Electrifying Thinkers

Abstract: The paper charts the relationship between three key figures in the philosophical and political turmoil that underpinned the American Revolution: Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, and Benjamin Franklin. It examines their friendship with a particular focus on their shared interest in electricity. It suggests that they had in common an understanding of electricity as a revolutionary new fluid that both offered a model for nature’s operations, and for the reorganization of society. It argues that their activities are best understood in the broader context of radical knowledge circulating around the eighteenth-century Atlantic world through peripheral men could wield substantial influence.