The Iconography of Electricity

A talk by Dr. Willem Hackmann, former Senior Assistant Keeper at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, and Reader in the History of Science, Oxford University on June 10, 2003, in the Great Hall at The Bakken Museum.

Historians of science have in the past paid scant attention to visual material but more recently the significance of such "images of science" is becoming increasingly recognized. Visualization and the modeling of natural phenomena became important components of experimental (or natural) philosophy from the seventeenth century. In his lecture Dr. Hackmann investigated the main themes of the iconography of electricity, including the representation of electrical experiments and associated phenomena in early textbooks, the visual strategies developed to make instrument-induced electrical phenomena "real" by using the skills of artists and engravers (and much later of photographers), and the debate that developed within the scientific (and lay) community about such images. Finally, he took a brief look at the way these "scientific" images were reproduced in paintings and popular works of art.