Representations of electricity: the development of a visual language for electrical phenomena

Abstract

This paper has two primary objectives. First, it addresses the development of an iconography for electrical phenomena in the eighteenth century, showing how scientific progress influenced artistic images, and how, eventually, Franklin's revolutionary discovery that lightning is an electric discharge made it possible to use a zigzag line (already used at the time as the iconographic symbol for lightning) as a sign for electricity. Second, it investigates the creation and evolution of conventions for scientific illustrations. The following original argument is also introduced: that the stylistic ideals of Classicism influenced scientific illustration in the period around 1800.