Queen's University Belfast

The frontispiece of Henry Noad's Lectures on Electricity(1844).

The electrician William Sturgeon, inventor of the electromagnet, made the point succinctly. The purpose of an instrument like his electromagnet was that it magnified electromagnetic effects--it made it possible to exhibit them more effectively to a larger audience. "It can be no small gratification to those who are in the habit of giving public lectures, to be enabled to exhibit this experiment to the satisfaction of a large audience," he suggested. It was not just exhibitionism either. As Sturgeon explained, "I considered that an apparatus for exhibiting the experiments on a large scale, and with easy management, would not only be well adapted to the lecture room, but absolutely valuable to the advancement of the science." This was because the workings of such instruments mirrored the workings of nature. "The electric fluid is so universally diffused throughout every part of nature's productions, that every particle of created matter, both animate and inanimate, which has hitherto been contemplated by the philosopher, is full of this surprizingly animated elemental fire," he argued. It followed that the "materials which form our batteries, and display electric streams at our pleasure, have all been brought from this exhaustless source. Nature's laboratory is well stored with apparatus of this kind ... and the insignificancy of our puny contrivances to mimic nature's operations, must be amply apparent when compared with the magnificent apparatus of the earth." Nevertheless, mimicking nature's operations was what electricians like Sturgeon thought they did. Display mattered because by exhibiting their machines they were exhibiting the mechanism of the universe.

Queen's University Belfast William Sturgeon's electro-magnetic tabletop apparatus. This was the perspective that underpinned the activities of the London Electrical Society, the group of electrical enthusiasts gathered together under Sturgeon's direction in 1837, the year Victoria came to the throne. Meeting first at the philosophical instrument-maker Edward Marmaduke Clarke's "Laboratory of Science" on the Lowther Arcade and later across the way at the newly opened Adelaide Gallery of Practical Science, the group was devoted to collaborative electrical experimentation and exhibition. Its members hoped that the Society would become "a parent to foster and cherish their investigations; a grand storehouse in which they may repose the rich productions of their labours, and a temple for their kindred spirits' resort." Henry Noad--an early member of the new Society--enthused that "rarely a month passes, without some new and important fact being announced, or some new apparatus being exhibited ...it is by actually witnessing the various operations performed that the necessary information can be acquired; hence the great advantage of a society, in which there is a community of taste and feeling, and in which knowledge is unrestrictedly communicated." Exhibition was at the heart of the London Electrical Society's collective ethos. One example of the way this worked was the "Electrical Soirée" hosted by the Society's Treasurer, the wealthy wine-merchant John Peter Gassiot, to celebrate a visit by the eminent Genevan natural philosopher Auguste de la Rive. The highlight of the affair was the use of a hundred Grove cells to produce a spectacular electric light. To look at it direct was painful. Its effect, however, was fully appreciated, by observing the brilliancy it imparted to the natural colours of foreign moths and butterflies in a case suspended against the wall. Had they been in fluttering existence, winging their way through tropical sunlight, they could not have looked more bright and beautiful. Another pleasing proof of the power of the electric light was the distance, through the window, it penetrated the outer darkness, shooting over the lawn; but now softened into the sweetest moonlight, and yet clothing the shrubs and turf with intense green. ("Electrical Soirée," Literary Gazette, 1843, 27: 352) Along with the light, the whole panoply of electrical effects was spectacularly on show: electromagnetic machines, electrotypes, specimens of Andrew Crosse's notorious acarus crossii and electrically-produced crystals. Events like this both displayed and defined the electrical universe. By putting electricity on show, Gassiot and his fellow-members of the London Electrical Society were putting it and its artefacts into context. This kind of showmanship remained integral to electricity throughout the Victorian period. Exhibition still mattered in the 1880s, even as Oliver Lodge demonstrated the possibilities of Hertz's newly-discovered electromagnetic waves to excited audiences in the genteel setting of the Royal Institution: "I exhibited many of the Leyden Jar experiments both to the Royal Institution and the Society of Telegraph Engineers, in a lecture on "The Discharge of a Leyden Jar," where were shown many striking experiments. The walls of the lecture-theatre, which were metallically coated, flashed and sparked, in sympathy with the waves which were being emitted by the oscillations on the lecture-table--an incident which must be remembered by many of those present. This was a novel result, surprising to myself also, and I hailed it as an illustration or demonstration of the Hertz waves." Lodge hailed Hertz's experiment as having made the electromagnetic ether into a reality: "In 1865, Maxwell stated his theory of light. Before the close of 1888 it is utterly and completely verified. Its full development is only a question of time, and labour, and skill. The whole domain of Optics is now annexed to Electricity, which has thus become as imperial science." Exhibition was a way of fixing that reality.