Session B14: The History of Electrical Science

Electrical Enlightenment: Joseph Priestley's Historical and Experimental Studies of Electricity

Joseph Priestley (1733--1804) was one of the most controversial public figures of the eighteenth century. A true Enlightenment polymath, he wrote more than two hundred books, pamphlets, sermons, and essays on subjects ranging from science to politics and from metaphysics to theology. He was a religious dissenter, political radical, vocal supporter of the French Revolution, and lifelong defender of the losing side in the Chemical Revolution. Priestley is best known for having ``discovered'' oxygen in the 1770s and for his lasting contributions to pneumatic chemistry. Yet his first scientific fascination, while teaching at Warrington Academy, was electricity---one of the greatest scientific fads of the Enlightenment. Priestley's work on electricity, both historical and experimental, culminated in his \textit{History and Present State of Electricity }(1767), which became a standard textbook on the subject for nearly a century, and went through numerous editions and translations. Situating Priestley's electrical investigations against the background of eighteenth-century ideals of scientific theory and practice, especially concerning physics, experimental philosophy, and natural history, illuminates the relations between science, society, and epistemology in the Enlightenment.   

Priestley's Shadow and Lavoisier's Influence: Electricity and Heat in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

In the late eighteenth century, Joseph Priestley argued that any complete theory of heat also had to explain electrical phenomena, which manifested many similar effects to heat. For example, sparking or heating a sample of trapped air caused a reduction in the volume of air and made the gas toxic to living organisms. Because of the complexity of electrical and thermal phenomena, Antoine Lavoisier did not address electrical action in his published works. Rather, he focused on those effects produced by heating alone. With the success of Lavoisier's caloric theory of heat, natural philosophers and chemists continued to debate the relationship between heat and electricity. In this presentation, I compare and contrast the fate of caloric in early-nineteenth-century electrical studies via the work of two scientists: Humphry Davy in Britain and Robert Hare in America.   

The Bottom Line: Cable Telegraphy and the Rise of Field Theory in the Victorian British Empire

The networks of telegraph wires and undersea cables that began to spread across the world in the 1840s and 1850s had far-reaching effects on commerce and the dissemination of news. They also had deep effects on electrical science. In this paper, I will argue that what might at first appear to be a prime example of pure science---the development of electromagnetic field theory in Britain in the middle decades of the 19th century---was in fact driven in important ways by developments in the telegraph industry, particularly British scientists' and engineers' encounters with puzzling new phenomenon of the `retardation' of signals that turned up on underground wires and undersea cables in the early 1850s.