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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.

Alcune proposte storiografiche, centrate sull'idea di una storia sociale degli esperti. Le proposte prendono spunto dagli studi condotti dall'autore sull'intreccio fra storia della fisica e storia della telegrafia nell'opera di William Thomson (Lord Kelvin).

The paper concerns the early age of electricity and addresses the the questions: 1) Why did it take so long for the steady current of the battery to transform our civilization? and, 2) What else was needed, beyond the current of the battery, for the age of electricity finally to take off?

The paper focuses on William Thomson‘s (later Lord Kelvin) endeavours as a “natural philosopher” around 1850, as illustrated in his published and unpublished writings, including the notes describing his daily experimental work and his visits to foreign laboratories. A metaphor that Thomas Nagel introduced some years ago into philosophical debate is adopted to convey the outcome of the historical reconstruction of Thomson’s work in those years. It is the metaphor of “the view from nowhere”. Nagel used the metaphor in an attempt to capture the rationale of our efforts aimed to reach a degree of objectivity in our knowledge. Nagel’s point was that there is no absolutely objective view of things, but it may be worth trying to reach “the view from nowhere”. The paper claims that the loose, imagined communities that scientists like Thomson conceived and temporarily joined in their endeavours across the Republic of Letters amounted to just as many attempts to reach the view from nowhere in the search for objectivity. After the “localist” turn in science studies, we know that no such view can possibly be attained. And yet, as argued in the paper, even pragmatic, locally oriented, engineering, “capitalist” scientists like Thomson occasionally indulged in that impossible exercise. It is suggested that historians of science themselves should, from time to time, be allowed to indulge in the search of the view from nowhere if they really want to understand how local and distant factors combine in scientific practice.