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Hello, in Galibiver's travels published in 1726, Jonathan Swift satirized natural philosophers

as trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers.

Perhaps you would have been surprised or even horrified by the sheer force of what these seemingly obscure experimentalists were about to unleash on society.

Electricity or electricary, as it was also called early on, soon reached into all areas of 18th century

life as Royal Society Fellows vied with showmen and charlatans to reveal its wonders to the world.

It was claimed one commentator, an entertainment

for angels rather than for men. Electricity also posed deep questions about the nature of life.

For some it was the divine spark that animated all things. For others

it represented a dangerous materialism that reduced humans to mere machines. But how did

electricity develop in the 18th and 19th century?

Why was it so politically contentious and how was it understood during the age in which it

changed the world forever?

When we to discuss the origins of electricity are Patricia Farra,orian of Science and a fellow of Claire College

Cambridge, Ewen Morris, lecturer in the History of Science at Queens University of

Belfast, and Simon Shaffer, Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Darwin College.

Simon Schaffer, the World Electricity was first coined by William Gilbert, Elizabeth, the first's position.

How did he come to that word?

And can he just do a brief reference?

So the Greeks had mentioned it about 2,000 years before then,

then everybody forgot about it?

...