An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment

Description

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 and electrified boys. Optimists predicted that this new-found power of nature would cure illnesses, improve crop production, even bring the dead back to life. Benjamin Franklin — one of America’s founding fathers, celebrated for drawing lightning down from the sky with a kite — developed the eighteenth-century’s most successful explanation of this mysterious phenomenon.

Prize-Winning author Patricia Fara reveals how natural philosophers used these stunning electrical performances as dramatic evidence of their special powers — they had demonstrated that they could control the natural world, and now they sought authority over society.