Electric paradigms from Volta to Maxwell

Abstract The paper argues that the ideas of scientific revolutions, normal science, paradigms and their shifts proposed by Thomas Kuhn in 1962 do not help with the understanding of the construction of electrical knowledge in the nineteenth century. That probably explains why many of the key figures in developing that extraordinarily important science, such as Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday, were not discussed by Kuhn. It also illustrates the neglect by historians and philosophers until the 1980s of the power of experiment.