Electric Power in Victorian Britain

Dr. Nathan Kapoor is an Affiliate Professor of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Department History at Grand Valley State University, Grand Rapids, MI, USA. He is a scholar of nineteenth and twentieth century technologies of electrification, with a specialisation in the history of British electrification at home and in its colonies, most especially New Zealand.

• Volume I Electric Power ImaginedSeries IntroductionGeneral IntroductionVolume I IntroductionPart 1. Anxiety1. Charles Babbage, Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on some of its Causes2. What Will He Grow To? (illustration)3. William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-MinesPart 2. Imagining Electricity4. John Bywater, Historical Electricity5. Erasmus Darwin, Progress of the Mind, Canto III6. Electricity7. Michael Angelo Garvey, The Silent Revolution, Or, The Future Effects of Steam and Electricity Upon the Condition of Mankind8. Science9. F. C. Webb, Electricity and the Future10. William Crookes, Electricity in Relationship to Science11. Benjamin Kidd, Social Evolution12. The Universality of Electricity13. Prometheus Unbound: Science in Olympus (illustration)14. TelectroscopyPart 3. Experiments15. Alexander Volta to Joseph Banks, On the Electricity Excited by the Mere Contact of Conducting Substances of Different Kinds16. J. C. Robertson, Mr. Bain’s Electro Magnetic Inventions17. Andrew Crosse, On the Production of Insects by Voltaic Electricity18. Anon, Endless Amusement: a collection of nearly 400 entertaining experiments in various branches of science19. Michael Faraday, On Electric Conduction and the Nature of Matter20. Charles Wheatstone letter to Alexander Bain, June 13, 184221. Hippolyte Fontaine, Industrial Applications22. Charles Wheatstone, On the Augmentation of the Power of a Magnet by the Reaction thereon of Currents Induced by the Magnet Itself23. Maxwell James Clerk, A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field24. Gisbert Kapp, Aron MeterPart 4. Self-Reflection-Retrospection “Looking”25. Anon, PriorityIndex