ABSTRACT
Enlightenment science was not something that could be confined to any narrow definition. Science, or natural philosophy as it was generally termed, could be practised for a variety of purposes in many different spaces, ranging from academies and learned societies to private cabinets and popular fairs, shops and boulevards. Scientific instruments were built and used not only for investigative and educational purposes but also for entertainment and popular shows. Air pumps, electrical machines, colliding ivory balls, coloured sparks, mechanical orreries, magic mirrors, speaking and defecating automata, and hot-air balloons constitute just a sample of the ‘apparatus’ used for public demonstrations. At the same time, public lecturers themselves mixed up social categories that were normally kept distinct, with aristocracy and clergy sitting side by side with merchants and university professors. Some of these public lecturers themselves succeeded in crossing national and social boundaries. Abbé Nollet, for instance, was a popular lecturer and writer who rose to become a professor and a member of the Paris Academy of Sciences.1 As for the topics of public demonstrations, they ranged from mechanics, physics and chemistry, to anatomy. Everything – light, electricity, magnetism, water, gases, minerals, plants, cadavers and monsters – was apt to be displayed before the public. Between the culture of curiosities, which flourished in the seventeenth century, and the modern distinction between academic and popular science that emerged across the nineteenth century, Enlightenment science strikes us as a complex and multifaceted activity.2
