Gilbert, Translated: Silvanus P. Thompson, the Gilbert Club, and the Tercentenary Edition of De Magnete

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The Gilbert Club was founded in 1889 by Silvanus Phillips Thompson and his friends to produce an English translation of William Gilbert’s pioneering treatise on magnetism and electricity, De Magnete (1600). In addition, the Club’s promoters wanted to ensure that Gilbert’s place in the history of English science was appreciated and that the tercentenaries of his book (1900) and death (1903) were observed appropriately. The key tool in their project was the publication of a “facsimile” edition of their translation, using antique typefaces and reproducing the exact layout and woodcuts of the Latin text. This allowed their translation to appear as if it had really been published in 1600, and made Gilbert accessible to a late nineteenth-century world in which electricity was suddenly everywhere. Thompson, a physical scientist, engineer, educator, and keen literary enthusiast, hinted cleverly at the tension between these two functions of the translation in the notes he compiled to accompany it. Although Thompson’s project suffered a setback with the appearance of a rival American translation before the Gilbert Club edition was complete, he recovered in time to ensure that Gilbert was given a place in the Elizabethan pantheon in 1903. The celebration of Gilbert provided common ground for the diverse and often controversy-ridden community of British electrical scientists and engineers, and the publication of the facsimile English translation of De Magnete, together with Thompson’s tireless attempts to uncover the authentic details of Gilbert’s life, should be viewed in the context of the late Victorian “invention of tradition,” in which an imagined common past was used as a source of present cohesion. Suitably reconstructed and commemorated, Gilbert himself was translated into modern form as the founder of late nineteenth-century electrical science.