ABSTRACT
The discovery of the newtonian world was a story that, from the point of view of the Enlightened thinkers who pursued it, had a happy ending. Truth triumphed, albeit rather belatedly, over false hypotheses. Liberality won its just victory over absolutism. The promise of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century was finally fulfilled, enabling the creation of a canonical account of the progress of the human mind from Kepler and Galileo through Newton and beyond. The present, idiosyncratic account of the demonstration of the Enlightenment through the efforts of the lecturers of the eighteenth century might at first seem irrelevant to the standard story about the history of eighteenth-century electricity. It is not that electrical researches somehow constituted illegitimate experimental philosophy. From the beginning of the eighteenth century the development of electrical experiments came in the lecture hall. The first new electrical discoveries emerged in Germany in the early 1740s.
