On 14 January 1895, the British engineer Sebastian de Ferranti (1864–1930) lectured at the Royal Scottish Society of Arts on the recent history of his electricity meter – a great commercial success to that date. The Society had been established in the 1820s to promote communication between men of science, engineers, instrument makers and manufacturers. In his lecture, de Ferranti resorted to ‘Ganot's physics’ to explain the basic mechanism of his meter. He considered obvious that his audience was familiar with Ganot's Elementary Treatise on Physics Experimental and Applied, the fourteenth edition of which had been published by the house of Longmans a few years earlier.

De Ferranti's reference did not merely have an expository function. In fact – he confessed – this had been the source from which he had started to work on the design of his meter. His inspiration came from a group of diagrams of Ampère's laws of the interaction between currents, which Ganot had introduced in the first edition of his Traité élémentaire de physique expérimentale et appliquée (1851) and developed subsequently. The same diagrams appeared in the first edition of the Treatise, an English translation commissioned by the Franco-British publisher Hippolyte Baillière (1809–67) to Edmund Atkinson (1831–1900), a young chemist just embarked on a career as a college ‘Lecturer on Chemistry and Physics’.

In fin-de-siècle Britain, Atkinson's translation of Ganot's textbook marked the standard in school and college physics.