One of the best permanent shows in London is the Science Museum’s collection of electrical and magnetic instruments commissioned by George III. Here, gathered in one room, you can see orreries, Leyden jars, air pumps and – my favourite – electrostatic spangles flickering like lightning in the glass pillars of a temple intended to stand as the centrepiece of a dining-table.
You could, until 1993, combine the joys of this collection with a visit to the museum’s history of electricity, laid out in darkened tableaux to make theatre of the lacemaker’s pin-pricked candleshade, the shock of the first arc-light. I mourn its passing; these are the places which bring us into imaginative connection with the extraordinary world of the Lunar men.
The Lunar men were anything but lunatics, although the line between brilliance and plain eccentricity was often thin. Lunar was the name they took for their society on New Year’s Eve, in 1775. A young doctor called William Withering had just arrived in Birmingham, hub of the group’s activities. His enrolment marked the point at which they decided to formalise their exchanges into monthly meetings on the date when the moon shed most light for the journey home.
Withering, a dedicated but cantankerous man who became furiously combative when Erasmus Darwin tried to steal his thunder over the discovery of digitalis as a heart medicine, is one of an absorbing cast of secondary characters in this enthralling history. Beside him stands the charmingly impractical Richard Day, who reared two adopted girls in order to create himself the ideal wife. Sabrina, winner of the first round of Day’s tests, failed the second when she screamed at having pistols fired into her petticoats as a test of courage.
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