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

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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 conceded 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.

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, succeed."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 techniques 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 to this tradition,mounted by Otto Sibum's studies of such episodes as James Joule's early nineteenth-centuryattempts to produce a mechanical equivalent of heat. Sibum's reworkingof Joule's trialswith paddlewheels includes the performanceof careful experimentswith specially built replicasof Joule's apparatus.Sibum' s worklets him define "gesturalknowledge, to be understoodas knowledge united with the actor's performance of work,"which "changesaccording to the specific kinds of performance,for example in the manipulationof an instrument or the use of mathematicaltools, and in ever new historical circumstances."Through reworking and historical scholarship, Sibum shows how the Salford brewer Joule's experimentalpractice used skills in the brewing community, apparentlyunrelated to experimentalscience, exactly when that communitywas un- dergoing major culturaland technical change. In the new system of brewing set up in the 1830s, traditionalworkers were seen as "automatonexemplars" possessing conventional, inexpressible,capacities. In the name of marketrelations, these brewers'"imitative knowledge" was now accompaniedby precision tools that controlledskill and became represen- tatives of workmen'saccuracy. Sibum well remindsus of the situatedand changingquality of gesturalknowledges and the means to be used to recover such knowledges. They were properto unique sites of knowledge productionand "gesturalcollectives," like the "com- munities of skill" found among the artisansof early modem London.4 Sibum's project helps historicize attitudes to skill and its recovery. In early modem culturethe comparativesecrecy of artisanworkshops encouraged the sense that embodied competencescould never quite be grantedthe statusof philosophy.Indication of the body's unwonted presence in the realms of mind and spirit might be seen as denigration,while philosophical scrutiny of artisansin histories of trades could be understoodas enlightenment. The Encyclopedie, initially inspired by EphraimChambers's 1728 survey of arts

3Henry King and John Millbum, Geared to the Stars: The Evolution of Planetariums, Orreries, and Astro- nomical Clocks (Bristol: Hilger, 1978), pp. 151 (Stukeley), 174 (Desaguliers), 191-193 (electrical orreries);and Marcel Mauss, "Body Techniques,"in Sociology and Psychology: Essays, ed. Ben Brewster(London: Routledge, 1979), pp. 97-135. 4Heinz Otto Sibum, "Reworkingthe Mechanical Value of Heat: Instrumentsof Precision and Gestures of Accuracy in Early Victorian England," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 1995, 26:73-106, pp. 76 n 8 (quotation),83, 91; and Sibum, "WorkingExperiments: A History of GesturalKnowledge," Cambridge Review, 1995, 116:25-37, on p. 31. He refers to Michael Berlin and Robert Iliffe, "The Places of Skill in Early Modem London,"unpublished paper, Achievement Project, Oxford, June 1992.

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 459 and trades, proclaimedthe liberationof the mechanicalarts from the ignorantcondescen- sion of the noble, yet did so in the name of rationalizedlabor processes underenlightened managers.5The Royal Academy of Sciences also promoted a long series of descriptions of trades,more critical of the artisans,based on collections made by Dufay's patronRene- Antoine de Reaumurfrom the 1720s. Dufay contributeda survey of the dye tradesto this project:"no dyer can have a general knowledge of all the parts of his art."Laborers were reckonedincapable of expressing principleson which laborprocesses relied. Dufay's successor Pierre-JosephMacquer, pharmacist at the King's Gardenand dye consultantat the Gobelins, explainedthat he could not rely on craftsmen'sown knowledge "since they have as a rule nothing but their hands and their experience."Techniques made visible under what Lissa Roberts calls "meteredreflection" could apparentlybe reproducedanywhere and everywhere.The Encyclopediejudged that in the dye trades"people are always being found who possess some secret in such an extensive and delicate art."But "it is for natural philosophers to instruct us about these supposed phenomena"and thus restore national trade.Historians of tradesreckoned that valuable knowledge was locked up in the localized operationsof mechanical workers, whom they saw as so many automata.In such eighteenth-centuryhistories, managing hands and extracting the knowledge they possessed were peculiarly important.6 Under the old regime labor was judged a curse; art was reckoned nobler and rational. The hand was then a metonymic sign of distinction,communication, and work. Fontenelle eulogized Dufay's "vivacity which would not easily be contented with the lazy specula- tions of the cabinet, but also demandedthat his hands should work as well as his mind."7 Governmentof the experimenter'shands dependedon self-knowledge. Early modem experimental philosophers held that they could sufficiently discriminatetheir bodies' re- sponses from illusions but that others, such as women or servants,could not. It was ques- tionablewhether craftsmen's hands could be the bearersof reliablephilosophy.8 In England the very term hand to describe a workerwas a later seventeenth-centurycoinage, common in the shops and yards of AugustanLondon, then used for subordinatelaborers in complex

I KathleenOchs, "TheRoyal Society of London's History of Trades,"Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 1985,39:129-158; JeanEhrard, "La main du travailleur,la plume du philosophe,"Milieux, 1984-1985, 19/20:47- 53; Antoine Picon, "Gestes ouvriers, operations et processus techniques:La vision du travail des encycloped- istes," Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopidie, 1992, 13:131-147; and LorraineDaston, "Enlightenment Calculations,"Critical Inquiry, 1994, 21:182-202. 6 Charles Gillispie, Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 177-178, 346-347; CharlesDufay, "Observationsphysiques sur le m6lange de quelques couleurs dans la teinture,"Memoires de l'Academie Royale des Sciences, 1737, pp. 253-268, on p. 253; P.-J. Macquer, cited in H. Wescher, "GreatMasters of Dyeing in Eighteenth-CenturyFrance," Ciba Review, 1939, 2:626-641, on pp. 629-630; Lissa Roberts, "The Death of the Sensuous Chemist,"Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., 1995, 26:503-529, on p. 504; and "Teinture,"in Encyclopedie, ou dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, 17 vols. (Paris, 1751-1765), Vol. 16, pp. 8-31, on p. 31. Dominique Pestre, "La pratiquede reconstitutiondes experiences historiques,"in Restaging Coulomb, ed. Christine Blondel and Matthias Dorries (Florence: Olschki, 1994), pp. 17-30, on p. 21, connects R6aumur's projects and the reworkingof experiments. 7 Bernardle B. de Fontenelle, "Eloge de M. Du Fay," Hist. Acad. Roy. Sci., 1739, pp. 73-83, on p. 74. For hands' meanings see JacquesRevel, "The Uses of Civility," in A History of Private Life, Vol. 3: Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier(Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniv. Press, 1989), pp. 167-205, on p. 167; Herman Roodenburg,"The Hand of Friendship,"in A Cultural History of Gesture, ed. Jan Bremmer and Roodenburg (Cambridge:Polity, 1991), pp. 152-189; and Stephen Greenblatt,"Toward a Universal Language of Motion: Reflections on a Seventeenth-CenturyMuscle Man,"in ChoreographingHistory, ed. Susan Leigh Foster (Bloo- mington:Indiana Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 25-31. 8 Simon Schaffer, "Self Evidence," Crit. Inq., 1992, 18:327-362; William Sewell, Workand Revolution in France (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 22-25; and Helene V6rin, La gloire des ingenieurs: L'intelligence techniquedu XVIe au XVIIIesiecle (Paris:Albin Michel, 1993), pp. 247-252.

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 460 THE ELECTRICPLANETARIUM systems of discipline. An eighteenth-centuryLondon trade guide noted that every maker of air pumps and orreries"employs several differentHands, who are mere Mechanics, and know no more of the Use or Design of the Work they make, than the Engines with which the greatestPart of them are executed."Steven Shapinhas used episodes such as the Royal Society's search for "a good hand" to serve as its operatorto clarify these distinctions between philosophers,masters, and technicians, while Stephen Pumfrey has documented their effects on laboring hands in the Society of the early eighteenth century.9When its curatorof experiments,Francis Hauksbee, first publisheda collection of trials in 1709, he relied on the Society's sanction to "overcomethe disadvantageof coming from the hands of so undeservinga person."Experimenters occupied ambiguouspositions in the society of ordersof which CraneCourt, the Royal Society's home, was a node. Isaac Newton, the Society's president,treated Hauksbee as his hired hand who could "wait on" his pleasure. The hands who received payment for showing experiments found it hard to establish themselves as philosophers;the gentlemen who owned the experimentalscene were often taken to be the effective performersof the trials shown there.'0 The story that follows explores ways of the hand in early eighteenth-centuryelectrical work. Electricaleffects dependedpeculiarly on manualdexterity, as contemporariesoften noted. Graywas creditedwith a special "knack"for electricaleffects. Thereis a connection between this knack and the dyer's art.The manualtechniques of the dye tradewere among those Gray used in making artificial electricity. But electrical work could not become naturalphilosophy simply by transferringdyers' skills to the rooms of the Royal Society. Gray's colleague and successor, Granvill Wheler, was a genteel virtuoso who sought to transformthe knack into reputablenatural philosophy and the electric planetariumfrom a resin cake to a model of the universe. He hoped the device might just become a challenge to some Newtonian accounts of celestial motions, making an electrical cosmology newly plausible. It was eventually judged that the planetariumwas not a reliable philosophical instrumentbut an unfortunateconsequence of a mismanagedhand. Wheler preservedhis status by distinguishinghis person from this disorderlylimb. A comparisonis made with the projects of Dufay in Paris, where he was supervisorof the state dye works and chief analyst of electrical phenomena.Dufay's regime was a new system in which hands were subject to strict discipline. The career of the electric planetariumis thereforeconnected with the metrology of labor in the old regime. Different forms of gesturalknowledge were developed in different settings of practice and culture. A historical understandingof experimentallabor will try to comprehendthose forms and their variation.

THE DYER'S KNACK

Public trials of artificial electricity began in London during 1706. Hauksbee placed his hand on a spinning glass globe to draw light, then to attractand repel nearby pieces of metal. He showed an Oxford professorthat "a glass kane stronglyrubbed with some folds

9 MarcusRediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 288-289; RichardCampbell, The London Tradesman(London, 1747), p. 253; Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth:Civility and Science in Seventeenth-CenturyEngland (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 399- 400; and Stephen Pumfrey, "Who Did the Work? ExperimentalPhilosophers and Public Demonstratorsin Au- gustan England,"British Joumrnalforthe History of Science, 1995, 28:131-156. 10 Francis Hauksbee, cited in Pumfrey, "Who Did the Work?"p. 156. Newton discusses Hauksbee in Isaac Newton to Hans Sloane, 14 and 17 Sept. 1705, in Correspondenceof Isaac Newton, ed. H. W. Tumbull, J. F. Scott, A. R. Hall, and LauraTilling, 7 vols. (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967-1981), Vol. 4, pp. 446- 448.

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 461 of white & brown paper betwixt the hand & it grows luminous."Hauksbee used his own finger to make electric effluvia, and luminous effects, real. When he rubbeda turningglass cylinder and held his finger to it, "I was surpriz'd with the appearanceof a brisk and vigorous Light continued between the point of my Finger and the Glass. It was not only visible on the Finger; but .. . seem'd as it were to strike with some force upon it, being easily felt by a kind of gentle pressure."In 1707 he told the Society that "it was not without some pleasure to behold how the Light began to break in Branches from that side of the Globe touched by the Hands" and that "it was not a little surprisingto behold from the point of ones Finger to the Glass, a vigorous Light."" The mix of passion and dexterity was reinforcedwhen, in January1708, the Society received a letter from Stephen Gray, a formerKentish dyer then working as an assistantat a Cambridgeastronomical observatory. He had read Hauksbee's reports about the attritionof a glass rod: "instead of rubing it with Paper as he directs,"Gray commented, "I found it to succeed better with me when Rubed with my bare hand onely." He chased a down feather with the rod he had rubbed with his bare hand. The feather's fibers, carefully handledbetween his thumb and finger, would "drawback soe soon as let goe and Imediatly cleave to the Glass as if they had Retainedsome sence of the Injurieofferd them [and] will hardlybe Allured to salute your fingers again." Gray reckoned that this timorous feather showed a patternof affluentand effluent flows from objects brought near the tube and that the shape of the light at his finger when it approachedthe rod demonstratedthe "rapitmotion" of the effluvia toward the glass.12 In London, the phenomenareported by Gray were tried by Hauksbee.When Hauksbee died in 1713 his post was taken by John Desaguliers, a leading London lecturer and engineer. Some eminent fellows tried to get the apparentlyunwilling Gray a subordinate post as the Society's operator.Instead, Gray worked closely with Desaguliers between 1716 and 1719 on astronomicalobservations and trials to show the communicationof electrical effects to other objects, such as gold leaf, at a distancefrom a rubbedglass rod.13 Desaguliersbegan to outline the righttechniques for producingthese electricalphenomena, linking them with metropolitanNewtonian doctrines.In March 1720, for example, he told the fellows how to sniff out the connectionbetween phosphorusand the purplelight made when an exhausted glass globe was turned violently against the hand: "if you open the glass and put [it] to your mouth or nose the same smell or taste as comes from the burning of the common phosphorus"could be detected. The remarkprompted a debate, in which

11 David Gregory, 15 May 1706; cited in W. G. Hiscock, David Gregory, Isaac Newton, and Their Circle (Oxford: Privately printed, 1937), p. 35; Francis Hauksbee, Physico-MechanicalExperiments (London, 1709), pp. 46-51; Hauksbee, "The Productionof a ConsiderableLight upon a Slight Attritionof the Hand on a Glass Globe Exhaustedof Its Air," Phil. Trans., 1707, 25:2277-2282, on p. 2281; and Hauksbee, "A Continuationof the Experimentson the Attrition of Glass," ibid., pp. 2332-2335, on p. 2333. See also R. W. Home, "Francis Hauksbee's Theory of Electricity,"Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 1967-1968, 4:203-217. For Hauks- bee's vocabulary see ChristianLicoppe, La formation de la pratique scientifique:Le discours de l'experience en France et en Angleterre (1630-1820) (Paris:La Decouverte, 1996), pp. 140-141. 12 Stephen Gray to Sloane, 3 Jan. 1708, in R. A. Chipman,"Unpublished Letter of Stephen Gray on Electrical Experiments,"Isis, 1954, 45:33-40, p. 35; and J. L. Heilbron, Physics at the Royal Society during Newton's Presidency (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Library,1983), p. 59. 13 On Desaguliersand Gray see David H. Clarkand Lesley Murdin,"The Enigma of StephenGray, Astronomer and Scientist," Vistas in Astronomy, 1979, 23:351-404, on pp. 388-389; and Michael Ben Chaim, "Social Mobility and Scientific Change: Stephen Gray's Contributionto Electrical Research,"Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 1990, 22:3-24, on p. 12. See J. T. Desaguliers, Course of ExperimentalPhilosophy, 2 vols. (London, 1734, 1744), Vol. 1, pp. 18-19 (the trials of 1716-1719), Vol. 2, p. 335 (mention of work with Gray). Cf. Royal Society MSS JournalBook 11:342-343 (7 May 1719).

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 462 THE ELECTRICPLANETARIUM

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Figure 1. Desaguliers illustrates techniques for showing electricity in 1734. At right (Fig. XIII),the experimenter'shand tests when a glass rod has been sufficientlyrubbed. At left (Fig. X), the experimenter'ssleeve can inadvertentlydestroy electnc virtue.From J. T. Desaguliers,Course of Experimental Philosophy, Volume I (London, 1734), Plate 2, page 24. (Courtesy of Cambridge UniversityLibrary.)

Newton for once participated,about respiration,electricity, and vitality. (See Figure 1.)14 Desaguliers developed a market for such shows inside and outside the Royal Society's precincts. Hands made electncity and indicatedwhen it was present.Desaguliers lectured that to tell when the glass tube was sufficiently electrified "you must move your fingers ends nimbly by the Tube as if you went to strike it in a Direction perpendicularto its axis." The Leiden naturalphilosopher Willem 'sGravesandeclaimed that the electric rod must be rubbedtoward the hand holding it to be effectively electrified. But the Swedish engineer MartenTriewald then reportedthat whicheverway he rubbedthe rod "tho' I have tryed this Expl a hundred times I could never discover the least sensible difference." Desaguliers replied that doubtless the Dutch professor's "handor sleeve" would touch the rod when he rubbed it away from his body, "whereby he destroyed most of the Virtue excited by Attritionin a contraryDirection."" Equipped with spinning globes and glass rods, performerstried "nimbly"to win audi-

14 Royal Society MSS JournalBook 11:472-475 (31 Mar. 1720). For electricity and the common phosphorus see Gad Freudenthal,"Early Electricity between Chemistry and Physics," Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 1981, 11:203-229, on p. 207; and Jan Golinski, "A Noble Spectacle:Phosphorus and the Public Culture of Science in the Early Royal Society," Isis, 1989, 80:11-39. '- Desaguliers, Course of ExperimentalPhilosophy (cit. n. 13), Vol. 1, p. 19; Willem 'sGravesande,Introduc- tion to the Newtonian Philosophy, trans. J. T. Desaguliers, 2 vols. (London, 1721), Vol. 2, pp. 2-13; Marten Triewald to Mortimer, 11 Dec. 1728, and J. T. Desaguliers to Mortimer,27 Feb. 1729, British LibraryMSS ADD 4432, fols. 71-74, 75-76. For Triewald's collaborationwith Desaguliers in 1725 see Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology,and Natural Philosophy in NewtonianBritain, 1660-1750 (Cam- bridge: CambridgeUniv. Press, 1992), pp. 362-364.

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 463 ences for the caprices of light leaf brass, feathers, and sparks. Electrical phenomenade- pended on manual skills embodied in individual persons who might look like proficient performersbut might also seem lowly vendors of curiosities. When Gray petitioned the virtuosi for patronagehe recalled his "mean circumstances"and humble station and the expense of books and instrumentshis research required.Eminent fellows of the Royal Society reckoned that the "bashful"Gray had "dreadfulapprehensions of the presence of so many virtuosos." When he attended their meetings, it was by special permission or invitation.He did not become a fellow of the Royal Society until 1730.16 The bashful Gray was neverthelesssingled out as unusuallyskillful. His erstwhilecollaborator, the poet Anna Williams, eulogized the "authorof the present doctrine of electricity"and especially his "dext'roushand." "He had a particularknack of exciting this propertyby friction with his hand, and was the father,at least first propagator,of electricity,"recalled Stukeley. For an indication of the significance of such a "knack"in naturalphilosophical theory and practice, compareStukeley's reminiscences of Newton's youthful skills: "a mechanicalknack ... very much assists in making experiments.Such as possess it take their ideas of things incomparablystronger and more perfect than others.... For want of this handycraft,how many philosophersquietly sit down in their studies and invent an hypothesis."References to Gray's manual knack were also significant because he made much of the difference between Hauksbee's use of paperand his own way of handlingthe glass rod. In late 1720- at his London lodgings, in the country, and then at the Royal Society itself-Gray publi- cized his ability to give "some degree of electricity" to feathers, hair, silk, and other substances without the rod, using his fingers alone. Gray's stories about his own fingers showed that his audience was wrong to limit electrical and luminous actions to glass or to their machines.17 Gray's notable skill had a practicalsource. Like his brotherand father, he was a dyer, free from 1692 to work in Canterbury,a major center of the silk and cloth trades. His tradehas been used to explain his weaknesses; certainlyhe did not hesitate to point to his professionalsufferings. In May 1706 he told the AstronomerRoyal thathe could not make observationsbecause of back pain, while in July 1711 he desperatelyasked the secretary of the Royal Society to intercede with the governorsof the Charterhouse,a London char- itable hospice, for a place there to pursue work on astronomy and navigation, "being already soe Infirmeas not to be able to follow my Imploy without much more Difficulty and Pain than in formeryears caused by a strainI received in my back some years agoe."18

16 Gray to John Flamsteed, 8 Sept. 1708, and Gray to Sloane, 31 July 1711, in Robert A. Chipman, "The ManuscriptLetters of Stephen Gray,"Isis, 1958, 49:414-433, on pp. 419, 424; Brook Taylor to John Keill, 3 July 1713, in Clark and Murdin, "Enigma of Stephen Gray" (cit. n. 13), p. 388; and Gray to Wheler, 6 Feb. 1736, Royal Society MSS LBC 22, p. 265. For Gray as witness to trials at Desaguliers's house see J. T. Desa- guliers, "Optical Experiments Made ... upon Occasion of Signior Rizzetti's Opticks," Phil. Trans., 1728, 35:596-629, on p. 629. On the demonstrationof electricalphenomena-and its social significance-see Stewart, Rise of Public Science, pp. 119-130; Pumfrey,"Who Did the Work?"(cit. n. 9), pp. 153-155; and Shapin,Social History of Truth(cit. n. 9), pp. 392-403. 17 Stephen Gray, "An Account of Some New Electrical Experiments,"Phil. Trans., 1720, 31:104-107. For the shows at the Royal Society see Royal Society MSS JournalBook 12:63-65 (Nov. 1720?); for Desaguliers's role see J. T. Desaguliers,"Some Thoughts and ExperimentsConcerning Electricity," Phil. Trans.,1739,41:186- 193, on p. 187; and Gray, "A LetterContaining Several ExperimentsConcerning Electricity," ibid., 1731,37:18- 44, on p. 18. For Williams on Gray's dexterity see Clark and Murdin, "Enigmaof Stephen Gray,"p. 404; for Stukeley on Gray's knack see I. BernardCohen, "Neglected Sources for the Life of Stephen Gray,"Isis, 1954, 45:41-50, on p. 43; and for "handycraft"see William Stukeley, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life (1752), ed. Hastings White (London:Taylor & Francis, 1936), pp. 54-55. 18 Gray to Flamsteed,4 May 1706, and Gray to Sloane, 31 July 1711, cited in Chipman,"Manuscript Letters of Stephen Gray"(cit. n. 16), pp. 419-420, and in Clark and Murdin,"Enigma of Stephen Gray,"p. 355.

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But the body techniquesof late seventeenth-centurydyeing were notjust a sourceof Gray's incapacities; they were a source of his capacities as well. Canterburysilk weaving and dyeing boomed during the last two decades of the seventeenth century. Faced with an increasein the importsof foreign silks and calicos, the English governmenttried to protect the domestic trade and encouragedyeing and printing.Some of the Royal Society's early fellows-Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and William Petty-tried to formalize the philosophy of color but were ignored in the reclusive world of the dye trade.Artisan dyers were confidentexperts on the textureof threads,on the managementof color, and on the manual techniques of pulling cloth, of temperatureestimation, and of weight. Their codebook, a rough compilation of writings by late seventeenth-centuryGerman chemists and French state regulationsgoverning the dye trade,was translatedand publishedin London in 1705. Timings for boiling up dyes requiredthe masterto "let the Dye cool so much thatyou can bear your hand in it." When buying woodashes, "thatrequire so nice a judgement in the choice of them," it was "necessarythat we have an especial regard to their weightiness; to which purpose poise a Handful of them in your Hand, and if you find them weighty, 'tis a very good sign." Especially importantwas judgment of the moment when the dye had been fixed in the threads.Here skilled managementof the threadswas required:"pass a threadof Yarn through [the dye], and Draw it throughyour Finger to examine whether there is any hair hangs to it." Versions of these techniques for drawing, handling, and coloring cloth were widely distributedand of major economic significance in early eighteenth-centuryBritain and France. (See Figure 2.)19 The similarityof dyers' techniques and those of early electrical work is striking.In his first electrical trials done at Cambridgein 1708 Gray had already shown an original capacity to "pinch [a feather's] fibres between [his] thumbe and finger" and then closely scrutinize its behavior. A dozen years later, in the very first paper he published on electricity, Gray described how the attractionbetween glass tubes and feathers "put me on thinking whether if a Feather were drawn through my Fingers it might not produce the same Effect." He detailed a series of techniques, first tested out in Kent, for handling "small downy Fibres"and "fine Hair"by "drawingit 3 or 4 times throughmy Fingers or ratherbetween my Thumband Forefinger,"and afterthese "thenext thing which I thought of was threadsof Silk of several colours and of several finenesses."He workedwith coarse and fine silk ribbons, with holland linen, muslin, and wool, and provided the significant instructionthat to obtain sparksfrom electrifiedcard paper "the paper before rubbingmust be heated as hot as the Fingers can well bear."Gray's remarkable"knack" depended on body techniques such as drawing fine threads,hairs, and fibers carefully throughthe fingers, the manual estimation of temperature,and the choice of a range of silks and linens. Some historianshave described these trials as "desultoryplay" and have seen Gray as "a simple empiricist."But this misses the particularsocial place of such playful empiricism.

19The Whole Art of Dyeing (London, 1705), pp. 82, 98, 119. This volume is a translationof a 1703 Jena compilation of the German texts Ars tinctoria experimentalis(1685) and Nachricht von der Pott- und Weyd- Asche (1685) and of Jean-BaptisteColbert's Instructiongenerale pour la teinture des laines (1671). For these sources see H. Wescher, "The French Dyeing Industry and Its Reorganizationby Colbert," Ciba Rev., 1939, 2:643-646. For Canterburydyeing see C. W. Chalklin, Seventeenth Century Kent: A Social and Economic History (London:Longmans, 1965), pp. 126-128. For dye regulationsee ArchibaldClow and Nan L. Clow, The ChemicalRevolution (London: Batchworth, 1952), pp. 199-203; and A. E. Musson and Eric Robinson, Science and Technologyin the IndustrialRevolution (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 338-342.

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|~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~....;...i. Xg| . .

...... f~~~~~~ ~ ..... i i l .

dippingthreads (B and D), removalof sacks of threadsfrom a copper vat (A), and carefuldrying (E). From The Art of Dyeing Wool, Silk, and Cotton (London, 1789), Plate 2, Figure 1. (Courtesy of CambridgeUniversity Library.)

Gray's trials were manipulations directed at a range of materials that formed dyers' ev- eryday concern and used body techniquescommon to their craft.20 Dyeing skills were ratherwell representedamong electricalexperimenters of the period. Gray's first metropolitancontact, the Royal Society's operatorand librarianHenry Hunt, may well have been a Canterburydyer too. Hauksbee was originally a cloth merchant, while Dufay was the first academiciancharged by the French state with runningthe Go- belins dye works. Dye works remained dominatedby craft traditionand, however regulated, were peculiarlyhard to subject to savants' expertise. Dufay, who used his expertise in dyeing to urge the significance of the three primitive colors red, blue, and yellow, reckonedthat "Dyeing is one of the Arts which can provide the most singularexperiments to those who wish to study it as Physicists."21In his first electrical experiments on the

20 Gray, "Account of Some New Electrical Experiments"(cit. n. 17); and Gray to Sloane, 3 Jan. 1708, in Chipman,"Unpublished Letter of Stephen Gray"(cit. n. 12), p. 35. On Gray's early experimentssee I. Bernard Cohen, Franklin and Newton (Philadelphia:American Philosophical Society, 1956), p. 370; and R. W. Home, The Effluvial Theoryof Electricity (New York: Arno, 1981), pp. 46-47. 21 Dufay, "Observationsphysiques" (cit. n. 6), p. 253. For Hunt see Clark and Murdin,"Enigma of Stephen Gray"(cit. n. 13), p. 356; and J. L. Heilbron,Electricity in the Seventeenthand Eighteenth Centuries:A Study of Early Modem Physics (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1979), p. 243 n 43. For Dufay as

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 466 THE ELECTRICPLANETARIUM attritionof bodies in the void, Hauksbee deliberatelychose to rub amber with a form of wool "such as is now commonly sold for Gartering,the coarser sort of which I purposely chose for its harshness."His choice of amber as a candidatephosphor has been convinc- ingly connected with contemporarychemical accounts of sulfurous oils, while his care with the kind of wool can be tracedto his expertise in the cloth trade.22The same consid- erationsapply to the exchanges between Dufay and Gray on the role of differentcolors in the productionof electrical effects. In 1730 Gray developed demonstrationsthat red, or- ange, and yellow bodies were attractedmore stronglythan green, blue, or purpleones. By summer 1735, he had concluded that there were also real differences in the aptitudeof differently colored silk lines as suspensions for electrified bodies. After working with a range of silk ribbons and gauzes and casting prismaticcolors on white cloth, in order to explore rival optical and chemical accounts of color, Dufay responded that these differences must proceed "not from the Colour as a Colour, but from the Substances that are employ'd in the dyeing," because differently dyed cloths held humidity to varying ex- tents.23In early eighteenth-centuryelectrical experimentationapparently random exploration of the variables governing the reliable productionof effects was linked with local expertise in crafts like dyeing. It is necessary to examine how, and where, this expertise was used.

THE VIRTUOSO AND THE ARTISAN

By the late 1720s Gray could call upon a resource that changed his standing among the virtuosi-the supportof GranvillWheler, a wealthy young gentlemanwith a large Kentish estate. Wheler met Graybefore 1729, probablythrough their mutualfriend John Godfrey, another Kent landowner and fellow of the Royal Society. In his survey of the county's economy in the 1720s, Daniel Defoe reportedon the wealth of estates like those of Godfrey and Wheler, comparingthem with the silk and cloth trades of Canterbury,where Gray's brother was mayor and Huguenot refugees swelled the workshops of weavers and silk workers. Defoe remarkedon "this neighbourhoodof persons of figure and quality,"the context for Gray's new electrical work.24Wheler's libraryheld the new canon of English administratorof dyestuffs see Fontenelle, "Eloge de M. Du Fay" (cit. n. 7), pp. 76-77; Wescher, "GreatMasters of Dyeing" (cit. n. 6), pp. 631-632; and Gillispie, Science and Polity in France (cit. n. 6), pp. 407-408. 22 Freudenthal,"Early Electricity" (cit. n. 14), pp. 211, 218. For sulfurous oils in dyeing see William Petty, "An Apparatusto the History of the CommonPractices of Dying" (1662), in Thomas Sprat,History of the Royal Society (London, 1667), p. 292. For other roles played by the chemistry of unctuous oils in electricity see Gad Freudenthal,"Clandestine Stoic Concepts in MechanicalPhilosophy: The Problem of Electrical Attraction,"in Renaissance and Revolution, ed. J. V. Field and F. A. J. L. James (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 161-172. 23 Gray, "LetterContaining Several ExperimentsConcerning Electricity" (cit. n. 17), p. 44; Charles Dufay, "A Letter Concerning Electricity," Phil. Trans., 1734, 38:258-266, on pp. 259-260 (cf. Dufay, "Troisieme m6moire sur 1'electricite:Des corps qui sont les plus vivement attirespar les matieres electriques,"Mem. Acad. Roy. Sci., 1733, pp. 233-254, on p. 239); and Gray, "A Letter ContainingSome ExperimentsRelating to Elec- tricity,"Phil. Trans., 1735, 39:166-170. See also Heilbron,Electricity in the Seventeenthand Eighteenth Cen- turies (cit. n. 21), p. 254. For Wheler's similar tests of differently colored silks in autumn 1732 see Granvill Wheler, "Some ElectricalExperiments Chiefly Regardingthe Repulsive Force of ElectricalBodies," Phil. Trans., 1739,41:98-111, on pp. 104-110. For dye tests and color theory see Alan Shapiro,Fits, Passions, and Paroxysms (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 260-261. 24 Clarkand Murdin,"Enigma of Stephen Gray"(cit. n. 13), pp. 355-356, 392-393; Victoria CountyHistory: Kent, Vol. 3, ed. William Page (London:Dawsons, 1932), p. 409; and Chalklin, SeventeenthCentury Kent (cit. n. 19), p. 117. Defoe's comments are in A Tour throughthe WholeIsland of Great Britain (1724-1726), ed. Pat Rogers (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1971), pp. 131-135. In 1705 there may have been a connection between Defoe and Gray (via Flamsteed), since both reportedthe notorious episode of Mrs. Veal and the Canterbury

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Figure3 GranvillWhelers Wheler....in.1759country house Otterden Place The churchwas builtfor FroThmsRckt.ADecitono.tere.lceadCurh(odo,13)p..(Cuts

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of "Christianoeconomicks" in his best-selling The Protestant Monastery:"Oh how Glo- rious would thatNation be, where each Nobleman's house were as an Academy of Virtuous Arts and Sciences and a Palace of ChristianHospitality! Whose Gentleman'sHouses were so many Colledges of PrudentConduct, Virtuous Education and Devotion!" Like many of the county gentry's younger sons, Granvill Wheler was sent to Cambridgeand later took holy orders. He marriedinto the Tory family of the earls of Huntingdon,so linking himself with several notablypious religious enthusiasts,then turnedhis new home Otterden Place, purchasedin 1725, into a site of active philosophy. There the servants, to be encouraged to "industriouslabour," were often used as supportstaff and subjects of experiment. (See Figure 3 .)25 Between spring 1729 and Gray's death in February 1736, "with equal pleasure and astonishment,we made many experiments together,"Wheler recalled. "Separatelyand jointly we made many ... Experiments,communicating alwaies our thoughtsas we went along." Desaguliers showed the Royal Society Gray's first "curious"experiments on the ghost: in Sept. 1705 Mrs. Veal, a recently deceased inhabitantof Canterbury,appeared in ghostly form to her neighbor Mrs. Bargrave to warn against the perils of an immoral life. The episode drew much comment in London, where Flamsteed transmitteda reportfrom Gray, and Defoe published a well-known pamphleton the case. See Clark and Murdin,"Enigma of Stephen Gray,"p. 373. 25 Catalogue of the Entire Libraryof the Late ReverendGranville Whelerof OtterdenPlace in Kent (London, 1771); George Wheler, Autobiographyof Sir George Wheler, ed. E. G. Wheler (Birmingham:Cornish, 1911), pp. 13-14; George Wheler, The Protestant Monastery or Christian Oeconomicks(London, 1698), pp. 177 (on virtuous arts), 62 (on servants);Edward Hasted, History and TopographicalSurvey of the Countyof Kent, 2nd ed., 12 vols. (Canterbury,1797-1801), Vol. 5, pp. 537-538; Thomas Rackett,A Description of OtterdenPlace and Church (London: Nichols, 1832), pp. 6-7 (for the Wheler family); and Dorothy Gardiner,The Oxinden Letters (London:Constable, 1933), p. xxiv (for the east Kent gentry).

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 468 THE ELECTRICPLANETARIUM communicationof electrical virtue from a rubbed glass rod to feathers, metal, and ivory balls on 1 May 1729. Frustratedby his inability to extend the line of communication beyond a drop of a few yards and unableto use the top of the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral for want of "assistance,"Gray left the next day for Kent.26Every summerGray stayed at OtterdenPlace, extending the places where communicationcould be shown, the distance throughwhich the virtue could be transmitted,and the numberof substancesthat showed this virtue. He returnedto London each autumnfor furthertrials, then wrote reportsfor the Society. Wheler helped make Gray an author. Gray's first report arrived in London from Kent in February1731, to some applause.The following November he staged shows at Crane Court for the Prince of Wales and was awardedthe Society's Copley Medal. In March 1733 he showed the Society demonstrationsthat electrical virtue could be transmitted without immediate contact with the glass rod. News spread from the Society to France,where Dufay was able to replicateand extend these trials. Dufay and his assistants visited London; then he and Jean Nollet reproducedlong-distance transmissionin a sub- urbangarden near Paris during September 1733. Electricalcommunication, hitherto limited to the Charterhouse,Crane Court, and OtterdenPlace, became a reputableinternational phenomenon.27 The comparativeprivacy and wealth of OtterdenPlace let experimentersmake trials backstagebefore showing them in Londonand then having them communicatedelsewhere. Domestic privacy was highly valued among early modernEnglish elites sensitive to gossip, flows of knowledge, and the fragility of honor and credit.Gray went down to Kentbecause "in the Country ... I knew that I should have the Opportunityof carryingon the Exper- iments much fartherthan I had yet done." At OtterdenPlace he strung packthreadlines from the gallery in Wheler's great hall and from the clock tower; then Wheler suggested that they try horizontal propagation,hanging the line from thin silk threads. The brass supportersfirst used to hang the packthreadlines had failed, so Wheler and Gray agreed that silk worked because it could not transmitthe virtue, not because it was thin. "With the Apt Method Mr Wheler contrived, and with the great pains he took himself, and the Assistance of his Servants,we succeededfar beyond our Expectation."Wheler' s prompting and his commandof many hands allowed arrayshundreds of feet in length, initially in the long "mattedgallery," then in the great barn, and eventually across the gardens and into the fields, where Wheler "came into the Field and rubbed the tube himself, that I might see there was an Attraction,which I saw." Later that summerand again the next year his Kentish colleagues helped Grayrealize the communicationof virtue at a distance,without contact with the rod or line.28

26 Wheler to Wilson, 7 Sept. 1748, British LibraryMSS ADD 30094, fol. 71; and Gray, "LetterContaining Several ExperimentsConcerning Electricity" (cit. n. 17), pp. 18-19, 25. Gray's work is described in Heilbron, Electricity in the Seventeenthand Eighteenth Centuries (cit. n. 21), pp. 245-249. His introductionof the new concept of electrical communicationis well analyzed in Ben Chaim, "Social Mobility and Scientific Change" (cit. n. 13), pp. 16-20. 27 Royal Society MSS Council Minutes 3 (15 Nov. 1731); and Royal Society MSS JournalBook 14:268-269 (22 Mar. 1733). For Dufay's visit see Fontenelle, "Eloge de M. Du Fay" (cit. n. 7), p. 78; for his replicationsee Dufay, "Troisieme memoire" (cit. n. 23), pp. 246-247. For the instrument-centeredvocabulary of Gray and Wheler see Licoppe, Formationde la pratique scientifique(cit. n. 11), pp. 149-15 1. 28 Gray, "LetterContaining Several ExperimentsConcerning Electricity" (cit. n. 17), pp. 19, 26-31, 33, 43. For Kent gentry and City tradessee Peter Laslett, "The Gentryof Kent in 1640," CambridgeHistorical Journal, 1948, 9:152. On issues of domestic privacy see Linda Pollock, "Living on the Stage of the World: The Concept of Privacy among the Elite of Early Modern England,"in RethinkingSocial History: English Society, 1570- 1920, and Its Interpretation,ed. AdrianWilson (Manchester:Manchester Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 78-96, on pp. 89-90.

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The Kent connection provided Gray with apparatusand status,Wheler with the oppor- tunity to masterthe dyer's skills. Wheler took the initiative, providing a magnet to follow up the effect of magnetic effluvia on electric ones and demonstratingthat hot and cold iron attractedequally well. During his summervisit in 1732, Gray wanted to test whether the virtue worked in the void. Wheler provided his air pump to show that sulfur and leaf brass still showed electrical virtue in an exhaustedreceiver. Air was unnecessaryfor electrical effects.29The following autumn,in Gray's absence, Wheler tried the transmissionof electric action across glass and between glass and thread.He reinterpretedchanges in "the Balance of Attraction"in electrifiedbodies within glass receivers as the establishmentof a "State of Repulsion," a term he coined. He found that unelectrifiedobjects-threads, silks, and feathers-would approachthe rubbedglass tube, touch it, and then be repelled. In summer 1733 Gray watched Wheler's new regularities.They now reckonedthat "electricity is not so properlycalled an attractiveand repulsive Virtue, as a Virtue attractiveof those bodies that are not attractivethemselves and repulsive of those that are."Wheler and Gray set out to link this permanentvirtue to mattersof fact about solution and evaporation drawn from London naturalphilosophy.30 Here was evidence of repulsive forces between particles. The Kent experimenterspointed to Edmond Halley's recent account of bubble formation and Stephen Hales's analysis of blood flow. Wheler moralized upon the fact that blood globules electrifiedby friction would be repellent and thus noncoagulant:"The Necessity of Exercise appears more plainly than ever, in order to keep the Body in a healthy state, as we may observe here the very Steps that nature makes use of to free herself from her Suppressions."31 The behavior of the humanbody became topical. In April 1730 Gray tried stringingup a Charterhouseschoolboy and holding a rubbed glass rod near his feet. Leaf brass was made to dance round his face and hair. Gray reckoned that "animalsreceive a greater quantityof electrick effluvia."Two years later he amplifiedthe trial with a pair of youths at Godfrey's house, using cakes of resin to substitutefor the silk lines. The display of mastery and its "surprising"show became a crowd-puller,and the supply of personnel from Kent helped. Control over the phenomenonmattered when in late 1733 Dufay had himself strung up and electrified. If another gentleman made to touch him then "there immediately issues from my Body one or more pricking Shoots, with a cracklingNoise, that causes to that person as well as to my self, a Little Pain ... and in the Dark these snappingsare ... so many Sparksof Fire."News of these sparksand shocks reachedthe Royal Society in spring 1734. Dufay andNollet came to London.In the repositoryat Crane Court, Gray arranged"six or seven persons"on a series of cakes of resin, made themjoin hands, electrifiedone end of the humanchain, and showed how leaf gold jumped near the

29 Gray, "LetterContaining Several ExperimentsConcerning Electricity," p. 32; Royal Society MSS Journal Book 14:412 (4 Apr. 1734) (on magnets), 33 (on hot iron); StephenGray, "A LetterContaining a FartherAccount of His ExperimentsConcerning Electricity," Phil. Trans., 1732, 37:285-291, on p. 289; and Gray, "Two Letters Containing FartherAccounts of His Experiments Concerning Electricity," ibid., pp. 397-407, on p. 399 (on electrical virtue in the void). 30 Gray, "Two Letters ContainingFarther Accounts of His ExperimentsConcerning Electricity," p. 398; and Wheler, "Some ElectricalExperiments Chiefly Regardingthe Repulsive Force of Electrical Bodies" (cit. n. 23), p. 111. See ArthurQuinn, "RepulsiveForce in England, 1706-1744," Hist. Stud. Phys. Sci., 1982, 13:110-128, on pp. 119-120. Hauksbee used the term "repulsiveforce" in Physico-MechanicalExperiments (cit. n. 11), p. 43. 31 Wheler, "Some ElectricalExperiments Chiefly Regardingthe Repulsive Force of ElectricalBodies," p. 111. Wheler first publicly described his trials of autumn 1732 on attractionand repulsion in Wheler to Mortimer,7 June 1736, Royal Society MSS LBC 22, pp. 381-382. Hales used Gray's work in his own account of blood flow: see Stephen Hales, Statical Essays (London, 1733), p. 58 ff.

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 470 THE ELECTRICPLANETARIUM other. The humble dyer became a skilled impresario.Later in the spring Gray replicated Dufay's shocks and sparks with a boy on resin and got a metal bar to discharge sparks. During the summerhe went down to OtterdenPlace and requisitionedWheler's footman, "a good stout lad," who "found himself pricked or burnt."Cosmological consequences were irresistible."Altho' these effects are at present but in minimis,"it was obvious that "this Electrick fire ... seems to be of the same Nature with that of Thunderand Light- ning."32 Wheler and his colleagues made their bodies and electrical instrumentsinto analogues. Wheler learned how to tie a bundle of strings at top and bottom and make them swell apartwhen he electrified them: "I could not without some Pleasure observe the Knot at the bottom, as the Strings swelled out, sensibly rising up. I could scarce forbearimaging my bundle of silks, a bundle of muscular Fibres."In September 1734 Gray was able to draw sparksfrom the end of an electrifiediron bar resting on wax cakes. "All the Time I am rubbingthe Tube, these Flashes of Light appearupon every Motion of my hand up or down the Tube, but the largest Flashes are produced by the Motion of my hand down- wards."Then Gray began trying the effects of such gestures on the whole body. In May 1735 he suspendeda boy on silk lines and electrifiedhis feet. When a gentlemanbrought his hand near the boy sparks and shocks would pass, the gentleman would be electrified, and after about four contacts the boy would lose his electric virtue.33Gray and Wheler tried to connect the cosmos with their electrical motions. In Augustannatural philosophy this was a bold bid for high status, since it touched on the possible cause and effects of gravitation.This was the status that "Newtonian"orreries had just achieved. In this high- stakes game the troublesof replicationwere endemic. Dufay had claimed thatlive animals were better transmittersof electric virtue than dead ones. English failure to replicate this finding must be due to "the French often not eating their food till some Degree of Putre- faction is set in." Nevertheless, "we believed Mr Du Fay to be a man of great honour and worth."Wheler used the languageof honor to define his relationshipwith Grayand Dufay. Wheler's confessed reluctance"to be an Author"was overcome by his "thoughtsof communicating ... through his Hands to whom [the experiments] owe their being." It was necessary that others share Gray's knack, but a skill too local or lowly was often suspi- ciously magical. Wheler's parish judged him a "wizard,"and Desaguliers's audiences sometimes gave him the same label. "Thereare many places where I have been," one later lecturerwrote, "so barbarouslyignorant that they have taken me for a magician ... such likewise was the case of our celebratedShow-Man, Dr Desaguliers."34

32 Gray, "LetterContaining Several ExperimentsConcerning Electricity" (cit. n. 17), pp. 39-42; Gray, "Two Letters Containing FartherAccounts of His Experiments Concerning Electricity" (cit. n. 29), pp. 399-402; Charles Dufay, "A Letter to His Grace Charles Duke of Richmond and Lenox Concerning Electricity,"Phil. Trans., 1734, 38:258-266, on p. 261; Dufay, "Troisieme memoire" (cit. n. 23); p. 253; Royal Society MSS JournalBook 14:404-406; and Stephen Gray, "Experimentsand Observationsupon the Light That Is Produced by CommunicatingElectrical Attractionto Animal or InanimateBodies," Phil. Trans., 1735, 39:16-24, on pp. 18, 24. 33 Gray, "Two Letters Containing Farther Accounts of His Experiments Concerning Electricity," p. 399; Wheler, "Some Electrical ExperimentsChiefly Regardingthe Repulsive Force of ElectricalBodies" (cit. n. 23), p. 106; Gray, "Experimentsand Observationsupon the Light That Is Producedby CommunicatingElectrical Attractionto Animal or InanimateBodies," p. 21; and Gray, "LetterContaining Some ExperimentsRelating to Electricity"(cit. n. 23), p. 168. 34 Gray, "Experimentsand Observationsupon the Light That Is Producedby CommunicatingElectrical At- traction to Animal or InanimateBodies," p. 19; Wheler to Wilson, 7 Sept. 1748, British LibraryMSS ADD 30094, fol. 71 (on French meat); and Wheler, "Some Electrical ExperimentsChiefly Regardingthe Repulsive Force of Electrical Bodies" (cit. n. 23), p. 98 (on authorship).For Wheler as wizard see Clark and Murdin,

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Showy skills and equipmenthad to be communicated.When Mortimerasked for Gray's electrical equipment to be shipped from Canterburyto London, "large Glass tubes and canes, silk and worsted cords"included, Wheler remarkedthat "the [resin] Cakes must be packed up very carefully or they will suffer: mine do so very much both in going up to London and returning."Carters earned a good living carefully shipping the apparatus between London and Kent.35In London, the fellows tried to make sense of the natural philosophical meaning of the Kent group's trials. When Gray's work on communication was published,Desaguliers reminded the Royal Society's new president,Hans Sloane, that Newton had believed in a subtle medium and had "very cautiously insinuated"it was the cause of gravity. "If the same Cause did extend to Electricity and Magnetism, it is very probablethat this wou'd be a discovery of the first of second Causes."Halley concurred thatGray's work "seemedto go a long way towardsthe confirmationof Sir Isaac Newton's notion concerning the existence of an universal medium which he sometimes calls the ether, at other times an electrical spirit."Soon Desaguliers commented on Gray's work. Electricity could perhapsbe made to engross all the "powersof nature"and be identified with a widely distributedand authoritativelyproposed active fluid. The careerof the electric planetariumwas much affected by these links between local techniquesand universal powers.36

BUILDING THE ELECTRIC PLANETARIUM

In February1736 Dufay heardof Gray's death:"it is a greatloss for experimentalphysics." Gray's recent trials on the redistributionof electricity between boys and gentlemen had been reproducedin Paris. The Frenchmanwas then involved in negotiations with the London instrumentmaker George Grahamand the Royal Society to help calibrate the instrumentshis French colleagues were to take to Laplandto check the figure of the earth and thus make trials of Newtonian naturalphilosophy. Now Dufay learnedthat Gray had managed to connect electricity with celestial physics. "I would be very obliged to you if you could well share it with me," he wrote to Mortimer,"and I would certainly not omit giving him all the honour which is due to him."37 Dufay was well informed. On 6 February,just a week before his demise, Gray wrote

"Enigmaof Stephen Gray"(cit. n. 13), p. 393. For Desaguliers as a "gimcrackwizard" see British LibraryMSS ADD 38175, fol. 215; for Desaguliers as a "magician"see Benjamin Martin,Supplement Containing Remarks on a Rhapsodyof Adventuresby a ModernKnight Errant in Philosophy (Bath, 1746), p. 29 n. Cf. Martin,Young Gentlemanand Lady's Philosophy, 2 vols. (London, 1759, 1763), Vol. 1, p. 316. For Desaguliers as a "conjurer" see Stewart,Rise of Public Science (cit. n. 15), p. 200. 35 Mortimerto John Gray, 14 June 1737, Royal Society MSS LBC 26, pp. 90-91; Wheler to Mortimer,21 Nov. 1737, Royal Society MSS LBC 24, pp. 48-49; Wheler to Benjamin Adams, 6 Dec. 1737, Royal Society Box File 54; and Whelerto Mortimer,25 Apr. 1738, Royal Society MSS LBC 24, pp. 318-319. For the inventory of Gray's equipmentsee Clark and Murdin,"Enigma of Stephen Gray,"pp. 399-400. 36 Desaguliers to Sloane, 4 Mar. 1731, British LibraryMSS ADD 4051, fol. 201; Edmond Halley, 20 May 1731, Royal Society MSS JournalBook 14:101-102; J. T. Desaguliers,"Some Thoughts Concerning Electricity," Royal Society Lettersand Papers 18 (2), no. 34, fols. 399-400, 3 June 1731; and Stewart,Rise of Public Science (cit. n. 15), p. 129. For Newtonian views on electricity and gravity see "De vi electrica,"in Correspondenceof Isaac Newton, ed. Tumbull et al. (cit. n. 10), Vol. 5, pp. 362-369; and R. W. Home, "Newtonon Electricityand the Aether," in ContemporaryNewtonian Research, ed. Zev Bechler (Dordrecht:Reidel, 1982), pp. 191-213. For Newtonian orreriessee King and Millburn,Geared to the Stars (cit. n. 3), pp. 152-153. 37 Dufay to Mortimer, 19 Jan. 1736, Royal Society MSS LBC 22, p. 175; Dufay to Mortimer, 13 Mar. 1736, Royal Society MSS MM 20.20; Charles Dufay, "Septieme memoire sur l'electricite: Quelques additions aux memoires precedents,"Mdm. Acad. Roy. Sci., 1737, pp. 86-100, on pp. 86-87; and Dufay, "Huitiemememoire sur l'lectricite," ibid., pp. 307-325, on pp. 308-309.

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to Wheler that he had performed some experiments that showed that small electrified bodies orbitedlarge ones in the same directionas planets roundthe sun. Mortimervisited Gray to get details. Gray said that these surprisingrevolutions would enable him to perfect his electrical research. He hoped "to astonish the World with a new sort of Planetarium never before thought of, and that from these Experimentsmight be established a certain Theory for accounting for the Motions of the GrandPlanetarium of the Universe." The dying electriciancould only give the simplest recipe for this drama.He electrifiedan eight- inch-diameterresin cake by warmingit, then hitting it. He put an iron globe, about an inch in diameter,on the middle of the cake. Then he tied a small cork to a threadand suspended it over the globe. The cork would orbit the globe from west to east. Put the globe eccentrically on the cake, or make the cake an ellipse, and the cork would move in an ellipse. He could get the same orbit without the cake by surroundingthe globe with an electrified glass hoop; the orbit was less distinct without either cake or hoop. Gray was using some traditionalresources of his group's work. They had learned how to cast resin and wax cakes and were skilled at watching the motions of light bodies nearby.They also expected bodies, especially their own hands, to exhibit significantelectrical effects. Grayproposed, but never tried, substitutingother animal matter,such as chicken legs or raw meat, for his own hand. He noted that a man resting his hands on his knees would see them move together "withoutany will or intention."The same happenedto the face and hands near a wall.38Were these new experimentsinvestigations of the humanbody's unwilled motions or of the divinely willed solar system? Mortimer,a Leiden-trainedphysician and chemist, dutifullytried them himself. He could not get regular orbits with the electric planetariumand began investigating the forces operatingon the cork. Mortimerfound that his finger would repel it. He replacedthe iron ball with other objects on the cake. He used the cork to explore the space roundthe cake and the iron. The cake's edge stronglypulled the cork, but the pull was weaker nearerthe center. The iron ball mostly repelled the cork but strongly attractedit at very short dis- tances. When he immersedthe setup in water "as high as half the Globe" and floatedcorks in the water "no revolutions round the Globe happen'd as I hoped to have seen." These were "trials[which] I recommendto the curious."On 1 April Mortimerread Gray's letter at the Royal Society and printedextracts of Gray's electricaltestament in the Philosophical Transactions.(See Figure 4.)39 The trials did, however, work in Kent. Wheler came to London, learnedfrom Mortimer of his failureto replicatethe orbits, did a few preliminarytests, and then went home. From this point on, the planetariumworked only at OtterdenPlace. In early April Wheler established that the exact mode of striking the cake with his hand to electrify it was crucial. Gray's knack was saved. Wheler had worried that the phenomenon was due to "the in- voluntary tremors of the old man.... But when I considered the Probity, Caution and Experienceof Mr Gray I could not help fearing I did him injustice in my suspitions."The dyer's hands were trustworthybecause he had become a moral exemplar.The cake had to be hit perpendicularly,not obliquely, nor rubbed."Moving it aboutits axis with the fingers and thumb of my left hand" produced orbits in the wrong direction, and any rubbing destroyed the effect. Wheler sent these instructionsto London and Mortimergot Desa-

38 StephenGray, "LetterConcerning the RevolutionsWhich Small PendulousBodies Will by ElectricityMake Round Large Ones from West to East as the Planets Do Round the Sun," Phil. Trans., 1736, 39:220; and Mortimer,"Account of Some ElectricalExperiments" (cit. n. 2), pp. 400-403. 39 Mortimer,"Account of Some Electrical Experiments,"p. 403, and unpublishedadditions in Royal Society RBC 19:364; and reportfrom Wheler, Royal Society MSS JournalBook 15:297 (1 Apr. 1736).

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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 474 THE ELECTRICPLANETARIUM guliers to rehearsethe performancethere, but the fellowship remainedskeptical. Mortimer told Wheler that "no person can be more experienced in making Electrical Experiments than you, who have been Mr Gray's fellow labourerin them for many years, and to whom he acknowledgeshe owes the hints of many of his Discoveries."The Londonersrecognized the special resources accumulatedat OtterdenPlace. These skills had to be broughtto the capital.40 During May and early June 1736 Wheler had several variables to play with: the way the cake was electrified, the substanceof the central globe, the arrangementof the cork, the way he held the string, and the direction, shape, and speed of the orbit. He varied the lot. Oblique strokes on the cake made the cork orbit from the east. The phenomenon worked as well with ivory as with iron. Sprinklethe cake with bits of cork and "my little planet"would change direction. The orbits worked best when he increased the length of the string to two feet, so that his "body and hand were placed so as to have little or no effect upon the Cake or the little revolving Cork."He concluded that the mode of suspen- sion was as crucial as the mode of electrification."If care be not taken so to stand above the Cake, as to have the pendulous body hang over the centre, one may be deceived by having it nearerto one hand than the other."Assured of the system's reliability, Wheler then tried to make it more astronomicallyapt. He placed several globes on the cake and found that regularwest-to-east orbits could be sustainedonly if there were five spheresor fewer. He could get eccentricorbits with two large globes widely spaced and "madeseveral attemptsto discover a motion about the axis in the revolving body, suspecting from the way of reasoning I have got into, there lay concealed a cause of such a motion." So he got his servant,"lying on the groundwith a wire passing thro' the Stand and the centre of the cake into the ivory ball," to rotate the ivory while Wheler suspended a ball of down feathersand threadsnearby. To his satisfaction,when the centralbody rotated,the orbiting ball spun on its own axis from west to east. Wheler reckoned he had produced a good model of the solar system, including planets (his corks), the sun (the ivory), satellites (motion with several central balls), and comets (eccentric motion round two balls). He composed a long treatiseon the planetariumand sent it to London on 7 June.41 Mortimerwelcomed the news. "This Gentlemanhas opened such a field of matter as can scarce be broughtunder comprehensionof anyone less conversantin the subjectthan himself." The compliment was double edged. Only Wheler could make the planetarium work, and its phenomena seemed hard to manage. "He has discovered such a variety of changes and even contrarietiesof motion to be producedby an alterationof circumstances so slight in appearancethat to any one unfurnishedwith his own key to the invention of them they must appearendless." Specific body techniques mattered."He adds a caution or two concerning the posture of the body in standingby the experiment and in placing the Cake."Desaguliers demandedmore instructionsand tried "some of Mr Gray's experiments"in the Society's repositoryat the startof July. Mortimeronce again invited Wheler to London. The urgency was all the greater,for Wheler now set out a full-blown electrical cosmology designed to make the evidential context of the experimentsunmistakably as- tronomical.42

40Wheler to Mortimer, 19 Apr. 1736, and Mortimerto Wheler, 24 Apr. 1736, Royal Society MSS LBC 22, pp. 278-282, and LBC 26, p. 61; and Royal Society MSS JournalBook 15:312-314 (22 Apr. 1736), 336 (20 May 1736). 41 Wheler to Mortimer, 7 June 1736, Royal Society MSS LBC 22, pp. 368-381; and Royal Society MSS JournalBook, 15:359-362 (24 June 1736). 42 Royal Society MSS JournalBook, 15:359-362 (24 June 1736), 364 (1 July 1736).

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Wheler's work of autumn 1732 had shown the mutual repulsion of a set of electrified bodies and the effect of immersion in "the electrical medium." He had techniques for displaying the repulsive forces that Hales and Desaguliers, amongst others, had begun to discuss in the late 1720s.43In 1736 Whelerreckoned that such repulsionmight be electrical. In a series of "queries"aping those of Newton's Opticks,he now arguedthat each stellar system was full of electrical fluid, centered in its sun. Long-range electrical repulsion deprived each star of observableproper motion. The balance of electricity and gravitation maintainedpermanent orbits and axial revolutions of planets and satellites. In the electric planetarium,stable orbits collapsed when more than five balls were placed on the cake- Wheler reckoned that this explained the small numberof moons round the planets. In the electric planetarium,eccentric orbits were produced when the cork orbited two large balls-hence the behavior of comets, which must orbit round two very distant suns, their tails electrically repelled from the "centralfountain" of the system. A decade later, in debates between electricians such as William Watson and BenjaminFranklin about electrical atmospheres,Wheler continuedto insist on the analogy between the "Mediumwhich surroundsBodies" and "the Atmospheres of larger Bodies as our Earth"and urged that this atmospheremust have both optical and electrical properties. Terrestrialelectricity could be a cosmic power.44

HANDLING THE ELECTRIC PLANETARIUM

Between summer 1736 and spring 1738 Wheler sought to distributethe electric planetarium outwith the confines of his Kent estate. Mortimer and Wheler both sent reports to Dufay, but the Frenchmancould not reproducetheir results. He wanted to know the size of the cake and the central ball, the arrangementof balls to demonstratesatellite motion, and the right means for electrifying the cake. Dufay knew the right gestures mattered:he reasoned that sweaty hands explained why electrified humans gave stronger shocks and faintersparks than did metal objects. It provedhard to get the planetariumtechniques right. "Is it absolutelynecessary that the threadwhich keeps up the cork be held from the fingers? How can the cork have a rotation on its own axis suspended from a thread?Won't this threadtwist round, in which case the rotationmust be alternatelyin one directionthen in the other?"45Until Dufay could get answers, he refused to publish his results. He soon found a principlefor most of what seemed to be happeningin OtterdenPlace. The Parisians were entertainedin the later 1730s by attemptssuch as those of the philosophy professor Joseph Privat de Molieres to reconcile Newtonian mechanics with vortex theory. Fonte- nelle held that in such accounts "a large and sensible electrical atmospherewould not be surprising."Dufay reckoned that round each body of the same kind of electricity was a mutuallyrepellent whirlpool. The cork's behaviorcould be due to the balance between its

43 Wheler, "Some ElectricalExperiments Chiefly Regardingthe Repulsive Force of ElectricalBodies" (cit. n. 23), pp. 103-104. For long-rangerepulsion in the 1720s see BenjaminWorster, A Compendiousand Methodical Account of the Principles of Natural Philosophy (London, 1722), p. 28 (discussed in Quinn, "Repulsive Force in England" [cit. n. 30], p. 115); and notes on Nicholas Saunderson'slectures of 1729, CambridgeUniversity LibraryMSS ADD 589, fol. 87r (quoted in Niccolo Guicciardini,"Gravitation and the Stars,"Journal for the History of Astronomy,1985, 16:221-223). 44 Wheler to Mortimer,24 June 1736, Royal Society MSS LBC 22, pp. 384-388; and Wheler to Wilson, 29 Jan. 1748, British LibraryMSS ADD 30094, fol. 59. 45 Dufay, "Septiemememoire" (cit. n. 37), p. 91; and Dufay to Mortimer,27 July 1736, Royal Society MSS MM 20.21. For messages to Dufay from London in summer 1736 see Dufay, "Huitiemem6moire" (cit. n. 37), p. 310.

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 476 THE ELECTRICPLANETARIUM gravity and the repulsionbetween its vortex and that of the iron-resinsystem. "Theremust be on the cake's surface a circular zone where there is a balance between the repulsive force of the metal ball and the attractionfrom the cake's centre."Dufay easily found it.46 But the cork's regular orbits-and thus its truly astronomicalmeaning-remained puz- zling. The problem seemed soluble when Dufay came back to London in spring 1737 to show his own electrical trials, especially those on sparksand the electrical vortices round metals and animals, and to be admitteda fellow of the Society. He taught the Londoners about the different kinds of electricity and how to use their knuckles to test for electrification. After watching how Desaguliers and Mortimer rapped their resin cake, Dufay decided that "I set off in exactly the same way" and guessed that "electricityperhaps influences much more than is thought in the mechanismof the universe."47 Dufay and Wheler never met. After the Frenchman'sdeparture it took the Kent virtuoso anothermonth to get ready for a show in London, "my working tools requiringsome time to get into order."He said that the angle at which he held the cake when he hit it was important.Differently shaped arrays of balls on the cake, which he associated with the relation between satellites and planets, had varying effects on the direction and speed of the cork's orbit.Next, he reiteratedhis electricalcosmology, claiming thatit would explain planets' axial rotationbecause the parts of the body nearerthe sun would be more electrified and that it would explain the eccentric place of the sun because of the net repulsion of the planets. He tried to extend this to model the moon's orbit, faster and less curved at syzygy than at quadrature,by shifting the central ball. "But the weather must be good to have this experimentsucceed well." There were other troubles.He could not get the planet moving without holding its thread from his hand. "I must not determine to show my experimentsto the Society in public, before I have to a few ... not exceeding half a dozen, being apprehensivethat the breathof a numberof people and the continuedmotion of the air may hinder the success of it." Preparationswere made for Wheler's visit and "a sight and confirmationof them from his own method of performance."48 Wheler at last showed his "own method"in the libraryat CraneCourt at midday on 11 May 1737. The select audience, following Wheler's instructionon its limited size, con- sisted of the Society's president, Sloane, its officers Desaguliers and Mortimer,and the instrumentmakers Francis Hauksbee, Jr., John Hadley, and George Graham,experts on orrery designs amongst their other skills. On the previous night Wheler had warmed a large wax cake, struck it perpendicularly"all over its surface with the hands in parallel directions," then covered it in pasteboard. Graham worked out a method of watching Wheler's hand to check its motion. Wheler made his cork revolve in a circle when the ball was centraland elliptically when it was placed eccentrically.He ran throughhis repertoire of reversing the motion and aping comets' orbits. When he used a paper cylinder instead of the cork, Wheler could make it spin roundits own axis and orbitthe ball. He completed the show "to the satisfactionof all present."But no one else could produce the phenom-

46 Dufay, "Huitiemememoire," p. 316. Cf. Fontenelle's enthusiasticsummary in "Sur1'electricite" (cit. n. 2), p. 5. Fontenelle reviewed Joseph Privat de Molieres, Lecons de physique, 4 vols. (Paris, 1734-1739), Vol. 3, in Hist. Acad. Roy. Sci., 1737, pp. 36-45, on p. 44: see Henry Guerlac, Newton on the Continent(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), p. 70. 47 Dufay, "Septieme memoire" (cit. n. 37), p. 86; this essay is copied in Royal Society MSS RBC 20:265- 285. See Royal Society MSS JournalBook 16:74 (31 Mar. 1737), 82 (7 Apr. 1737), 94 (5 May 1737). For Dufay watching Desaguliers and Mortimerin spring 1737 see "Huitiemememoire," p. 313. 48 Wheler to Mortimer,1 and 11 Apr. 1737, Royal Society MSS Box File 54, nos. 1 and 2; Wheler to Mortimer, 4 and 26 Apr. 1737, Royal Society MSS LBC 23, pp. 288-298; and Royal Society MSS JournalBook 16:90 (28 Apr. 1737). For Dufay on Wheler's remoteness see "Huitiemem6moire," p. 317.

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enon, though Hauksbee,Graham, and Mortimerall tried.Wheler explainedthat his servant had also failed, showing that the same person must excite the cake and hold the thread. This was confirmedby Gray's remarkthat "therewas something in the human hand es- sential to the experiment,which he had not yet found in any other supporterof the thread." Mortimerdrew up a transcriptof the events, had the witnesses testify, and sent it all to the Society's meeting. The document was carefully edited. Three trials were omitted as not pertinent,and instructionsabout the orientationof Wheler's hands and fingers were added. Ultimately the report was printed in the Philosophical Transactions.49Wheler's show failed to resolve the puzzle. The Society judged that the trial did not always work for Wheler and never worked for anyone else. The audience at CraneCourt examined his hand, because with a "suspensionfrom a fixt body," a more "indubitable"trial, the phenomenon failed. During the next week Wheler stayed in London;Mortimer and Hauksbee joined in the trials while Wheler acted as tutor. Mortimermanaged to get west-to-east rotationwhen he electrifiedthe cake himself, but Hauksbeedid not. Wheler reckonedthat he must have beaten the cake wrongly. Wheler then showed the two men how to hold the threadfrom a quill pen to amplify the orbits. The trick worked, and other fellows came to watch two days later. But this trial then failed; Wheler attributedthe failureto the fact that he had cut his hand on a glass tube. Mortimerwas the only Londonerwho replicatedthe planetarium'saction, and he was the worker most closely linked with Wheler and Gray. When Wheler returnedto OtterdenPlace in June, he left behind a fellowship convinced that he had demonstrateda fact about the experimenter'shand, not the workings of the heavens.50 The year from spring 1737 was the last Wheler spent in southernEngland and saw his final investigations of the planetarium.In September,following his father's career path, he took holy orders and immediatelybegan planning his departurefor a northernincum- bency. Mortimertold Dufay that Wheler "has not been able to apply himself to his electrical researcheswith as much assiduity as before."Wheler later recalled the change in his "stateof life: I left off making electrical experiments,so that for a few years there was a kind of interregnumin this partof philosophy."A few furtherinstructions reached London and Paris from Kent, notably the lesson that the cork would revolve better if it, and its thread,were very wet. Then the model planet would keep revolving for as long as half an hour.51 The Londoners, now increasingly under Desaguliers's direction, requisitioned Gray's equipment from his kinsmen in Canterbury.The equipment, as always, suffered from the journey.In the opening monthsof 1738 Desaguliers staged a series of experiments before the Society using the Kent instrumentsto systematize the recent work of Gray and Dufay. This work was "partof the course he is now in towardsmaking a discovery of the true laws of electricity,"notably an effluvial model of the behavior of "conductors,"the components of electrical systems that allowed communication.He introduceda new ter-

49 CromwellMortimer, "Report of the ElectricalExperiments Made by GranvillWheler," British LibraryMSS ADD 4453, fols. 258-259, and Royal Society MSS RBC 20:339-346; for the published version see Mortimer, "An Account of Some of the Electrical ExperimentsMade by Granvill Wheler," Phil. Trans., 1739, 41:112- 117. 50 Royal Society MSS JournalBook 16:95-96 (12 May 1737); and CromwellMortimer, "An Account of What FurtherElectrical ExperimentsMr Wheler Hath Made," British LibraryMSS ADD 4433, fols. 260-261, and Royal Society MSS RBC 20:347-350. 51 Mortimerto Dufay, 22 Sept. 1737, Royal Society MSS LBC 24, pp. 14-15, LBC 26, pp. 96-97; Wheler to Wilson, 7 Sept. 1748, British LibraryMSS ADD 30094, fol. 71; Wheler to Mortimer,21 Nov. 1737, Royal Society MSS LBC 24, pp. 48-49; and Wheler to Dufay, 21 Nov. 1737, Archives, Academie des Sciences, Dufay Dossier.

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 478 THE ELECTRICPLANETARIUM minology for electrics per se, the "supporters"of communicationsystems. "Thesewords," stated Wheler, "I first saw in some experimentsDr Desaguliers publish'd."Wheler never liked such new terms: "'tis the fate of science in all her branchesto outstripher terms as new leaves and twigs sproutout, but shou'd an alterationbe allow'd as often as the terms appearscanty, nothing but confusion would follow."52 In the monthsthat followed, early in 1738, Wheler abandonedthe astronomicalconstrual of the planetarium.He took care to make this abandonmentconsistent with a preservation of philosophicaland polite status.He at last wrote up his trials,performed five years earlier, which he reckoned first demonstratedthe patternof attraction,contact, and repulsionthat governed electrical motions. This establishedhis priorityover Desaguliers and Dufay and showed why repulsion might help explain orbitalmotion; Mortimer,always sympathetic, swiftly publishedthe paper.53Then Whelerrepeated his new protocolfor wetting the thread and thus producingrevolutions that would last astonishinglylong. Hundredsof times, for up to thirty minutes, with suitable rests in between, Wheler held the damp string and watched his cork planet orbit. Finally, he began a systematic study of his own arm and hand. He confessed to Dufay that he had always refused to have his trials "appearin the World in a more public manner"because he could not get orbits "when the Pendulous Body has been supportedby an undoubtedlyfixed Point," some object that had no connection with his own body. He ruled out tremors and pulses in his hand and airstreams, for these effects would fade. The very length of the new trials promptedthese self-ex- aminations.He built a wooden armrestfrom his telescope standand "foundthe Experiment [to] succeed only well when the Rest was lower than the electric area and the arm was supportedupon its elbow." So, at last, he convinced himself thatthe planetarium'smotions were due to "a secret motion of the hand"imperceptible to the experimenter.Neither he nor Gray was "sensible of giving any motion"to their hands. The phenomenonbecame a trial of "his own mind," and its "secrecy" helped justify his long decision to keep the planetariumfrom the press. Wheler nevertheless tried to keep the link with the cosmos: "The Phaenomenaof Fire and our electric Effluvia have a great affinity to each other;and ... many of the heavenly Phaenomenaare to be accountedfor upon this suppositionwith great Simplicity." Soon Wheler's palinode was printedin the Philosophical Transactions and a copy sent to Dufay.54 The equipment Wheler used was shipped back to Crane Court in April 1738, and he left Kent forever. By the 1740s, the sparks,shocks, and dancing metal leaves surrounding electrified victims under the managementof such experts as Nollet were commonplace throughoutEurope. In 1744 the electric planetariumwas baldly describedin the influential

52 Desaguliers, "Some Thoughts and ExperimentsConcerning Electricity" (cit. n. 17); Royal Society MSS JournalBook 16:183-184 (26 Jan. 1738), 211 (9 Mar. 1738); and Wheler to Wilson, 29 Jan. and 7 Sept. 1748, British LibraryMSS ADD 30094, fols. 59, 71. Desaguliers's work, summarizedin A Dissertation Concerning Electricity (London, 1742), is discussed in Heilbron, Electricity in the Seventeenthand Eighteenth Centuries (cit. n. 21), p. 292; Quinn, "RepulsiveForce in England"(cit. n. 30), pp. 121-126; and Home, Effluvial Theory of Electricity (cit. n. 20), pp. 69-71. On the requisitionof Gray's equipmentand the problems of transportsee Mortimerto John Gray, 14 June 1737, Royal Society MSS LBC 26, pp. 90-91; Wheler to Mortimer,21 Nov. 1737, Royal Society MSS LBC 24, pp. 48-49; Wheler to Adams, 6 Dec. 1737, Royal Society Box File 54; and Wheler to Mortimer,19 Dec. 1737, Royal Society MSS LBC 24, pp. 88-89. 53 Wheler, "Some Electrical ExperimentsChiefly Regardingthe Repulsive Force of ElectricalBodies" (cit. n. 23). 54 Wheler, "LetterContaining Some Remarkson the Late Stephen Gray His Electrical CircularExperiment" (cit. n. 2); Wheler to Dufay, 21 Nov. 1737 and 6 Mar. 1738, Archives, Academie des Sciences, Dufay Dossier; Wheler to Mortimer,9 Mar. 1738, Royal Society MSS Box File 54, no. 3; Royal Society MSS JournalBook 16:214-215; and Wheler to Wilson, 7 Sept. 1748, British LibraryMSS ADD 30094, fol. 71.

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English version of Pieter van Musschenbroek's Leiden textbook, Elements of Natural Philosophy, while the now-standardcritique of the planetarium'sreliability was set out in the rather derivative summary of electrical phenomena published the same year by the elderly Germanastronomer and Royal Society fellow JohannDoppelmayr.5 Wheler himself remained in touch with his London colleagues, made himself a reliable gossip on electrical affairs, and bought the most up-to-dateworks on naturalphilosophy, including those of Nollet, Benjamin Franklin, and Joseph Priestley. From his kinsmen's elegant house in Leicestershirehe studied the path of the great comet that appearedover Britain in winter 1744. But his proposal for linking comets and planets with electricity through the regularand almost interminableorbits of a cork round an ivory ball eventually faded from the collective memory.56

ORDERLY WORK, DISORDERLY HANDS

"However surprisingbe all the phenomenaof electricity reportedtill now, it can be said that they are as nothing in comparison with these," claimed Dufay in a history of the electric planetarium'scareer first read to the Royal Academy of Sciences in late 1737, then much revised and published posthumously.The academicianset out to contrastthat initial surprisewith his regulationof the planetariumunder the principle of the repulsion of similar electrical vortices. Dufay reckoned that this was a device that depended on the ''most simple and most general laws of physics," the balance of force between electric vortex and gravitation.He judged, equally surely, that "involuntarymovements" must be carefully regulated.He "triedto hold the threadwith metal pliers to avoid all suspicion of an involuntarymovement in the hand or arm, and because I had realised for a long time that in most experimentsmetals produce the same effects as living bodies." In a manner similar to the strategies of self-experimentsoon adopted by his eminent follower Nollet, Dufay worked hard to eliminate, or at least regulate, his own body. Lissa Roberts has noted the erasureof direct sensory evidence and the new role of the precision balance in published records of French chemistry later in the eighteenth century. Dufay needed a reliable materialtest balance to substitutefor, then efface, the public ways of Gray's hand. In May 1736 he had alreadydescribed one, a wire needle balancedon an ironbar suspended from silk threads,which he used to map the electric vortices and measure their force. A year later he transformedthis device so as to explore the resin cake. On tne central ball he erected a thin ten-inch vertical rod carrying a small hollow ruby as a fulcrum for a horizontalbrass balance beam, then suspendedthe cork from this beam so he could move it aroundthe cake's surface. The device became in his hands a means for determiningthe balance between "centripetaland gravitationalforce." Calling on his understandingof the behavior of different kinds of cotton and silk, he then regulatedthe cork's motions so as

55 Pieter van Musschenbroek,The Elements of NaturalPhilosophy, trans.John Colson, 2 vols. (London, 1744), Vol. 1, pp. 193-194; and JohannDoppelmayr, Neu-entdeckte Phaenomena von bewunderswiurdigenWurkungen der Natur (Nuremberg, 1744), pp. 18-19. For the development of shows with electrified humans see W. D. Hackmann,Electricity from Glass (Alphen aan den Rijn:Noordhoff, 1978), pp. 69-72; and Heilbron,Electricity in the Seventeenthand Eighteenth Centuries(cit. n. 21), pp. 264-269, 279-280. 56 Wheler to Mortimer,25 Apr. 1738, Royal Society MSS LBC 24, pp. 318-319. For Wheler's possession of Franklin'sand Priestley's electricity texts see Catalogue of the Entire Libraryof Granville Wheler(cit. n. 25); for his observationsof the 1744 comet see Frances Hastings to TheophilusHastings, 28 Jan. 1744, in Historical ManuscriptsCommission Report on the Papers of Reginald Rawdon Hastings, 3 vols. (London: His Majesty's StationersOffice, 1934), Vol. 3, p. 42; for later work on east-to-west rotationssee GranvillWheler, "Two Letters Concerninga RotatoryMotion of Glass Tubes about Their Axes," Phil. Trans., 1745, 43:341-348.

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 480 THE ELECTRICPLANETARIUM to dramatizethe workings of the vortices. Unsurprisedby Wheler's admissionthat "intention and desire" were "the secret cause which determinedthe suspended body to turn," Dufay instead transformedthe planetariuminto a controlled and disciplined model of his vortex physics. He stressedthat orderlymanagement also characterizedthe conduct of this debate in the learned world. Even, and particularly,Wheler's final gesture at the vagaries of his own hand could be reconciled with this high morality:"Mr Wheler' s testimonydoes him all the more honour because until now he was confirmedin the contraryopinion by very seductive experimentsand by the confidence he had in those communicatedby Mr Gray."Fontenelle picked up the theme, publicly celebratingthe "franknessand generosity very rare among the learned"that characterizedthese exchanges.57 Dufay's account of his own balanced self-control, his resistanceto corporealseduction and his moral probity,sat well with his otherofficial roles, includingthe efficient direction of the King's Gardenand, in particular,the regulationof the Gobelins dye works. Recall Sibum's observationthat Joule's experimentswere contemporarywith a transformationof traditionalbrewing practice under a new system of discipline and management.In the "hybridof craft consciousness and that of a gentleman specialist"there was required"an expert culture which had not yet been established."In similar manner, the expertise of Dufay's new dye-works projects showed how control over the experimentalscene relied on directingerrant hands. The Frenchdye tradeshad long distinguishedbetween the great dyers, who were licensed to use fast colors such as woad and madder,and the lesser dyers, strictly confined to cheaper, fugitive colors. Public officials tested dyed cloths to check this key distinction by boiling in alum or soap, tests in which reclusive craft judgment played a major role. When Jean-BaptisteColbert nationalized the Gobelins in 1667, he promulgatedstiff regulationsto reinforce this hierarchy.In a society of orders where the colors and the cleanliness of clothing were issues of public display, regulationof the rather restricted number of master dyers was a matter of state policy. In 1727, during major economic dislocations in the cloth trade under the Regency, Dufay's influential patron Reaumurdistributed a memoir advertisingthe role academicianscould play in supporting state commercialregulation. Reaumur, promoter of the academichistory of trades,referred to the use of chemistry in dyeing. The enterprisethat boasted of its capacity to impose scientific reason on artisancraft was laid out in detail. Dufay soon joined in this inquiry into the art and craft of color. Instead of producinga judiciously circumstantialnarrative, the regulatorsbegan to specify reliable recipes that, if rightly followed, would yield guar- anteed effects.58 In early 1731 Dufay was hired by the controller-generalof finance to design new ways of runningthe dye tests. The controller-general'srole included the imposition of standard measures as part of absolutist administrationand, especially, to regulate systems of metrology that depended on the vagaries of bodily practice.As he launchedhis privatetrials with Nollet on the transmissionof electricity and its dependence on color and became involved in the requisitionof length standardsfor Frenchgeodesy, Dufay also inaugurated

57 Dufay, "Huitiemememoire" (cit. n. 37), pp. 309, 316-317, 321-322, 323; and Fontenelle, "Surl'e1ectricite" (cit. n. 2), p. 5. For effacement of sensory evidence see Roberts, "Deathof the Sensuous Chemist"(cit. n. 6), p. 507. For Nollet's work on self-discipline see Schaffer, "Self Evidence" (cit. n. 8), pp. 345-348. 58 Sibum, "Reworkingthe MechanicalValue of Heat" (cit. n. 4), p. 74. See also Wescher, "GreatMasters of Dyeing" (cit. n. 6), pp. 628-632; Henry Guerlac, "Some French Antecedents of the Chemical Revolution," Chymia, 1959, 5:73-112, on pp. 77-79; Daniel Roche, The Cultureof Clothing: Dress and Fashion in Ancien Regime France (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 283-285; Licoppe, Fornation de la pratique scientifique(cit. n. 11), pp. 116-124; and Gillispie, Science and Polity in France (cit. n. 6), p. 346.

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 481 a major programto design new standardsfor dye tests. Dufay's post carried an annual stipend of at least 6,000 livres-it was an office to which Nollet, for one, earnestlyhoped to succeed. Managing a team of weavers and dyers, Dufay produced a proof liquor that he reckonedcould exactly reproducethe effect on test fabrics of exposure to fixed periods of sunlight.59"Until now, dyeing has been left solely to the artisans who make it their profession, and indeed it seems that there has never been anyone who knew all the parts, because reasons of policy (police) have concurredwith those of the workers' convenience to separatedyeing into different classes." The aim of Dufay's careful metrology was to replace artisanculture by a principledstandard, backed with a doctrineof color fixing akin to his vortex theory of electricity and distributedunder state patronagethroughout the dye trade. According to his successor Jean Hellot, "he collected every drug which he thought might possibly be used for dyeing, and tried them without any regardto the prejudicesof the dyers."In 1737, trainingfor Gobelins apprenticeswas reorganizedunder a strictregime of timetablingand surveillance,replacing traditionalartisan methods of guild learning.In the same year, just as Dufay began reproducingthe effects of the electric planetarium,his proof liquorsand test regimes were imposed by law underthe instructionsof the controller- general. At exactly this moment, too, he told the Royal Academy of Sciences that his strategy was directly in contrast with that of "artisanswho have no interest in pushing things furtherand who only regard anything which doesn't lead to their private use as a real waste of time." Craftprivacy, he judged, had been displaced by public accountability and the artisansubjected to the rules of art.60 ContrastDufay's metrology with the self-examinationof Wheler. Both sought to distance themselves from manual labor yet strove to acquire the skills needed competently to producereliable knowledge. The Kentish gentlemanreckoned that the planetariumwas a model of the divinely ordereduniverse. He stipulatedthe dependence of its good order on the actions of his arm, fingers, and torso. Wheler made a moralizinggesture toward his unruly hand, thus preservingthe integrity of the learned. In his world, to be gentlemanly and civil was to be in chargeof one's own person. It was well understoodthat handsmight be sources of disorder. Augustan pamphleteersdamned radical sectaries by associating "the shakings of their Heads, Pointing with the Finger, Shaking the Hand" with "their gross Contradictions,manifold Lies, Conjecturesturn'd into Predictionsand being in all mannerof Disorder."Lack of self-control, financialor corporeal,dependence on masters, on the disorderedwomb or the overheatedbrain, renderedthese subjects constitutionally incompetent.Wheler had resourcesto pull off the trick of dissociating his person from the actions of his own limbs without thereby losing status. He managed, too, to preserve the probityof StephenGray, whose trembling"Hand of Seventy"was used to save his "known Honesty & Veracity"from the planetarium'sfate. In comparison,Dufay made an objec- tifying gestureaway from his own personto a reliableinstrument, thus seemingly factoring

59 Fontenelle, "Eloge de M. Du Fay" (cit. n. 7), pp. 76-77; JeanHellot, TheArt of Dyeing Wool (1750; London: Scott, Greenwood, 1901), pp. 10-13; and BarbaraWhitney Keyser, "Between Science and Craft:The Case of Berthollet and Dyeing," Annals of Science, 1990, 47:213-260, on p. 219. For the controller-generaland metrology see Witold Kula, Measures and Men (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986), p. 173; for the remunerationof the dye post see Isaac Benguigui, Theories e'lectriquesdu XVIIIesiecle (Geneva: Georg, 1984), p. 92. 60 Dufay, "Observationsphysiques" (cit. n. 6), pp. 253-254; and Hellot, Art of Dyeing Wool, p. 10. See also Guerlac,"Some FrenchAntecedents of the Chemical Revolution"(cit. n. 58), p. 79; and John Beer, "Eighteenth CenturyTheories on the Process of Dyeing," Isis, 1960, 51:21-30, on pp. 23-25. For training at the Gobelins see E. Gerspach,La manufacturenationale des Gobelins (Paris:Delagrave, 1892), pp. 156-157, 236-237.

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 482 THE ELECTRICPLANETARIUM out human agency in the productionof a matterof fact. Dufay relied on his community's sense that rationaldiscipline could securely guide embodied skills.61 Electricalphilosophers slowly developed social technologies governingwho might give an account of his own body when it became an object of an electric trial and material technologies that relied more on employed hands. Instrumentmakers designed spinning glass globes worked by assistants; master demonstratorsstood by as managers of the experimentalscene. This had effects on the public presentationof electricians' character and labor. As Steven Pumfrey points out, a midcentury Parisian eulogist of Hauksbee praisedthe experimenter's"enormous skill in manualoperations," but then falsely claimed that Hauksbee had never marketedhis electrical machines, "which would have been to cede control to the ignorant."Propriety of experiment and property in machines were closely linked. Nollet maintainedhis preference for his own hand, ratherthan a leather pad, as the best way of electrifying the spinning globes, while William Watson assumed that a gentlemanly experimenter"might likewise cause the Globes to be rubb'd with the Hands of your Assistants."Benjamin Martin's popular dialogues on electricalexperiment similarly envisaged that a genteel youngster would be able to "call [his] Servant in to be the Executioner"of dramatictrials. The electrical "knack"was gradually transferredto subordinatesunder a hierarchyof strict control.62 In his history of gestures, RobertMuchembled observes that historiansget access to the exceptional and debatablerather than the normal and mundane.At moments of what he calls "social friction,"when norms are disturbedor questioned, gestures then illuminate the assumed basis of deportment.As in historical studies of scientific controversy,sanc- tioned gestures seem self-evident. In contemporarycases such as David Sudnow's study of the jazz piano or Hugh Kenner's account of the typewriterkeyboard, the experienced hand is involved in this self-evidence. Experimentssuch as those with the electric plane- tariumare frictionalmoments because they involve polemical contrastsin ways of handling hardwareand authorizingits behavior.This momenthad its antecedents,as Steven Shapin has lucidly demonstratedfor distinctions between gentlemanly and mechanic labor. The gestures that separatedauthorship from experimentalhands were conventions on which Whelerand his colleagues could provisionallyrely. These gesturesalso had theiraftermath. A century after the demise of the electric planetarium,many London electrical workers still showed machines and handicraftsto win audiences through skilled techniques.Iwan Morus has shown that, in contrast,professorial natural philosophers such as Michael Far- aday then sought ratherto separatetheir own devices and gesturesfrom what they claimed were the true underlying laws of electric action. Distinctions between philosophical au- thorities and skilled artisanscontinued to count in electrical science.63

61 Nathaniel Spinckes, The Spirit of EnthusiasmExorcis'd (London, 1709), p. 499; and Wheler to Dufay, 21 Nov. 1737, Archives, Academie des Sciences, Dufay Dossier. The Gobelins trainingsystem of 1737 is taken as the exemplary form of classical discipline in Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975; Harmondsworth:Peregrine, 1979), pp. 156-157. 62 Hackmann,Electricity from Glass (cit. n. 55), pp. 70, 81; Pumfrey, "Who Did the Work?"(cit. n. 9), pp. 138-139; Benguigui, The'orieselectriques (cit. n. 59), p. 118; William Watson, "FurtherExperiments and Ob- servationsTending to Illustratethe Natureand Propertiesof Electricity,"Phil. Trans., 1746,44:41-57, on p. 41; Watson, "A Sequel to the Experiments and ObservationsTending to Illustrate the Nature and Properties of Electricity,"ibid., pp. 704-749, on p. 705; and Martin, Young Gentlemanand Lady's Philosophy (cit. n. 34), Vol. 1, p. 312. 63 RobertMuchembled, "The Order of Gestures,"in CulturalHistory of Gesture,ed. Bremmerand Roodenburg (cit. n. 7), pp. 129-151, on pp. 131-132; David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: The Organizationof Improvised Conduct(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 142-143; Hugh Kenner,The Mechanic Muse (Oxford:Oxford Univ. Press, 1987); Shapin, Social History of Truth (cit. n. 9), pp. 362, 376; Iwan Morus, "Currentsfrom the

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Bodily knowledge in controversyand the changing self-evidence of gestures are further focused throughthe reworkingof experimentssuch as those of Faraday,Joule, and their ilk developed recently by Sibum and his colleagues. If, instead of repeatingtrials to show thatthey functionreliably, historians rework them to explore the form of knowing involved in their performance,then traditionalboundaries between epistemology and practice are questioned. Sibum argues that it is necessary to contextualize gestural knowledge and identify the premises of experimentalwork. It is not just that the textual traces of past experimentsturn out to be incomplete guides to practice-this is a result alreadyfamiliar from the sociology of experiment.It is, rather,that reworking shows how otherwise ab- struse forms of gesturalknowledge were implicatedin the performanceof such trials.The programdetails those forms and indicates the resources already available in culturefrom which such knowledge was developed. Historical reworkingthus resembles a diagnostic adventuremore than a deductive test; it approximatesthe so-called low sciences of artisan culture. This proximity is significant because, as this story about electricity, gentility, dyeing, and the body has sought to show, there are historically significant connections between gesturalknowledges in experimentallabor and the history of craft techniques.64

Underworld:Electricity and the Technology of Display in Early VictorianEngland," Isis, 1993, 84:50-69; and Morus, "DifferentExperimental Lives: Michael Faradayand William Sturgeon,"History of Science, 1992,30:1- 28. 64 Sibum, "Reworkingthe MechanicalValue of Heat" (cit. n. 4), pp. 75-83; and Heinz Otto Sibum, "Working Experiments:Bodies, Machines, and Heat Values," in The Physics of Empire, ed. Richard Staley (Cambridge: Whipple Museum, 1994), pp. 29-56, on p. 38. Cf. Peter Heering, "The Replication of the Torsion Balance Experiment,"in Restaging Coulomb,ed. Blondel and Dorries (cit. n. 6), pp. 47-66. For the inadequacyof written traces as guides for replicatorssee H. M. Collins, Changing Order (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1985), pp. 73- 74. See Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 35-37, for "low sciences" and the notion of diagnosis and adventure.

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