Electric Worlds / Mondes électriques
Creations, Circulations, Tensions, Transitions (19th–21st C.)
Pierre Lanthier (Volume editor)
Stéphanie Le Gallic (Volume editor)
Summary
Quel(s) regard(s) les historiens d’aujourd’hui portent-ils sur l’électrification, processus engagé il y a près de cent cinquante ans mais auquel plus d’un milliard d’hommes et de femmes restent encore étrangers ? Le présent volume rend compte de la diversité des mondes sociaux électriques et des manières d’enquêter sur leur histoire. Il actualise les connaissances et témoigne du renouvellement de l’historiographie, dans ses objets et ses approches. Quatre points d’interrogation sur le basculement des sociétés dans l’âge électrique jalonnent le volume : moyennant quelles créations ou combinaisons créatrices ? En vertu de quelles circulations et appropriations ? Selon quelles tensions et alliances ? Et produisant quelles transitions et accumulations ?
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of Contents / Table des matières
- Part 1. Creations
- Introduction
- Bright Lights, Brilliant Wits. Caricature and Electric Light in Later Nineteenth-Century Paris
- From Gas to Electric. Georges Seurat, Brassaï and the City of Light
- Electricity at Court. Technology in Representation of Imperial Power
- Architecture in a New Light. Architects and Illuminating Engineers in the Early Twentieth Century United States
- De la circulation à l’appropriation. La patrimonialisation du paysage de néon aux États-Unis
- Part 2. Circulations
- The Branches of Large Electricity Companies in Portugal. From Trade to the Transfer and Adaptation of Technology (Twentieth Century)
- La réglementation internationale – apport de la Tchécoslovaquie à la normalisation électrotechnique en Europe. La coopération de Vladimír List et Ernest Mercier et son importance pour l’introduction du système MIR dans les années 1960 dans les pays du Conseil d’assistance économique mutuelle
- La part des capitaux français dans les sociétés électrotechniques tchécoslovaques durant l’entre-deux-guerres et au début de la guerre froide
- Electrical Colonialism. Techno-politics and British Engineering Expertise in the Making of the Electricity Supply Industry in Cyprus
- Le frère cadet. France’s Contributions to Spanish Nuclear Development, c. 1960s-1980s
- “Spain – Eximbank’s Billion Dollar Client”. The Role of the US Financing the Spanish Nuclear Program
- Part 3. Tensions
- Bias in Electric Power Systems. A Technological Fine Point at the Intersection of Commodity and Service
- Origine et perspectives de l’électrification rurale au Cameroun
- The Akosombo Dam and the Quest for Rural Electrification in Ghana
- Le développement des technologies de l’information et de la communication en Côte d’Ivoire face aux contraintes d’énergie électrique
- Faire dialoguer scientifiques et politiques sur l’énergie nucléaire en France dans les années 1970. Deux initiatives autour du projet Superphénix
- Réacteurs nucléaires mobiles en régions polaires. Le cas controversé de « PM-3A » en Antarctique
- Public Dams, Private Power. Electric Energy and Political Economy in the Post-Second World War US South
- Le barrage des Trois-Gorges. Des déplacements de populations sous contrôle
- Part 4. Transitions
- “Lord, We Don’t Want to Hurt People”. The Decline and Fall of the American Electric Utility Industry in the 1970s
- Designing the Energy Future. Two Narratives on Energy Planning in Denmark, 1973-1990
- Les monuments de la transition énergétique
- Preparing a Solar Take-Off. Solar Energy Demonstration and Exhibitions in Japan, 1945–1993
- Adapting to a Bearish Nuclear Market. The Transition of Framatome in the 1980s
- Is Small Really Beautiful? Operating Early Brazilian Power Plants
- Les quatre phases de l’histoire de l’électricité en Inde, de 1890 à nos jours
- Contributeurs
Caricature and Electric Light in Later Nineteenth-Century Paris
Abstract
Paris as la Ville Lumière is indelibly linked to abundant gaslight, which proliferated starting in the 1840s and 1850s, and remained the city’s dominant form of outdoor éclairage throughout the Belle Époque and beyond. The French capital was however one of the first cities in the world to experiment with the newest forms of highly technologized streetlight: electric arc lighting. Between 1878 and 1882, undivided arc lamps (Jablochkoff candles) were put in service experimentally on prominent thoroughfares in some of the city’s more prosperous quartiers, including the environs of the new Opera House. The blazing lights drew interminable commentary. The culture-wide preoccupation with electric light reached fever pitch during the 1881 Exposition Internationale d’Électricité, held in the Palais de l’Industrie, the largest and most diverse display of electric lights in history, including four kinds of incandescent electric light, the eventual world standard.
The inventor of the most influential form of incandescent light, the American Thomas Edison, the so-called genius of Menlo Park, shortly became electric light’s metonym. His seemingly boundless energy and inexhaustible risibility coupled with the dazzling new lights of the era were godsends to the caricaturists and illustrators of Paris. This paper examines aspects of the pictorial response to Edison, the new éclairage, and its social effects by focusing upon the work of three major graphic satirists: Cham (Amédée Charles Henri de Noé, 1818-1879), Draner (Jules Jean Georges Renard, 1833-1926), and Albert Robida (1848-1926).
Keywords: Jablochkoff, gender, caricature, humor, éclairage
*
Introduction: New luminosities and comic art
The newfangled éclairage of the final decades of the nineteenth century altered the visual environment of central districts of the city of Paris, and ignited vivid social scenarios. This state of affairs was an enormous benefit to graphic artists, especially those working in a comical ← 17 | 18 → vein. Inspiration was ubiquitous; there seemed to be new lights blazing in different locations everyday sewing confusion and amusement. Who could keep up? What caricaturist could resist? The spectacular one-off exposition showcasing electric lights, l’Exposition Internationale d’Electricité, held in the Palais de l’Industrie in 1881, and the novel illuminations in the French capital, les bougies Jablochkoff, installed in prestigious parts of the city between 1878 and 1882, were significant sources of humorous imagery. The simultaneous consolidation of the polyvalent celebrity of electric light’s metonym, Thomas A. Edison, was also providential: the confusing effects of the new illumination and the risibility of the legends attaching to Edison sparked new lines of wit. Humor provoked by various visually dazzling environments, on one hand, and the Genius of Menlo Park, on the other, revivified two of the thematic mainstays of mid-century periodical-based Parisian caricature of earlier decades: the sizable opportunities for sexual mischief in Paris, and the cluelessness of Americans.
The concurrence of the era of nonstop innovation in electric light and the 1880 founding (as well as a revival) of La Caricature by Albert Robida (1848-1926) were a boon for Parisian visual culture. Robida’s journal is our point of entry into the thematics of electricity and electric light in the comic visual arts. The publication’s razor-sharp visuals shine a bright light upon some of the signature beliefs and preoccupations in circulation on the Parisian sociocultural scene in and around 1880 – at least in the eyes of the subscribers to Robida’s 8-page weekly. The corpus of caricatural responses to the new lighting scenarios in La Caricature and elsewhere mined in this essay tests some of the leading theories of the distinguishing achievements of the modern idiom of caricature. On one end of the theory axis, caricature is defined as an inherently democratic and potentially subversive genre; and thus a potent tool of counter-discourse and ridicule. At the opposite end, caricature is construed as an irretrievably conservative mode, whose purpose is taxonomization and the recycling of types. This interpretation navigates between the far poles of caricature theory, but gravitates towards the latter cluster of thought defining it as a mode that repeats and reinforces the traits of pre-established types.
Hilarious and ludicrous situations fostered by new lights as well as other electric contraptions may have motivated Robida’s publishing venture. The journal’s specialization under his direction was la caricature des moeurs, an intentionally less political program than that followed by the 1830s publication of the same name edited by Philipon. The front page of the June 19, 1880 issue, an amalgamation of picture and text by Robida himself, showcased the journal’s prowess in the realm of social caricature. “Nouvelle et Merveilleuse Invention d’Edison” (“New ← 18 | 19 → and Marvelous Invention by Edison”) (figure 1), a tour de force of the humorous imagination rooted in actuality, starred the angular and wildly charged-up Thomas Edison in his laboratory. June 1880 was well into the flowering of the American inventor’s transatlantic reputation as the Wizard of Menlo Park, a term used famously by Villiers de l’Isle Adam in his novel, L’Ève future, begun in 1878. The successful test of the Edison bulb in New Jersey in late 1879 secured Edison’s reputation as electric light’s flashiest prodigy, dispelling most of the doubts that had governed the thinking about him in the French électricien crowd.
Figure 1. Albert Robida, “Nouvelle et Merveilleuse Invention d’Édison: Le Fidélimètre,” La Caricature, 19 juin 1880
Courtesy of Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries. ← 19 | 20 →
Details
- Pages
- 606
- Publication Year
- 2016
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9782807600287
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9782807600294
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9782875743305
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783035266054
- DOI
- 10.3726/978-3-0352-6605-4
- Open Access
- CC-BY-NC-ND
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2017 (January)
- Keywords
- Électricité Histoire électrification énergie
- Published
- Bruxelles, Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2016. 603 pp., num. ill. and tables
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG
Biographical notes
Alain Beltran (Volume editor)
Léonard Laborie (Volume editor)
Pierre Lanthier (Volume editor)
Stéphanie Le Gallic (Volume editor)
Alain Beltran est directeur de recherche au CNRS, UMR Sirice (Paris), et président du Comité d’histoire de l’électricité et de l’énergie. Léonard Laborie est chargé de recherche au CNRS, UMR Sirice (Paris), et secrétaire scientifique du Comité d’histoire de l’électricité et de l’énergie. Pierre Lanthier est professeur d’histoire à l’Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. Stéphanie Le Gallic est maître de conférence à l’Université Bordeaux-Montaigne (CEMMC) et ancienne secrétaire scientifique du Comité d’histoire de l’électricité et de l’énergie.
