The year following the publication of his Lettres philosophiques (1734), Voltaire wrote that poetry was no longer à la mode in Paris. Instead, everyone was turning into a geometer or physicist: “On se mêle de raisonner.” He was not irritated as much as fearful this new fashion would become “a tyrant that would exclude all the rest [opera, comédie, etc.]” (Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, Voltaire Foundation ed., 142 vols. [Oxford, 1968–], 87:D863; my trans.). Less than three years later, after a sojourn in Holland, where he met with the brothers Petrus and Jan van Musschenbroek and Willem Jacob 's Gravesande, Voltaire himself started putting together a large physics cabinet at the Château de Cirey, where he lived with the Marquise du Châtelet. “Abbé Nollet is ruining me,” he quickly wrote in 1738 (the cabinet's expenditure reached approximately ten thousand livres), reporting it was easier to find money than a philosophe like Nollet (ibid., 89:D1640; my trans.). Although both Voltaire and du Châtelet rarely used the Cirey cabinet, this famous example shows the astonishing increase in popularity of philosophical instruments, which went hand in hand with the “spectacular” visual elements found in private and public lecture demonstrations during the European Enlightenment. This collected work gives numerous accounts and describes several fascinating facets of this epochal trend.

The editors are right in saying that their work is “full of sparks and smells” (2). Electricity and chemistry provide the bulk of the historical examples selected by the group of well-known contributors. The book's chief focus is not on the wide selection of instruments designed for the practice of these experimental disciplines—though they form an integral part of the narratives. The focus is set, rather, on two features novel to the Enlightenment: (1) the expanding range of locations and settings where experimental demonstrations took place; (2) the experimental practices themselves, the skilled (and theatrical) lecture-demonstration performances that became linked to an emerging epistemology of the spectacle.

Experimental practices, we learn from Larry Stewart, were no longer restricted to the closed walls of academies, societies, and schools. In Britain, private laboratories, instrument-maker workshops, and industrial manufacture spaces became intertwined to such an extent that “those who understood the workshop transformed the experimenter's bench” (23). Michael Lynn describes that in Paris, the geography of experimental lecture courses extended along three main axes, depending on the targeted audience: the Left Bank, where one would find the educated and bourgeois Parisians; the Boulevard du Temple, which served as a center for popular entertainment; and the Palais Royal area, where the social and economic elite attended courses and bought instruments. Also in Paris, explains Christine Lehmann, one could attend private, fee-paying chemistry courses in apothecary laboratories as well as free public lectures at the Jardin des Apothicaires and the Jardin du Roy, whether it was for formal training or cultural entertainment. In Italy, as well as in France and elsewhere, electrical experiments stormed the salon society, creating “the conditions for the domestication of electrical experimental philosophy” (80), according to Paola Bertucci. Other demonstrators moved all the time, writes Oliver Hochadel, from town to town, showing their prowess, teaching the basic concepts of natural philosophy, and earning some money. An itinerant electrician such as Martin Berschitz spent the better part of three decades going to roughly forty different European cities, where he would usually perform in the back rooms of inns, rented theaters, and even simple booths at fairs.

Whether one was an aristocrat conversing in a salon, a commoner standing at a street corner, or a bourgeois visiting an instrument-maker workshop, all witnessed sensational experiments, skilled performances exhibiting nauseating smells and deafening booms. Lecture demonstrations were pleasurable and carefully staged shows. Guillaume François Rouelle, a chemist teaching at the Jardin du Roy, understood this well. There was a genuine theatricality to Rouelle's performances, reminiscent of popular theater and entertainment set on the Boulevard du Temple. His success as a lecturer was not based on his eloquence, argues Lissa Roberts, but on a gestural language that best conveyed “the sensibilities of his audience to the qualities of the sensible world” (135). In England, Jan Golinski shows that Joseph Priestley sought to enlist his audience's sensibility to the wonders of chemistry by developing an aesthetic and a social strategy of communication founded on the notion of the sublime. Jonathan Simon demonstrates how Honoré Fragonard's anatomical preparations, made from cadavers, encouraged the study of the human anatomy owing to their unparalleled artistic composition and mise-en-scène.

Delightful and amusing physics, with its myriad of haute-voltige tricks, performances, and especially its power of replication, provided a sense that natural phenomena could be revealed. It moreover contributed to the transformation of the public sphere pertaining to the realm of politics and consumerism (Habermas's familiar concept is never far from the authors’ collective mind). When academicians appointed by the royal court refuted the practice of Mesmerism and attributed it to effects of the imagination, argues Jessica Riskin, they confronted and went against “a public conviction [created by the rise of amusing physics] that knowledge of natural phenomena was founded in dramatic, sensible manifestations of otherwise hidden principle” (62). This new culture of curiosity and sensibility blended the boundary between the mechanical arts and polite society, each influencing the other. Instruments, toys, automata, and other machines found a market that began to value an “aesthetics of utility understood as fitness, based on the praise of design, project and purpose” (35). Amusing physics created a new type of informed and technology-literate consumer, concludes Liliane Pérez.

This book is coherent, well done (despite several misprints—“s’Gravesande” should be spelled “'s Gravesande”), and will greatly enlighten those who are unfamiliar with the theme. Scholars in the field, however, will find nothing new here, most chapters having been drawn from previously published work by the contributors. (Lynn's chapter is the most extreme case, taken almost verbatim from his book Popular Science and Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France [Manchester, 2006], 55–65.) Were it not for its price, I would recommend it as a very useful undergraduate textbook.