The web of knowing, doing, and patenting. William Thomson’s apparatus room and the history of electricity

This is a case study in the history of electricity, based on William Thomson and his “apparatus room” at the University of Glasgow. The room was packed with electric paraphernalia that Thomson had set up as a newly appointed professor of natural philosophy after 1846, when he was barely 22. From about 1857, the facility was known as “the laboratory,” and Thomson and later historians regarded it as the first such teaching facility in the history of physics. During those same years, as is well-known, Thomson developed a theory of electric and magnetic phenomena to which a younger contemporary, James Clerk Maxwell, declared he owed most when introducing his own new approach to the science of electricity and magnetism.As is also wellknown, by the end of 1856 Thomson was one of the directors of the Atlantic Telegraph Company, which laid the first telegraph cables between Ireland and Newfoundland. By 1858, Thomson held a patent for telegraphy, which gave him an important position in the field for decades. Thus, in the dozen years following 1846, Thomson with his apparatus room showed that it was possible to move from the kind of “physical mathematics” in which Thomson himself had been trained as a student in Cambridge, to experimental physics and teaching, to industrial consultancy and patenting, and back again. The case is used to highlight the web of knowing, doing, and patenting in which the science of electricity was woven half a century after the introduction of the voltaic battery, during the slow dawn of the age of electricity.