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Social mobility and scientific change: Stephen Gray's contribution to electrical research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Michael Ben-Chaim
Michael Ben-Chaim
Affiliation:
King's College, Cambridge, U.K.
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Extract

The concept of electrical conductivity, or, as initially coined by Stephen Gray (1666–1736), ‘electrical communication’, has always been assigned an important role in the history of electrical research. Some thirty-five years after Gray's ‘electrical communication’ acquired wide attention, Priestley employed the concept of conductivity to define physical reality, thus giving a privileged position to the science he himself endeavoured to cultivate. As he argued in the introduction to The History and Present State of Electricity (1767), ‘the electrical fluid is no local, or occasional agent in the theatre of the world. Late discoveries show that its presence and effects are every where … It is not, like magnetism, confined to one kind of bodies, but every thing we know is a conductor or nonconductor of electricity’. Contemporary historians, for example, Heilbron, Home and Hackmann, link the concept of conductivity to a radical transformation of electrical research which pertained to its mode of organization and the definition of its subject-matter, and which culminated in its emergence as a distinctive branch of eighteenth-century ‘experimental philosophy’.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 1990 , pp. 3 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1990

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References

1 I am grateful to Simon Schaffer for numerous insightful suggestions. I also want to thank the anonymous referee for helpful comments.

2 For detailed studies of the concept and its role in eighteenth-century electrical research see Priestley, J., The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments, 1st edn, 2 vols, London, 1775, i, especially pp. 19–86Google Scholar; Roller, D. and Roller, D.H.D., ‘The development of the concept of Electric Charge’, (ed. by Conant, J.B.) Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science, Cambridge, Mass, 1954, pp. 29–48.Google Scholar; Heilbron, J.L., Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of early Modern Physics, Berkeley, 1979, pp. 234–249.Google Scholar; Home, R.W., The Effluvial Theory of Electricity, New York, 1981, pp. 41–77.Google Scholar

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