Snap, crackle and pop

As you go into the new Wellcome Collection exhibition, Electricity: The Spark of Life, you might have in mind a sentence from Mary Shelley’s original electrifying novel Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus: ‘I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.’

A copy of the 1831 edition of her book, with its startling anatomical frontispiece, awaits you, among many other wonders. The exhibition, a collaboration between the Wellcome, the Teylers Museum of Haarlem and the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, is packed with electrical instruments, together with models, artefacts, books, film loops and pictures. It displays a vast historical panorama dating from the ancient Greeks — a terracotta plate from Campania showing an electric torpedo fish, 630 BCE — to the late 20th century, with a sporty two-minute movie of pioneering electric cars from the 1960s.