Electricity is such an integral part of daily living that it is difficult to imagine a time when it did not "exist" a time when there were no lights, no computers, no phones, and no appliances. A time when everyday tasks like laundry, cooking, and vacuuming were not made easy with mechanics run by electricity. However, such a time did exist. But with the observations and experiments of curious and intelligent scientific figures, electricity was discovered and harnessed.
Awareness of electricity dates back to the Greeks who discovered that amber, when rubbed, attracted lightweight particles such as straw (Dunsheath, p. 1). However, the value of this force was not determined until much later when scientists began to study it in more depth and invent equipment that could measure and capture it.
William Gilbert of Colchester (1544 1603) was one of the first to include the topic in a published work. De Magnete examined the electrical properties of many substances and set forth experiments Gilbert had conducted with his versorium, a personal invention that measured the magnitude of electrical charge (Dunsheath, p. 2).
While the information was interesting, not much was done with it until Otto von Guericke (1602 1686) conducted his own studies with his own invention. He had developed a frictional machine which generated static charges. This work led to the discovery that like charges repel each other, one of the fundamental principles of electricity (Dunsheath, p. 3).
Static electricity continued to be the focal point for those who studied this science. In the mid-eighteenth century, Pieter van Musschenbroek (1692 1761), a professor at the University of Leyden in Holland, took the work a step further and devised the Leyden jar (so named for Musschenbroek's contribution) to store electrostatic charges (Dunsheath, p. 5). While this represented a big advance for the field and provided material upon which others could ...