In 1705, the English scientist Francis Hauksbee demonstrated a series of spectacular experiments with evacuated glass globes at the Royal Society in London. By spinning a glass sphere from which air had been partially removed and placing his hand against it, Hauksbee produced a vivid, mysterious glow inside the globe, the first demonstration of gas-discharge lighting. These visually stunning experiments, performed before audiences of London's intellectual elite, made electricity a topic of popular fascination in early eighteenth-century England.

Hauksbee's eerie, glowing globes prefigured the Geissler tubes and neon lights of the nineteenth century and introduced the image of electrical light as something mysterious and beautiful rather than merely functional. The dramatic visual quality of his demonstrations, which resembled magical or alchemical transformations, influenced the literary culture of Augustan London, where poets and essayists increasingly used electrical metaphors to describe wit, attraction, and the invisible forces governing social life. Alexander Pope's electrical imagery in "The Rape of the Lock" reflects this newly popularized science.