Electric Power in Victorian Britain: Volume I: Electric Power Imagined(Nineteenth-Century Science, Technology and Medicine: Sources and Documents)

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

Table of Contents:
Volume I Electric Power Imagined Series Introduction General Introduction Volume I Introduction Part 1. Anxiety 1. Charles Babbage, Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on some of its Causes 2. What Will He Grow To? (illustration) 3. William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines Part 2. Imagining Electricity 4. John Bywater, Historical Electricity 5. Erasmus Darwin, Progress of the Mind, Canto III 6. Electricity 7. Michael Angelo Garvey, The Silent Revolution, Or, The Future Effects of Steam and Electricity Upon the Condition of Mankind 8. Science 9. F. C. Webb, Electricity and the Future 10. William Crookes, Electricity in Relationship to Science 11. Benjamin Kidd, Social Evolution 12. The Universality of Electricity 13. Prometheus Unbound: Science in Olympus (illustration) 14. Telectroscopy Part 3. Experiments 15. Alexander Volta to Joseph Banks, On the Electricity Excited by the Mere Contact of Conducting Substances of Different Kinds 16. J. C. Robertson, Mr. Bain’s Electro Magnetic Inventions 17. Andrew Crosse, On the Production of Insects by Voltaic Electricity 18. Anon, Endless Amusement: a collection of nearly 400 entertaining experiments in various branches of science 19. Michael Faraday, On Electric Conduction and the Nature of Matter 20. Charles Wheatstone letter to Alexander Bain, June 13, 1842 21. Hippolyte Fontaine, Industrial Applications 22. Charles Wheatstone, On the Augmentation of the Power of a Magnet by the Reaction thereon of Currents Induced by the Magnet Itself 23. Maxwell James Clerk, A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field 24. Gisbert Kapp, Aron Meter Part 4. Self-Reflection-Retrospection “Looking” 25. Anon, Priority Index

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