Translation of Otto von Guericke's Experimenta Nova, Bk. IV, Ch. 15

 

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 had experimented with electricity themselves. Sulfur is listed among Gilbert's electrics, rather inconspicuously, but we don't know if this is why Guericke used sulfur as the base material (along with 9 other minerals, either for added weight, or for a closer model of the earth) in his globe. 

I've already shared the correspondence between Guericke and Leibniz where they discuss the sulfur globe experiment. There's also my annotated Latin edition of this chapter, in the Orbergian style, and my forthcoming translation of excerpts from Balthasar de Moncony's travels in Germany, specifically the section where he meets with Guericke and views the sulfur globe experiment himself. 

I reproduced some of Guericke's experiments in my recent video on the experimental history of electricity, which I recommend for deeper insight into how the experiments are performed.