I Teylers at the Paris Electrical Exhibition

Gerard Oyens was not keen on being upstaged by the British. But in March of 1881, he was worried he might be – and justifiably so. Oyens had just been tasked with organising the Netherlands’ contribution to the Paris Electrical Exhibition of 1881 and, from his perspective at least, things had not got off to a good start.

The idea behind the Electrical Exhibition was that every country in the world could present the newest electrical devices its engineers and scientists had developed. The grand total of these separate, national sections to the Exhibition would then amount to a spectacular celebration and public demonstration of the immense progress that had been made in the field of electrical science in the space of just a few decades. As one official announcement published in France stated: “This exhibition will comprise everything to do with electricity: it will bring together apparatus of various types and various origins which serve to generate, transmit and use electricity”.

The Paris Exhibition was not the first large-scale international exhibition. Ever since the Great Exhibition held in London in 1851, a veritable hype had developed around what came to be known as the World's Fairs, with every country that could afford to do so organising various international exhibitions on a wide variety of topics. The exhibition in Paris was, however, the first that was devoted exclusively to electricity. What prompted it were the groundbreaking developments that had occurred over the course of a fairly short period preceding the exhibition. Not many years had passed since James Clerk Maxwell published his theory of electromagnetism for instance, and even more recently patents had been filed for the electric telephone and the electric light bulb, by Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Alva Edison respectively. The world was quick to realise the far-reaching implications these and other inventions had, and the Paris Exhibition can be seen as the epitome of the excitement they generated, both amongst the general public and amongst scientists and engineers. The exhibition itself was held from August until November 1881 at the Palais de l’Industrie on the Champs-Élysées, and it was accompanied by a four-day conference to which specialists from all over the world were invited. One “hot topic” at this conference was the establishment of standard units to describe electromagnetic phenomena.