L'Art d'enseigner la physique: Les appareils de demonstration de Jean-Antoine Nollet, 1700-1770 (review)

This splendid book, produced under the direction of Lewis Pyenson and Jean-François Gauvin, concerns the celebrated French scientific popularizer Jean-Antoine Nollet (1700-70) and the demonstration apparatus made according to his designs. At its heart is a well-annotated and beautifully illustrated catalog of the twenty Nollet-type demonstration instruments now in the collections of the Stewart Museum in Montreal, enriched with a chronology of Nollet's life, a list of his writings, and an inventory of Nollet-type instruments found in other public and private collections.

Seven interpretive essays provide a context for the collection. Gerard Turner leads off with a discussion of the emergence of experiential science education in the eighteenth century, noting that Nollet's cours de physique with its arsenal of some 350 different "philosophical" instruments represented the apogee of this form of instruction. Paolo Brenni discusses different national styles of natural philosophy, pointing out that while the leading instrument makers in England were respected members of the scientific community, Nollet in France was a showman who succeeded by clothing his science in theatricality. Anthony Turner traces Nollet's transformation from an artisan to a savant, noting that it was facilitated in large part by his membership in the Societé des Arts. Jean-François Gauvin analyzes Nollet's correspondence with two natural philosophers, Étienne-François Dutour and Jean Jallabert, on the exciting new subject of electricity. Susan Sheets-Pyenson discusses the role of women in the scientific culture of France in the eighteenth century. Lewis Pyenson treats the role of ideology and ethics in the science of Nollet and of Franklin. And Jacques Dubois examines the collection of Nollet-type instruments put together in Dijon in the late eighteenth century, of which the instruments in the Stewart Museum form the largest extant part.