Is chemistry more than bangs, flashes and stinks? The question should be absurd, yet the discipline still brings these things immediately to mind for those unfamiliar with it, not to say wary of it. The “chemistry demonstration lecture” can offer spectacle with which physics, biology, the earth sciences, mathematics and other scientific topics can’t hope to compete. But is that a good thing? Or does it mean that all we ever see of the public face of chemistry is superficial entertainment and sensory cheesecake, rather than any sense of the questions and ideas that lie behind it?

That was the question raised by chemist Andrea Sella of University College London in his lecture at the Royal Society on 9th February for receipt of the Michael Faraday Prize for communicating science. If you watch even a little science on TV, there’s a good chance you will have seen Sella: he is the go-to man for chemical demonstrations, regularly assisting the likes of Brian Cox, Jim Al-Khalili and Mark Miodownik when they need a particularly whizzy, difficult or dangerous chemical reaction. In standard-issue lab coat and safety specs, Sella’s quick banter and evident glee at making his presenters’ jaws drop at the sights and smells he conjures up conceal a deep knowledge of practical chemical lore and a profound aesthetic appreciation of its attractions. Sella is part of a tradition of “science as spectacle” going back to the educators of Victorian England, such as John Henry Pepper of the Royal Polytechnic Institute, and indeed to the fathers of the field, Humphry Davy and Faraday himself at the Royal Institution. The Christmas lectures for children, which Faraday instituted in 1825, are still a highlight of the Royal Institution’s programme, and seem every year to up the ante with their eye-popping demonstrations.

This tradition always had an explicitly theatrical aspect—it was as much a part of the flourishing of stage magic in the Victorian era, developed by the likes of John Nevil Maskelyne at the Egyptian Hall in London, as it was an attempt to educate the public. The stage magicians were, all the same, often debunkers of pseudoscience and fraud: Maskelyne attacked the shenanigans of the Spiritualist…

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