Snap, crackle and pop

As you go into the new Wellcome Collection exhibition, Electricity: The Spark of Life, you might have in mind a sentence from Mary Shelley’s original electrifying novel Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus: ‘I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.’

A copy of the 1831 edition of her book, with its startling anatomical frontispiece, awaits you, among many other wonders. The exhibition, a collaboration between the Wellcome, the Teylers Museum of Haarlem and the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, is packed with electrical instruments, together with models, artefacts, books, film loops and pictures. It displays a vast historical panorama dating from the ancient Greeks — a terracotta plate from Campania showing an electric torpedo fish, 630 BCE — to the late 20th century, with a sporty two-minute movie of pioneering electric cars from the 1960s.

Yet your first impressions might be a bit muted, a bit low-voltage. Despite the sparky promise of the title, the danger is that nothing much will actually light up; that there are no great euphoric flashes, no cheering gleams or sinister glows. There is a Cuthbertson electrical discharger of 1800, consisting of two brass and copper globes mounted side-by-side on an insulated mahogany stand, but you will wait in vain for an actual spark to crackle between them. There is also a Martinus van Marum electrostatic generator of 1787, capable of discharging 300,000 volts and producing a two-foot spark, but it is only a fold-out illustration. There is an original Edison carbon filament incandescent lamp bulb from 1879, but it does not switch on. There is even an Archer electric kettle of 1900, but it does not boil.

However, as one of the dedicated curators, Ruth Garde, shrewdly admonished me, you would be wrong ‘to switch off your own imagination’.