Popular Science Review - An Entertainment for Angels

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Review - An Entertainment for Angels - Patricia Fara

Although it was the Victorians who turned electricity into a useful servant (how Victorian), the previous century, often dubbed the age of enlightenment, was also fascinated by this strange force of nature.

For the eighteenth century, electricity was endowed with all sorts of mystical properties, seen as both a parlour entertainment and a medical boon. Much of the medicine of the time was shocking - but electrical medication quite literally so.

This is a fascinating book to read as a precursor to something like Morus' Michael Faraday and the Electrical Century. Fara explains the mostly pseudo-science in the eighteenth century, leading into (at least partially) true science that Morus uncovers in the nineteenth. But it's not a book without flaws.

There's at least one factual oddity. Patricia Fara teaches history of science at Cambridge, which makes it hard to believe she could get something so basic wrong, yet she describes Euler as "adopting the literary device of softening technicalilities by writing letters addressed to a German princess..." Calling it a literary device implies that the letters were fakes, yet every other source I've seen says that the book was based on actual letters sent to the Princess d'Anhalt Dessau.

It is also a pity, which is perhaps to some extent a restriction of the small book format series this is part of, that Fara draws no parallels between the enlightenment tendency to pick and choose to fit desired results and to combine science and spirituality with very similar characteristics in modern fringe pseudo-science. And there's no index.

But these flaws shouldn't get in the way of the fact that the book fills in the pre-history of electricity very effectively, and should be praised for that. One of the main characters who emerges strongly is Benjamin Franklin, which may encourage readers to move on to a biography of that remarkable character - and perhaps that best describes this book as a sampler for further reading.

Also in hardback (US version is hardback):

Reviewed by Martin O'Brien

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