Experimenters' Techniques, Dyers' Hands, and the Electric Planetarium Author(S): Simon Schaffer Source: Isis, Vol
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Experimenters' Techniques, Dyers' Hands, and the Electric Planetarium Author(s): Simon Schaffer Source: Isis, Vol. 88, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 456-483 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/236152 Accessed: 12-08-2014 18:26 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press and The History of Science Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Isis. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 140.247.28.59 on Tue, 12 Aug 2014 18:26:08 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Experimenters' Techniques, Dyers' Hands, and the Electric Planetarium By Simon Schaffer* ABSTRACT During the 1730s a numberof fellows of the Royal Society of London worked on a device they called an "electricplanetarium," which its inventor, the Kentish dyer Stephen Gray, claimed was a representationof the planetary system and showed that that system was truly driven by electricity. The Society's secretary, Cromwell Mortimer, and a distin- guished Frenchnatural philosopher, Charles Dufay, sought to reproducethese phenomena. Gray's patronand successor, the Kent landownerGranvill Wheler, explored the motions of the planetariumbetween Gray's death in 1736 and mid 1738. Wheler eventually con- ceded that the device relied on unsuspectedmotions of his own hand that his desire for success had unconsciously produced.Since it relied on the ways of experimenters'hands, the electric planetariumallows an exploration of the body techniques of early modem naturalphilosophers. Gray's celebrated"knack" for producingelectricity can be connected with his work as a dyer, since the techniques of dyeing were akin to those of the electric experiments.Ranges of techniquesinvolved in these experimentsdrew on practicesalready currentin the craft world of AugustanEngland. Dufay, too, was a masterof the dye trade, and his different attitudes can also be linked with this craft culture. Relations between artisansand gentry raise problems of the status of "hands,"where this term is taken both as referringto the experimenters'limbs and to their employees. By gesture, we render our thoughtsand our passions intelligible to all.... 'Tis as it were the common language of all mankind,which strikes the understandingin at our eyes, as much as speaking does in at our ears. -The Art of Speaking in Public (1727) WAYS OF THE HAND Here is an electrical recipe of the 1730s. Use an iron ladle placed by the fire to prepare a thick cylindrical cake, ten inches in diameter, of three parts resin to one part beeswax. * Departmentof History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge,Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RH, England. Manuscriptscited in this essay are from the Royal Society Library,London (JournalBooks, Letter Books, Lettersand Papers,Register Books, MiscellaneousManuscripts, Wheler File), the BritishLibrary, London (Birch Papers, Wilson Papers), and the Acad6mie des Sciences, Paris (Dufay Dossier). Thanks for their generous help to Michael Ben Chaim, Marie-Noelle Bourguet, Otto Sibum, Nani Clow, and G. Wheler. Isis, 1997, 88: 456-483 C) 1997 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved. 0021-1753/97/8803-0003$02.00 456 This content downloaded from 140.247.28.59 on Tue, 12 Aug 2014 18:26:08 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SIMON SCHAFFER 457 When the cake has set, beat the whole surface vigorously with your hand and then cover with thin pasteboardand leave overnight. The following day, if the weather is fine and dry, reheat the cake and rest it on a glass receiver one foot high. Beat the cake's entire surfaceagain, with regularperpendicular blows using the middlejoints of the back of your fingers. You must beat the cake yourself-don't get anyone else to do it for you. Then put an ivory ball about one-and-a-halfinches in diameteron the very center of the cake, make sure the ball is moistened, avoid drafts, and keep company at a distance. Now attach a very small piece of cork to a fine white thread about one foot long, and wind the top of the threadfirmly round the stem of a good quill pen-it helps if this threadis wet. Grasp the end of the quill between your thumb and forefinger,and rest your arm carefully over the back of a chair so that the thread hangs straight down from the quill with the cork suspendedjust over the ivory ball on the cake. The cork will immediately spring away from the ivory ball and then startto orbit rapidlyround it in just the directionand manner in which the planets orbit the sun. This is an "electric planetarium."It may exhibit a hundredorbits or more before the cork's motions fade. A variety of movements can be obtainedby placing the ivory ball eccentricallyon the cake, increasingthe numberof balls, or replacing the cork with a paper cylinder and other appropriateobjects. From a careful study of these phenomena,conclusions may be drawnas to the likely causes of planetary, lunar, and cometarymotions and the universalrole of the electric fluid.' The electric planetarium,all but absent from the official history of electricity, might be taken as an unfortunatedetour on the road from StephenGray's demonstrationof electrical conduction in 1729 to Charles Dufay's enunciationof the principles of electrificationby influence before 1738. The recipe can yet be cobbled together from papers by several fellows of the Royal Society of London. Just before he died in February1736, the aged cloth-dyerGray began designing the setup, called it a "new sort of Planetarium,"and gave hints of its working to his close friend the Kentish landowner Granvill Wheler and to Cromwell Mortimer,the Royal Society's secretary.Wheler developed the details of the apparatus,showed it to his colleagues in London in May 1737, and, via Mortimer,sent instructionsto the Paris academicianDufay, head of the King's Garden and advisor on dyeing at the Gobelins tapestryworks. The secretaryof the Royal Academy of Sciences, Bernardde Fontenelle, saw here "a new and vast hope for all Astronomy."But by February 1738 Wheler had conceded that the planetarium'sphenomena were principallydue to "a secret motion of the hand which the desire of success imperceptiblygave the pendulous body." He reflected that "many odd Experimentsthat please may, when repeated, suc- ceed."2 Unlike its contemporaries,such as the pneumatictrials embodied in barometersand air pumps, this odd and pleasing experimentnever quite became a philosophicalinstrument. Its closest equivalent, the mechanical planetariumor orrery,devised in early eighteenth- century England for the entertainmentof polite audiences, was a machine with which Gray, an astronomicalenthusiast, was surely familiar.His Cambridgecontemporary Wil- I The epigraphis from [Michel Le Faucher],The Art of Speaking in Public, 2nd ed. (London, 1727), p. 171. 2 Cromwell Mortimer, "An Account of Some Electrical ExperimentsIntended to Be Communicatedto the Royal Society by Mr Stephen Gray,"Philosophical Transactions, 1736, 39:400-403, on p. 403; Bernardle B. de Fontenelle, "Sur l'6lectricit6,"Histoire de l'Academie Royale des Sciences, 1737, pp. 2-6, on p. 6; Granvill Wheler to Benjamin Wilson, 7 Sept. 1748, British LibraryMSS ADD 30094, fol. 71; and Wheler to Cromwell Mortimer for Charles Dufay, 3 Mar. 1738, Archives, Acad6mie des Sciences, Dufay Dossier, published in GranvillWheler, "A Letter ContainingSome Remarkson the Late Stephen Gray His ElectricalCircular Exper- iment,"Phil. Trans., 1738, 41:118-125, on p. 124. Here and elsewhere, translationsare mine unless otherwise indicated. This content downloaded from 140.247.28.59 on Tue, 12 Aug 2014 18:26:08 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 458 THE ELECTRICPLANETARIUM liam Stukeley and erstwhilepatron John Desaguliersboth worked on the orrery's improve- ment. Later, in the 1760s, several instrumentmakers even designed "electricalorreries" in which electric dischargewas used to drive a rotatingastronomical model. But the electric planetariumwas designed as a principled demonstrationof the true causes of planetary motion ratherthan as an entertainingmodel of those motions' good orderfit for drawing- room conversation.The electric planetariumdecisively dependedon ways of the hand. It helps illuminatethe history of experimenters'body techniques.Body techniquesare linked to problemsof trainingand skill in experimentalphilosophy. They may vary accordingto the site of performance,the social role of the performer,and the instrumentsused. Prac- titioners were credited with remarkabledexterity, established their authorityby spelling out the skills needed, or relied on existing body techniques to reproducethe actions they reckoned decisive.3 There has perhapsbeen more historical interest in scientific hardwarethan in the tech- niques of those using it, and more in cosmology than in conduct. An influentialtradition distinguishes knowledges that seem cerebral,rational, and communicablefrom those ap- parently embodied, tacit, and irremediablylocal. In this essay I draw on a compelling challenge