ICE Fellow Michela Massimi, University of Edinburgh, explores how realism in science might be compatible with perspectivism, i.e. the view that our scientific knowledge is historically and culturally situated. She considers the history of the electric charge around 1897-1906—with JJ Thomson’s Faraday-Maxwell perspective, Max Planck’s quantum perspective and Drude and Helmholtz’s electrochemical perspective—and explains how our realist commitment to the electric charge was borne out of the interplay among these three scientific perspectives.