The physics cabinet at the Rennes high school

In the 1760s, James Watt perfected the steam engine, making it more efficient. It became the driving force behind industrial development en the 19th century, especially within the mining, textile, and metalwork industries.
Subsequently, its use extended to transportation, enabling the acceleration of economic, human, and material exchanges.

Industrial development always requires more energy. Coal was widely used, but some processes still favored the use of human labor.
The hydraulic press, developed at the end of the 18th century by Bramah, was immediately adopted into many industrial processes. Through the application of Pascal's law, this press could exert sizeable compression force from very little input energy.

Beginning in the 1860s, electricity accelerated developments in industry and communication. Many inventors developed batteries to enable the transmission of information over thousands of miles.
In 1881, essentially due to the telegraph, more than 300,000 of the batteries designed by George Leclanché in 1866 were sold.

More widely known as "General Morin's Machine," this device produces a graphic recording of the fall of bodies and highlights its uniform acceleration. It is named after its inventor, Arthur Morin, who dedicated his career to mechanical experiments, which eventually took him to work at the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts (Conservatoire national des arts et métiers) in 1852. He also wrote and published in 1938 an aide-mémoire in mechanics for artillery officers and civil and military engineers.

Distillation enables the separation of liquids by heating and then condensing them. This small model designed by the Maison Jules Salleron, founded in 1855, also has a precision alcoholometer to measure the alcoholic degree of the distillate produced. These instruments, originally meant for use in laboratories and physics cabinets, were also used in enology and farming.

Due to a rise in photography, optical games became increasingly popular, which led to a growing market for the producers of instruments. Events were organized around photographic stereoscopes that could show faraway lands or historical events on a flat surface.

It was in 1851 that Heinrich Ruhmkorff designed the first induction coils which made it possible to obtain a very high voltage from a high intensity electric current at low voltage. It could produce sparks, shocks, and lighting effects in rarefied gases. Indispensable in physics cabinets, industry, and medicine, these coils opened the door for the development of new technologies, such as radiography.

In 1869, Zénobe Gramme developed a machine that could transform mechanical energy into electrical energy. He presented his invention to the Paris Academy of Science in 1871 and marketed it as a "dynamo-electric machine." Two years later, Hippolyte Fontaine demonstrated the reversibility of the dynamo which, when used as an engine, had many industrial applications. The dynamo was key to the vast applications of electricity that followed, most notably in the field of transportation.

A later version of the first electric machines of the 18th century, the Wimshurst machine presented in 1883 produced static electricity through induction and contact. Unlike electrical friction machines, this mainly used the phenomenon of electrical induction. Less cumbersome and more predictable, its educational application meant it could be found in the collection of almost every school.

Louis-Joseph Deleuil, who was awarded a prize at the first world fair in London (1851), marketed Nobili's galvanometer.

At the end of the 19th century, mobile magnet galvanometers were in competition with mobile frame devices. Instead of a magnetised needle moving when electrical current flows through a surrounding wire coil, there was a fixed magnet and moveable coil. And so the Deprez d'Arsonval mobile galvanometer became standard in every laboratory. Jules Carpentier, who bought the Ruhmkorff workshops in 1877, was the first to market this type of galvanometer and to supply it to a large number of laboratories.