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Seeing and Believing Science

By Iwan Rhys Morus*

ABSTRACT

The visual culture of the sciences has become a focus for increasing attention in recent
literature. This is partly a result of the concern with examining the material culture of the
sciences that has developed over the last few decades. Increasing attention has also been
devoted to understanding science as spectacle and to trying to understand the spaces where
scientific performances, variously understood, take place. This essay surveys some aspects
of the visual culture of the sciences in the long nineteenth century. I examine the way
visual scientific performances—such as magic lantern shows, optical illusions, and public
experiments—were put together. I suggest in particular that if we want to understand the
ways in which nineteenth-century sciences appealed to their audiences we need to pay
close attention to these kinds of performances, their performers, and the material and social
resources that were deployed in their staging.

I N HIS LETTERS ON NATURAL MAGIC, the Scottish natural philosopher David Brew-
ster devoted a great deal of his attention to describing and explaining optical illusions.
Brewster was fascinated by both natural and artificial—accidental and deliberate—
mechanisms that fooled the eye. He was particularly taken by the phantasmagoria intro-
duced to the British Isles by Paul de Philipstahl in 1801. His Letters not only gave a
detailed description of the illusion and the way it worked but suggested a way of making
it even more realistic, with an ingenious arrangement of mirrors and lenses he called a
“catadioptrical phantasmagoria” through which reflected images of living figures could be
put on show, “and in place of chalky ill-drawn figures mimicking humanity by the most
absurd gesticulations, we shall have phantasms of the most perfect delineation, clothed in
real tapestry, and displaying all the movements of life.” The natural philosopher Thomas
Young also devised his own phantasmagoric mechanism in an attempt to overcome some
of the problems with perspective and image resolution that dogged Philipstahl’s perfor-
mances. Tellingly, when William Nicholson, whose account of the phantasmagoria Brew-
ster followed closely in his Letters, returned home from the performance, his first act was
to try to reproduce the illusion for himself.1

* Department of History and Welsh History, Hugh Owen Building, University of Wales, Aberystwyth SY24
3DY, Wales.
1
David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, Addressed to Sir Walter Scott (London, 1832), pp. 160–163, on
p. 162; Mervyn Heard, “Paul de Philipstahl and the Phantasmagoria in England, Scotland, and Ireland,” New
Magic Lantern Journal, 1996, 8:2–7; and William Nicholson, “Narrative and Explanation of the Appearance of
Phantoms and Other Figures in the Exhibition of the Phantasmagoria, with Remarks on the Philosophical Use
of Common Occurances,” Journal of Natural Philosophy, 1802, 1:147–150.

Isis, 2006, 97:101–110

䉷2006 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.
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Brewster, as well as Nicholson, Young, and other contemporaries, cared about illusions
such as these because they provided a way of exploring the relationship between vision
and judgment. According to Brewster, the eye was “the most remarkable and the most
important” organ for understanding the relationship between mind and matter. As he ex-
pressed it, the eye was “the sentinel which guards the pass between the worlds of matter
and spirit, and through which all their communications are interchanged.”2 This is why
optical illusions were such an important field of investigation. Understanding how an
illusion—whether natural or manufactured—worked was a way of studying the interaction
between the inner mind and outer reality. Historians of science should be interested in the
history of illusions for similar reasons. They provide us with a way of probing the rela-
tionship between seeing and believing science too. There was a proliferation of philo-
sophical technologies of display during the latter half of the eighteenth and the first half
of the nineteenth century. Audiences flocked to see electrical exhibitions, magic lantern
shows, panoramas, phantasmagorias, and similar wonders. There was a vogue for philo-
sophical and optical toys. Looking at these kinds of technologies provides one way of
exposing the work needed to make us believe what we see in science. They should provide
tools to help us think about the relationship between spaces, practices, and consumers’
experiences of seeing scientific performances.
There has been a flurry of interest in visual culture and its historiography in recent
decades. Art historians such as Jonathan Crary have posited the emergence of new regimes
of visuality from the late eighteenth century and have focused attention on seeing as a
historical process. In fact, Crary points to the scientific study of optical illusions to illu-
minate the ways in which modernity and the rise of industrial society brought about new
ways of seeing and inaugurated new accounts of the relationship between observer and
observed. This historicized account of vision emphasizes seeing as an active, culturally
specific process. Thinking about seeing in this way has clear resonances with recent ap-
proaches in the history of science, which emphasize the locally constructed nature of
scientific knowledge and the role of audiences and witnesses in actively construing science
in the making.3 There has certainly been recent interest in looking at the history of scientific
spectacle and in trying to locate such displays within a broader cultural history of exhibition
and showmanship. One way, at least, in which new approaches toward the history of visual
culture can help in this respect is by drawing our attention to the relationship between the
production and the consumption of scientific knowledge.4 By thinking about the ways in
which scientific spectacles are produced and about the spaces where they are witnessed,
we may get a better sense both of how the visual cultures of science are made and of the
contexts in and through which the audiences for those visual cultures understand the sci-
entific performances they see before them.
2
Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, pp. 8, 10.
3
Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1999); Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991); Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-
Siècle France (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1998); Schwartz, “Cinematic Spectatorship before
the Apparatus: The Public Taste for Reality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life,
ed. Leo Charney and Schwartz (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1995), pp. 297–319; and Alison
Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 2002).
4
Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), is suggestive in this respect. Nineteenth-
century exhibition culture is surveyed in Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1978). For scientific exhibitions see Iwan Morus, Simon Schaffer, and James Secord, “Scientific
London,” in London—World City, 1840, ed. Celina Fox (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1992).
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FOOLING THE EYE S

One of the things that made optical illusions and spectacles philosophically interesting for
a contemporary natural philosopher—particularly one, such as Brewster, who was steeped
in the Scottish Common Sense philosophical tradition—was the way they served to high-
light the importance of properly interpreting the relationship between experience and judg-
ment. Illusions were the result of the mind’s inability to make sense of the play of light
projected onto the retina. They were, as Brewster put it, “the result of an operation of our
own minds, whereby we judge of the forms of bodies by the knowledge we have acquired
of light and shadow. The greater our knowledge is, of the subject, the more readily does
the illusion seize upon us; while, if we are but imperfectly acquainted with the effects of
light and shadow, the more difficult is it to be deceived.”5 While illusions laid bare the
limitations of experience, they exposed the fallibility of human judgment as well. There
was nothing necessarily wrong with the eye that saw a ghost, but there might well be
something wrong with the mind that recognized what it saw as a supernatural apparition.
Optical shows and illusions provided laboratories that could be used to probe the relation-
ship between mind and body and lay bare the mechanisms through which even the best
judgment could be misdirected.
Eighteenth-century spectacles such as the panorama, patented by the Edinburgh portrait
painter Robert Barker in 1787, were designed to reproduce nature mechanically, “to perfect
an entire view of any country or situation, as it appears to an observer turning quite round.”6
Barker’s patent carefully specified the way panoramas were to be constructed and displayed
in order to heighten the effect of reality. The whole experience was designed to misdirect
observers into imagining themselves to be somewhere other than where they were. Philip-
stahl’s phantasmagoria, likewise, depended on misdirection. Much of its effect was
achieved by disorienting spectators so that they lost their sense of distance, scale, and
perspective. Something similar was going on in optical toys such as Brewster’s kaleido-
scope, which seemed to construct a complex and apparently meaningful pattern from what
was in reality simply a random scattering of colored glass. More often than not, however,
the point of such visual deception was to educate the mind. Philipstahl insisted that the
purpose of his show was to lay bare the mechanisms through which charlatans could
deceive the unwary—“to expose the Practices of artful Impostors and pretended Exorcists,
and to open the eyes of those who still foster an absurd belief in GHOSTS or DISEMBODIED
SPIRITS.” Brewster similarly argued that the kaleidoscope was a tool to educate the eye
and therefore the mind of the beholder.7

5
David Brewster, “On the Optical Illusion of the Conversion of Cameos into Intaglios, and of Intaglios into
Cameos, with an Account of Other Analogous Phenomena,” Edinburgh Journal of Science, 1826, 4:99–108, on
p. 104. See Richard Olson, Scottish Philosophy and British Physics, 1750–1880 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1975), on physics and Scottish Common Sense.
6
“Specification of the Patent Granted to Mr. ROBERT BARKER, of the City of Edinburgh, Portrait-painter; for
His Invention of an Entire New Contrivance or Apparatus, Called by Him La Nature à Coup d’ Oeil, for the
Purpose of Displaying Views of Nature at Large, by Oil-painting, Fresco, Water-colours, Crayons, or Any Other
Mode of Painting or Drawing,” Repertory of Arts and Manufactures, 1796, 4:165–167, on p. 165.
7
The quotation is from an advertising handbill featured in Heard, “Paul de Philipstahl and the Phantasmagoria”
(cit. n. 1), p. 4. See also Nicholson, “Narrative and Explanation of the Appearance of Phantoms and Other
Figures in the Exhibition of the Phantasmagoria” (cit. n. 1). For details of the phantasmagoria see Laurent
Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema (Exeter: Exeter Univ. Press, 2000),
pp. 136–175. On the purpose of the kaleidoscope see David Brewster, A Treatise on the Kaleidoscope (Edinburgh,
1819), p. 72.
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This educational intent was what differentiated modern illusions from those of their
natural magical predecessors, according to Brewster and many other early nineteenth-
century commentators. These and other forms of scientific showmanship were occasions
for Victorians to celebrate the superiority of their industrial culture. Not only could they
really do what past charlatans had only claimed to do, but they could see through the trick
as well. Panoramas, phantasmagorias, and optical toys were certainly meant to evoke
wonder in their spectators, but much of that wonder was meant to be directed at the
technology that sustained the integrity of the illusion. It is worth noting that Barker’s
panorama patent went into considerably more detail about the construction of the building
housing the panorama and the organization of its interior space than about the technique
of painting itself. It was the technology sustaining the illusion that warranted protection.8
Paradoxically, the more successful many of these technologies were at fooling their spec-
tators’ eyes into seeing things that were not there, the more successful they were at un-
derwriting their creators’ claims to understanding the operation of natural principles.
Where idolatrous priests or medieval wizards had tricked their victims’ senses in order to
mislead them about the nature of reality, scientific showmen misdirected them precisely
in order to reveal the true order of things—or so at least the showman’s patter went.
Thinking about just what visitors to scientific shows and exhibitions were meant to see
during this period is a good way of approaching that peculiarly Victorian combination of
entertainment and edification. Performances and technologies that were avowedly designed
to misdirect or mislead the senses were certainly meant to entertain. But there was no
distinction between entertainment and edification here. They were meant to be the same
thing in the eye of the beholder.9 We should also think carefully about how and where
these kinds of visual performances are to be understood historically. These kinds of spec-
tacles have usually been approached from the perspective of cinematic history, their emer-
gence understood as another step on the road to the full cinematic experience as it came
into being at the beginning of the last century. What that genre of visual history tends to
miss is the ways these optical spectacles were experienced by their own audiences, who
presumably regarded them as fully fleshed-out experiences in their own right rather than
as milestones on the way to twentieth-century cinema.10 Our attention should be directed
at trying to understand how these performances were put together—how (and why) the
eye was being fooled—and how these visual experiences were encountered by their au-
diences.

DISPLAYING INGENUITY

When telegraph inventors such as Charles Wheatstone or Edward Davy put their devices
on show at London’s Galleries of Practical Science during the 1830s, they faced a dilemma.

8
The rhetoric of superiority is ubiquitous in Victorian accounts of magic lanterns and other scientific exhibits.
See, e.g., “Royal Polytechnic Institution: The Dissolving Views,” Illustrated Polytechnic Review, 1843, 1:97–
98. For nineteenth-century physics and natural magic see Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman, Instruments
and the Imagination (Princeton, N.J: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995). For panoramas see Stephan Oettermann, The
Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (New York: Zone, 1997).
9
Iwan Rhys Morus, “Manufacturing Nature: Science, Technology, and Victorian Consumer Culture,” British
Journal for the History of Science, 1996, 29:403–434.
10
A particularly egregious example in this respect was the recent exhibition “Eyes, Lies, and Illusions” at the
Hayward Gallery, London. See the exhibition catalogue: Laurent Mannoni, Werner Nekes, and Marina Warner,
Eyes, Lies, and Illusions (London: Hayward Gallery, 2004). For this perspective more generally see Mannoni,
Great Art of Light and Shadow (cit. n. 7).
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Show too much, and their hopes of gaining a patent were dashed. Show too little, and the S
spectators were left skeptical and unconvinced. Deciding what to show and what to keep
secret was a common problem. This was not a dilemma confined to those whose showman
activities were ancillary to their aim to place potentially lucrative new inventions before
the public. Deciding what to show and what to hide was an issue that concerned anyone
involved in the business of exhibition. The key to successful performance often lay in the
management of information between performer and audience. As one magic lantern op-
erator remarked, “When dissolving views were first introduced the method of producing
them was for some time kept secret, and the effect on the spectators was greater than it is
at the present day, since their admiration was not alloyed by knowledge,—for there is no
doubt that one of the great charms of optical and conjuring experiments lies in the mystery
which attaches to them.”11 Even if showmen did not want their audiences to see all their
secrets, they wanted them to see enough to recognize and applaud the skill and ingenuity
that lay behind the successful show. Strategies of concealment and exposure therefore lay
at the heart of scientific performers’ self-fashioning.
Audiences at exhibition halls, galleries of practical science, or scientific lectures were
there to witness wonders. Those who performed or exhibited in such places needed to be
sure that what they offered met their audiences’ expectations. One way of appreciating the
attraction such scientific performances held is to regard them as posing a challenge to their
viewers. P. T. Barnum famously challenged his audiences to figure out “How did he do
it?” Barnum developed a series of strategies to advertise exhibits such as the Feejee Mer-
maid and the Cardiff Giant. His strategies often quite explicitly called the authenticity of
the artifacts on display into question while challenging spectators to come and judge the
real nature of the exhibit for themselves.12 In similar fashion, scientific performances chal-
lenged audiences to understand the mechanism that underlay the production of spectacular
effects such as electrical displays or optical wonders. Barnum’s audiences came along, at
least in part, to applaud the ingenuity that had been devoted to trying to dupe them.
Audiences at scientific performances were also invited to applaud the ingenuity that lay
behind the production of effects. By making nature visible, performers such as William
Sturgeon or, later in the century, John Henry Pepper were making their own skill at ma-
nipulating nature visible too.
Thinking about science’s visual culture focuses particular attention on the audiences for
such scientific performances, the spaces where they took place, and the social identities
of the performers. In London and other European cities and in North American cities such
as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, audiences thronged to scientific performances and
exhibitions in order to participate (and be seen to participate) in a particular kind of public
culture. Benjamin Read’s spectacular colored prints of fashionably dressed crowds at the
Regent Park Colosseum—themselves made to advertise the latest fashions—are a sug-
gestive indication of the place these kinds of spaces occupied in London’s cultural geog-
raphy (see Figure 1). One way of understanding the cultural place of scientific shows is
to look at their geographical location.13 It mattered that the Colosseum was on the edge of

11
Iwan Rhys Morus, “The Electric Ariel: Telegraphy and Commercial Culture in Early Victorian England,”
Victorian Studies, 1996, 39:339–378 (exhibitions by telegraph inventors); Morus, “Different Experimental Lives:
Michael Faraday and William Sturgeon,” History of Science, 1992, 30:1–28 (management of information); and
The Magic Lantern: Its History and Effects (London, 1854), pp. 18–19 (quotation).
12
Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1973); and James W. Cook,
The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001).
13
Ralph Hyde and Valerie Cumming, “The Prints of Benjamin Read, Tailor and Printmaker,” Print Quarterly,
106 FOCUS—ISIS, 97 : 1 (2006)

Figure 1. A Benjamin Read print of fashionable Londoners parading themselves at the Colosseum
near Regent Park.

Regent Park, that the Royal Polytechnic Institution was on Regent Street, and that the
Royal Institution was on Albemarle Street. Their location helped identify them on the
social map for their audiences. This kind of geography of performance helps us locate the
social identity of performers as well as the audiences for science on show. Cognoscenti of
scientific London would no more have expected to see Michael Faraday lecturing at the
Adelaide Gallery than to find William Sturgeon at the Royal Institution.
It was through its visual products—its exhibits, instruments, and performances—that
Regency and early Victorian natural philosophy became part of consumer culture. This
was not an uncontested process. The Mechanics’ Magazine poured scorn on the notion
that the inventor needed “crowds of curious idlers, or fashionable loungers, assembled to
admire his productions.” Appreciation of philosophical or technological artifacts should
not need to be “cultivated or purified, as in the case of the fine arts, by the repeated
exhibition of masterpieces.”14 That was nevertheless what late eighteenth- and early nine-
teenth-century exhibitions and scientific performances did. They made natural philosophy

2000, http://www.motco.com/BenjaminRead. On science and space see Altick, Shows of London (cit. n. 4); and
David R. Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum and Its Audience (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Books, 1995). On the location of scientific shows see David Livingstone, Putting Science in Its
Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2003).
14
“National Repository,” Mechanics’ Magazine, 1829, 11:58–60, on pp. 58–59. On the move of natural
philosophy into consumer culture see Iwan Rhys Morus, Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and
Experiment in Early Nineteenth-Century London (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998).
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into part of consumer culture and taught consumers how to see philosophical artifacts and S
displays in the appropriate light. Exhibition halls and lecture theaters where natural phi-
losophy went on show were embedded in particular networks of production and con-
sumption. They could not exist without the workshops and small factories that made their
exhibits and supplied the skills to make them work. Thinking about what was on show at
these places—what spectators saw—should therefore draw us toward tracing the labor
and resources that produced these artifacts and performances in the first place. By doing
this we have a better chance of understanding just where and how science fitted into the
networks that produced and sustained the new culture of consumption that accompanied
the beginnings of modernity.15

PERFORMING WORK

One of the most important consequences of the emergence of a new historiography of

visual culture is the attention historians now pay to practices of seeing. Looking at some-
thing is not a culturally neutral act; neither is the gaze an ahistorical phenomenon. To visit
a panorama in late eighteenth-century Edinburgh or Paris, for instance, was to participate
in a new, specific, and culturally located visual practice. Spectators had to learn how to
see panoramas.16 The same holds true for other kinds of exhibitions and performances.
Even while fulminating against the rise of scientific exhibitionism, the Mechanics’ Mag-
azine’s strictures were an acknowledgment that what went on at galleries and displays of
inventions was an education of the senses. David Brewster made clear his view that only
an educated eye could properly appreciate the wonders of the kaleidoscope. As historians
of the visual cultures of science, we need to direct our attention to the mundane practices
of seeing—going to an exhibition, watching a show—rather than to abstract discourses.
We should also pay attention to the practicalities of how the new visual cultures that
emerged during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were practically achieved
and the sorts of architectures and technologies that were needed to realize and sustain
particular ways of seeing.
I have already noted the importance of unraveling the networks within which exhibitions
were embedded. A great deal of work and significant resources were devoted behind the
scenes to make a successful exhibition. The more extravagant exhibits at places such as
the Royal Polytechnic Institution were expensive in terms of human and material resources.
The polytechnic was closed for a fortnight while W. H. Armstrong’s Hydro-electric Ma-
chine was installed in 1843, for example. This was not, presumably, a decision the pro-
prietors would have taken unless they were convinced that the venture would prove prof-
itable. Successful exhibitions depended on the availability of the human skills and material
resources that were needed to put together crowd-pleasing shows. The diary kept by the
American instrument-maker Joseph Saxton during his period working at the Adelaide
Gallery in London gives us some indication of the work that went on behind the scenes.17
As the gallery’s principal mechanic, Saxton attended there on an almost daily basis. He

15
Simon Schaffer, “Babbage’s Dancer and the Impresarios of Mechanism,” in Cultural Babbage: Technology,
Time, and Invention, ed. Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), pp. 52–80.
16
Oettermann, Panorama (cit. n. 8); and Crary, Techniques of the Observer (cit. n. 3), p. 295.
17
On Armstrong’s machine at the Royal Polytechnic see “Electricity Generated through the Agency of Steam,”
Illustr. Polytech. Rev., 1843, 2:111. On Saxton see Morus, Frankenstein’s Children (cit. n. 14); and Arthur Frazier,
“Joseph Saxton’s First Sojourn in Philadelphia,” Smithsonian Journal of History, 1968, 3:45–76.
108 FOCUS—ISIS, 97 : 1 (2006)

also had his own workshop, at 22 Sussex Street, where he produced models and artifacts
for the gallery’s exhibitions. His diary records regular visits to different shops and work-
places to borrow tools, buy exhibits and equipment, or place orders for finishing work. It
also shows how places such as the Adelaide Gallery were embedded in the working culture
of London’s artisans. The gallery could not exist without the supporting networks of small
workshops and factories through which Saxton moved and that provided the gallery with
its material resources and skills.
Putting a show before an audience often required careful choreography. Lanternists’
accounts of the work needed to put on a good magic lantern show suggest how much
effort was required to produce a suitably seamless performance. They emphasized the
importance of careful preparation and rehearsal: “the lantern and all its appurtenances may
be the very best of their kind, but their performance as a whole in the hands of a bad or
indifferent operator may be vastly inferior to that of a second-rate instrument managed by
a really competent person; in other words, lantern work provides considerable room for
the ‘personal equation.’” Magic lantern performances at the Royal Polytechnic Institution
relied on a whole panoply of skills. As one old hand recalled, in “the Phantasmagoria
produced at the original Polytechnic Institution, it was sometimes necessary for the op-
erator to walk about carrying a lantern attached to the front of his body. This person must
have found it no slight task to step steadily backwards in comparative darkness keeping
the projection from his lantern steady and free from vibration, focussing with one hand,
and perhaps working a mechanical slide with the other.”18 Extensive collaborative effort
was called for in order to mount exhibitions such as these successfully. In many cases the
trick of successful performance rested on the proper coordination of the backstage manip-
ulations, so that what appeared on stage looked like a single, seamless process (see
Figure 2).
We still know very little about the skills and practices that sustained Regency and early
Victorian visual and exhibition culture. Henry Langdon Childe may have worked as Paul

Figure 2. Behind the scenes at one of the Royal Polytechnic Institution’s magic lantern shows. From
J. H. Pepper, A Boy’s Playbook of Science (London, 1860).

18
The Showman, “The Lantern Operator,” Magic Lantern Journal and Photographic Enlarger Almanac and
Annual, 1896–1897, 1:72–73, on pp. 72, 73.
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de Philipstahl’s assistant on the original phantasmagoria performances at the Lyceum The- S
atre and acquired at least some of the technical know-how that helped establish him as
one of the Royal Polytechnic Institution’s best slide illustrators and magic lantern operators
through that connection. W. R. Hill, one of the most prominent of Childe’s successors at
the Royal Polytechnic, was formally bound to him as an apprentice before entering into
partnership with him in the late 1840s. Magic lantern production appears to have been a
skilled trade in its own right, although with close connections both to toy-making and to
optical instrument-making.19 The instrument-makers who produced exhibits for display
appear to have come from a variety of backgrounds and to have acquired their skills in
different ways. William Sturgeon seems to have been self-taught as an instrument-maker,
though with a background as a skilled craftsman. E. M. Clarke, on the other hand, appears
to have been a member of an established Dublin instrument-making dynasty before moving
to London during the 1820s. In very straightforward terms, however, the spectacular visual
culture of nineteenth-century scientific showmanship was the direct product of such men’s
skills and labors.

LOOKING AHEAD

In order fully to appreciate the visual culture of early nineteenth-century natural philo-
sophical display and exhibition, we need to understand just what the place of natural
philosophy was in the broader visual culture. Where did scientific entertainments belong
in the spectrum of spectacular showmanship? By the 1830s or 1840s Londoners (or Pa-
risians or Philadelphians) could choose from a whole range of theatrical performances,
dissolving view and magic lantern shows, dioramas and panoramas, exhibitions of freaks
and curiosities, waxworks, and balloon ascents, as well as exhibitions of the products of
the arts and sciences. In the competitive, cut-throat world of showmanship, rational en-
tertainment had to hold its own and bring in the paying customer. Showgoers were in-
creasingly attuned to expect the visually spectacular and wonderful.20 This is what they
expected of natural philosophical shows as well. In order to succeed, scientific showmen
had to match their strategies of showing to the expectations of their audiences. To under-
stand science’s visual culture, therefore, we need to know more about the expectations and
the composition of those audiences. Illustrations of visitors at places such as the Adelaide
Gallery or the Royal Polytechnic Institution typically show men, women, and children
among the visitors. We know little, however, about just who visited and under what cir-
cumstances. Some distinguished late nineteenth-century physicists—Lord Rayleigh, for
one—reminisced in later life about being taken to the Polytechnic Institution by female
relatives. We do not know to what extent this was a common middle- and upper-class
experience.21
Thinking about science’s visual culture should draw attention to the importance of ap-
preciating how the practice of seeing is enculturated. When visitors to late eighteenth- or
early nineteenth-century exhibitions saw science on show they were, in a sense, being

19
“Henry Langdon Childe,” Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 10; “Prominent Men of the Lantern World:
No. XIV—Mr. W. R. Hill,” Optical Magic Lantern Journal, 1897, 8:199–200; and E. P. Thompson and Eileen
Yeo, eds., The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle, 1849–1850 (London: Merlin, 1971),
pp. 295–298 (on the connections of magic lantern production with toy-making and instrument-making).
20
Altick, Shows of London (cit. n. 4); and Michael R. Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991).
21
Robert Strutt, Life of Lord Rayleigh (London: Arnold, 1924).
110 FOCUS—ISIS, 97 : 1 (2006)

taught how to see science. These sorts of encounters were primarily visual, and this,
therefore, was how such audiences understood natural philosophy. Natural philosophy was
a way of producing spectacular effects that demonstrated both the workings of nature and
the power of the showman to control that nature.22 Audiences were certainly directed,
through these kinds of performances, to see nature and natural philosophy in a particular
way. It was through particular kinds of performances—different visual displays of spec-
tacular effects—that lecturers and exhibitors demonstrated their philosophical credentials
to their audiences. Thinking about how science was seen alerts us, therefore, to the intimate
relationship between performer, place, and epistemology. What made scientific perfor-
mances and performers for their audience was where they stood in particular cultural
networks. What mattered as much as anything for audiences’ understanding of the epis-
temological location of particular practices was quite literally the geographical (and, there-
fore, cultural) locations of the venues where they took place.23 Thinking about the ways
in which science was put on show—how such knowledge was seen by its consumers—
provides a way of thinking about the politics of performance and of spectacle. It was
through such performances that scientific showmen produced particular visions of philo-
sophical authority for their spectators.

22
Simon Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century,” Hist. Sci., 1983,
21:1–43.
23
Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place (cit. n. 13).