Chinese Electricity

Author
Stanislav Južnič

Journal
ICON, Volume 30, Issue 1 (2025), pp. 81–139

DOI
https://doi.org/10.11590/icon.2025.1.04

Abstract
In 1755, Jesuits in Beijing and their local collaborators invented an early electrophorus device under the auspices of the leading scientist Augustin Hallerstein from Carniola, a missionary in China. The Jesuits sent their findings to the academicians in St Petersburg as part of their regular collaboration.

These Chinese ideas inspired prominent scientists such as Aepinus, his student Johan Carl Wilcke, Leonhard Euler and his son, the Italians Giovanni Battista Beccaria and his nephew Giovanni Francesco Cigna, Benjamin Franklin, and eventually, Alessandro Volta. However, Stephen Stigler’s law of eponymy gradually overshadowed the Beijing Jesuits’ accomplishments.

Exactly a quarter of a millennium after Hallerstein, Rudi Podgornik, a Ljubljana native and his neighbour, revisited and updated Hallerstein’s research on electricity at the same Beijing headquarters.

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