ABSTRACT
Much of the scientific practice of the eighteenth century was ‘public science’: it was aimed at a general audience and performed in the social spaces characteristic of the Enlightenment public sphere. In an age when learned academies declined to segregate professionals from amateurs, or natural philosophy from literature, experimental demonstrations often straddled specialist research and popular entertainment. This situation poses particular challenges for historians of Enlightenment science. Although we know the identities of many scientific practitioners, and something about the composition of their audiences, what their activities meant to those who witnessed them remains elusive. We might surmise that some of those who attended public lectures and demonstrations wanted them to yield technical information, while others sought theological edification; some might have derived from them a sense of participation in enlightened culture, while others simply relished their entertainment value. To go beyond this to specify the precise meanings imputed to particular displays by particular audiences requires a sensitive reading of the textual evidence and some degree of speculation.1
