Phenomena of Electricity
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Before about the last quarter of the eighteenth century, electricity essentially did not exist as a comprehensible phenomenon. The effects of lightning were of course universally known, but no remotely accurate guesses had been made as to its causes. The phenomenon of static electricity was also known--the word electric and its variations comes from the Greek word elektron (in Latin, electrum), or amber, which produces static electricity when rubbed with a cloth (Shilling, 1948, p. 5). (confusing, the term was also used for an alloy of gold and silver, perhaps of similar color.) Experimentation with static electricity began in sixteenth-century Italy; Jerome Cardan, about 1550, first distinguished electrical from magnetic phenomena (Roller and Roller, 1954, p. 5). The relationship between the two continued to be acknowledged; Gilbert, in 1600, included a section on electrical phenomena in his work on magnetism (Roller and Roller, 1954, pp. 5-13). Little progress in the understanding of electricity was made, however, during the succeeding century and a half of scientific development. One reason, perhaps, was that electrical phenomena were uncertain and perplexing. A number of basic misapprehensions regarding electricity, for example the belief that dry air and humid air had different conductivities, persisted for a very long time. Another reason was simply that electricity appeared to be a distinctly minor phenomenon, a weak property of a few substances. It seemed
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ure led him to identify as positive a condition which actually corresponds to a deficit of free electrons. Thus, to the mild confusion of future generations, an electric current flows from negative to positive, and the charge of the electron itself (the first subatomic particle to be identified) had to be characterized as a negative charge.
It often happens that the first introduction of a new theory or technology is associated with a startling precosity; possibilities are sometimes grasped more quickly than are limitations. (Thus, for example, pioneering British railroads of the 1840s and 1850s were aligned and engineered for 100-mph speeds, which would not be achieved in routine practice for over a century.) One of the electrical applications which Franklin evidently demonstrated with an actual working model was an electric motor, or electric jack, as he called it, which in his test apparatus was used to turn a roasting spit (Franklin, 1941, pp. 194-96). It would be another century before electric motors were widely employed in practical applications. Franklin's motor, however, differed fundamentally from the types of motor with which we are familiar; it was driven by electrostatic forces, not, as all present-day electri
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Approximate Word count = 7728
Approximate Pages = 31 (250 words per page)
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