Abstract
In the last decade, many scholars of performance studies have turned to performance-based analogies to navigate representations of science in popular culture, and to examine how various scientific disciplines generate knowledge or meaning.1 Few scholars, however, have devoted attention to how experimental practices, and scientific narratives, operate as performances themselves.2 In this chapter, I examine one of the most theatrical public sites of scientific experimentation in the Enlightenment: the public lecture demonstration. Public performances of electricity in Europe and Colonial America during this age reveal precisely how essential the arts of display and performance were in popularizing not only the fledgling study of electricity, but also, and more importantly, of the sciences writ large.
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Notes
Paola Bertucci, ‘Sparks in the Dark: The Attraction of Electricity in the Eighteenth Century’, Endeavour 31.3 (2007), 89.
There is an excellent survey of Enlightenment scientific performances in the introductory chapter of Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Christine Blondel (eds), Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 1–10.
For an interesting discussion of the conceptual and geographical separation of public and private science, see Iwan Rhys Morus’s essay on the subject, ‘The Two Cultures of Electricity: Between Entertainment and Edification in Victorian Science’, Science and Education (2006), 1–10. Morus’s work addresses the later Victorian period, but his work certainly has strong reverberations for Enlightenment science.
Simon Schaffer, ‘Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century’, History of Science 21 (1983), 1–43.
Benjamin Martin, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy: In a Continued Survey of Works of Nature and Art by Way of Dialogue (London, 1772). By the time Martin published his general textbook for young men and women in 1772, there were only two universities in England: Oxford and Cambridge. Both of these institutions were closed to women.
These gender binaries are observable in many popular scientific textbooks of the Enlightenment era. For a more thorough discussion of gender in popular science writing in this period, see Patricia Fara, An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment (Great Britain: Totem Books, 2002).
For one of the most fascinating analyses of gender in science popularization outside of Britain, see Geoffrey Sutton’s work on literary salons in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, Geoffrey V. Sutton, Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, And the Demonstration of the Enlightenment (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).
For a very interesting introduction to the history of the electrified body in contemporary performance art, see Arthur Elsenaar and Remko Scha, ‘Electric Body Manipulation: A Historical Perspective’, Leonardo 12 (2002), 17–28. There is a strong erotic component to demonstrations like the Venus Electronificata, which make the convulsive female body their centrepiece. Bertucci, ‘Sparks in the Dark’, views these demonstrations as a manifestation of an emergent libertine culture, and traces appearances of electrified women’s bodies from salons and domestic spaces to erotic literature and poetry.
Larry Stewart and Paul Weindling, ‘Philosophical threads: Natural philosophy and public experiment among the weavers of Spitalfields’, The British Journal for the History of Science 28.1 (1995), 38.
W. Hooper, Rational Recreations: in which the principles of numbers and natural philosophy are clearly and copiously elucidated, by a series of easy, entertaining, interesting experiments: among which are all those commonly performed with cards (London, 1787), vol. 1, iv.
Most of the literature on the origins of popular science treats with Britain. See J. Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Schaffer, ‘Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle’, 1–43; Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Riskin, ‘Amusing Physics’, 44. On early Newtonian popularization, see Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacobs, Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), ch. 2.
J. L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics (London: Dover, 1999), 13–19.
J. T. Desaguliers, A Course of Experimental Philosophy (London, 1734–44), vol. 1, preface.
David Gooding, ‘In Nature’s School: Faraday as an Experimentalist’, in D. Gooding and F. A. J. L. James (eds), Faraday Rediscovered (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), 105.
Harry Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (London: Sage, 1990), 18.
Joseph Priestley, The History and Present State of Electricity (London, 1767), xv.
Hauksbee’s electrostatic machine consisted of a glass globe (from which most of the air had been evacuated by an air pump) mounted on top of an axle and large spinning wheel. When the wheel was cranked, and the globe rotated, the globe could discharge an electrical charge. For a full description of Haukbee’s instrument, see Willem Dirk Hackmann, Electricity from Glass: The History of the Frictional Electrical Machine 1600–1850 (Netherlands: Sitjhoff & Noordhoff, 1978).
Michael Brian Schiffer, Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of Enlightenment (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2006).
Given the enormous importance of Gray’s work in the development of an electrical science in this period, there are relatively few primary or secondary resources that provide a full picture of Gray’s life and experimental practices. The most useful biographical information on Gray can be found in I. Bernard Cohen, ‘Neglected Sources for the Life of Stephen Gray’, Isis 45.1 (1954), 41–50.
R. A. Chipman, ‘An Unpublished Letter of Stephen Gray on Electrical Experiments 1707–1708’, Isis 45.1 (1954), 33–40.
Stephen Gray, ‘A Letter to Cromwell Mortimer, M.D. Secr. R.S. Containing Several Experiments Concerning Electricity by Mr. Stephen Gray’, Philosophical Transactions 37 (1731–32), 21.
In most of this chapter, I use Gray’s own (historically specific) language to describe his emerging sense of how materials ‘communicated’ electrical charges. For a detailed discussion of Gray’s contribution to theories of conductivity, see Michael Ben-Chaim’s, ‘Social Mobility and Scientific Change: Stephen Gray’s Contribution to Electrical Research’, The British Journal for the History of Science 23.1 (1990), 3–24.
Prof. Jim Al Khalili lovingly replicates this extraordinary experiment in the first episode of a three-part BBC documentary on the history of electricity. See ‘Spark’, narr. Prof. Jim Al-Khalili, Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity (London: BBC, 2011).
Michael R. Lynn, Popular Science and Public Opinion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 27.
Elsenaar and Scha, ‘Electric Body Manipulation’, 18. For a full report of Gray’s later experiments, see Stephen Gray, ‘Two Letters from Stephen Gray, F.R.S. to C. Mortimer, M.D. Secr. R.S. Containing Farther Accounts of His Experiments Concerning Electricity’, Philosophical Transactions 37 (1731–32): 400–2.
John Turbervill Needham, ‘Extract of a Letter from Mr. Turbervill Needham to Martin Folkes, Esq; Pr.R.S. concerning Some New Electrical Experiments Lately Made at Paris’, Philosophical Transactions 44 (1746–47), 248.
James DelBourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 28.
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: A Genetic Text, ed. J. A. Lemay and P. M. Zall (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), 153.
Recent scholarly work in this period has revived (and significantly revised) our understanding of this period of American theatre history. For the most comprehensive work in this field, see Odai Johnson, Absence and Memory in Colonial American Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Heather S. Nathans, Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Odai Johnson, ‘Working up from Postholes: (Im)material Witnesses, Evidence, and Narrativity in the Colonial American Stage’, Theater Survey 46.2 (2005), 184.
Bruce McConachie, ‘American Theatre in Context, from the Beginnings to 1870’, in C. W. E. Bigsby and Don B. Wilmeth (eds), The Cambridge History of American Theatre Vol. I: Beginnings to 1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 111.
Peter A. Davis, ‘Puritan Mercantilism and the Politics of Anti-Theatrical Legislation in Colonial America’, in Ron Engle and Tice L. Miller (eds), The American Stage: Social and Economic Issues from the Colonial Period to Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 19.
Ann Taves, Fits, Trances and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 16.
Kinnersley, A course of experiments, in that curious and entertaining branch of natural philosophy, called electricity; accompanied with explanatory lectures: in which electricity and lightning, will be proved to be the same thing (Philadelphia, 1764), 7–8.
James Bowdoin II, quoted in Gordon E. Kershaw James Bowdoin II: Patriot and Man of the Enlightenment (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991), 121.
Andrew Eliot, quoted in Nina-Ruth Reid-Maroney, Philadelphia’s Enlightenment, 1740–1800: Kingdom of Christ, Empire of Reason (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 52.
James DelBourgo, ‘Common Sense, Useful Knowledge, and Matters of Fact in the Late Enlightenment: The Transatlantic Career of Perkins’s Tractors’, The William and Mary Quarterly 61.4 (2004): 643–84.
Benjamin Franklin, A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations of America (Philadelphia, 1743).
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Murphy, C. (2013). Shocks and Sparks: Participatory Electrical Performances in the Enlightenment Period. In: Reilly, K. (eds) Theatre, Performance and Analogue Technology. Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319678_9
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