Historical Math and Science Blog

I've been experimenting with the practical side of the history of electricity for over a year now. In this post, I'd like to gather some resources and notes for how to best perform the various electrostatics experiments that are rarely described in any detail. This page is a work in progress. References For a look at the history of electricity , there are many treatments. I'd recommend of course looking at my YouTube channel; for authoritative contemporary and modern references see Priestley's History;  the Encyclopedia Britannica , 3rd edition (1797) or other editions for comparison; Heilbron's Elements of Early Modern Physics ; or Park Benjamin's History. Whittaker's History  is most concerned with theory and is not particularly well suited to practical history. For advice on performing electrical experiments , see: Encyclopedia Britannica , 3rd edition (1797). One of the most thorough yet concise contemporary treatments of electricity available, including

  The following is my translation of Otto von Guericke's Experimenta Nova (1672), book IV, chapter 15, wherein he describes his famed "electrostatic generator," a globe made of solid sulfur. Guericke was a fairly acute philosopher, but was still more in the tradition of sympathies and antipathies, rather than the burgeoning rationalism of Bacon, Descartes, Huygens, Leibniz, and Newton. He developed a concept of mundane virtues  which was his proposed model of the universe and nature. It was with this in mind, and certainly not electricity, that Guericke developed his sulfur globe experiment. With its "conservative virtue", the sulfur globe is able to draw bits of paper, or soft feathers, and he even develops a few experiments to demonstrate electric repulsion and conduction. These were not recognized by him, and in fact it's not clear whether he understood the phenomena to be electric in nature. He was familiar with Kircher and Gilbert and other authors, who

Between May of 1671 and March of 1672, Otto von Guericke carried out a correspondence with none other than the great Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. These letters started out in Latin, but the vast majority is in German, with Latin interspersed, usually for technical terms or quotes and ideas from Guericke's book, Experimenta Nova  (1672), which was eagerly anticipated. Below I've reproduced the text of the letters (without the critical annotations found in the original source) to provide as clear a picture of the correspondence as possible. The numbers of each letter are for cross-referencing with the associated numbers in my main reference: Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Philosophischer Briefwechsel . Vol. 1. Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe 2. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006. Because the letters are in German, and I don't speak German, it was necessary to get at least a rough translation through Google Translate. This provides the gist of the letters, and I lightly edited some parts

  Below you'll find an Orberg-style annotated edition of the original Latin text from Otto von Guericke's 1672 book, Experimenta Nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica , book 4, chapter 15, where von Guericke describes the his famous sulfur globe experiments. The Latin is very readable for anyone who has finished Orberg's Lingua Latin per se Illustrata: Familia Romana , the first book in the LLPSI series. New words are listed on the side with a Latin-only definition, synonym, or antonym (usually adapted from Forcellini or other Latin synonym dictionaries). 

 The other day I tried to follow a citation for the Akademie der Wissenshaften, Berlin , the Mémoires , 1776. But I have little experience trying to look up these older journals, and was confused to find publications from the Berlin Academy , the  Königliche-Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften , journals in Latin, French, and German, under names like  Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences et des Belles-Lettres de Berlin, Avec les Mémoires pour la même Année, tirez Registres de cette Academie  and  Miscellanea Berolinensia . I've got a small amount of experience with these older publications, so I knew that you can often find collections, abstracts, summaries, and translations, but I couldn't find a reference on this "Berlin Academy" beyond the Wikipedia page for the Prussian Academy of  Sciences  (German:  Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften ) which featured a history of the Academy, but little on the publication history.  Fortunately, the Eu

I just published my new video , which covers the Accademia del Cimento as well as Niccolo Cabeo, and their contributions to electrical science. This video took five months (!), from research, to translating (and brushing up on my Latin, which I had been neglecting), to making the music, to making CG renders of the Accademia's apparatus (by first learning Blender...) and finally editing. I've already mentioned the great pains I took transcribing the notes and diary of the Accademia del Cimento. Now, here is my working version of the translation of parts of Niccolo Cabeo's Philosophia Magnetica . I expect to revisit this translation soon.