Can I read Frankenstein's Children : Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London on EtoBox?

Frankenstein's Children : Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London by Iwan Rhys Morus; American Council of Learned Societies is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Frankenstein's Children : Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London about?

During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Londoners were enthralled by a strange fluid called electricity. In examining this period, Iwan Morus moves beyond the conventional focus on the celebrated Michael Faraday to discuss other electrical experimenters, who aspired to spectacular public displays of their discoveries. Revealing connections among such diverse fields as scientific lecturing, laboratory research, telegraphic communication, industrial electroplating, patent conventions, and innovative medical therapies, Morus also shows how electrical culture was integrated into a new machine-dominated, consumer society. He sees the history of science as part of the history of production, and emphasizes the labor and material resources needed to make electricity work. Frankenstein's Children explains that Faraday, with his colleagues at the Royal Society and the Royal Institution, looked at science as the province of a highly trained elite, who presented their abstract picture of nature only to select groups. The book contrasts Faraday's views with those of other practitioners, to whom science was a practical, skill-based activity open to all. In venues such as the Galleri

Author

Iwan Rhys Morus; American Council of Learned Societies

Publisher

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press

Published

1998

Language

EN

ISBN

9780691605272

Subjects

History, Sociology, Science