research was fuelled by hostility as well as by curiosity.

Scientific experiments aren’t always successful: people make mistakes, ignore results that later seem significant, or persuade themselves – and others – to adopt theories that turn out to be false. Just as importantly, science’s accomplishments are not due to the single-handed efforts of a few geniuses. With the benefit of hindsight, it is relatively easy to pick out key individuals and events that seem to have directed the course of history. But singling them out means forgetting about the countless other projects that were being undertaken at the same time.

Franklin is central to any story of Enlightenment electricity, but he was just one player in a complex tale of change that had many other participants – Joseph Priestley in England, Jean Nollet in France and Luigi Galvani in Italy, to name just a few. Franklin became interested in electricity only after he had read about other people’s inventions, and his own innovations were adapted and improved by his successors. Even the story of his kite has been embroidered into a myth; in reality, some French experimenters were the first to show that lightning is electrical by drawing it down from the sky.

Science, politics and society were inextricably linked. When Franklin was eighty-one years old and helping to draft the American Constitution, an eminent English doctor sent him a flattering letter in which he wrote: ‘Whilst I am writing to a Philosopher and a Friend, I can scarcely forget that I am also writing to the greatest Statesman of the present, or perhaps of any century, who spread the happy contagion of Liberty amongst his countrymen; and … deliver’d them from the house of bondage, and the scourge of oppression.’5 Franklin’s interest in electricity was rooted in this Enlightenment political ideology, and that is where this version of electricity’s history will begin.

2 Electricity and Enlightenment

In the second half of the eighteenth century, there were only two English universities – Oxford and Cambridge. Both were expensive, closed to women, and better at training young men to become clergymen than scientific practitioners. Like Franklin himself, many people learnt about electricity by reading journal articles and attending lectures. One of the more successful popular scientific books was called The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy, indicating that – unlike its heavier rivals – it was designed for women as well as for men.

The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy uses dialogue, a traditional teaching method dating back to the Greeks. An elegantly dressed student, burdened with the appropriately classical-sounding name of Cleonicus, returns from university to play the superior role. He engages in long conversations with his envious sister Euphrosyne, who has been confined at home to study suitably feminine subjects such as drawing and dancing. In each chapter, the knowledgeable Cleonicus patronisingly explains the rudiments of a different branch of natural philosophy, the study of nature. By using terms so simple that even she can be expected to understand them, this artificial dialogue implicitly advertises that natural philosophy can be understood by everyone.

One day, after a lengthy session on the weather, Cleonicus agrees to explain how lightning and thunder are related to the exciting new science of electricity. Leading his sister into a shuttered room, he prepares to demonstrate a recent invention conveniently placed in their well-appointed home – an electrical machine (Illustration 2). Cleonicus is confident that with the help of this machine, he can dazzle his sister with dramatic effects of light and sound totally different from anything she has ever encountered before.

Euphrosyne: But, pray, Cleonicus, can you, by any Experiments, shew me this Matter of Electricity; for otherwise it is talking to me in the Dark?

Cleonicus: Yes; come with me into this dark Room, and then you will view it in its proper Light.

Euphrosyne: Well! it is dark enough sure. What am I to see here?

Cleonicus: You will now see in the Dark what you could not before perceive in the Light. I rub the Tube with a Piece of Silk, and you see the Sparks of Fire … Flashes many Inches in Length, and very much resembling the forked Lightning of the Skies.6

Illustration 2: ‘A New Electrical Machine for the Table’. Benjamin Martin, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy, 2 vols, London, 1759–63, vol. 1, facing p. 301. (Cambridge University Library)

Writers of this period delighted in using elaborate puns, and these references to light and dark allude not only to the physical surroundings of this young couple, but also to their intellectual and spiritual illumination. French philosophers declared that they were living in the ‘Siècle des Lumières’, the ‘Century of Lights’, and this was indeed the time when Europe’s cities started to be brightly lit. London’s citizens were among the first to install hanging glass lanterns that shone all night – one German prince even thought that the splendid display had been especially prepared to honour his visit. Cleonicus’ electrical sparks and flashes were a smaller, homespun version of the dramatic firework shows so beloved by wealthy party-givers.

Seeing was closely allied with knowing. Progressive thinkers often claimed that they were living in an enlightened age, when the bright flame of reason would dispel the dark clouds of ignorance and superstition. Yet this was also a profoundly Christian society, and religious imagery of divine light still pervaded literature and art. Through learning about electrical light, Cleonicus is arguing, Euphrosyne will gain an enlightened mind, the rational, secular equivalent of a soul inspired by the Light of God.

The period from roughly 1730 to 1790 is often loosely referred to as ‘the Enlightenment’. During this period, many writers declared that rational thought would sweep away old errors and superstitions; reason would guarantee material and intellectual progress, as well as political liberty and freedom of thought. Faith in the Bible as the unique source of truth should, they insisted, be replaced by confidence in knowledge about the physical world gained by natural philosophers. Rather than relying on Aristotelian logic (which was often referred to as ‘the teaching of the schools’), people should learn through experiment and reason. The Scottish philosopher David Hume recommended ritual book-burning:

If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.7

One of the most famous Enlightenment philosophers was François-Marie Voltaire, who declared triumphantly that ‘the spirit of the century … has destroyed all the prejudices with which society was afflicted: astrologers’ predictions, false prodigies, false marvels, and superstitious customs’.8 In accordance with Voltaire’s boast, the Enlightenment came to mean the time when scientific, quantitative methods were successfully introduced. Often dubbed ‘the Age of Reason’, the Enlightenment is traditionally celebrated as the birth of modern civilisation, which took place primarily in France.