NOLLET, Jean-Antoine. Recherches sur les causes particulières des phénomènes électriques: et sur les effets nuisibles ou avantageux qu’on peut en attendre.

Electric Boys and Stimulating Plants

NOLLET, Jean-Antoine. Recherches sur les causes particulières des phénomènes électriques: et sur les effets nuisibles ou avantageux qu’on peut en attendre. Paris: Frères Guérin. 1749.

12mo. Contemporary mottled calf, spine gilt in compartments to a floral design, gilt brown morocco lettering-piece to spine marbled endpapers, edges stained red; pp. xxxvi, 444; 8 copper-engraved folding plates; short splits to joints at foot, carefully restored, a few minor abrasions to boards, slight wear to corners; twentieth-century bookplates of Alfred Schmid and H.F. Bienfait to front pastedown and front endpaper (see below); a very good copy.

First edition of Nollet’s principal synthesis of experimental electricity, including accounts of his celebrated public demonstrations, among them the ‘electric boy’ experiment and large-scale conductive human chain trials, illustrated with eight folding engraved plates.

Jean-Antoine Nollet (1700–1770) was a colourful character who, despite never progressing beyond the rank of deacon, insisted on using the title Abbé and became one of the great showmen of eighteenth-century science. His speciality was electricity, and he became known for staging public lectures displaying hundreds of his own inventions. He was most famous for the stunt of the ‘electric boy’ – whereby a suspended man was charged with static electricity and attracted objects towards himself – and for using a circle of two hundred monks linked by iron wire to discharge a Leyden jar.

The present work brings together Nollet’s experimental investigations and theoretical system, including his formulation of electrical action as the result of the ‘effluence and affluence of a subtile fluid which is everywhere present’. Some interesting experiments are described with vacuum tubes also on the influence of electric charges on the growth of plants’ (Catalogue of the Wheeler Gift of Books, p. 355). The work is particularly notable for its engagement with contemporary interest in electroculture, as pioneered by Bertholon, as well as for its attempt to systematise a wide range of experimental observations across atmospheric, medical, and physical phenomena. The folding plates illustrate apparatus and experimental arrangements, including vacuum tube experiments and devices for generating, conducting, and controlling electrical charge.

Although often associated with the spectacular character of his demonstrations, Nollet’s work contributed to the formalisation of experimental practice in early electrical science and to the wider dissemination of electrical theory through public instruction. Earlier work, including his Essai sur l’électricité des corps (1746), established Nollet’s dual-fluid interpretation of electrical phenomena and secured his position within the scientific circles associated with Du Fay and Réaumur. Voltaire is recorded among his early supporters, intervening financially on his behalf in the 1730s and urging substantial payments to support Nollet’s scientific work and instruction. From at least 1743, the Royal Academy of Sciences entrusted Nollet with responsibility for research on electricity and in 1762 he became director of the Academy.

Provenance: bookplate of Alfred Schmid (1899–1968), Swiss physicist and philosopher, to front pastedown. Schmid’s early career saw him working as a researcher in physical chemistry at the University of Basel, patenting inventions in the fields of electrochemistry and synthetic materials, to which this book was clearly relevant. In 1932 he moved to Berlin to pursue the commercial development of his ideas. This proved to be a mistake, as his involvement in non-Nazi youth groups led to him being imprisoned by the Gestapo for several months. His experiences during the war led him to lean away from science and industry towards metaphysics and religion. In 1945 he relocated back to Switzerland and wrote a spiritual treatise Traktat über das Licht. Eine gnostische Schau (The Marvel of Light. An Excursus, 1957), which was followed by the unfinished Principium Motus. Vom Wesen der Schöpfung (Principium Motus. On the Nature of Creation, 2007). His works are still published by the Professor Dr. Alfred Schmid-Stiftung in Zug, Switzerland.

DSB X, pp.145-148; Poggendorff II, 296; Wheeler 355.

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