The systematic study of electricity steadily evolved into a discrete branch of scientific and technological research, particularly from the 1740s. Artistic interest, expressed in diverse media, increased likewise: the wholesale aestheticisation of the thunderstorm that took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was unprecedented in Western culture. While it seems highly likely that those two developments were connected there are considerable differences in interpretation, though these are not mutually exclusive. Some think artists’ fascination with the thunderstorm should be understood as a reaction to the over-technical approach to nature. Others describe it as a way of allaying fear or as a means of conjuring inner uncertainty. The most plausible interpretation, however, sees that aestheticisation as (implicit) evidence that a wild danger had been domesticated, explaining the emergence of the sublime as a category by man's increasing mastery of nature – epitomised by the invention of the lightning rod. Once lightning was, in principle, rendered harmless, it could be played with, in poetry, music, and painting. Images of nature, man, and God underwent a major parallel change, in a more optimistic direction.