Gaston Tissandier — balloonist, editor of La Nature, and impresario of popular science — filled Popular Scientific Recreations with the entire golden age of parlour experiment: physics with coins and candles, chemical conjuring, optical illusions, home electricity and a thousand other ‘recreations’ by which the nineteenth century entertained itself into scientific literacy.
It is an inexhaustible rainy-afternoon book, and a museum of how science once lived in the drawing room. Download the free EPUB and raid the century’s best cabinet of wonders.