EARLY DAYS OF ELECTRICITY There is

EARLY DAYS OF ELECTRICITY
There is electricity everywhere in the world. It is present in the atom, whose particles are held together by its forces; it reaches us from the most distant parts of the universe in the form of electro-magnetic waves. Yet we have no organs that could recognize it as we see light, hear sound. We have to make it visible, tangible or audible; we have to make it perform work to become aware of its presence. There is only one natural phenomenon which demonstrates it unmistakably to our senses of seeing and hearing – thunder and lightning; but we recognize only the effects – not the force which causes them.

Small wonder, then, that Man lived for ages on this earth without knowing anything about electricity. He tried to explain the phenomenon of the
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thunderstorm to himself by imagining that some gods or other supernatural creatures were giving vent to their heavenly anger, or were fighting battles in the sky. Thunderstorms frightened our primitive ancestors; they should have been grateful to them instead because lightning gave them their first fires, and thus opened to them the road to civilization. It is a fascinating question how differently life on earth would have developed if we had an organ for electricity.

We cannot blame the ancient Greeks for failing to recognize that the force which causes a thunderstorm is the same which they observed when rubbing a piece of amber: it attracted straw, feathers, and other light materials. Thales of Miletus, the Greek philosopher who lived about 600 BC, was the first who noticed this. The Greek word for amber is “electron”, and therefore Thales called that mysterious force electric. For a long time it was thought to be of the same nature as the magnetic power of the lodestone since the effect of attraction seems similar, and in fact there are many links between electricity and magnetism.

There is just a chance, although a somewhat remote one, that the ancient Jews knew something of the secret of electricity.

Perhaps the Israelites did know something about electricity; this theory is supported by the fact that the Temple at Jerusalem had metal rods on the roof which must have acted as lightning-conductors. In fact, during the thousand years of its existence it was never struck by lightning although thunderstorms abound in Palestine.

There is no other evidence that electricity was put to any use at all in antiquity, except that the Greek women decorated their spinning-wheels with pieces of amber: as the woolen threads rubbed against the amber it first attracted and then repelled them – a pretty little spectacle which relieved the boredom of spinning.

More than two thousand years passed after Thales’s discovery without any research work being done in this field. It was Dr. William Gilbert, Elizabeth the First’s physician-in-ordinary, who set the ball rolling. He experimented with
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amber and lodestone and found the essential difference between electric and magnetic attraction. For substances which behaved like amber – such as glass, sculpture, and sealing wax – he coined the term “electrica”, and for the phenomenon as such the word “electricity”. In his famous work “De magnete”, published in 1666, he gave an account of his studies. Although some sources credit him with the invention of the first electric machine, this was a later achievement by Otto von Guericke, inventor of the air pump. Von Guericke’s electric machine consisted of large, disc spinning between brushes; this made sparks leap across a gap between two metal balls. It became a favorite toy in polite society but nothing more than that. In 1700, an Englishman by the name of Francis Hawksbee produced the first electric light: he exhausted a glass bulb by means of a vacuum pump and rotated it at high speed while rubbing it with his hand until it emitted faint glow of light.

A major advance was the invention of the first electrical condenser, now called the Leyden jar, by a Dutch scientist, a water-filled glass bottle coated inside and out with metallic surfaces, separated by the non-conducting glass; a metal rod with a knob at the top reached down into the water. When charged by an electric machine it stored enough electricity to give anyone who touched the knob a powerful shock. More and more scientists took up electric research. A Russian scientist Professor Reichmann from St. Petersburg was killed when he worked on the same problem.

Benjamin Franklin, born in Boston, was the fifteenth child of poor soap-boiler from England. He was well over 30 when he looked up the study of natural phenomena. “We had for some time been of opinion, that the electrical fire was not created by friction, but collected, being really an element diffused among, and attracted by other matter, particularly by water and metals”, – wrote Franklin in 1747. Here was at last a plausible theory of the nature of electricity, namely, that it was some kind of “fluid”. It dawned on