ABSTRACT
In his History and Present State of Electricity, published in 1767, Joseph Priestley wrote of the invention of the Leyden jar in 1745:
Who were these scientific salesmen who made a living from their electrical demonstrations? Priestley was probably right in claiming that they were to be found all over Europe (Figure 6.1). Yet with the exception of England,2 little is known about itinerant electricians. Here I will focus on the German-speaking territories and on an electrician named Martin Berschitz, who was at least for a couple of years the most famous of them. When he performed at his best, around the early 1780s, he was even mentioned in an entry on electricity in an encyclopaedia of the time: ‘Some of these itinerant electricians proved to be very successful. A certain Martin Berschitz, for example, shows the most striking, extraordinary and powerful experiments for money.’3
