Electric Vocabulary
We all know the words around electricity, "charge," "positive," "battery", and more. But where do they come from and what do they really mean? Let the history of these words illuminate the...
==========
I'm going to try to shine a historical light on our language, and tell you a story about the electric vocabulary. It all begins over 2,600 years ago. An ancient Greek, called Thales of Miletus, is thought to be the first person to observe what we would today call electrical phenomena. He discovered that a piece of amber, when rubbed with fur, could pick up small pieces of straw. In Thales's language, amber was called "electron." For a long time, that was pretty much all anybody knew about the subject. And nature had to wait around 2,200 years before any new investigations were made into amber's properties. William Gilbert, a 17th-century English scientist, discovered that with a careful experimentation, a number of other materials ...
==========
I'm going to try to shine a historical light on our language, and tell you a story about the electric vocabulary. It all begins over 2,600 years ago. An ancient Greek, called Thales of Miletus, is thought to be the first person to observe what we would today call electrical phenomena. He discovered that a piece of amber, when rubbed with fur, could pick up small pieces of straw. In Thales's language, amber was called "electron." For a long time, that was pretty much all anybody knew about the subject. And nature had to wait around 2,200 years before any new investigations were made into amber's properties. William Gilbert, a 17th-century English scientist, discovered that with a careful experimentation, a number of other materials ...
