An entertainment for angels : electricity in the Enlightenment

Author / Creator

Fara, Patricia

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Summary

"An Entertainment for Angels tells the story of how electricity charged the eighteenth-century imagination. With contemporary illustrations and engaging prose, Patricia Fara portrays the struggles ...

"An Entertainment for Angels tells the story of how electricity charged the eighteenth-century imagination. With contemporary illustrations and engaging prose, Patricia Fara portrays the struggles to understand the unusual and exciting effects that electrical experiments were producing." "One of the heroes of the story is Benjamin Franklin, renowned on both sides of the Atlantic as an expert on electricity, who introduced lightning rods to protect tall buildings, pioneered techniques to treat paralyzed patients, and developed one of the most successful explanations of this mysterious phenomenon. Others include Luigi Galvani, whose electrical research on frogs and animals makes for grisly reading but led to the discovery of direct current electricity; and Alessandro Volta, who - with Napoleon's enthusiastic support - became one of Europe's leading scientific practitioners and invented the world's first battery."--Jacket.

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