1st Edition

Electric Power in Victorian Britain Volume II: Electric Power in Practice

Edited By Nathan Kapoor Copyright 2026
348 Pages
by Routledge

348 Pages
by Routledge

The materials in this volume explore how the transformation of electric power imprinted on the political landscape of Great Britain and the Empire. Outside the lecture halls and laboratories, electric power became a source for inventors, politicians, economists, and the public to explore, define, and lament how energy consumption should look. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this... Read more

Volume II: Electric Power in Practice

Series Introduction

General Introduction

Volume II Introduction

 

Part 1. Industry

1. Arthur Vaughan Abbot, Industrial Niagara

2. Comte Theodore du Moncel, Electricity as a Motive Power

 

Part 2. Transportation

3. Uriah Clarke to William Sturgeon, Description of an Electro-Magnetic Carriage

 

Part 3. Generating Power

4. John Tyndall, Origin of Power in the Voltaic Pile

5. James Blyth, On the Application of Wind Power to the Generation and Storage of Electricity

6. C. Scott Snell, The Sea – A Source of Power

7. Henry Dircks, Three Centuries of Perpetual Motion

8. Thomas H. Blakesley, Alternating Currents

9. Emile Garke, Manual of Electrical Undertakings

10. John Hopkinson, Patent No., 618,175.V (January 24, 1899) Automatic Switch for Distribution of Electricity

11. H. Basil Roper, Report of the Inspector of Prison for the Year 1892

12. C. William Siemens, The Electrical Transmission of Power

13. Edward Standford, Stanford’s Map of London According to the Local Government Act. 1888

 

Part 4. Light

14. Humphry Davy, On Some New Electrochemical Researches, on Various Objects, particularly Metallic Bodies, from the Alkalies, and Earths, and on some Combinations of Hydrogene

15. The Electric Light

16. Public Exhibition of the Electric Light

17. Charles Flesch, Electric Lighting in Australia

18. Thomas Stevenson, Electric Light

 

Part 5. Medicine

19. Of Somnambulists

20. John Abernethy, Lecture 1, Physiological Lectures, Exhibiting a General View of Mr. Hunter’s Physiology

21. Melancholy Accident at Westfield

22. George Eliot, Scenes of a Clerical Life

23. Arthur Smee, Theory of Instinct and Reason

24. Charlotte Bronte, Shirley

25. James Murray, On the Electrical Causes of Epidemics

26. Thomas Addison, On the Influence of Electricity as a Remedy in Certain Convulsive and Spasmodic Diseases

27. Is the Nervous System a Coherer?

28. John Bovee Dods, Lecture II, Mental Electricity, or Spiritualism and Lecture IV, Philosophy of Disease and Nervous Force

29. Electricity and the Sewage Problem

30. Photography in Medicine: Photoelectric Apparatus

 

Index

Biography

Dr. Nathan Kapoor is an Affiliate Professor of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Department History at Grand Valley State University, Grand Rapids, MI, USA. Nathan Kapoor is a scholar of nineteenth and twentieth century technologies of electrification, with a specialisation in the history of British electrification at home and in its colonies, most especially New Zealand.