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This essay recounts Hermann von Helmholtz's trip to represent Germany at the International Electrical Congress in Chicago in 1893 as well as his reception by various members of the American scientific, technological, and cultural elite in several other American cities. In doing so, it seeks to portray something of the vitality of the youthful and increasingly important American scientific community; of the strong relationship between American and German scientists, including how Helmholtz used and was used by them and various other members of the American elite to promote science and culture in America as well as to promote his own and German interests; and, finally, of what many considered to be the close interactions between science and technology in the late nineteenth century. In short, the essay seeks to use Helmholtz's trip to capture a sense of the broader relationship among science, the nation-state, and cultural elites in Gilded-Age America and between Germany and America. (Contains 3 figures and 131 footnotes.)

Robert Brain's essay review covering four edited books on Helmholtz seeks to promote a problematic historiographical position based on some factual errors and overstatements. Brain attempts to give Helmholtz's work unity as a 'cultural project,' but this unity does not actually exist in the variety of Helmholtz's interests and experience. Brain also attempts to reduce Helmholtz's work to a manifestation of local culture and ultimately seeks to reduce it to the personal level.