Autorentext

Dr. Nathan Kapoor is an Affiliate Professor of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Department History at Grand Valley State University, Grand Rapids, MI, USA. He is a scholar of nineteenth and twentieth century technologies of electrification, with a specialisation in the history of British electrification at home and in its colonies, most especially New Zealand.

Klappentext

The materials in this volume cover the works of the natural philosophers, mathematicians, engineers, and entertainers for whom electricity became a vessel to say new things about energy and create a new means of generating motive force. The papers, books, and experiments explore the ways in which electricity transforms from a force of nature into a source of energy. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this collection will be of great interest to students and scholars of the History of Science.

Inhalt

Volume I Electric Power Imagined

Series Introduction

General Introduction

Volume I Introduction

Part 1. Anxiety

1. Charles Babbage, Reflections on the Decline of Science in England*, and on some of its Causes*

2. What Will He Grow To? (illustration)

3. William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Natio*n, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines*

Part 2. Imagining Electricity

4. John Bywater, Historical Electricity

5. Erasmus Darwin, Progress of the Mind, Canto III

6. Electricity

7. Michael Angelo Garvey, The Silent Revolution, Or, The Future Effects of Steam and Electricity Upon the Condition of Mankind

8. Science

9. F. C. Webb, Electricity and the Future

10. William Crookes, Electricity in Relationship to Science

11. Benjamin Kidd, Social Evolution

12. The Universality of Electricity

13. Prometheus Unbound: Science in Olympus (illustration)

14. Telectroscopy

Part 3. Experiments

15. Alexander Volta to Joseph Banks, On the Electricity Excited by the Mere Contact of Conducting Substances of Different Kinds

16. J. C. Robertson, Mr. Bain's Electro Magnetic Inventions

17. Andrew Crosse, On the Production of Insects by Voltaic Electricity

18. Anon, Endless Amusement: a collection of nearly 400 entertaining experiments in various branches of science

19. Michael Faraday, On Electric Conduction and the Nature of Matter

20. Charles Wheatstone letter to Alexander Bain, June 13, 1842

21. Hippolyte Fontaine, Industrial Applications

22. Charles Wheatstone, On the Augmentation of the Power of a Magnet by the Reaction thereon of Currents Induced by the Magnet Itself

23. Maxwell James Clerk, A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field

24. Gisbert Kapp, Aron Meter

Part 4. Self-Reflection-Retrospection "Looking"

25. Anon, Priority

Index