Description

[004686] [Philosophical Fireworks] Mr. Diller’s Grand Exhibition of New-Invented Philosophical Fireworks from Inflammable Air, Exhibited on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday Evenings, at the Lyceum, Near Exeter ‘Change, Strand, from Eight to Ten O’clock. London: Stevenson [Printer]. First Edition. 4to. Unbound. Broadside. Good. Printed broadside, approximately 170mm x 235mm in size, n.d. but dated in pen to ?1790

Trimmed to head, lightly water stained (where removed from an album?), date in ink towards head, otherwise clean

The printer was probably [James] Stevenson (fl. 1786, see BBTI)

The ‘philosophical’ aspect of the ‘fireworks’ “merely shifted the nominal emphasis from old-fashioned magic to new-fashioned science. ‘Philosophical’ meant ‘scientific’; conjurors’ tricks were dignified as ‘experiments’ or ‘demonstrations’, as if rational explanations accompanied them – which they normally did not. The programs consisted mostly of familiar optical illusions, mind reading, prestidigitation, and mechanical effects, but recent advances in the production of inflammable gas and electricity were responsible for some novelties under the heading of ‘philosophical fireworks’. In 1788 the Lyceum, then the particular home of shows with scientific pretensions, housed Diller’s Philosophical Fireworks, an apparatus innocent of ‘smoke, smell, or detonation’, that produced, among other effects, ‘a fixed flower – a sun turning round, varying in figure, a star varying, a triangle, a dragon pursuing a serpent – a star of knighthood'” (Altick, The Shows of London, page 81)