I just had a fantastic dinner at a cozy little restaurant in Lyon. I’m stuffed to the gills, but fortunately, I have a long walk ahead of me to get back to the hotel. It had been raining earlier, but the rain has stopped, and now it seems like a nice night for a walk.
A Short History of Electricity
I passed the street that the Ampere museum was on. That got me thinking… Why don’t I ever hear about museums for scientists or engineers in the US? Here I am in a little neighborhood in Lyon, and they have this museum all about Ampere and the history of electricity. And near the hotel I noticed a square called “Place Carnot,” named after Nicolas Carnot, the first guy to figure out how steam engines work. I don’t remember seeing any places like that at home.
Maybe it’s because there are more people in Europe who invented things, but I’ve noticed more interest in general over here about science, engineering, and the like. I bet if you asked a kid back home who invented electricity, he’d probably say, “Ben Franklin!” (Well, these days, the kid probably wouldn’t know who Benjamin Franklin is, either, but that’s a whole other story).
All ol’ Ben did was figure out that if you stick a metal rod on top of your house, lightening will hit the rod and go into the ground instead of blowing up your house. Guys in Europe were figuring out way more than that while Ben was doing his thing with the key and the kite. You wanna know what they were doing? Well… OK, but only because it’s a long walk to the hotel and there’s not much else going on at the moment.
In the Beginning…
People have known about electricity ever since the first cave-kid figured out that on a dry day, he could rub his feet on a saber-tooth tiger-skin rug and then shock his cave-sister by touching her with his finger. In ancient Greece, some people were writing about their observations of amber becoming “staticky” when rubbed with certain materials.
That’s as far as it went until after the Renaissance, when people started getting interested in all things scientific. English, German, and French guys were all discovering things about electricity. They figured out how to generate static electricity, for example.
The Age of Discovery
In 1733, Francois du Fay discovered that electricity comes in two forms. Now, we call ’em “positive” and “negative.” Ten years later, a British guy figured out how to store it up. It was about ten years after that, in 1752, that Benjamin Franklin showed that lightening is electricity. Ben was on the ball, that’s for sure, but he was lucky he didn’t get lit up like a Christmas tree that day.
The Italians got into the act shortly thereafter, when Luigi Galvani discovered that nerve impulses are electrical in nature. (Frogs were the unwilling participants in the experiments). In 1800, another Italian, Alessandro Volta, invented the first battery. He was also the first guy to figure out that electricity could travel over wires. OK, now they were really getting somewhere, eh?
Enter André-Marie Ampère
Twenty years later, André-Marie Ampère observed that two parallel wires carrying electric currents attract or repel each other, depending on whether the currents flow in the same or in opposite directions. He must have said something like, “Whoa… what was THAT I just saw?” (Or perhaps more likely, “Sacre bleu!”).
Ampere did a lot of experiments, took a lot of data, and put it all together in mathematical form. He could have called it, “The Theory of Electricity, Magnetism, and Things Moving Around,” but he called it the study of “Electrodynamics” instead. And for hundreds of years thereafter, physics students the world over would be tortured mercilessly in a class known as “Electrodynamics.”
Once Ampere laid the mathematical foundation for the science of electricity and magnetism, things really took off. By the 1830’s and 40’s, electric motors were starting to appear here and there. It wasn’t long before people figured out that one could produce heat and even light, just from electricity.
Then in 1873, there was another breakthrough. The infamous, (well, infamous to physics students, anyway), James Clerk Maxwell, figured out how to sum up everything known about electricity and magnetism up to that time in a set of four interrelated mathematical equations. He really nailed it. And you know what the really interesting thing about those equations was? They predicted that there are electromagnetic waves, and that those waves travel at the speed of light!
Even though I haven’t been traveling at the speed of light myself, I’ve made it almost all the way back to the hotel. Hey, that wasn’t such a long walk after all, eh? (Or was it??)
To be continued…
Featured Image: Part of a page from André-Marie Ampère’s notebook.
