At the beginning of the seventeenth century ‘physics’ signified a qualitative, bookish science of natural bodies in general. It was at once wider and narrower than the subject that now has its name: wider in its coverage, which included organic and psychological as well as inorganic phenomena; and narrower in its methods, which recommended neither mathematics nor experiment. The width of coverage and the depreciation of mathematics derived from Aristotle; the indifference to experiment, as opposed to everyday experience, from the authors of peripatetic textbooks.

The libri naturales, or physical books of the Aristotelian corpus, begin with a treatise called...

We shall later examine the work of some 210 electricians active between 1600 and 1790. They make up two-thirds of all those then writing on electricity whose publications are noticed in the catalogs of the world’s great collections.¹ They include everyone who made significant contributions to the understanding of electrical phenomena.

These early electricians may be divided into five groups according to their chief means of support: members of religious orders; paid academicians; professors; public lecturers; and ‘others,’ primarily artisans, practicers of professions (doctors, lawyers, ministers), and the independently wealthy. The results appear in Tables 2.1 and 2.2. Numbers in...

Although the ancients knew amber’s peculiar ability to draw light objects, and medieval philosophers had occasionally exercised their speculative powers upon it, the ‘amber effect’ did not become the basis of an independent branch of knowledge until the seventeenth century.¹ This improvement followed the discoveries that many substances besides amber could be made to exhibit the effect, and that certain characteristics seemed to distinguish it sharply from other processes previously lumped together as ‘attractions.’ In a word, the amber effect became ‘electricity,’ and those substances which displayed it, ‘electrics.’ We owe this term, derived from the Greek word for amber,...

Cabeo was educated in the Jesuit college of Ferrara, where, according to his friend and biographer, Antonio Libanori, ancient languages, Tuscan literature, philosophy, Euclid and theology came as easily as games to him. His teachers thought him a prodigy, and invited him to join their company. He entered his novitiate in 1602, and subsequently taught mathematics, astronomy, and natural and moral philosophy in several Italian cities. After 1622 he followed the occupations of itinerant preacher, consulting engineer, experimental physicist,¹ writer, and stoic philosopher, ‘humble in all his dealings, modest in dress, and blameless in character.’² Cabeo wrote two important books,...

Not until the 1640s did Gilbert’s countrymen begin to free his watery humor from the objections of Cabeo.¹ The chief actors then were Sir Kenelm Digby, Stuart diplomat, traveller, and miscellaneous philosopher; his Jesuit side-kick and former mentor, Thomas White, alias Blacklow; and his one-time literary opponent, the physician Sir Thomas Browne.

Digby took up electricity, along with everything else, in a peripatetic, animistic, corpuscularian hodge-podge written in Paris, where he enjoyed the enforced leisure of a Royalist refugee. In contrast to Gilbert, Digby took amber as the prototypical electric; he deduced that electrical effluvia have an unctuous, viscid, non-watery...

Three seventeenth-century physicists, Madeira, Maignan and Guericke, employed principles other than material effluvia to explain the amber effect.¹ They formed no school and had no disciples. They are nonetheless individually interesting both for their work and as exceptions to the rule that the facts of electricity forced natural philosophers, whether radical or conservative, corpuscularian or peripatetic, to regard the amber effect as mechanical.

‘Electricity’ is advertised on the title page of Madeira’s book, On Occult Qualities, along with the powers of music, the bite of the tarantula, and the virtues of a tree from the Garden of Eden. Madeira was...

Descartes came to speak of electricity toward the end of the fourth part of his Principia philosophiae, following his brilliantly imaginative discourse on the magnet. He apologized for opening the subject, for he had wished to limit himself to prominent natural phenomena; electricity, although common to several substances, seemed too parochial to invite attention on its own account. Moreover, the empirical evidence did not satisfy him; before he could know certainly how electrics work, he would have to try many tiresome experiments. Nonetheless he felt obliged to offer an explanation. Just before discussing the magnet he had revealed the nature...

On December 5, 1703, the Royal Society enjoyed two maiden performances, the chairmanship of Newton, its new president, and the demonstrations of Francis Hauksbee, who was to become its chief experimentalist. Their simultaneous initiations were related. Newton, who wished to revive the earlier practice of weekly experimental demonstrations in order to recall the Society, grown comfortable and a trifle frivolous, to its proper activities, required a talented operator, a good Newtonian with the ingenuity of a Hooke. He appears to have picked Hauksbee for the post. How the obscure demonstrator, who lamented his lack of a ‘Learned Education,’ had prepared...

Old Gray’s rambling report of his collaboration with Wheler and Godfrey caught the interest of Charles François de Cisternay Dufay, a young man as different from Gray in temperament, class, education and cast of mind as in age and nationality. In 1733 Dufay was 35, energetic, brilliant, thorough and orderly, already a leading member of the Paris Academy of Science, independently wealthy, equally at home among academicians, ministers and high society, open and good-humored, with a taste for Italian burlesques and the satires of Swift.¹ He proved the ideal successor to Gray and Hauksbee. In one stroke he ordered their...

Despite the discoveries of Gray and Dufay there was little general interest in electricity in 1740. Five years later nothing was more fashionable. ‘Persons of quality’ traveled about to see the electricity of famous professors; the Berlin Academy, in royal session, chose electrical experiments to entertain its guests; a Mr. Smith offered ‘all lovers and judges of experimental philosophy’ at Bath the sight of his ‘electrical phenomenon’ from ten in the morning to eight at night; at a certain inn in Amsterdam a lecturer stood ready six hours a day, five days a week. For a time electricity, as Haller...

Fontenelle seized on the ‘prodigious’ and ‘practically incredible’ new phenomena of electricity as plain and timely proof of the beleaguered system of vortices. The mere need for preliminary heating and rubbing, he wrote in résumé of Dufay’s first memoir, shows that electrified bodies are surrounded by a vortex of very subtle and very mobile matter. ‘There is nothing conjectural about these vortices any more,’ he continued. Electrification by communication is the sharing of a vortex.¹ Collisions between the conferred and the conferring vortices bring about repulsion and suspension. As we know, the two electricities, though an ‘unforeseen paradox,’ presented Fontenelle...

During the ‘interregnum’ that, according to Wheler, stretched from 1737, when he last attended to electricity, until ‘the Germans took up the Sphere in Hauksbee’s Method,’¹ the Reverend J. T. Desaguliers generated most of England’s electrical power. The son of a prominent Huguenot pastor and schoolmaster, he had helped to educate his father’s charges before going to Oxford, where he matriculated unusually late, at the age of twenty-two. Five years later, in 1710, having become a graduate and a deacon, he succeeded John Keill as lecturer in experimental philosophy at Hart Hall (Hertford College).²

According to Desaguliers, Keill was the...

The circumstances surrounding the invention of the condenser should interest the philosopher as well as the historian of science. The apparatus required—an electrical machine, a wire and a glass vessel containing water—was everyday equipment for the electrician. His constant manipulation of these elements might have created condensers wholesale once the spinning globe came into common use. But the theories received in 1745 would suggest the wrong arrangement to anyone intent upon constructing what the condenser proved to be, an instrument for concentrating and strengthening the force of electricity. Its invention, made independently in Germany and Holland, was a...

In January 1746, when Benjamin Franklin attained the age of forty and the leisure toward which he had long been working, he was busily engaged in advancing the study of natural philosophy in America. Already in 1743 he had joined in an effort to establish a society dedicated to ‘promoting useful knowledge among the British Plantations in America.’ The society at first grew briskly, but as the novelty wore off the ‘very idle Gentlemen’ who were its members found they preferred ‘the Club, Chess and Coffee House’ to the ‘Curious amusements of natural observations.’ By the fall of 1745 Franklin...

The response of Europe’s electricians to Franklin’s subversive system provides the historian with instructive material. In England, where Franklin’s letters to Collinson circulated before their publication in 1751, the American system was either ignored, as by Wilson and his group, or minimized, as by Watson, who thought it similar to his own. In France and Italy the reverse occurred; Franklin’s innovations were unduly, often unfairly, emphasized to improve their utility in academic squabbles.

On January 21, 1747/8, Watson read to the Royal Society from Franklin’s first letter on electricity. He emphasized the analogy between tube and pump and the idea...

The leading English Franklinist of the 1750s was a London schoolmaster, John Canton, a native of Stroud in Gloucestershire. Canton received little formal education himself, for just as he reached the rudiments of geometry his father removed him from school to set him to the family trade of broadcloth weaving. He continued his studies on his own. Dr. Henry Miles of Stroud, a nonconformist minister and sometime physicist,¹ noticed the clandestine scholar. Through Miles, whose pulpit was in Surrey, Canton obtained a situation more suitable than weaving. He was articled to a London schoolmaster, whose business he acquired in 1745.²...

In 1750 Jesuit missionaries in Peking received an electrical machine from a well-wisher in St. Petersburg. Richmann made them a present of his papers. These opportunities were not lost on Joseph Amiot, S. J., who knew all the sciences of Europe and most of the languages of Asia. He and his confrères began to amuse themselves with electricity; and in 1755 they were able to send the Petersburg Academy an account of experiments both new and important.¹

They had placed a glass pane, rubbed side down, on top of a compass case. The needle rose to the top, stayed, and...

‘I had for some time observed, that upon pulling off my stockings in an evening they frequently made a crackling or snapping noise; and in the dark I could perceive them to emit sparks of fire.’ Pursuing this commonplace,¹ which began to intrigue him in November, 1758, Robert Symmer, an ‘upstart,’ as he put it, in electricity, was led to ‘differ from all who had ever wrote upon the subject.’ He proceeded from the discovery that a pair of stockings, one white, the other black, worn together on the same leg and then removed, showed almost no electricity as long...

The successful quantification of physical theory presupposes the existence of appropriate concepts expressible mathematically and amenable to ‘transaction,’¹ to test and refinement by measurement. The heart of the process lies in the selection of the concepts; and this, as the painful emergence of the notion of localized charge (Q) abundantly illustrates, may not be easy. Space and energy forbid our following the development of other central ideas of electrostatics, such as capacity (C) and potential (V), in the detail lavished on Q. But truth and harmony require an explicit recognition of the difficulties of selection and transdiction in their cases...

The work of Volta, Cavendish and Coulomb brought electrostatics to the point that, within a few years, it could suffer its definitive quantification at the hands of the mathematical physicists of the Ecole Polytechnique. The step permanently removed higher electrical theories from the reach of the Gilberts, Franklins and Voltas who had prepared it. It did not, however, resolve all or perhaps even the chief qualitative difficulties that had worried the electricians of the Ancien Régime. The question of the number of electrical fluids remained unanswerable; proto-field theories continued their shadowy existence, in disagreement with one another and with many...