Making the Most Beautiful Experiment: Reconstructing Gassiot’s Cascade

Iwan Rhys Morus investigates the electrical performances of Charles Gassiot, who demonstrated his electrical coil, and especially its most famous instantiation as the cascade, to numerous public audiences through the 1850s. Morus considers the extensive knowledge—both technical and scientific—that was required to stage the cascade demonstrations and reveals the numerous networks of production that contributed to it. In doing this, and in revealing the complex skills required to make such performances work, Morus also shows how these popular demonstrations fed back into the skills needed for scientific experimentation and claims that without them late Victorian physics would have lacked the expertise it needed to investigate.