The Empire of the Imagination

Abstract

“Nothing is too wonderful to be true,” proclaimed the great British experimenter Michael Faraday in his laboratory notebook in 1849. His researches into electricity and magnetism during the 1830s had given scientific proof that the world was charged by strange invisible forces. Despite widespread skepticism, instantaneous contact between distant people using electric sparks became possible when Samuel F. B. Morse established the first successful telegraphic link in 1844 between Washington and Baltimore with a soul-stirring message: “What hath God wrought?”

There are two worlds, the world that we can measure with line and rule, and the world that we feel with our hearts and imagination.

—Leigh Hunt, Men, Women and Books