Victorian Electrostatic Machine Bell Experiment

For sale, a Victorian bell experiment apparatus for an electrostatic machine.

Consisting of a lacquered brass bar with three bells on chains and hung so that they each hang separately from one another. The D hook attached to the brass bar would have been in turn suspended from a discharge rod in order for it to accept current. Owing to its design this example is most likely devised to hang directly onto a Ramsden or Nairne pattern machine but would have been equally suited to a Wimshurst machine with an appropriate stand.

The effects of the electrostatic discharge would excite movement in each bell and the effect would cause them to ring against one another every time a charge was passed through them.

A neat little electrostatic experiment and perhaps one of the most famous of all the curious parlour tricks that were devised for such machines during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.

Circa 1880