| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of Enlightenment. By Michael Brian Schiffer. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xiv, 383 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-520-23802-8.)

Michael Brian Schiffer offers a detailed, informative, and entertaining account of electrical technology in the eighteenth century, although one flawed by a shallowness of historical conceptualization. Focusing on variant uses of electrical apparatus, mainly in western Europe rather than North America (the title's invocation of Benjamin Franklin is misleading), Schiffer accessibly discusses the full range of electrical technologies in the Enlightenment, including the Leyden jar and the electrostatic generator, their use in spectacular public demonstrations, the marketing and consumption of electrical apparatus, medical electricity and electrical reanimation, animal electricity and galvanism, lightning rods, electrochemistry, the Voltaic pile, and anticipations of later electrical technologies (telegraphy, for example). In closing, he articulates a framework of "technology transfer" for understanding the process of differentiation among electrical apparatus through a sequence of information transfer, experiment, redesign, replication, acquisition, and use (pp. 261–67). This model, however, is tacked on at the end, not systematically explored. Perhaps its introduction at the outset would have compelled the author to demonstrate its validity in the body of what ends up a somewhat desultory narrative.

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