Things About Stuff Draft

Foreword
In mid-1913, AT&T began working in earnest on the first telephone line to span a continent. Alexander Graham
Bell himself inaugurated service on January 25, 1915, repeating from New York the famous words hed spoken
over his first telephone of 1876: Mr. Watson, come here. I want you. His former assistant, Thomas Watson,
replied, It would take me a week now, as he was then enjoying his second careeras a Shakespearean actor
in San Francisco. The cost of a 3-minute call was then approximately $21 (roughly the equivalent of $500 today).
One century later four million cellphones are sold worldwide each day, allowing nearly 7 billion subscribers
equivalent to 98% of the earths populationto tap wirelessly at negligible cost into a vast global storehouse of
information, misinformation and entertainment, and exchange 250,000 content-free text messages every second.
Science and technology have given ordinary humans extraordinary powers beyond those of the richest potentates
of the previous century. Yet most of us are so jaded (or perhaps dazed) by the regularity of miracles that we rarely pause long enough to be amazed. For all that the
average person knows, the technology that animates modern civilization came from
a crashed alien spacecraft stored at Area 51, and relies on nanoscopic gnomes who
seem mysteriously and benevolently inclined to grant our wishes more often than
not.
Many pundits fear that an ignorant citizenry might be doomed to enslavement by
the increasingly powerful forces that are shaping civilization. That may or may not
be, but what is certain is that the intimate ways in which technology has insinuated
itself into the fabric of existence argue for revisiting the question of what it means
to be cultured and enlightened.
This book considers that question somewhat by proxy, by contemplating the revolutionary idea that has propelled civilizations evolution at an ever-increasing pace
for the last half-millennium in general, and the last century in particular. Its that
science, unlike other systems of thought, uniquely declares all of its truths to be
provisional, constantly subject to re-evaluation and revision as evidence demands.
In science an idea can be emotionally satisfying and breathtakingly elegant, but if it
disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. It doesnt matter if a Big Shot came up with
the idea after many decades of arduous labor; it doesnt matter if the expert is very
attractive, kind to animals and has a mellifluous voice; it doesnt matter how intuitively obvious the idea feels, nor how well it comports with ones personal philos-
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Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15
ophy; it doesnt even matter how many other experts also think that the idea is
correct. If experiments say your hypothesis is wrong, your hypothesis is wrong. Sciences profoundly subversive notion that one may separate the validity of an idea
from the authority who espouses itthat there exists a definite process for dispassionately separating fact from fertilizeris what divides the modern from the
ancient. It arguably defines modern. By reducing the amount of time and effort
wasted on ideas that are false, the scientific method powerfully focuses our alwaysfinite collective resources on activities that are more likely to yield fruit. The results
speak for themselves.
To be clear, understand right now that this book isnt directly about the scientific
method. If it were, its title would be The Scientific Method, and it would be a
snorefest that evil professors would wield to torment hapless undergrads; there
would be deaths. Writing it would also be torment so, instead, this book is a collection of stories. The focus is on the inventions and ideas that changed, and are
changing, civilization. Its on the people who came up with these ideas, on what
inspired them to create, and on the socio-historical contexts that enabled their ideas
to prevail at that time and place. The aim is to underscore that science is a human
activity by talking about the active humans who came up with all this stuff. And
since humans are involved, well encounter blind alleys, naked greed, titanic egos,
selfless geniuses, wingnut crackpots, heart-wrenching pathos and dumb luck.
The basic motivation for this book is hardly novel. Countless popularizations of
science have preceded and informed it. Relatively few, however, have focused on
the development of electricity (and electronics) that most of us use and depend on
in our extraordinary lives. It is electricity that has most profoundly transformed
human civilization over the last century by giving us easy access to the vast extracorporeal accumulation of knowledge generated by our species over millennia. If
you go back in time just 20 years, there is no Web. Another 10, and there are no cell
phones, and only primitive personal computers. Go back another 30, and there are
no silicon chips. Go back another 50 or so years, and there is no wireless communication. Less than another 40 years back, and there is no electrical communication
between America and Europe of any kind; messages are conveyed by ships and
take two weeks, each way. It is astounding to contemplate how rapidly life for the
ordinary person has changed in such a short time, all thanks to advances in electricity. Pause to consider that there are people alive today whose grandparents were
born into a telephone-free world. Be amazed.
This book derives from a series of extemporaneous lectures improvised for an
eponymous freshman seminar at Stanford University. Although conventional wisdom holds that curiosity is largely beaten out of us by adulthood, its encouraging
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that supporting evidence for that belief is weak. Certainly, the students in the seminar have been infinitely inquisitive. I am particularly grateful to the very first group
of students, who bravely signed up for a class with a mysterious title and a purposefully vague syllabus. They quickly caught on to the fact that the class was all about
curiosity, and how to satisfy it. What began as a trickle of queries ultimately
became a flood. They asked so many questions, in fact, that weve had to leave out
a great deal, perhaps to be answered someday in Stuff about Things.
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CQD
CHAPTER 1
CQD
She wasnt wounded; she was dying. And he was as much a ghost. He finally
accepted as inevitable what hed first denied as even possible. In that newfound
clarity he remembered his duty to all the others who were also in a twilight superposition of alive and not. That the RMS Titanic boasted a modern wireless telegraph
gave Captain E. J. Smith his only small measure of hope. He would presently call
upon the device for a miracle.
Bearing the burden for delivering that miracle were two twenty-something employees of the Marconi Wireless Corporation: Senior Wireless Operator John George
Jack Phillips and Junior Wireless Operator Harold Sydney Bride. With an equanimity that belied their youth, they dutifully tapped out Titanics urgent messages.
With each press of the telegraph key, the five-kilowatt Marconi spark transmitter
buzzed and crackled potently as it impelled evanescent dots and dashes into the
moonless sky. Throughout the night, invisible electromagnetic kinks cascaded outward from the ships antennas at light speed, bearing at first the distress call CQD,
and then the much newer SOS.1 After each transmission, Phillips and Bride listened
hopefully for a response. They made out replies intermittently, but from stations too
distant to matter. At other times, their receiver registered only the indifferent static
of a restless aether. Knowing that theyd have to do better for the 2200 passengers
and crew, they checked and re-checked their apparatus, making continual adjustments along the way. They worried about the transmitter, for it had failed just a day
earlier. Theyd rebuilt it themselves, in violation of Marconi regulations forbidding
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onboard repair. They quickly verified with some pride that their repair job was
holding up well. They tuned everything, turned knobs, flipped switchesthey did
all the geeky things that geeks can do. Theyd hoped to raise the Californian,
recently so close that her lights had been visible on the horizon. Alas, her sole wireless operator had gone to bed shortly before the collision. Finally, a strong signal
came booming in from the Carpathia. Her wireless operator, Harold Cottam, had
been away from his receiver when Titanic first sent out her distress call. He made
the fateful decision to listen to some sports news before turning in for the night.
Upon firing up his receiver, he heard about the Titanic from the Cape Race wireless
station in Newfoundland. He rushed to awaken Captain Arthur Rostron, who then
immediately issued orders to push the Carpathias steam engines beyond safe limits, as she was then almost 100 kilometersand thus several hoursaway. Cottam
hustled back to his station to assure Titanic that the Carpathia was on her way
faster than prudence would allow.
Phillips and Bride relayed the message to Captain Smith. The duo remained at their
station to make sure that the Carpathia would find its way to the Titanic. Keeping
the wireless set tuned up as the generators started to misbehave presented a challenge made more difficult by the need to ignore the growing roar of water as it
gushed into the stricken ship. They thought only of guiding the Carpathia to them
as fast as possible, transmitting news of Titanics rapidly worsening situation along
with updated position estimates. After two frenetic hours that had passed both too
quickly and too slowly, Captain Smith called on them personally. Conveying pride
and gratitude in understatement, he told them, You can go now, boys. You've done
your job well, as he formally released them under the every man for himself
rule. Knowing that minutes could matter, Phillips and Bride nevertheless continued
sending, finally stopping only when imminent failure of the generators took the
decision out of their hands. With the ship soon to go dark forever and the frigid
Atlantic lapping ominously at the floorboards, they managed to tap out one final
message to Cottam: We are sinking fast, passengers being put into boats. Then,
out of professional habit, Phillips reflexively flipped a knife switch downward to
disconnect the transmitter from the generator. As he and Bride prepared to depart, a
stoker intent on stealing Phillips lifebelt rushed into the wireless room. After prevailing in a frantic, deadly battle, the shaken pair finally made their way topside,
1. A common misconception is that these abbreviations stand for come quickly; distress
and save our ship (or some variants thereof). The prefix CQ (a homonym of seek
you) had long been the equivalent of ahem in wireline telegraphy, so that CQD simply
means attention: distress. SOS was chosen for its recognizability and mnemonic
value (three dots, three dashes, three dots). Its use had been ratified by international treaty
in 1908, but had not yet displaced CQD by the time of the Titanic.
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CQD
only to discover that their difficulties were not quite over: Only one small lifeboat
remained. They stood on the rapidly shrinking patch of deck and quietly considered
their meager options. The air felt still and cold.
The water would feel colder.
The remaining lifeboat washed off the deck before it could be launched. Phillips
and Bride dove into the freezing water, ending up underneath the capsized craft.
They struggled to get out from under the boat and, along with fifteen other survivors, clung to it as the waterlogged lifeboat slowly sank. Phillips succumbed to
hypothermia shortly before the Carpathia arrived, joining the 1500 souls claimed
by the ocean that April night in 1912. Bride miraculously survived, along with 704
others that he and Phillips had saved. Despite serious injuries that included a very
frostbitten foot, he even assisted Cottam in another marathon session in advance of
their arrival in New York, sending out news and an endless stream of personal messages from the survivors.
FIGURE 1.
Wireless heroes Jack Phillips (left) and Harold Bride
Among the legacies of the Titanic disaster was a requirement for wireless apparatus
on passenger ships and, unlike the Californian, an operator on duty at all times.
And, although the rescue had not been the first enabled by wireless, the drama
underscored in the publics mind how far the electrical arts had progressed in a
short time. In rapid succession, the telegraph, incandescent light, telephone, and
now wireless had shown powerfully that the study of electricity was no longer the
elite and largely useless diversion that it had been for centuries. How these inventions annihilated space and time in the truncated span of a few decades is a
remarkable tale that begs recounting.
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CHAPTER 2
In Praise of
G(r)eeks
Nearly a century after the Titanic went to its final rest, film director James Cameron
documented his return to the wreckage in Last Mysteries of the Titanic. Maneuvering a robot camera into the wireless room, Cameron pointed out the transmitter
controls. As silent and poignant testaments to professionalism in those last, desperate minutes the generator was cranked up and the power switch was in the down
position, just as Bride had testified. Cameron was moved to say, These guys were
heroes. They were the computer geniusesthe computer geeksof their day.
The spark apparatus used by Phillips and Bride owed its existence to the collective
effort of geeks spanning many continents and centuries. The first geek in recorded
history, according to tradition, was Thales of Miletus ( ). He
was born in that Aegean port city in what is now Turkey, and spent his days thinking great thoughts around 600 BCE, when Nebuchadnezzar still ruled Babylon.
Thales was one of the Seven Sages of Greece, and the first Greek mentioned in connection with philosophy, mathematics and science (indeed, he is one of the earliest
Greeks mentioned in history). No writings by Thales or his contemporaries have
survived, but entertaining (and probably apocryphal) stories about Thales abound.
They generally describe archetypal geek behavior, such as tripping and falling
while lost in thought ([If you cant even see] what is under your feet, [how can
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In Praise of G(r)eeks
you] understand what is in the sky?). Such stories are unreliable in detail, but their
very existence perhaps does establish Thales as the first nerd. Hed have worn a
pocket protector, if Greek garb had had pockets.
Charming tales aside, tradition frequently awards him priority in the discovery of
either magnetic or electrostatic attraction (static cling), or both. A common story,
for example, is that Thales was the first to note that small bits of lint, straw or the
barbs of a feather are attracted to a piece of amber (, most commonly
transliterated as elektron) that has been rubbed with cloth (or animal fur, in other
recountings), as depicted in the postage stamp of Figure 2.
FIGURE 2.
Greek stamp honoring Thales (note the amber and feather)
http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Thales.htm
Countless textbooks, encyclopedias (including the usually rock-solid Britannica)
and web pages present as factual this standard story of Thales, amber and feathers.
Its a nice tale, and although Thales seems as deserving of the honor as any, it is just
that a tale.2 Certainly, the phenomenon of static cling would have been noticed
by many of the ancients, but writers seem to feel happier if they can assign credit
for a discovery to a specific person, rather than to an anonymous, amorphous
group.
2. Because a resolution of this question is unimportant to our narrative, we defer further discussion of the issue to the Appendix at the end of this chapter.
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From elektron to electricity

Whether Thales actually made the firstor anyobservations of the amber effect
is largely irrelevant, as the limited consumer market for feeble feather attractors
assured the subjects neglect for a millennium or two. Magnetism fared much better, with the Han Dynasty Chinese first exploiting the phenomenon to make compasses starting around 200 BCE for geomancy (feng shui and all that), to identify
favorable burial sites and such. These early compasses were unwieldy affairs with
spoon-shaped lodestones whose handles were supposed to point south (see Figure
3).
FIGURE 3.
Modern replica of Han Dynasty compass
(http://www.grand-illusions.com/compass.htm)
Even with well-made spoons and highly polished bases, the friction at the point(s)
of contact between the spoon and plate was large enough to inhibit motion. The
accuracy and repeatability of such compasses was correspondingly too poor for
most navigational purposes.
Its not known precisely when the magnets potential for navigation became widely
appreciated, but the first written description of how to produce a compass that
would be suitable for this purpose is found in Meng Xi Bi Tan (Dream Pool Essays)
by Song Dynasty scholar Shen Kuo (Shen Gua) in 1086 CE. The essay describes
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how an iron needle drawn across a piece of lodestone itself becomes magnetized,
and how a needle so prepared may be used as a compass by suspending it with a
fine thread affixed to the center with a bit of wax. He reports that, as with the
spoon, one may not know in advance which end of the needle will point south. A
generation later, his countryman Zhu Yu would be able to write, in Pingzhou Ke
Tan (Pingzhou Table Talks) of 1117 CE,
The navigator knows the geography, he watches the stars at night, watches the sun
at day; when it is dark and cloudy, he watches the compass.3
Judging from the chronological sequence of writings on the subject, knowledge of
the compass seems to have spread along the Silk Road to the Arab world, and from
there to the West. The first written description of the compass in Europe is found in
Alexander Neckhams De Naturis Rerum (On the Natures of Things, believed to
have been written by the English monk around 1190), and which adds a bit to Zhu
Yu:
Sailors, moreover...when in cloudy weather...touch the lodestone with a needle,
which (the needle) is whirled round in a circle until when its motion ceases, its
point looks direct to the north.4
By the early 13th century, the compass had finally developed into an essential tool
of navigation the world over, even if no one was quite sure how it worked. The prevailing opinion was that a magnet magically points toward Polaris, the Pole Star,
not to a location on Earth.
Given the newly acknowledged importance of the compass, its no surprise that the
first treatise on magnetism appears around this time. Its author, Pierre de Maricourt
(better known as Petrus Peregrinus Peter the Pilgrim, implying that hed been a
Crusader), was an engineer in the army of Charles dAnjou (Charles I of Sicily)
during an extended siege of Lucera (sometimes rendered Luceria or Nocera) in
southeastern Italy. Medieval sieges tended to be somewhat slowly paced affairs and
thus demanded patience; the primitive technology of the day didnt support the frenetic cadence of modern mechanized warfare (think about the scene in Monty
Python and the Holy Grail where a soldier cries out Fetchez la vache! before a
cow is catapulted over a castle wall, and you get the idea). Thus did Peregrinus
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compass.
4. The Letter of Petrus Peregrinus on the Magnet, translated by Brother Arnold, McGraw,
1904.
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apparently find enough free time to document contemporary compass design, carry
out experiments on magnetism, and propose a perpetual motion machine based on
an ingenious arrangement of magnets.5 Dated 8 August 1269, the 3500-word Epistola de magnete describes those activities.6 Here, for the first time, we read that
magnets have two poles (the first appearance of that term in connection with
magnetism), that like poles repel, and that unlike poles attract. Furthermore, Peregrinus observes that breaking a magnet into two pieces always produces two whole
magnets, each with two poles of opposite type; a single-pole magnet (a monopole) is never observed. He also considers two possible explanations for how a
compass works its magic. Peregrinus dismisses as ridiculous a popular theory that a
magnet works because of a massive range of lodestone mountains at the north pole.
Instead he concludes that a compass needle points to the Pole Star because of some
power (virtue) it receives from the heavens. Even though he is wrong on that
point, Peregrinus deserves credit for the first quasi-scientific study of magnetism.
The Epistola perhaps the first scientific paper, period was sufficiently complete that centuries elapsed before anyone added anything useful to it. Before
Gutenberg and his printing press, Peregrinus letter could be found in only a few
libraries. It was eventually published widely, but in plagiarized form.7 No one went
beyond Peregrinus until the year 1600.
As round-numbered years go, 1600 is less arbitrary than many others as a boundary
separating one era from another (in this case, the Baroque from the Renaissance). A
young Pieter Pauwel (Peter Paul) Rubens journeyed from Antwerp to Venice that
year, soon to astonish the art world with his sumptuous, sensuous style. Many
would later call him the most important artist of the century. At the same time,
Jacopo Peri (Zazzerino)8 of Florence was exploring new musical forms, of which
5. The cheerful enthusiasm he expresses for his perpetual motion machine tells us that he
didnt try to build it.
6. The full citation is Epistola Petri Peregrini de Maricourt ad Sygerum de Foucaucourt,
militem, de magnete (Letter from Petrus Peregrinus of Maricourt to Syger of Foucaucourt, soldier, on the magnet). Peregrinus clearly had lots of time on his hands.
7. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then de Maricourts head would have
exploded sincerely. In 1572 the Belgian Johannes Taysner (Jean Taisner or Taisnier) tried
to pass off as original his plagiarized version of the Epistola, believing that the 300-year
gap would be enough for no one to notice (the key to looking intelligent is to hide your
sources). It was, but only for a short while. His attempt at deception was further hindered by his inclusion of a treatise on falling bodies written by a fellow named Benedetti,
again without attribution.
8. Other popular nicknames include the Zazzman, Zazzmeister, and my personal favorite,
the Zazzinator.
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11
the opera looked particularly exciting. He cowrote Euridice that year (the oldest
opera extant; his earlier Dafne is lost). That flowering of creativity was perversely
mirrored in the Vaticans practice of immolation to execute heretics (specifically,
heretics who recanted falsely). Because of a proscription against drawing blood,
burning at the stake was deemed a more righteous method of dispatching defective
souls to the hereafter. And so it came to pass that this diabolically ingenious solution was applied in 1600 to the vexing problem of Giordano Bruno, who had been
sentenced for various heresies that included his stubborn belief in a Copernican
solar system. Decades later, how Bruno met his end would still be a fresh memory
for one Galileo Galilei.
A thousand miles away, 36-year old William Shakespeares powers were at their
peak, with audiences about to enjoy his latest play, Hamlet, at the newly-built
Globe Theater. At the same time, a fellow London denizen, William Gilbert, was
enjoying conspicuous successes of his own. His widespread fame as a medical doctor had recently led to his being named court physician to Elizabeth I. Fortunately,
the 67-year old queen enjoyed generally good health, leaving Gilbert with ample
time to continue indulging his intense passion for research on electricity and magnetism. Friends were frequently in attendance as collaborators and spectators while
he carried out experiments at his elaborate home laboratory, using many instruments of his own devising. He was deeply irritated to discover through these experiments that much of what had been written and repeated as fact over the centuries
was wrong:
The writers deal only in words that involve subject matter in thicker darkness; they
treat the subject esoterically, miracle-mongeringly, abstrusely, reconditely, mystically. Hence such philosophy bears no fruit, for it rests simply on a few strange
Greek terms just as our barbers [who then offered medical services as well as haircuts] toss off a few Latin words in the hearing of the ignorant rabble in token of
their learning and thus win reputation; bears no fruit because few of the philosophers themselves are investigators or have any firsthand acquaintance with things;
most of them are indolent and untrained, add nothing to knowledge by their writings, and are blind to the things that might throw a light upon their reasonings. [De
Magnete, Book 2, Chapter 2; Translation by P. Fleury Mottelay]
Not as much has changed in 400 years as one wouldve hoped. The simple, reasonable and profound notion that ideas and assertions should be put to the test is still
not nearly as widely held as it should be.
On top of additional rants against self-proclaimed authorities who were often
wrong but never in doubt, Gilbert reported on a vast array of original experiments
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in a classic tome called De Magnete.9 From the title, you can see that Latin was still
the language of scholarly communication, although Shakespeares success at showcasing the rich literary potential of English would eventually relegate Latin to the
status of a quaint linguistic relic.
FIGURE 4.
Portrait of William Gilbert
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gilbert
In perhaps his most famous experiment, Gilbert fashioned a sphere out of lodestone, calling it a terrella (little Earth).10 After careful measurements with a
9. De Magnete, Magneticisque Corporibus, et Magno Magnete Tellure; Physiologia Nova,

Plurimis et Argumentis, et Experimentis Demonstrata (On magnets, and magnetic bodies, and the great magnet, the Earth; a new natural philosophy, demonstrated with many
arguments and experiments).
10.Peregrinus had also described a lodestone sphere, but only in the context of how to locate
its two magnetic poles by experiment. Gilberts insight was to regard the sphere as an
analog of the Earth, allowing him to carry this idea to the logical conclusion that Peregrinus had missed.
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13
small compass moved over its surface, he showed that he could reproduce in miniature the known behavior of compasses on the Earth. The stunning implication is
that the Earth itself acts as a giant magnet, making it is unnecessary to invoke the
existence of a huge lodestone mountain and also unnecessary to assume a mystical
exchange of influences with Polaris to explain the operation of compasses. Of
course, there still remained unanswered the question of precisely how magnets
work, but at least he reduced the number of unknowns by telling future scientists
(natural philosophers, to use the term then in vogue) where not to look.11
In his thorough checking of the received wisdom he disproved, among other things,
a prevailing belief that garlic diminishes a magnets strength (an idea traceable to at
least as far back as Pliny the Elder). Despite his clear experimental demonstrations,
it nevertheless remained a floggable offense in the British Navy for more than
another century for a helmsman to approach a ships compass after eating garlic.12
We also have Gilbert to thank for explicitly treating magnetism and the amber
effect as two different phenomena. Before him, there was a tendency to lump them
together (things that attract other things).13 We also have him to thank for devising a compact alternative to the term amber effect. In Figure 5 we see an excerpt
from De Magnete (Book 2, to be precise) in which the term electrica first appears
in print anywhere (the relevant phrase is circled), among Gilberts enumeration of
materials that exhibit the amber effect.
11. The subject of philosophy was then much broader than it is today, encompassing the
physical sciences as well as the contemplation of ones navel. Linguistic relics reflect this
older usage, for example in the Ph.D. degree conferred to scientists and metaphysicians
alike.
12.A primary source for this assertion remains to be found; it may turn out to be apocryphal.
13.Girolamo Cardano, an Italian and Renaissance man (in all senses of that term) much more
famous for having been the first to publish algebraic solutions for the roots of cubic and
quartic equations, also clearly understood the difference between magnetism and the
amber effect. He published his thoughts in De Subtilitate (On Precision) in 1560, but
Gilberts influence was much greater, perhaps because Cardano discussed so many different topics in De Subtilitate.
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FIGURE 5.
First appearance of electrica (De Magnete, Book 2, Chapter 2)
The excerpt translates very roughly as14

... of soda, and belemnites [which we now know are fossils of prehistoric squid-like
creatures]. Also attracting are sulphur, mastic, and hard sealing wax of lac tinted
various colors. Hard resin attracts, as does arsenicum [arsenic oxide], but weakly;
feebly also and favoring dry air are rock salt, mirror stone [mica], and rock alum.
Such [an effect] is possible to see, when the air mid-winter is frigid, and clear, and
thin; when the electrical effluvia of the earth are less impeded, and the electric bodies are harder; of such things, later. All these are attracted...
His use of effluvia reflects Gilberts belief that magnetic and electric effects are due
to the emission of some gas- or fluid-like substance. Just as cedar can emit a scent
for quite a long time without any noticeable change in the host material, he postulates that magnetic and electric materials are analogous emitters of insubstantial but
potent vapors of a kind. His imagery of something flowing out of these materials
would provide subsequent generations valuable fluid analogies for explaining electrical phenomena. Although flawed (as all analogies ultimately must be), the intuitions derived from this imagery would prove fruitful nonetheless, and would
profoundly influence the lexicon of the subject.
Another English physician, Thomas Browne, would take the next, nearly inevitable
etymological step, fashioning from Gilberts Latin electrica the English words electrical (electricall) in 1635, as well as electric (electrick) and electricity in 1646.15
14.As is evident from its awkwardness, weve chosen to provide a more literal, rather than
literary, translation than is customarily available.
15.Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Vulgar Errors), Ch. IV.
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15
Why they call it The Enlightenment

Gilberts London was crowded and noisy, as well as noisome with effluvia of an
unwholesome organic sort. As was then common in Europe, the 200,000 or so
inhabitants in and around the city regularly emptied their chamber pots onto the
streets. Although a prototype flush toilet had been demonstrated to Queen Elizabeth
in 1596, it would not be widely used for centuries.16 Pedestrians were always at
risk of encountering a shower of refuse from thoughtless residents above street
level (no wonder Londoners wore tall hats see Figure 4). Only Londons rains
cleaned the streets from time to time. The citys Fleet River (better known as Fleet
Ditch, and for which Fleet Street is named) was essentially an open sewer that
teemed with rats and their fleas. Not surprisingly, the plague tended to recur during
the warm summer months with alarming regularity. Many well-to-do Londoners
prudently spent those months in the country to avoid catastrophes such as the outbreak of 1592 which killed 15,000 (almost 10% of the population). Gilbert was
unfortunately in the city when another serious outbreak occurred in 1603. He and
his primitive medical skills were no match for the fleas that carried the plague. Gilbert breathed his last in November of that year, six months shy of his 60th birthday,
and eight months after the Queen herself had passed away (evidently from old age).
Gilbert the man may have left us, but De Magnete endures. This immortal work has
enlightened and even enraged while inspiring others to take up research on electricity and magnetism. Nicol Cabeo, an Italian Jesuit priest, chose to study the subjects because he found so many of the books statements provocative. Forced
eventually to concede that Gilbert had correctly described his experimental results,
all Cabeo could do was disagree with Gilberts interpretations (he found the effluvia theory less than convincing). He did more than merely replicate Gilberts
work, however, and demonstrated electricitys ability to repel as well as to attract,
reporting on these findings in 1620 in Philosophia Magnetica. Finally, 350 years
after Peregrinus, electricity and magnetism were each understood to attract and
repel. That qualitative similarity hinted that electricity and magnetism might be
related somehow, but it would take another two centuries before someone would
lift the veil of that mystery.
One impediment to research had always been the temporary nature of the electrical
effects produced by rubbing things against stuff, to say nothing of the inconve16.And no, it was not invented by a guy named Thomas Crapper. There was indeed a
plumber by that name, but he lived in the late 1800s, long after the flush toilet had been
invented.
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nience of having to rub in the first place. Otto von Guericke, the popular brgermeister of Magdeburg, took an important first step toward solving these
problems.17 Despite the chaos and deprivation directly following the Thirty Years
War, von Guericke found the time to carry out important research. Perhaps the
Mayor made time for these diversions precisely to take his mind off of the pathos
surrounding him as the Holy Roman Empire crumbled. Whatever the reason, von
Guericke accomplished more in his spare time than most achieve at their full-time
professions.
Taking his inspiration from Gilbert, he sought to make a terrella, but an electric
one. The absence of an electrical compass phenomenon makes von Guerickes
choice a bit curious, but he was guided by mystical notions of the universe. He
chose sulfur, partly because it was one of the materials discovered by Gilbert to be
electric (as seen in Figure 5), but mainly because of its importance in alchemy
(another subject with which he was preoccupied). He fashioned his terrella by pouring molten sulfur into a glass globe, and then breaking the glass after the sulfur had
cooled to a solid. As seen in Figure 6 a stick served as a handle for rotating the ball.
When mounted in the wooden frame shown, spinning the rod with one hand and
rubbing a cloth against the ball with the other produced good results. He reported in
his Experimenta Nova of 1672 that a sulfur ball charged in this manner produces
much more powerful effects than had been obtained with amber. Under some conditions, it would even generate visible and audible sparks. These were feeble
effects, certainly, but they were sensible nonetheless. Von Guericke thus was the
first to produce miniature lightning on demand, but neither he nor anyone else
knew exactly how.
17.He was born Otto Gericke. Upon his elevation to the peerage, he became Otto von Guericke. The consequent change in the spelling of the last name has tripped up more than one
biographer.
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17
FIGURE 6.
Von Guericke (l) and his generator, Die Elektrisiermaschine
http://www.desy.de/expo2000/deutsch/dhtmlbrowser/webthemen/04_vakuum/ottovonguericke_druck.htm
Von Guericke is much better known for experiments with an early vacuum pump
that he made by operating a water pump backwards. He coupled two large hemispheres together with a leather gasket, then pumped out the air as well as he could,
testing the Aristotelian assertion that Nature abhors a vacuum. Today, the phrase is
used metaphorically, but in von Guerickes time, it referred to a widely accepted
declaration by Aristotle that a vacuum simply could not exist. Von Guericke was
amazed to find that he could not pull apart these 55cm-diameter Magdeburg
Hemispheres, no matter how hard he tried.18 He was more amazed to find out that
sixteen horses (a team of eight pulling on each hemisphere) couldnt, either. Evidently, Natures abhorrence doesnt prevent the production of a vacuum after all.
The drama of that demonstration so overshadowed his achievements with the sulfur-ball static generator that few other scientists were inspired to work with Die
Elektrisiermaschine.
Or maybe it was the smell.
One scientist that von Guerickes electrical work did manage to inspire was Francis
Hauksbee (Hawksbee).19 Like the great Gilbert a century earlier, Hauksbee was
born in Colchester and lived his professional life in London. Hauksbee was a bril18.These spheres are currently on display in the fabulous Deutsches Museum in Munich.
18
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liant, self-taught scientist, a skilled maker of instruments, and a virtuoso experimentalist. His self-published book of 1709, Physico-Mechanical Experiments on
Various Subjects, Containing an Account of Several Surprising Phenomena Touching Light and Electricity, chronicles a lifetime of experimentation. Hauksbee
explains in his book that von Guerickes electrical generator continues to work just
fine when a glass globe is substituted for the sulfur ball.
FIGURE 7.
Diagram from his book of Hauksbees glass globe machine
http://www.sparkmuseum.com/BOOK_HAUKSBEE.HTM
He also describes the wondrous effects obtained when another glass sphere containing a small quantity of mercury and very little air (using a vacuum pump much like
von Guerickes) is brought in proximity with the machine. The beautiful glow that
results is bright enough to read by. Moreover, the patterns of light vary as a hand
moves over the surface of the globe. Hauksbee was thus the first to build a plasma
globe (descendants of which continue to sell well in novelty shops). Not only that,
19.As with Pliny, there is sometimes confusion about whether we are talking about the Elder
or the Younger. Here, we refer only to Hauksbee the Elder.
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19
but his glowing sphere is also an ancestor of the modern fluorescent light, which
depends on the same phenomenon of glowing mercury vapor for its operation.
Unlike von Guerickes sulfur device, Hauksbees machine soon became a standard
piece of laboratory equipment all over the world. Note to future scientists: If your
machine doesnt stink up the joint, more people will use it.
Hauksbees book and apparatus did much to stimulate the development of electrical
understanding by accelerating the pace of discovery. That acceleration was compounded by the research of an unlikely scientist named Stephen Gray. Although he
lacked a formal education and eked out a meager living as a dyer in Canterbury, he
dreamed of bigger things. He was a nerd at heart, and nerdiness will out. He was
fortunate that his social circle included a number of wealthy individuals who
accepted the friendship of someone of low station. They shared their libraries and
instruments, and he soon taught himself enough to become a conspicuously talented amateur astronomer. He made a number of minor, though notable, discoveries
with a telescope hed built himself. The quality of his work brought him to the
attention of John Flamsteed, Britains first Astronomer Royal. Flamsteed was overseeing the construction of the new observatory at Greenwich, and hired Gray to
assist him. When another observatory was under construction in Cambridge, Gray
assisted again. Unfortunately, Sir Isaac Newton and Flamsteed were adversaries
and Gray suffered when Newton inevitably triumphed. Grays finances had never
been robust, so he could scarcely afford the loss of his position, no matter how low
the pay might have been. Flamsteed fortunately retained enough influence to
arrange for Gray to receive a pensioned position at a government-supported home
for destitute men (the Charterhouse). With room and board thus secure, Gray (still a
nerd in late middle age) embarked on a second scientific career, choosing electricity
as his new obsession.
Previous researchers had been preoccupied with the creation of an electrical effect
(primarily by friction). By 1729, the 63-year old Gray had classified materials into
two new categories, distinguished by whether they could convey an electric effect.
In the course of his investigations, in fact, he transmitted an electrical effect (the
classical amber effect of picking up small bits of fluff) over a distance of 250
meters. He thus may be considered the inventor of a crude electrical telegraph.
Gray noted that some materials, particularly metals, convey electrical signals well,
while other materials, such as dry silk, do not. His friend and colleague John
Desaguliers gave the names conductors and insulators to these two classes of materials, and these terms have been used ever since.
Grays work intrigued the French chemist Charles Franois de Cisternay du Fay
(undoubtedly Chuck to his friends), who visited him and listened attentively as
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It hurts when I do that
Gray described the results of his many experiments. After returning to Paris, du Fay
carried out his own investigations. He felt that the results could be understood
within a framework of two types of electricity, one which he called vitreous, and
the other, resinous, so named because they were produced by friction with glasslike or amber-like materials, respectively. Unlike conductor and insulator, these
terms have not survived to the modern day, having been replaced by positive and
negative. In 1734 du Fay published his restatement of Gilberts theory of effluvia,
replacing the mysterious gas-like emanations imagined by Gilbert with two different (but still mysterious) gas-like emanations. According to this new idea an
unelectrified body fails to attract or repel because it contains equal quantities of resinous and vitreous electricity. If these types of electricity are not in balance, then
the familiar effects of attraction and repulsion emerge. This theory appeared to
explain a great many things and therefore begged further investigation. Sadly, neither Gray nor du Fay was able to pursue this topic to conclusion. Gray passed away
in 1736 and was buried in a common grave for Charterhouse pensioners. It is sad
that his name is but a footnote in the history books (if he is mentioned at all). Du
Fay died three years later at 40 after struggling briefly with an unspecified illness.

Du Fays work attached great importance to the view of electricity as a sort of fluid.
But how real was this view? Was electricity truly a fluid? That question was arising with increasing frequency, and several scientists resolved to answer it. In January of 1746 at the University of Leyden in the Netherlands, Professor Pieter van
Musschenbroek and his student, Andreas Cunaeus, were seeking ways to store electricity. Guided by the image of electricity as a sort of fluid, van Musschenbroek and
Cunaeus attempted literally to pour electricity into a jar. They connected the business end of a friction generator to the inside of an otherwise empty jar. That didnt
work; when the generator stopped, they couldnt get any juice out of the jar. Then
they filled the jar with water, thinking that perhaps the electric fluid (whatever that
might be) would dissolve in it. They were disappointed to obtain the same null
result as without water. After a lengthy, frustrating series of failures, it was time to
disassemble the apparatus and perhaps move on to better things. Cunaeus picked up
the jar with one hand, and went to pull the wire out of the water with his other.
Every nerve in his body lit up. He was certain that he was going to die. A fine
Dutch expletive and a loud crash likely announced the discovery of the Leyden
jar.
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21
At least the experiment was a success. Cunaeus quickly recovered and lived to
enjoy fame as co-discoverer of the Leyden jar.
Van Musschenbroek experienced his own accidental electric shock a short time
later. He reported to the French scientist Ren-Antoine Ferchault de Raumur
(inventor of the alcohol thermometer) that it took two days to feel like himself
again and that he would not take a second shock for the entire kingdom of France.
Further experimentation by less-traumatized researchers revealed that water was
unnecessary. William Watson (an English physician, in the tradition of Gilbert)
showed around 1747 that lining a glass jar with metal foil on the inner and outer
surfaces produced much the same behavior without water. That arrangement
worked somewhat better, in fact, and this form of the Leyden jar quickly came to
dominate.
FIGURE 8.
Leyden jar of Watsons type (shown here being discharged)
http://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/~eugeniik/instruments/archaic/leyden_jars.htm
Watson was even able to send an electrical effect across the Thames at Westminster
Bridge that year. A modified Leyden jar of his design connected to one end of a
wire was able to produce a visible spark at the other end. We see in Watsons experiment yet another anticipation of electrical telegraphy.
From the success of Watsons water-free jar, scientists came to understand that van
Musschenbroek and Cunaeus had gotten the result that they were seeking entirely
by accident. Accident or not, the Leyden jar proved an important development. By
acting as an accumulator of electricity, scientists could charge up the Leyden jar
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with a friction generator, and then discharge the jar all at once, allowing them to
produce more powerful effects (like near-electrocution) than had been possible.
The device is today called a capacitor, and appears in less dramatic forms in virtually every electronic circuit.
As it happens, the Leyden jar was actually discovered a couple of months earlier,
by the Pomeranian cleric Ewald Jrgens Georg von Kleist. In October of 1745 he,
too, had stumbled across the Leyden jar after traversing a path remarkably similar to that followed later by van Musschenbroek and Cunaeus. Hed reported his
findings in November, thus anticipating the Leyden group by a couple of months.
Nevertheless, the name Leyden jar was coined early on and stuck, and relatively
few today are even aware that von Kleist was first. Perhaps its just as well, for
Pomeranian jar sounds rather like a storage container for a small dog.
So, how does a Leyden jar work? For that matter, how do those friction machines
work? Lets answer those questions now, rather than waiting for another 150 years
of history to pass, and get started on disentangling a language problem associated
with electricity.
Today, we have the benefit of knowing that matter consists of atoms, and that atoms
contain electrons. These are modern notions, of course.20 The investigators weve
introduced so far did not know about the structure of matter, and so they groped in
the darkness. In fact, it is their struggle that has illuminated and informed our
understanding. They could not know that friction machines depend on the fact that
electrons in a given material are bound imperfectly to their host atoms. The strength
of this binding depends on the details of the material, as well as on external factors
such as temperature. It is more likely than not that two different materials will have
differing affinities for electrons. Consequently, a net transfer of electrons will generally take place to the material with the greater affinity, leaving that material with a
net surplus of electrons, and the other with a deficiency of electrons. To use du
Fays language, one material will exhibit vitreous electricity, and the other will be
resinous. In modern terms, one will be positively charged, and the other will be
negatively charged.
From the foregoing description, it would seem that rubbing is not fundamentally
needed. Indeed, thats right. Contact between dissimilar materials is the basic
requirement. Anyone who has seen the sparks produced as a piece of cellophane
adhesive tape is rapidly pulled off a surface has seen evidence that this is the case.
20.With due apologies to Democritus.
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23
Rubbing is simply an expedient way to get a greater surface area to come into intimate contact (the key word is intimate, for a separation of a few atomic diameters is
sufficient to prevent functioning).
Again, depending on the materials involved, as well as on external factors (such as
temperature and humidity), the state of charge of a material may persist for varying
amounts of time. With good insulators, its possible for charge to be retained for
hours or days (yet longer durations are possible, but less common).
Its also possible for two identical materials to have different states of charge, but
not without an external influence to break the symmetry. A friction generator is a
perfect external influence for driving the transfer of some charge from one metal
electrode to another in a Leyden jar. Thanks to the excellent insulating qualities of
the jars glass, any displacement of charge can persist for a surprisingly long time.
Researchers quickly discovered that one could get a nasty shock from a Leyden jar
that has lain undisturbed for hours or even days.
Over the years, the phrase charge up a Leyden jar or charge up a capacitor
came into common usage. To many, that evokes an image of filling up a jar with
electrons, but that isnt the right picture at all. What actually happens is that some
charge from one electrode moves over to the other; the total amount of charge
doesnt change. And if the phrase is charge it up with electricity we have a double
language problem. Here, electricity is not a substitute for electrons. Rather, it is
being used as a proxy for electrical energy. Charges that have been separated
have the potential to perform some function as they attempt to return to their unseparated state. They can move things, heat things, break things. Thus, charge it up
with electricity really means separate charges so that they will have electrical
potential energy. The cumbersome nature of the more accurate statement explains
why the shorthand language is universally used, misleading as it may be.
With that interlude completed, we can now relate the wonderful story of Abb JeanAntoine Nollet. It is he who named and popularized the Leyden jar, but hes better
remembered for a delightful experiment to determine the speed of electricity.
Again, this phrase must not be taken to mean the speed of electrons. Rather, interpret it as meaning the speed with which an electrical effect may travel. In 1746 he
arranged enough Carthusian monks to form a circle of about a mile in circumference (thats a lot of monks).21 Each monk was electrically connected to his neighbors through a length of iron wire. When Nollet connected a charged Leyden jar to
the assembly, the monks all leapt into the air at the same time. Luckily, monks of
the Carthusian order dont take a vow of silence, for there was almost certainly
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some shouting. Nollets charming demonstration showed that electrical effects are
powerful, travel a significant distance and move very fast.
FIGURE 9.
The Abb Jean-Antoine Nollet
Up to this point, the story of electricity is purely European, driven mainly by gentlemen born of high station. The next big contribution comes from the New World,
from someone who began life near the bottom of society. Benjamin Franklin was
the tenth of seventeen children of a Boston soap maker. His poor family apprenticed him at the age of 12 to his older brother, James, a printer. He and James did
not get along, unfortunately, and Ben eventually ran away to Philadelphia. Arriving
with only enough money for a few breadrolls to munch on, the 17-year old Franklin
managed to find employment in printing shops. The runaway teen eventually
became a wealthy and respected social lion, and chose to retire at the age of 42.
He was free to pursue whatever activities interested him, and at that time in his life,
electricity was his preoccupation. A gentleman (and Fellow of the Royal Society)
named Peter Collinson had sent a gift of electrical apparatus to the Philadelphia
Library Company in 1746, the same year Nollet startled his monks. The Library
21.The number of monks involved ranges from 180 to over 700, depending on which source
you consult. The earliest published account, written by Joseph Priestley in 1767 (The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments), doesnt specify a number, only the total circumference. It does mention a subsequent demonstration in front of
the King himself, with 180 royal guardsmen (perhaps because willing monks were in
short supply; word gets around). They jumped just as well as the monks.
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25
Company had been Franklins project, and Collinsons gift to the Company was,
effectively, a gift to Franklin, who became so fascinated with the subject that he
proceeded to purchase still more electrical devices (including the wondrous Leyden
jar). He read everything he could on the subject, and soon Franklin knew as much
about electricity as any expert. When he got around to the writings of du Fay, he
was struck by the inefficiency of the two-fluid theory. He felt that a single fluid theory could explain things at least as well. Instead of vitreous and resinous electricity,
perhaps all electrical phenomena could be understood as due to a surplus or deficiency of a single entity. Abb Nollet, a strong proponent of his countrymans twofluid theory, at first refused to believe that the single-fluid theory could have come
from a place as backward as America. He assumed that it was a joke contrived by
his detractors on the Continent. Once he discovered that there really was a Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia who had recently taken up the study of electricity,
Nollet set about to craft learned rebuttals to the upstarts proposals.
In 1750, Franklin proposed the experiment for which he is most famous. As had
others, Franklin suspected that lightning was electrical in nature, but clear proof
was lacking.22 He devised an experiment to settle the question once and for all. The
description of his proposal has been mangled in so many ways by so many sloppy
authors that it is best to let Franklin speak for himself:
On the top of some high tower or steeple, place a kind of centry-box [sentry-box]
big enough to contain a man and an electrical stand. From the middle of the stand
let an iron rod rise and pass bending out of the door, and then upright 20 or 30 feet,
pointed very sharp at the end. If the electrical stand be kept clean and dry, a man
standing on it when such clouds are passing low, might be electrified and afford
sparks, the rod drawing fire to him from a cloud. If any danger to the man should be
apprehended (though I think there would be none) let him stand on the floor of his
box, and now and then bring near to the rod the loop of a wire that has one end fastened to the leads, he holding it by a wax handle; so the sparks, if the rod is electrified, will strike from the rod to the wire, and not affect him.
Note that he makes no mention of trying to get lightning to strike the apparatus. His
proposal describes an arrangement for drawing sparks from storm clouds that have
not yet generated lightning strikes. Moreover, he describes how the observer is to
be insulated, and even offers advice how to reduce the risk still further.
22.It should be obvious that Franklin did not discover electricity, as too many textbooks
state. Whos writing these things, and why do they get paid?
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On 20 May 1752, this experiment was performed, but not by Franklin. ThomasFranois d'Alibard had translated Franklins proposal into French, and the scientific
community there quickly resolved to see if the American was correct. Under dAlibards instructions, a 40-foot high pointed iron bar was erected in the middle of a
garden at Marly-la-Ville in St. Germain. The bar was kept insulated from the earth.
This insulation included the supporting lines, which were isolated from the earth
through empty wine bottles (mais bien sr! see Figure 10). A storm cloud passing by produced the predicted effect, allowing sparks to be drawn from the insulated bar. News of this success swept the Continent, and the experiment was soon
repeated in many places. Overnight, Franklin became the scientific hero of the
Enlightenment. But Franklin didnt know it.
FIGURE 10.
Franklins sentry-box experiment, carried out by the French
From Expriences et Observations sur lElectricit, trans. by

dAlibard, 2nd ed., vol. II, 1756.
Franklin himself finally got around to running a version of the experiment on the
15th of June. He had been waiting for the completion of a spire at Christs Church
in Philadelphia, but construction was progressing slowly. Tired of waiting, he
improvised an alternative, using a kite to carry a conductor to great heights. With
his 21-year old son William assisting, Franklin flew his famous kite in a storm, and
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waited.23 After a time, they noticed the free fibers of the hemp twine suddenly
stand out. When the twine was wet from the rain that was now falling, it became a
good enough conductor to allow Franklin to draw sparks from a key tied to the
twine.24
Again, its important to stress that there was no lightning. Franklin had correctly
reasoned that it takes clouds a fair amount of time to develop a sufficiently large
charge imbalance to produce a lightning strike. His experiment was designed to
detect that charge imbalance well in advance of a strike. Nonetheless, flying a kite
in stormy weather is extremely dangerous, and you should not even think of
attempting to replicate Franklins experiment.
Franklins pointy conductor is still used today as a lightning rod. The only difference between it and the sentry box setup is that the rod must be well connected
(electrically speaking) to the earth, rather than insulated from it. Contrary to widespread misunderstanding (and common linguistic usage) the rod is not intended to
work by attracting lightning to itself, in the manner of a sacrificial target. Rather, its
job is primarily to drain off the built-up charge (or, if you prefer, to restore charge
balance), precisely to prevent lightning from striking in the first place. Of course, as
with virtually everything else in life, lightning rods are not 100% effective, but they
do significantly reduce the occurrence of lightning strikes. Franklin had proposed
the lightning rod before his Philadelphia experiment, but the Royal Society in
England found it too far-fetched to take seriously. After the French demonstrated
that Franklin knew what he was talking about, the Royal Society made a rapid
about-face and elected Franklin a Fellow of the Society. Lightning rods soon
became common adjuncts to buildings, saving countless structures and lives from
lightning-induced fires.
23.Paintings and other depictions of the experiment invariably show William as a young boy,
not the man of 21 that he was. Perhaps it is artistic license, with a young William representing universal childlike curiosity. Or perhaps its just another instance of sloppy factchecking.
24.Occasionally, some doubt is expressed over whether Franklin actually carried out this
experiment (there are books dedicated to the debunking of what is alleged to be the kite
myth). William was the only witness, and Franklin himself did not write anything about
it. The earliest account comes from Joseph Priestley, written about 15 years after the fact,
after a correspondence with Franklin. The letter from Franklin is written in the style of
how-to instruction, rather than a description of an event, leaving some room for controversy. Perhaps it is relevant to note that, despite a famously painful estrangement of father
from son as the two supported opposite sides during the American Revolution, William
never uttered a word suggesting that the experiment didnt happen.
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The painful experiences of the Leyden team had hinted at the dangers of electricity,
but the whimsy of Nollets jumping monks may have lulled some into underestimating the risks. Regrettably, Georg Wilhelm Richmann of St. Petersburg became
the first to show that the dangers were very real. On 6 August 1753, during an
investigation of lightning inspired by Franklins accounts, Richmann and one M.
Sokoloff (an engraver brought along to document his discoveries) were observing
an electrical gnomon devised by Richmann. The device was a primitive voltmeter designed to provide a quantitative measure of the electrical pressure induced by
a passing storm. While they huddled close to the device, lightning struck, instantly
stunning Sokoloff into unconsciousness. When he awoke, he saw that Richmann
was dead. A small spot of blood on his forehead was all that marked where lightning had entered the recently departed professor. More dramatically, his left shoe
had been blown off where the lightning had exited, with his foot much worse for
the wear. Moral: Dont try this at home, even if you are a professional.
Sidebar: Franklins polarity error
Franklin replaced vitreous with positive and resinous with negative. So great was
his influence that the older terms were permanently displaced almost overnight.
Unfortunately, state countless textbooks, Franklin made a mistake in assigning
those polarities. However, polarities are arbitrary, so it is hard to see how one could
ever be wrong in selecting one convention or the other. Its as if someone were to
assert that left and right had been assigned incorrectly long ago. As long as one
sticks consistently with a choice once its made, there is no fundamental problem.
However, Franklin did indeed make a mistake: His single-fluid theory is wrong. It
is true that in ordinary conductors, electrical current results solely from electron
motion. In those cases, a single-fluid theory explains phenomena well. However,
there also exist positively charged entities, such as protons, positrons (anti-electrons), and positive ions. These can also move, and therefore can constitute an electrical current. This consideration is hardly esoteric, for an ordinary flashlight
battery depends on the motion of ionic species for its operation. So, too, does your
nervous system. Thus, strictly speaking, du Fay was correct, and Franklin was
wrong. There really are two kinds of electrical fluids.
The idea that lightning could have anything in common with the feeble sparks generated by friction machines intrigued everyone. The experiments by dAlibard and
Franklin showed that these were indeed manifestations of a single phenomenon.
Still, it was natural enough to ask whether the output of friction machines could be
increased enough to make this case even more convincing. The Dutch scientist
Martinus van Marum designed a huge generator in 1784 that was ideal for this purpose. The machine consisted of two parallel rotating glass disks (basically, a
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Hauksbee-like design on steroids, with disks replacing globes), each 165cm in

diameter, mounted 20cm apart on a single meter-long axle. With this enormous friction machine, van Marum produced sparks up to about 65cm in length, corresponding to an estimated 300kV!
FIGURE 11.
Replica of van Marums machine (note the bank of Leyden jars)
http://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/~eugeniik/history/marum.html
Franklin undoubtedly would have been most impressed by van Marums generator.
Whether he was aware of its existence is unknown, however. He never commented
on it in any known correspondence, but thats hardly surprising, given that he was
somewhat busy with other matters, such as establishing a new government after
fighting a revolutionary war.
Its alive!
While van Marum was considering preliminary designs for his mammoth generator, and Franklin was working deft diplomatic magic to win the sympathy of a
monarchical France toward a republican revolution, Luigi Galvani was performing
some routine dissections of frogs in his laboratory at the University of Bolognas
medical college.25 It was a dry November day in 1780 and the bracing air cut
through his laboratory just as Galvani cut into a frogs leg with his scalpel. To his
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Its alive!
utter shock the leg kicked. He was puzzled that this phenomenon was only intermittently repeatable. Investigating further, he discovered that the kicking occurred only
when the leg was on a metal plate while the scalpel was touching a relevant nerve.
The conclusion was inescapable: Electricity caused the jumping. A dead frogs leg
kicks just as if it were alive, thanks to electricity. Galvani could hardly contain his
excitement. Had he found the secret of life?
Galvani soon discovered that asking the question was a great deal easier than
answering it. The lack of a good theoretical framework meant that most of his
experiments would yield null or confusing results. Plus, he had more than a full
time job in his classes to teach, a busy medical practice to run (including much
charitable work for the poor citizens of Bologna), and the many laboratory demonstrations he had to prepare and present. His electrical research progressed slowly.
FIGURE 12.
Luigi (Aloisio) Galvani
Somewhere along the way, he understood that his frog legs could be used as electrical indicators. His ignorance of how they worked was secondary to the fact that the
frog legs were exquisitely sensitive. Where Franklin had to draw sparks, Galvani
25.He was born Luigi, but preferred to be called Aloisio (after his patron saint). Different
biographical sources call him by one name or the other, leading to some confusion.
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only had to observe some twitching. No one could have known then that, had Galvani combined his frog legs with van Marums giant generator, the age of wireless
communications could have begun a century earlier than it did. True, such a development would have been bad news for frogs, but thats only a problem if youre a
frog.
Once Galvani got the idea of using frogs as electrical indicators, he reasoned that
their highly sensitive legs would allow him to detect electricity in nearby storm
clouds without dAlibards 40-foot pointy iron bar, or Franklins kite. And so one
fine blustery October day in 1786, Galvani took some frog legs up to the roof of his
building and hung them on an iron railing, using hooks that happened to be made of
copper. Then he sat, waited and watched. Just as he had hoped, he eventually
observed twitching. He was surprised, though, that no storm clouds were yet visible. Could frog legs be that sensitive? As he continued his observations, he realized
that the frog legs twitched whenever a passing breeze happened to blow them
against the iron bars of the railing. He forgot all about dAlibard and Franklin, and
went back downstairs to study this new finding. The twitching obviously couldnt
have anything to do with lifeless copper and iron, and so he concluded that animal
electricity was the cause of the twitching. More than ever, he felt he was on the
threshold of unlocking the very secrets of life.
He published the culmination of eleven years of research in 1791, as part of a multiple-volume set of the local Institute of Sciences memoirs. His contribution was
such a sensation that it was excerpted and reprinted as a separate monograph.
Twenty-five years later, Mary Shelley would be inspired in part by Galvanis discoveries to pen Frankenstein.26 Galvani was famous. More precious to him was
that he was beloved by his family, by the many grateful poor whom he treated for
free, and by his students. Life was good for the 54-year old doctor.
Its not alive!

Alessandro Volta was one of many scientists who had been following Galvanis
work with great avidity. Volta was a young professor at the University of Pavia, and
initially agreed with Galvanis declaration that lifeless copper and iron could not
give rise to the twitching. The animal electricity theory seemed as obviously correct
26.Despite the depictions of Hollywood versions of Frankenstein, Shelley makes no explicit
mention of electricity animating the monster of her novel.
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Its not alive!
to him as it had to Galvani. But as he ran his own experiments, doubts emerged. If,
as Galvani was arguing, the life force that drove the twitching resided solely in
the frog leg, why were two different metals always required? It dawned on him that
the metals were essential to the phenomenon, not merely incidental. Volta began to
publish a series of increasingly critical rebuttals, and the two men became adversaries.
International politics then intervened. Napolon Bonapartes army liberated
Bologna and other regions in 1797 from the alleged tyranny of Austria.27 The government of the Cisalpine Republic established by Bonaparte required all state
employees, including university professors, to swear allegiance to it. Galvani defiantly refused, and was summarily dismissed from the University. He hoped to compensate for the loss of salary with income from his medical practice, but his patients
had never been the wealthy Bolognese, and the political turmoil only made things
worse. Galvani suffered poverty for the first time in his life. Worse, the professor of
medicine was powerless to help his beloved wife when she fell seriously ill. Her
death shattered him. He was eventually allowed to return to the University despite
his earlier refusal, but this small bit of good news hardly mattered. He followed his
wife in December of 1798.
Volta fared much better. He was apolitical a nerd, really. A gentleman to be sure,
but a nerd nonetheless. As long as he was free to carry out his research, he didnt
particularly care who was in charge. In keeping with the spirit of the times, he
developed a convenient amnesia that his grandfather had been a count, and so was
perfectly happy now to be Citizen Volta. Thus unencumbered by politics, Volta proceeded to study Galvanis pretended animal electricity in detail. As the snideness
evident in that reference clearly shows, Volta had come to believe with certainty
that the electricity came from the combination of dissimilar metals. Biology had
nothing to do with it. The challenge was to prove it.
He recognized that he would have to invent an electrical indicator that was comparable to a frog leg in sensitivity, but constructed out of non-living materials. His
solution was an ingenious improvement over existing devices. He bent a thin piece
of straw into a V-shape, and suspended it upside-down on a conductive pivot. Any
charge deposited onto the straw through the pivot connection would cause the two
27.Within a few years he would declare himself Emperor, enraging Beethoven, who had
originally planned to dedicate his Third Symphony to Bonaparte the liberator. Tearing up
the dedication page, Beethoven renamed the symphony the more generic Eroica, the
name by which it has been known ever since.
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33
arms of the V to repel. The angle they formed would be a measure of the amount of
charge deposited.28 Figure 13 shows an actual electroscope used by Volta. An electrical connection to the pivot is made through the brass terminal on top.
Now came his coup de grce.29 He put two dissimilar metals together (copper and
zinc plates, in his first experiment). If his theory was correct, the mere contact of
these two metals would leave one with a net positive charge, and the other with a
net negative one. He wasnt concerned about the polarity at this point; all he cared
about was the net charge part of the phenomenon. He picked up one of the plates
with an insulated tool, and placed it in contact with the electroscope terminal. He
put the plate back into contact with its mate, and then touched the electroscope with
it again. After several iterations, he could see that the straw arms were indeed moving apart.
FIGURE 13.
Volta and his straw electroscope
Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza
Voltas experiment showed convincingly that dissimilar metals in contact would

produce electricity. It was therefore unnecessary to postulate some magical animal
28.Once again, what we mean by deposit charge is really displace charge.
29.Pronounced coo de grahss, not coo de grah. The gras in Mardi Gras is pronounced
grah, but thats because its a different word.
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Its not alive!
electricity to explain what Galvani saw. He came to these conclusions in April of

1798, when a dispirited Galvani would no longer have cared.
Although his definitive dismissal of animal electricity was impressive and established his reputation as a first among equals, Voltas crowning triumph was yet to
come. Having proven that contact electrification was a fact, he reasoned that it
should be possible to intensify the effect by using multiple elements in a stack. He
found that mere contact between two metals didnt work very well, although it had
served well enough for the animal electricity experiment. Further experimentation
revealed that using a fluid to couple the two metals worked much better. The basic
repeating cell consequently consisted of a copper and zinc disk, with a brine-soaked
piece of felt in between. In 1800 he assembled a great many of these cells in a column (pila, in Italian). When his report was translated into English, people referred
to his device as a Voltaic Pile. Today we call it a battery.
The pile was revolutionary because it was the first steady source of electricity.
You didnt have to spin or rub anything. It was cheap and easy to build, and the
electrical pressure could be adjusted readily by changing the number of cells in
the stack. Not surprisingly, Voltas pile soon became an indispensable piece of laboratory equipment the world over. With it, one could easily excite frogs legs, melt
small quantities of metals, and repeatedly deliver both non-lethal and lethal shocks.
Although the underlying details of its operation were not yet fully understood, the
mere fact of its existence set the stage for the key developments of the 19th century.
The telegraph, telephone, electric motor, electric light and wireless communication
were just around the corner. The modern age of electricity was dawning.
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35
FIGURE 14.
Voltas column (pila or pile)
Cu
Brine-soaked
felt
Zn
Detail of one cell (other versions
substitute silver for copper)
http://www.corrosion-doctors.org/Biographies/VoltaBio.htm
In recognition of these achievements, Bonaparte made Volta a Count in 1810, and
in 1881, the international physics community named the electrical unit, the volt, in
his honor.
True to form, Volta weathered Bonapartes downfall with grace. He seized the
opportunity to retire to an estate near his birthplace of Como, as hed always
dreamed. He lived there to the ripe age of 82, enjoying his retirement years as a
gentleman farmer. The Tempio Voltiano, a museum dedicated to honoring his work,
was built near Lake Como in 1928 to house his original papers and instruments, and
remains a popular tourist destination for nerds of all ages.30
30.The original plan was to open the Tempio in time to celebrate the centennial of Volta and
his pila. Unfortunately, the whole place burned down in 1899, just before its public dedication. The vast bulk of Voltas original papers and instruments were lost in an instant. It
took almost 30 years to locate the few surviving artifacts scattered over the globe, reconstruct others, and rebuild the museum.
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Appendix: Tracing the Legend of Thales

Now lets take a look at that legend of Thales and amber. The earliest known reference to an amber effect is found in Platos Timaeus:
... marvels that are observed about the attraction of amber and the Heraclean
stones... c. 360 BCE; translation by Benjamin Jowett
Aside from having been written a quarter-millennium after Thales, note that the
quotation conspicuously fails to mention the man at all. Plato does mention Heraclean stones, an alternative term for lodestones, named for a region rich in magnetic ore. Such ore is also found in Magnesia (home of the mythical characters
Jason and Achilles; the modern city of Volos is near the center of that ancient prefecture of Thessaly), and the name derived from that region eventually prevailed,
giving us the word magnet.31 The areas mineral wealth extended to magnesium ore
as well, whose name is even more directly derived from the regions name.
Note also that Plato makes no distinction between the amber effect and magnetism.
Other authorities occasionally cite Aristotle but, in all of his extant writings, there is
just a single sentence linking Thales with magnetism:
Thales, too, to judge from what is recorded about him, seems to have held soul to
be a motive force, since he said that the magnet has a soul in it because it moves the
iron.
De Anima (On the Soul); c. 250 BCE; translation by J. A. Smith
That sentence, written 350 years after Thales a century after Plato is indirect
at best (.... from what is recorded about him...). And instead of describing a discovery, it reads as if Thales were invoking an already-familiar phenomenon to
present a logically dubious proposition about souls.
In some other cases, one encounters citations of writings by Theophrastus (Aristotles favorite pupil and successor), or much later ones by both Pliny the Elder and
31.Although Plato preferred Heraclean stones, in Ion he cites Euripides use of magnetis,
around 450 BCE. It should also be mentioned that other ancient cities in that general part
of the world were also named Magnesia, so there is some disagreement among authorities
about which Magnesia gave rise to the word.
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37
his nephew, Pliny the Younger. The Elder was a Roman naturalist who, among
other works, wrote a 37-volume encyclopedia of natural history (it has survived
intact to the present day). He died (apparently from some sort of respiratory distress) while observing Mount Vesuvius during the early hours of its famous eruption in 79 CE. The Youngers eyewitness account of the eruption itself (from a safe
30 km away, across the Bay of Naples) makes for thrilling reading.32 Voluminous
as they are, their collective writings also do not provide any accounts of relevant
discoveries by Thales. So where does the amber legend come from?
Diogenes Laertius, in a somewhat gossipy (thus popular) and certainly unreliable
biography of philosophers, gets around to adding a brief reference to the amber
effect in connection with Thales, some 600 years after Platos magnet reference
(again, in a single sentence):
But Aristotle and Hippias say that he [Thales] attributed souls also to lifeless
things, forming his conjecture from the nature of the magnet, and of amber.33
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers; c. 250 CE; translation by C.
D. Yonge
It is unfortunate that nothing of Hippias has survived, for the sentence still does not
describe a discovery. Moreover, the brevity of that quotation perhaps suggests
something of the importance attached to it. Its length certainly stands in contrast to
that of some of his other stories about Thales:
Some assert that he was married, and that he had a son named Cybisthus; others, on
the contrary, say that he never had a wife, but that he adopted the son of his sister;
and that once being asked why he did not himself become a father, he answered,
32.Pliny the Elder is also responsible for popularizing an explanation of the origin of Magnesia and magnet. In Book 36, paragraph 127 of his Historia Naturalis he cites the Greek
poet Nicanders tale of a shepherd named Magnes, whose sandals (actually, the iron nails
holding them together) stuck to an outcrop of rock in the fields atop Mount Ida. The
Younger was always amazed at how much his uncle could write, but we now know part of
the secret: He either just made things up or passed along stories from others without bothering to investigate further (hint, Mr. Pliny: Nicander was a poet, as in not a historian.).
Fact-checking only slows you down. Its no wonder that the Romans contributed almost
nothing of fundamental value to science and mathematics.
33.There is even an unresolved question among scholars about whether the amber reference
was added later by another writer. As with Platos quotation, this one makes no distinction between the amber effect and magnetism.
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that it was because he was fond of children. They say, too, that when his mother
exhorted him to marry, he said, No, by Jove, it is not yet time. And afterwards,
when he was past his youth, and she was again pressing him earnestly, he said, It is
no longer time.
In any event, subsequent authors greatly embellish the slim tidbits from Aristotle
and Laertius to credit Thales with having first observed the amber effect. Notably,
however, Thales is nowhere in Gilberts thorough historical review, so we are left to
conclude that the now-popular story takes hold after the year 1600. Its indeed
amazing how so much has been made out of so little, and how difficult it is to correct an error once in print.
Teaching is easy; its un-teaching thats hard.
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39
Pieces of the Puzzle
CHAPTER 3
Voltas pila revolutionized electrical research by lowering the barrier to participation. This inexpensive, versatile and steady source of electrical power greatly accelerated the rate of discovery simply by making it easier for more people to perform
experiments. Suddenly, it was possible for just about anybody to get into the act.
What had recently been almost exclusively a wealthy gentlemans recreational pastime suddenly became an obsession for nerds of all backgrounds. The battery liberated the inner geek as it democratized research.
This liberation succeeded in spite of a minor embarrassment, however: The battery
did not quite work according to the principles that led to its invention. Recall that
Volta had offered contact electrification as the explanation for Galvanis kicking
frog legs and his own electrometer indications. Although that remains the accepted
explanation for at least part of those observations (even though some doubts persist
about the details), his leap to the battery required the somewhat arbitrary addition
of a fluid. It was appreciated only later by others (especially by the remarkable
Michael Faraday, whom well meet shortly) that the fluid is by no means an incidental convenience for maximizing the effective contact area. Rather, the fluid
(now known as the electrolyte) actively participates in chemical reactions that ultimately produce the electrical output. When the reactants have been consumed, the
battery stops working. Thus the battery does not produce energy forever from the
mere static contact of two dissimilar metals, as implied by Voltas original explanation; no magic is involved. Instead the electrical energy comes from the release of
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energy already stored in chemical bonds, and is therefore finite. That there is no
free lunch is perhaps the most fundamental of the physical laws, and the battery is
sadly no exception.34
None of these developments bothered Volta in the least, of course. By the time
other scientists got around to asking these tough questions, he was enjoying his
retirement years in Como, having long ago disengaged from the research that had
brought him fame. And for the most part, others werent terribly bothered, either.
The battery worked, Volta was a nice guy, and that was enough for many. For the
few who did care about the mistake, the error simply gave them another enjoyable
puzzle to solve.
One of the many scientists excited by Voltas marvelous invention was Hans Christian rsted (Oersted). The Dane was a disciple of the philosopher Immanuel Kant,
whose musings rsted distilled down to the idea that all phenomena are produced
by the same power.35 For rsted, the belief in a unified theory of everything was
more than an abstract philosophical notion. It was a profound organizing principle,
a reductionist lens through which he perceived the world. He saw the pila as a
means for validating his beliefs about the nature of nature.
As did his contemporaries, he knew that electricity and magnetism individually
exhibited attractive and repulsive behaviors. Furthermore, he was well aware, as
were most good scientists, that iron rods were sometimes found magnetized after
nearby lightning strikes. Although Franklin himself had expressed skepticism about
any direct link, rsted ignored those doubts.36 He chose instead to regard those
observations as further evidence that electricity and magnetism were indeed merely
different aspects of a more fundamental power.
Despite his belief, and despite having all of the necessary apparatus at his disposal,
it took a surprisingly long twenty years before he succeeded in proving it. In his
34.The principle of energy conservation was not yet a foundational tenet of science, although
many researchers had learned lifes lessons and thus had gained an intuitive understanding that one could not expect something for nothing.
35.This saying became rsteds oft-uttered credo.
36.Franklin felt that the most probable explanation was that lightning heated these iron
objects to a high enough temperature that, upon cooling, they would be spontaneously
magnetized by the earths magnetic field. His theory explained many inconsistencies,
including why some rods actually became demagnetized after a lightning strike. Franklin
was a very good scientist!
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41
defense, he spent much of that time engaged in many other activities, including an
intense study of chemistry, as well as chasing after tenured faculty positions. Failing in the latter endeavor, he settled for earning a living as a lecturer, and quickly
became one of the most popular teachers at the University of Copenhagen. He was
so busy with these other activities that he apparently didnt get around to undertaking his unification experiments in earnest until around 1816. The basic setup he
contrived was simplicity itself: A battery, some wire, and a compass. He reasoned
that a current in the wire ought to generate magnetism. On one occasion in the winter of 1819, he chose to perform an experiment with his apparatus in front of a
group of students.
In his own words, heres what happened:
The magnetical needle, though included in a box, was disturbed; but as the effect
was very feeble, and must, before its law was discovered, seem very irregular, the
experiment made no strong impression on the audience.37
Translation: He thought he saw something, but no one else did.
37.From an entry by rsted on thermoelectricity for the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, 1830.

The years it took to find a link between electricity and magnetism (when he was allegedly
actively seeking one) soon gave rise to suspicion that his discovery had been a total accident. After all, if you hand a battery, some wire, and a compass to some reasonably bright
students, they will generally stumble across the relevant effect in less than an hour (Ive
actually run this experiment with 5th-graders). Its almost impossible not to discover it, in
fact. Perhaps the most charitable interpretation is that rsteds stubbornness led him to
repeat only a limited set of experiments that were unfortunately doomed to fail. Then he
got lucky. His inability to understand subsequently developed mathematical descriptions
of his discovery has left him vulnerable to less generous views. The most popular version
has rsted demonstrating the heating potential of electrical current, when a nearby compass needle deflects, demonstrating an effect that he hadnt been searching for. Like the
Thales myth, this story has been retold so many times (by none other than J. C. Maxwell
himself, for one) that it has acquired the status of fact. However, its important to keep in
mind that the ambiguity of the available sources neither confirms nor rules out the damn
lucky professor hypothesis.
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FIGURE 15.
Photo of actual compass used by rsted
He could hardly declare success on the basis of such an ambiguous result. If he

couldnt impress his own students students who liked him, no less it was
unlikely that hed impress anyone else. He needed an unequivocal demonstration.
He met with failure after failure. The compass needle either stubbornly refused to
budge at all, or moved so slightly or unpredictably that he couldnt draw any consistent conclusions. Despite these frustrations, he stubbornly held to his belief that
the experiment should work, and persisted long past when others would have given
up. At one point he began wondering whether his battery was capable of providing
enough current (whatever enough might be), so he built a much larger pile in the
spring of 1820. As hed done many times before, he placed a wire near his trusty
compass, then closed a switch. The needle rotated by a definite amount at last. The
powerful Voltaic pile produced a noticeable effect even though he had oriented the
wire and compass incorrectly, as apparently on virtually every previous occasion.38
In cartoon form, his experiment looked like this:
38.If we are inclined to grant rsted the benefit of the doubt, the more powerful battery
helped to compensate for excessively thin wires, and for incorrect orientation of the compass. He apparently believed that large wires would tend to mask the effect he was seeking, so he initially used very thin wires. Unfortunately, these have high resistance, which
reduces current. In turn, a reduced current corresponds to a reduced magnetic force.
Wrong placement of the compass based on his not unreasonable expectation that the
magnetic force should be aligned along the direction of current made things even
worse. In brief, he evidently worked overtime to stack the deck against success. Fortunately, his persistence gave luck enough time to prevail.
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43
FIGURE 16.
rsted and the electromagnet
battery
battery
compass
switch
compass
switch
With the switch in the open position (as in the left drawing), no current flows, and
the compass points north (here drawn as toward the right). With the switch closed,
current flows, and the wire exerts a magnetic force. That force rotates the compass
needle, pushing it to align more or less orthogonally to the wire. It is thus a peculiar
force, as it pushes at right angles to the direction of the electrical current that produces it. Undoubtedly, this unexpected behavior contributed to rsteds long delay
in discovering it. By carefully orienting the compass to look for deflections in the
normal direction, he may have cleverly designed many of his experiment to fail.
rsted was gratified at the fulfillment of his Kantian quest, even if he was puzzled
by several aspects of the artificial magnetism he generated. He was particularly surprised that the compass needle pointed one way when above the wire, but the opposite way when below it. It appeared that the magnetic influence circled the wire, in
addition to its orientation at right angles to the current flow. Magnetism was even
more perplexing than hed originally found. He spent a couple of months running
additional experiments and double-checking his results, just to be sure. Finally, he
felt confident enough to reveal to the world what he had discovered. On 21 July
1820 he sent off a four-page letter to scientific societies throughout Europe (and to
selected individual scientists as well). It was an instant sensation, much like dAlibards verification of Franklins conjecture so many years before.39 rsted won a
39.Some sources spuriously credit Gian Domenico Romagnosi with having anticipated
rsted, citing newspaper reports dating to 1802. Romagnosi may have been a fine lawyer, but he was no scientist. His experiment involved no current flow at all; his reports of
a compass needle being deflected therefore cannot in any way be construed as evidence
of beating rsted to the punch. His work should remain just a footnote. Like this one.
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permanent faculty position at last, and lived the remainder of his life a much
beloved figure of Danish science.
FIGURE 17.
Danish postage stamp honoring rsted
http://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/~eugeniik/history/oersted.htm
On 4 September 1820, rsteds discovery was formally reported to the French
Acadmie des Sciences. The news astounded and excited everyone present, but
none more than the brilliant and eccentric Andr-Marie Ampre.40 Electromagnetism instantly became the latest in a series of obsessions that insulated him from
tragic memories.
Ampre was born in 1775 in a small village with a long name. Polmieux (Poleymieux)-au-Mont-d'Or was a quiet hamlet near Lyon in central France. It had no
school, so Ampre was taught by his doting father. Either the teacher or the student
was very good for, by the time he was a young teen, Ampre was amazing acquaintances with prodigious powers of calculation, and with his ability to recite from
memory long entries from an encyclopedia. He spent the days happily drinking in
knowledge from a great variety of fields. The French Revolution abruptly ended
this idyll when Ampre was a young man of 18. It was his familys misfortune that
the Lyonnaise were among those who actively resisted the Revolution. In the orgy
40.His countryman and scientific Big Shot Charles Augustin Coulomb believed that electricity and magnetism were so different that there could not possibly be any link between
them. Coulombs stature was such that his opinion carried considerable weight. Thus, as
Ampre would later ruefully relate, the French failed to discover the link between electricity and magnetism for the simple reason that no one in France was looking for one.
That is one reason why the reaction to rsteds discovery was particularly extreme in
France.
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45
of violence that followed Lyons inevitable fall, Ampres beloved father a businessman and minor city official was found guilty of trumped-up charges and
sent to the guillotine. The death of his father drove the poor son mad with grief. For
the next couple of years, the inconsolable Ampre was scarcely able to speak, and
he wandered aimlessly about Lyon and environs, a pathetic figure. He gradually
recovered after a fashion and immersed himself obsessively in the subject of botany. At 21, during one of his many self-assigned field studies, he happened upon a
young woman, Cathrine-Antoinette (Julie) Carron, and miraculously began a
romance with the gentle Julie. Her father was understandably concerned with his
daughters seemingly unstable choice, and insisted that Ampre prove himself by
securing gainful employment before marriage could even be discussed. After showing his ability to attract a great many lucrative tutoring jobs, Ampre married Mlle.
Carron in 1799. A son, Jean-Jacques, was born the following year. Two years after
that, Ampre won a position teaching physics and chemistry at l'cole Centrale du
Dpartement de l'Ain (now the Lyce Lalande) in Bourg-en-Bresse, some 60km
from Lyon. The distance was great enough in that era of equine transportation that
he had to spend most of his time away from his young family in Lyon. Sadly, his
wife fell ill and died a year later, in July of 1803. The survival of his young son
(who would later enjoy academic success as a philologist) consoled him, but he
never truly recovered from this second tragedy. He took another job, this time to
teach mathematics, at lcole Polytechnique in Paris in 1804, soon married one
Jeanne-Franoise (Jenny) Potot in 1806, had a daughter, Josephine-Albine, in
1807, and was divorced from Jenny by 1808. He hopped from mathematics to languages to chemistry to various other topics. He approached each with such maniacal intensity that one might reasonably speculate that he was trying to keep painful
memories buried, more than anything else. A quiet mind is contemplative.
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FIGURE 18.
Portrait of Ampre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Andr%C3%A9_Marie_Amp%C3%A8re.jpg
The announcement of rsteds achievement virtually set Ampres already-busy
brain aflame. In a marathon nerdfest he replicated all of rsteds experiments, and
derived important additional insights along the way. He presented his first report to
the Acadmie on 18 September, just two weeks after hearing rsteds news. He followed up with another on the 25th, and then, just one week after that, presented a
comprehensive paper of almost 70 pages (sometimes, being obsessive-compulsive
is a good thing). In effect, he had started and then completed a doctoral thesis in a
month. Along the way, Ampre encountered an unexpected impediment: Extant
vocabulary was simply inadequate to describe the subject in a clear and consistent
manner. Following Shakespeares lead, he solved that problem by inventing new
words as needed:
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47
FIGURE 19.
From first page of Ampres third report to the Acadmie41
A rough translation is as follows:

Report
Presented to the Royal Academy of Sciences on 2 October 1920, where is found the
summary of that which has been read to the same Academy on 18 and 25 September 1820, on the effects of electric currents.
By M. Ampre
1st: On the mutual action of two electric currents.
I. The electromotive action manifests itself as two sorts of effects that I believe
ought to be distinguished at the outset by a precise definition.
41.Annales de chimie et de physique, 1820, vol. 15, pp. 59-74, and pp.170-218.
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I will call the first electric tension, the second electric current.
The terms tension and current remain with us, although the former has been largely
replaced by voltage in the United States. In any event, we have Ampre to thank for
explicitly separating and identifying these fundamental quantities.42 Just as water
pressure and water flow are distinct, a voltage can exist without the flow of charge
(without a current), and a current may exist without a voltage. The term current
flow is frequently encountered (but not in Ampres writings), but its another one
of those linguistic oddities that understandably confuses the uninitiated. Because a
current is already a flow (of charge), current flow is redundant at best, and meaningless at worst. But its common usage, so we use it commonly.
In his methodical study of the subject, Ampre not only provided a welcome verification of rsteds results, but went well beyond them. Ampre showed, for example, that the magnetism surrounding a current-carrying wire behaves as that around
an ordinary magnetized material.43 In a dramatic demonstration of this equivalence, Ampre showed that two adjacent current-carrying wires exert forces on
each other. If the currents are in the same direction, then the wires attract. If the currents are oppositely directed, the wires repel.44
This evident equivalence of natural and artificial magnetism emboldened
Ampre to offer an answer to an ancient question: Iron, cobalt and nickel were then
known to be magnetic, but no one could explain what made these metals special. In
an age when the existence of atoms was at best a conjecture, Ampre made a daring
intuitive leap from just a few experiments to postulate that magnetic materials
derive their properties from microscopic electric currents within them. Instead of
invoking Gilberts mysterious effluvia, he explained magnetism in terms of another,
known physical phenomenon: electricity. He noted, as had rsted, that current-carrying wires always generate a north and south pole together. As de Maricourt had
42.His influence was so great, in fact, that the modern symbol for current is I. Few engineers
today (outside of France, perhaps) are aware of its origins in Ampres use of intensit to
describe what we now call a currents strength in amperes.
43.The concept and terminology of a field were as yet undeveloped. Instead, Ampre and his
contemporaries used rsteds term, electrical conflict, to describe the curious spatial
dependencies of this magnetic force. The conflict, of course, was psychological, not electrical.
44.Indeed, this fundamental effect is today used as the basis for defining the force between
charges, even if the charges are not flowing. Measurements based on such an indirect definition present fewer experimental challenges than does measuring the forces between
charges directly.
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49
reported centuries earlier, naturally occurring magnets always have two opposite
poles as well, even if you break them into any number of pieces. The similarities
were not lost on Ampre. However, other scientists immediately raised quite reasonable objections: Where were these currents? What drove them? How could they
persist indefinitely? Ampre could not provide satisfactory answers to all of these
questions (and in fact a comprehensive explanation would not be possible until the
development of quantum mechanics, more than a century later), but today we know
that his intuition was basically correct (at least generally, if not in detail). Specifically we now know that atoms have electrons, and that these electrons may move
through the bulk of a material, orbit their host atoms, and also spin.45 All of these
types of motion constitute electric currents capable of generating magnetism, but it
is the latter property, spin, that is most important. In an ordinary, non-magnetic
materials, spins are randomly oriented, and so the magnetism they collectively generate averages to zero. But in certain special cases, the spins align, and a net magnetism results.
Ampre later derived a quantitative relationship (now known, appropriately
enough, as Ampres law) that describes the strength and direction of the magnetic
force in terms of the current in a wire, and the distance from that wire. rsted,
whose own strength was in chemistry rather than in mathematics, not only failed to
understand Ampres achievement, but went so far as to make an uncharacteristically snide remark about the clever French mathematician.46 In any case, rsted
made essentially no further contributions to the subject.
Even with Ampres substantial contributions, rsteds program for a Kantian unification of forces was incomplete, but rsted himself seemed not to notice or care.
His discovery of electromagnetism showed a definite link between electricity and
magnetism, to be sure (as reflected in the very word electromagnetism), but he left
unanswered an important question for others to ponder: If all forces derived from a
common power, shouldnt magnetism be able to produce electricity? The answer to
45.This type of spin is a quantum-mechanical property, and therefore the image usually
evoked by the word is grossly misleading. An electron, as far as we can tell, is a point
particle with no sub-structure, and points cant spin. But an electron exhibits angular
momentum nonetheless, so physicists gave this property the name spin. To avoid confusion they probably should have called it something totally unevocative of a familiar phenomenon, like numberwang, but alas...
46.The actual quotation translates roughly as The shrewdness with which the clever French
mathematician has shown little by little to convert and develop his theory in such a way
that it lets itself unite with a multitude of conflicting facts, is peculiar. (Many thanks to
Marit Kleveland Ardila for the translation!)
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Davy and Faraday
that question would ultimately lead to motors, generators, industrial power plants,
disk drives in computers, and wireless communication, to name but a few examples. In short, the answer would teleport humanity to a new universe, beyond the
fantasies of even the most creative literary lights.
Davy and Faraday

The race to answer that question would be won by a most unlikely genius. Dickensian poverty is perhaps the most succinct, poignant way to describe the circumstances of Michael Faradays early life. Even the anomalous Stephen Gray, poor
though he might have been, was well off compared with young Faraday. There
were times when the family Faraday could manage only a single loaf of bread a
week for the boy.
Apparently, man can live by bread alone at least for a time for Michael made
it to the age of 13 in sufficiently good health to begin an apprenticeship with a London bookbinder named George Riebau, in 1804. Riebau was a kind fellow who,
noticing early on that Faraday was at least as interested in reading books as in binding them, allowed young Michael to read customers books after hours. With the
finest volumes of Londons elite thus at his disposal, Faraday eagerly gave himself
a first-class education in a variety of subjects. The overused phrase voracious
reader definitely applies to him, as understatement. Books on science were his
favorite, and he devoured them all. He used what little money he could spare to purchase a few materials to carry out simple experiments of his own. He even formed a
club with a few like-minded young nerds to share in this newfound hobby. Alone or
together with his fellow club-members, Faraday would attend public lectures when
he could, always taking careful notes, and then working on them afterwards, adding
illustrations and examples. Riebau was impressed, even if he didnt quite understand what Faraday was doing.
In February of 1812, when the 20-year old Faraday was nearing the end of his
apprenticeship, Riebau showed some of these notes to a customer named William
Dance (a co-founder of the Royal Philharmonic Society). Dance was duly
impressed and handed Riebau tickets for Faraday to attend a series of public lectures by the great Humphry Davy, who was a rock star chemist, sometime poet,
frequent substance abuser (he synthesized nitrous oxide laughing gas and
used it recreationally), sex symbol and spellbinding speaker. Faraday attended
Davys four lectures at the Royal Institution in March and April with a focus that
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went beyond avidity.47 He took copious and careful notes as he listened to every
word in rapt attention.
FIGURE 20.
Humphry Davy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphry_Davy
Davy described how hed used an incredibly powerful battery of his own design to
decompose (electrolyze) certain compounds into apparently fundamental constituents. Using language not then in vogue, we can say that passing an electric current
through certain liquid compounds can force ions in solution to deionize and become
atoms. With this method, he became the first to isolate sodium and potassium,
among other achievements. Thanks to Davy, these substances were now understood
to be elements. Davy was using Voltas pile to probe the very structure of matter
47.The Royal Institution, not to be confused with the Royal Society, was founded by American scientist and arms dealer Benjamin Thompson, who fought on the side of the British
in the Revolutionary War. As Count Rumford, he married Lavoisiers widow and established, with Sir Joseph Banks, the Institution on the premise that subjecting Londons
poor to science lectures would improve their lot. Predictably, the poor stayed away in
droves. It quickly evolved into a gathering place for London high society. One of Davys
friends, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was frequently in attendance, for example. It became
the place to see and be seen.
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Davy and Faraday
itself. The invisible was no longer inaccessible. Ultimate Understanding was within
grasp!
Faraday was spellbound. After returning home, he expanded, edited and bound his
notes. In a bold move, he presented the volume to Davy himself, along with a letter
informing the great Davy that the humble Faraday would be available for any task.
Davy had nothing for him at the time, but thanked him graciously, offering that it
might be possible someday to arrange for the bookbinding business of the Institution to be given to Faraday. And that was that for a while.
Some months later, in October, Davy was temporarily blinded in a chemical explosion (always wear safety goggles in the lab). Needing an assistant with a technical
background and excellent note-taking skills, Davy called on Faraday, who jumped
at the chance and performed brilliantly. Although Faraday had to leave after Davy
recovered, fate intervened a second time. The Royal Institutions laboratory assistant was dismissed after a row with another Institution employee. Davy saw to it
that Faraday was offered the salaried, full-time position. Faraday began what
amounted to a second apprenticeship, in chemistry, on March 1, a few months shy
of his 22nd birthday in 1813.
The next several years were heaven for Faraday. He served as Davys research
assistant in the laboratory and as factotum on his European travels. Faraday could
scarcely believe his good fortune. That Davys wife, Jane, refused to allow someone of Faradays low station to dine with them bothered him not at all. Faradays
Sandemanian humility would not allow him to take offense. To the contrary: He
was deeply grateful to Davy for a chance at a life in science.
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FIGURE 21.
Portrait of Faraday as a young scientist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Faraday
Faraday was such a quick study that he rapidly shifted from mastering the state of
the art, to defining it. Davy initially took great pride in his prodigys achievements
(Davys greatest discovery may be Faraday), but seemed to develop increasing
unease as the full extent of Faradays superior talent became apparent. Faradays
contributions are so numerous that it is impossible to do more than focus on a few
highlights, but together they record a breathtaking pace of discovery. This was a
man on fire. His initial work was dedicated to advances in chemistry, given his
mentors field of expertise. His work in electricity was then limited primarily to
exploiting Voltaic piles to decompose substances, again in the manner of Davy.
The year 1821 was to prove an important turning point for Faraday. At 30, after
rethinking his earlier dedication to a monastic existence, Faraday married a fellow
Sandemanian, Sarah Barnard. His passions were evidently not limited to unlocking
the secrets of nature, as the following letter to Sarah (written while pulling an allnighter alone at the Institutions lab in December of 1820) shows:
My Dear Sarah,
It it astonishing how much the state of the body influences the powers of the mind.
I have been thinking all the morning of the very delightful and interesting letter I
would send you this evening, and now I am so tired, and yet have so much to do,
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Davy and Faraday
that my thoughts are quite giddy, and run round your image without any power of
themselves to stop and admire it.
I want to say a thousand kind and, believe me, heartfelt things to you, but am not
master of words fit for the purpose; and still, as I ponder and think on you, chlorides, trials, oil, Davy, steel, miscellanea, mercury, and fifty other professional fancies swim before and drive me further and further into the quandary of stupidness.
From your affectionate Michael
Allusions to chlorides, oil and mercury are rarely found in the romantic literature,
but they did the trick, for he and Sarah were soon married; they would remain
together until Faradays death in 1867 (she would pass away 13 years later). The
year 1821 also marked his first historically important achievement in the electrical
arts. Faraday had been trying to make sense of the same paper by rsted that had
inspired Ampre. Especially intriguing and perplexing was the behavior of a
compass moved around a current-carrying wire. To Faraday, the observations suggested the imagery of a sort of cyclonic wind encircling the wire. The wind
pointed in the right direction to explain everything that rsted reported, including
why the compass needle pointed at right angles to the wire the needle behaved
exactly as would a flag in a breeze. It explained why two parallel current-carrying
wires could attract or repel: If the currents are in the same direction, the cyclones
rotate in a direction that pulls them together. If one of the currents reverses, the
cyclones push each other away. That dynamic picture of action in the invisible
space between wires was to have far-reaching consequences, as we will eventually
see in the chapter Nothing is very important. In the short term, it was to inspire
Faraday to create the worlds first, though crude, electric motors. Heres what he
did:
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FIGURE 22.
Faradays motors (Experimental Researches in Electricity, vol, 2)
Conductive frame
Wire on pivot
Fixed magnet
Magnet on pivot
Mercury pool
from battery
to battery
The figure shows two motors; well focus on the one on the right. There, a cylindrical permanent magnet is fixed in place at the center of a cup filled with mercury,
which you probably know is an electrically conductive liquid at room temperature.48 Touching that mercury is a wire suspended from a pivot, allowing the wire
to move freely in a circle around the central magnet. Faraday reasoned that, if his
cyclone picture was correct, this arrangement would allow the cyclone surrounding the permanent magnet to push at an angle against the cyclone surrounding a
current-carrying wire, and thereby produce rotary motion. When Faraday closed a
switch, allowing a battery (not shown) to force current through the suspended wire,
the wire dutifully and continuously traced a circle in the mercury, around the central magnet. Reversing the current reversed the rotation of the wire. For the first
time in history, electricity was used to produce a constant motion. Practical motors
were only a few years away.
48.It is also toxic. Faraday suffered later in life from chronic ailments that many authors
have attributed to mercury poisoning. He paid a heavy price for his laboratory work.
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Davy and Faraday
Excellent scientist that he was, Faraday showed that a movable permanent magnet
would also trace a circle about a fixed current-carrying wire, as required by the
symmetry inherent in his cyclone picture. The corresponding configuration is
shown in the unlabeled left-hand part of the figure above. He ran that experiment,
and was again rewarded with confirmation of his deep physical insight. In one very
full year, Faraday married, devised a powerful mental picture of how magnetism
works, and used that picture to invent not just the worlds first motor, but the
worlds first two electric motors.
This auspicious beginning promised still greater achievements, but Faraday would
have to overcome some political difficulties first, for his invention of the motor
turned Davy from an envious mentor to an active adversary. Davy had been working with one William Hyde Wollaston to build a motor himself, and the duo had
failed. Faradays paper acknowledged neither gentleman, and Davy chose to take
great offense at the omission. In a fit of pique, Davy campaigned against Faradays
election to membership in the prestigious Royal Society, charging plagiarism. Wollaston came to Faradays aid, fortunately, and Faraday was made a Fellow of the
Royal Society despite opposition from his powerful former mentor. Not wishing to
risk even the remotest possibility of another distasteful episode, he stayed well
away from any research area in which Davy was active until Davy died in 1829, at
a young age 50 (likely from the cumulative effects of partaking too many of his
chemical creations).49 One can only speculate how many inventive contributions
were lost because of Faradays self-censorship.
Once Davy was out of the picture, Faraday turned his full attention back to electromagnetism. He wanted to complete rsteds quest, and show that a magnetic effect
could produce an electrical one.
He tried lots of things that didnt work. Since electric current through a coil produces magnetism, perhaps putting a magnet inside a coil would produce electricity.
He tried it, but it never worked. Had it worked, it would have meant that one could
produce unlimited amounts of energy for free, and Faraday intuited that somehow
nature would disallow such a result.
49.His fondness for inhaling nitrous oxide (N2O) is well known, but he also tried a great
many other substances, including nitric oxide (NO). Davy very nearly died when the
highly unstable nitric oxide became nitric acid in the moist environment of his lungs.
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Finally, two years after Davys passing, Faraday succeeded in his quest to show that
magnetism could be used to produce electricity. He wound two coils of wire on a
single ring of iron:
FIGURE 23.
Faradays original induction ring (Royal Institution)
He energized one coil (called the primary winding) with an electrical current. He
hoped that the magnetism produced by the primary would create (induce) an electrical effect in the second coil (called, sensibly enough, the secondary winding). He
discovered that induction of a voltage would result if and only if the current
in the primary were changing with time. The faster the primary current change, the
greater the secondary voltage. Today we call this arrangement of two magneticallycoupled coils a transformer, and Faraday invented it.
Based on his ring experiments he reasoned that, since a varying primary current
produces a varying magnetic strength, he ought to be able to induce a voltage in a
coil by simply moving a permanent magnet into and out of it. He ran the experiment, and verified his prediction; he had just invented the first electric generator.
Today that same, simple arrangement is the basis for the battery-less shaker flashlights sold in hardware and novelty stores. There, a cylindrical magnet is free to
move within a cylindrical coil. As the magnet moves back and forth, it pushes electrons along the wires of the coil, generating an electric current in the process. The
power produced ultimately powers up a light. Whenever you shake such a light,
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Davy and Faraday
thank Faraday. Whenever you use electricity generated by the power company,
thank Faraday. Whenever you drive a car, thank Faraday for the alternator (generator) that keeps your battery charged.
Heck, just thank Faraday. So much of our modern life depends on his discoveries
and insights in one way or another that its hard to find a piece of modern technology that isnt enabled by a fundamental discovery of his.
FIGURE 24.
Shaker flashlight
Coil (fixed in place)
Cylindrical magnet
(free to move)
Circuit to
convert to
DC needed by LED
Well have a bit more to say about Faraday in a future chapter, but well note here
that Faradays powerful ability to visualize the invisible enabled him to develop an
insight that ultimately was to enable wireless communication. He believed, but did
not live to show, that light was an electromagnetic phenomenon. He fortunately did
live long enough to convey his firm conviction to the man who would show it mathematically, the brilliant Scottish mathematical physicist, James Clerk (pronounced
clark) Maxwell. Maxwells achievement, in turn, would inspire a young German
physicist, Heinrich Hertz, to construct the first wireless transmitter and receiver to
prove that Maxwell was right. The discoveries of these scientists would give rise to
a new profession electrical engineering whose practitioners would soon
deliver the telegraph, telephone, electric generators and motors, the incandescent
light, and wireless communication, all before the end of the nineteenth century. In
short, the mayhem we associate with modernity was just around the corner.
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Projects: Magnets, compasses, generators and

motors
Its surprisingly easy to make your own magnets, either by magnetizing objects
made of iron to create a permanent magnet, or by following rsted in making an
electromagnet. Once youve made a magnet, its pretty easy to make a compass. As
it turns out, once youve made a compass, its not much of an additional leap to
build a meter for measuring voltage or current. All of these objects and devices can
be built using inexpensive, readily available materials, and without requiring any
special skills.
Lets start with making magnets out of iron or steel. If you happen to have a magnet
already, you can use it to create more magnets. Take a sewing needle or iron nail,
for example, and simply stroke it with the magnet. Dont go back and forth, or
youll undo what youve done. Just stroke it, lift the magnet, and stroke again. If the
magnet is powerful enough, one stroke is sufficient. Remove the magnet and test
the needle. Youll find that its now magnetized.
Now what can you do if you dont have a magnet to begin with? Take an iron nail,
for instance, oriented parallel to the ground, along a north-south line, and give it a
good thwack or three with a hammer. It will become magnetized! Why? The individual microscopic magnets within ordinary iron are only loosely locked in place.
The mechanical violence unlocks them and sets them into motion. The earth aligns
these microscopic magnets along the north-south direction while theyre jostling,
so when the microscopic magnets settle back into place, they end up with a net
magnetization.
Mechanical violence is not necessary, but its effectiveness explains why it is important not to subject magnets to mechanical shock, unless you want to demagnetize
them.
Heat turns out to be as effective as mechanical violence, and for the same fundamental reason. Heat drives random motion; the higher the temperature, the greater
the motion. Above a critical temperature (which differs from material to material),
heat destroys a magnet. If you bring the temperature back down below that threshold (known as the Curie temperature), the material can acquire a permanent magnetization from external influences. So, if you simply heat, say, a steel sewing needle
with a match, it will be found to magnetize upon cooling (if the needle is kept oriented more or less along a north-south line during the process).50 If you ever need
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Projects: Magnets, compasses, generators and motors
to build a compass (think Gilligans Island), keep the fire+needle recipe in mind.
Its also a great campfire activity for kids.
This heat sensitivity also explains how scientists know that the earths magnetic
field has changed over geologic time. Volcanic flows contain iron. As the lava
cools, the iron acquires magnetism aligned to the earths magnetic field at that location in space and time. In essence, the cooled lava constitutes a tape recording of
the earths magnetic field over the period of time during which the volcanic activity
persists.
This heat sensitivity has also been used in high-speed duplication of magnetic tape
recordings. A master specially recorded on a high-Curie temperature material is
brought in contact with the blank. The temperature is raised above the Curie temperature of the blank (but kept below that of the master), and the master and blank
are sped along each other at a much faster rate than ordinary tape-to-tape transfers
would allow.
Once you have a magnetized needle, making a compass is trivial. Stab the needle
through a cork (or affix it to the top surface of the cork) or styrofoam packing peanut, and float the assembly in a pan or bowl of water, set on a stable surface.
Shield it from wind, and watch as the cork or peanut rotates. When it stops, the needle will be pointing along the magnetic north-south line. This information alone is
insufficient to determine north from south, but at least it reduces the number of
choices to two. Additional information (e.g., from the suns motion remember, it
sets in the west) allows you to figure out which end is which. A little drop of paint
or wax or some other thing to mark North51 completes your compass. This simple
compass works surprisingly well.
50.This requirement would seem to suggest that you need to know which way north is,
before youve made the compass. Its really not that bad, though; you dont have to have
anywhere near perfect alignment. As long as youre not oriented too closely to east-west,
it will generally work. If the amount of magnetization seems unsatisfactory, simply
change the orientation of the needle a bit, and try again. Repeat as necessary. You can
always reduce the number of blind experiments if you have even a rough idea of northsouth or east-west lines, say, by observing the sun in the daytime, or locating Polaris
the Pole Star at night.
51.It is a confusing quirk that the end of the compass needle that points to the earths magnetic north pole is actually of the same magnetic polarity as the earths south pole,
because opposite poles attract.
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Because a compass is sensitive to magnetic fields, it will also be sensitive to artificially created magnetic fields, such as those produced by the electromagnet. If you
wind a coil of wire about the compass, you can enjoy a much higher sensitivity than
rsted achieved. Commercial electromagnetic voltmeters may use coils with hundreds of turns of extremely fine wire.
FIGURE 25.
Compass as heart of ammeter52 or voltmeter
thing
to
measure
switch
compass
Ampre himself discovered the miraculous effect of using multiple turns. The current produces magnetism in each wire, so the use of many wires is an ingenious
way to produce an augmented effect; the magnetism produced by one loop of wire
adds to that produced by all of the other loops of wire.
When you exploit this effect to make a meter, it means that you can produce a more
sensitive meter. That is, for a given current through the coil, the compass needle
will deflect a greater amount.
Homemade generator
Its not hard to recreate a demonstration of Faradays moving-magnet generator.
You can use a coil wound around a compass as an indicator (a voltmeter), and
another coil with a moving magnet as the generator, just as in a shaker flashlight.
52.Although, strictly speaking, one could argue that the proper term should be ampmeter,
the word is awkward to say. The offending p was eliminated to give us ammeter.
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FIGURE 26.
How to push electrons around, and then prove it
compass
magnet in coil
As you move the magnet in and out of the coil, youll notice that the compass needle deflects one way, and then the other. Youll also notice that if you stop moving
the magnet, the compass needle will return to its original position: motion is necessary to generate a voltage. The magnet pushes around the electrons, but you are
needed to push around the magnet. So indirectly, but in a real sense, you are pushing the electrons. This connection is so strong that, as you draw more energy from
the magnet-coil system (say, by trying to light up an ever-increasing number of
light bulbs), the magnet gets progressively harder to move! It feels increasingly as
if you are trying to move the magnet through molasses, even though theres nothing between the magnet and the coil. You are invisibly but intimately coupled to
the electrons through Faradays unseen magnetic cyclone.
Homemade batteries from pocket change

If you tire of pushing magnets around to generate a wee bit of voltage, you might
want to recreate Voltas pile instead. Batteries are now so commonplace that we forget that a miracle of chemistry quietly goes on inside each one of them. Once we
understand a bit about how a battery works, well also have learned why certain
metals corrode (and others dont), what special things must be done to ships to keep
them from disintegrating, and even how to electroplate one type of metal onto the
surface of another.
In this part of the Appendix, well learn how to make batteries out of ordinary
household materials, such as pocket change.
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Battery basics
As weve seen, Volta discovered that the key ingredients are two dissimilar metals
immersed in an electrically conductive electrolyte.
The electrolyte plays an important role in battery functioning. When a metal is
immersed in an electrolyte, some of that metal inevitably dissolves in it, releasing
metal ions into the solution. This process proceeds until the unmated electrons left
behind exert a sufficiently strong pull to balance the tendency for the metal to dissolve in the electrolyte.
An important idea is that not all substances attract or hold onto charged particles
with equal strength. When we immerse two different metals into an electrolyte,
then, one metal generally ends up with a greater surplus of electrons than the other,
creating a voltage between the electrodes. When we connect a consumer of electrical power to the battery (engineers call this device a load), current flows. Electrons
travel from where they are overabundant, through the load, and eventually to where
they are relatively scarce. The electrode that supplies the electrons then exerts less
electrical force on its own atoms, and more electrode atoms dissolve into solution.
This dissolution explains why batteries eventually run down using the battery to
power things causes the parts to dissolve.
The voltage produced by a battery depends on the materials used. The more dissimilar the electrodes, electrically speaking, the higher the voltage. The amount of current that can be supplied by a battery is proportional to the total electrode surface
area, as well as the strength of the electrolyte (the faster it can dissolve the metal,
the greater the quantity of electrons liberated per unit time). Putting batteries in
series increases the available voltage without affecting the available current, while
putting them in parallel increases the available current without altering the available voltage.
Now, commercial batteries often use hazardous chemicals, such as the sulfuric acid
(H2SO4) used in lead-acid car batteries, or the potassium hydroxide (KOH) found
in alkaline batteries. We dont want to fool around with these sorts of dangerous
substances in home projects. In fact, we dont even want to play with the relatively
benign ammonium chloride (NH4Cl, known in days of yore as sal ammoniac) used
in the cheapest carbon-zinc flashlight batteries. So were going to seek alternatives that get the job done without exposing us to much risk. The tradeoff is that the
batteries we make at home will not be as powerful or convenient as store-bought
ones. But it sure is satisfying to be able to use junk bits to make something useful
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The penny battery

Perhaps the simplest and cheapest recipe uses a penny as one electrode, a piece of
felt or paper towel soaked in some electrolyte, and a piece of aluminum foil as the
other electrode, all arranged in a repeating stack as follows:
FIGURE 27.
The penny battery, and how to prove that it works
red, e.g.
Penny
Felt + Coke
Aluminum foil
Penny
Felt + Coke
Aluminum foil
Penny
(-)
Felt + Coke
Aluminum foil
black, e.g.
88888888
(+)
Calculator, for testing
(Can use paper towels instead of felt; they just disintegrate easily)
Cell (repeat
for more
voltage, if
needed, but
dont overdo
it -- you can
kill your
calculator)
The piece of paper towel is soaked in the electrolyte, and has to be large enough to
make sure that the penny and aluminum foil within a cell do not touch each other
(this would create a short circuit). It is all right in fact, necessary for the aluminum foil of one cell to make excellent contact to the penny of the next cell.
Indeed, it is advisable to smooth out the foil to improve the contact area. A clean
penny helps, too.
When ketchup or vinegar is used as the electrolyte, you can generally expect about
a half a volt from each individual cell. Such a cell cant supply very much current,
though (typically less than 1/1000 of an ampere 1milliampere). In fact, it is far
too feeble to light a flashlight bulb. However, several of these in series will readily
operate a wristwatch or small calculator, or even a small light-emitting diode (LED)
to a dimly perceptible glow.
Some simple modifications to an ordinary calculator allow it to be powered up by
the homemade battery, as shown in the figure above. Simply open up the calculator
and remove its factory-supplied battery. Connect a wire to the terminal that nor-
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mally connects to the positive battery electrode, and connect another to the negative
terminal. Engineers generally use red wire for positive voltages, and black for negative, so thats what indicated in the figure. You dont have to follow this convention, but you definitely need to do something to keep the polarities straight.
As shown in the figure, the copper electrode is the positive terminal of the battery.
The reason is that copper holds onto electrons less tenaciously than does aluminum.
If your battery works, and if youve made no wiring errors, the calculator should
spring to life. Press clear and then try a calculation. Try extracting the square-root
of 888888888 (this value lights up all of the segments that make up the display,
and thus maximizes current drain for a rigorous test). If your batteries last long
enough to complete the calculation, pat yourself on the back!
You should experiment with this general arrangement of Voltas pile. Try different
electrode materials, say, dimes instead of aluminum foil, for instance. Or nickels
(theyre cheaper). Try different electrolytes. Various juices work well. So do many
soft drinks, such as Coke or Pepsi. Salt water does, too, and its certainly easy to
make. Vinegar and even potato juice work. Bananas do, too, as it turns out. Just
resist the temptation to eat these things after youve done battery experiments with
them.
Scrubpad battery (Danger: potentially harsh chemicals involved)

Powering up a calculator with junk is miraculous and fun. Perhaps that success only
whets your appetite. If you want to get more oomph out of the battery, we need
more surface area. You could use many batteries in parallel or series, but thats
unwieldy and a lot of work to connect up. An alternative is to use a copper scouring
pad in place of the penny (e.g., Chore Boy brand pads). The copper segments
accessible through all those nooks and crannies add up to a considerable amount of
exposed metal surface area. Connect a wire to the pad, then surround the pad completely with a paper towel (two or more layers is a good idea, just to make sure that
the wet towel doesnt tear anywhere and inadvertently short out the battery). Next
wrap aluminum foil around the paper towel. Crinkling the foil ahead of time helps
to increase the useful surface area, but youll inevitably crinkle it during construction, so you dont have to do much extra work.
You may use the same electrolytes used earlier with the pennies. For better performance, however, it is a good idea to use something stronger. Both acids and bases
are good candidates in general, but bases are probably better in our case.53 The rea-
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son is that aluminum has such a strong affinity for oxygen that it is invariably found
bound to it. There is always a microscopically thin layer of aluminum oxide on any
aluminum surface. This oxide, unlike ordinary iron rust, is transparent. Furthermore, it inhibits further oxidation because oxygen is too big to squeeze through the
aluminum oxide (regrettably, iron oxide is very permeable to oxygen, which
explains why rust just keeps growing). The relative impermeability of aluminum
oxide is why aluminum foil stays shiny under most conditions; it creates its own
protective skin.
While the oxide layer is good for inhibiting corrosion, it also impedes the flow of
current, reducing the useful output of the battery. Alkaline (basic) electrolytes help
to inhibit formation of aluminum oxide, and thereby generally increase the output
of such a battery.
A particularly good basic electrolyte is a solution of sodium hydroxide (NaOH,
commonly known as lye or caustic soda). Unfortunately, it is poisonous if ingested,
and eagerly attacks flesh (in fact, lye is used to convert fat into soap, and it will
happily convert the fatty tissues of you into soap; this action is generally deemed
suboptimal), so I cannot recommend using it. If you ignore this advice and proceed to use lye anyway, wear eye protection and gloves. And please use dilute
solutions. A drain opener such as Drano or Red Devil is a suitable source of lye
(Red Devil is nominally pure lye, while Drano has some aluminum mixed in). Dissolving a teaspoon of lye in one cup of water produces a reasonable electrolyte.54
Again: Avoid contact with flesh, protect your eyes, dont get any in your
mouth, and exercise caution!
With a copper scrubpad-aluminum foil electrode combination immersed in a
sodium hydroxide electrolyte, one may expect an open-circuit voltage of about
1.7V (just a little bit greater than an ordinary flashlight battery), and a short-circuit
current in excess of 0.2 amperes! Such a battery will light a small flashlight bulb or
LED, and readily operate a small toy motor. Two in series will brightly light a bulb,
and spin a toy motor impressively fast.
53.Acids tend to taste sour, while bases generally taste bitter. However, it is a decidedly bad
idea to go about tasting random chemicals. This was once the tradition among German
chemists in the late 1800s and early 1900s, until so many deaths occurred that this bad
habit was stopped.
54.For those of you with a chemistry background, the aim is to produce an electrolyte of
approximately 1M concentration. The exact value is not critical; a factor of two either
way will make little difference.
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A safer choice for home experimentation is washing soda (sodium carbonate,

Na2CO3). This common laundry detergent booster can be purchased at many grocery stores if you dont already happen to have it handy (it is very inexpensive). Or,
if you are determined to make this project more challenging, you can make your
own, by converting baking soda (sodium bicarbonate, NaHCO3) into washing soda
by heating it up (the fancy term for the process is pyrolytic decomposition). In this
process, heating causes sodium bicarbonate to release both water and carbon dioxide:
2NaHCO 3 Na 2 CO 3 + H 2 O + CO 2 .
(1)
The water and carbon dioxide evaporate away during the process, leaving behind
just the desired sodium carbonate. (As a side note, baking soda works its magic in
cooking precisely because of these gases given off during baking. They help make
dough rise, filling it with numerous minute holes and channels as the gases escape.)
What follows are specific instructions for making your own washing soda from
baking soda:
1) Place a half cup of baking soda in a suitable oven-safe (e.g., Pyrex) container.
The shape is not too critical, but a larger surface area is desirable, so if you have a
choice between a baking dish and a measuring cup, the dish is preferable.
2) Heat in an oven at, say, about 350F for one hour, or for 10-15 minutes after the
powder has stopped bubbling noticeably.
3) Remove the container and let it cool to room temperature.
Make a solution of the washing soda and use it as the electrolyte in your scouring
pad battery. Any leftover washing soda can be used the next time you do your laundry (most modern detergents contain washing soda), or the next time you decide to
fool around again with homemade batteries. Nothing goes to waste in Things About
Stuff experiments!
There are infinitely many ways of making a motor, some good and most not so;
well settle for the latter. This last of the three challenges constrains what you can
do by limiting the available materials to a ludicrously meager set: A D size battery, a couple of feet of wire, and a magnet that has been salvaged from a disk drive.
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Simple motor
Just in case you havent spent your entire life studying the design of motors from
surplus materials, heres a time-tested version you may consider as a starting point
for your improvisations:
FIGURE 28. Worlds cheesiest motor (stylized drawing)
Coil (n turns)
remove only upper
enamel coating (see
text)
Magnet
Paper clips, e.g.

(mounting method
on base not shown)
The coil wire is enamel-coated copper, so you need to remove some of the insulating enamel from the horizontal stubs to make electrical contact to the battery. In
lieu of making a classical commutator (needed to reverse polarity so that the coil
doesnt have two equilibrium positions), remove only the enamel along the upper
surface of the two horizontal stubs. That way, the coil will only be energized during
half the rotation, giving it at least the chance of spinning continuously. You will
need to get things going by giving it a spin, after which inertia should keep the
motor operating on its own (if all goes well).
The (separate) wires leading to the battery also serve as mechanical supports and
electrical contacts to the horizontal stubs. A standard choice is to use paper clips for
these elements. Figuring out exactly how to put it all together is part of the challenge.
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Annihilating Space and Time
CHAPTER 4
Annihilating Space
and Time
Morse
President James Madison announced that the beloved Marquis de Lafayette
French hero of the American Revolution and friend to George Washington
would mark the 50th anniversary of the Revolution by visiting all 24 states as the
nations guest. New York Citys Common Council (forerunner of todays City
Council) in turn would honor his grand tour by commissioning a portrait of Lafayette. After considering and rejecting a number of prominent candidates, the Council
ultimately selected a rising young talent, 33-year old Samuel Finley Breese Morse.
News of winning the commission and the funds it promised arrived just in
time. Samuels wife, Lucretia, was carrying their third child, and the young couples debts had become oppressive. The job, though, required Morse to travel to
Washington, D.C. for the sitting. Any unease he might have felt at leaving Lucretia
behind in New Haven was moderated by the knowledge that his own parents would
be looking after her. Besides, she was a healthy 25-year old who had already borne
two children without any complications. He set out for Washington in November of
1824 with a light heart.
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Morse
FIGURE 29.
Morses portrait of Lafayette
Lucretia gave birth to their third child, James, on schedule in early January as
Morse was finishing the painting. All was well with James but Lucretia soon fell ill.
When her condition worsened Morses father sent word and, after the usual twoweek mail delay (horses, remember), Samuel received the troubling news. He
arranged for a hasty return but, sadly, Morse was unable to return quickly enough
(horses again). Lucretia died one month after giving birth and was already buried
by the time Morse arrived. The communication delay had robbed him of a chance
to say goodbye to his wife. It is not too great a leap to suggest that the bitter memory of that theft would subconsciously drive him to annihilate the twin foes of space
and time.
From artist to inventor

Although Morse was born in the same year as Faraday, the two gentlemen initially
had little else in common. Morse certainly did not set out to be a scientist or inventor. Nothing in his choice of classes in college hinted at much of an interest in, let
alone a passion for, the sciences. At Yale he studied the usual variety of subjects,
including some chemistry and mathematics. Religion interested him much more,
but art was his true passion. Indeed, he was able to underwrite much of his education by painting and this success convinced him that art could be both vocation and
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avocation. He decided to commit to a life in art and within a year of graduating in

1810, Morse made his way to Englands Royal Academy to further his studies. Not
long after settling in, Morse sculpted what most critics consider his masterpiece,
The Dying Hercules.
FIGURE 30.
Morse (c. 1845) and his masterpiece of 1812
The War of 1812 was then raging and the sculpture was and is widely interpreted as a negative commentary on British imperialism. He evidently did not wear
out his welcome with works like these, though, as Morse remained in England until
the autumn of 1815. He spent the decade after his return to America working diligently to establish himself as an important artist. In an early triumph, he won the
job of painting a portrait of former president John Adams in 1816. He also met 16year-old Lucretia Pickering Walter that year, while in New Hampshire to drum up
some business. The two were engaged not long afterwards, and married by 1818.
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Morse
FIGURE 31.
Lucretia with Susan and Charles (portrait by Morse, of course)
Morses fame grew steadily along with his family. The couple were blessed with
two children (Susan and Charles) by 1823 and, except for intermittent money troubles, the Morses were the picture of happiness until Lucretias death in 1825. The
loss of Morses father the following year, and then the death of his mother less than
two years after that left Morse reeling. Placing his children in the care of other family members, Morse headed to Europe to take a sabbatical from grief. He visited
Lafayette and the writer James Fenimore Cooper in Paris, toured the Continent and
studied as many art collections as he could locate. The healing balms of friendship,
art, distance and time worked magic and by 1832 he was ready to return to America.
He befriended a Dr. Charles Jackson during the six-week-long voyage back to New
York aboard the Sully. Jackson was a bit of a nerd who knew a fair amount about
what was going on in the exciting world of electromagnetics, including primitive
efforts in Europe to build telegraphs. Morse was happy to learn about these new
developments and Jackson was probably delighted to meet someone who didnt
find him lethally dull. Indeed once Jackson suggested that this sort of research
could make instantaneous communication a practical reality someday, Morse
shifted from genial travel companion to nascent inventor with astonishing rapidity.
He was driven by a passion whose origins he may not have consciously acknowledged. He was so taken by the idea, in fact, that by the end of the voyage Morse had
recorded rough ideas for his own telegraph in his sketchbook. Contemporary efforts
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at telegraphy, he learned from Jackson, involved complex schemes, such as compass-like needles that spun to point at letters arrayed in a circle. His relative ignorance led him toward a simpler and eminently more practical approach.
As intriguing as these ideas may have seemed during the voyage, Morse didnt
immediately develop them further upon arriving home. For one thing, his schooling
in the electrical arts was largely limited to what hed gleaned from Jackson, supplementing the little he could recall from a few lectures hed attended in his college
days. He was aware that he lacked the expertise to evaluate whether what he had
conceived would actually work and, indeed, even to evaluate how much more he
would need to know. Hed have to do quite a bit of homework before he could go
much further and he had more urgent priorities to address first. He needed to
rebuild his professional standing after the long absence and, most important, he had
to reacquaint himself with the children hed virtually abandoned.
By 1835 a decade after Lucretias death Morse felt ready to return to the telegraph in earnest. He began building bits and pieces of apparatus and demonstrated
some of them to his friends and acquaintances. These early experiments exposed
the near-infinite breadth and depth of his ignorance. He knew nothing about wire
(how thick should it be? how far can one transmit electrical effects?); about batteries (how much tension? how much current?); and about electromagnets (how
many turns of wire? how large an iron core? what shape?). His problems were
legion, so in early 1836 he sought the help of NYU science professor Leonard Gale.
Within a year the two had become business partners and were joined soon after by
an acquaintance of Morse named Alfred Vail, whose father had attended one of
Morses early demonstrations. Vail was a man of means as well as a talented
machinist and his addition to the team enormously accelerated their progress. As
word spread of Morse and Gales grand plans, Morses erstwhile travel companion,
Dr. Jackson, popped up to claim ownership of these ideas. This legal difficulty was
just the beginning of troubles to come.
Despite Jacksons claims, Morse proceeded to file a telegraph patent application in
1837, two years before the British engineers Sir William Cooke and Charles
Wheatstone would put their own needle telegraph into operation on a 13-mile
stretch of the Great Western Railway (itself an engineering triumph, designed by
the great Isambard Kingdom Brunel, whom well meet in the following chapter).
Within a year of that filing, Morse and Vail completed their work on the dot-anddash code, using the binary signaling now to represent individual letters, rather than
whole words, as in Morses original concept. Vail had suggested assigning the
shortest symbols to the most frequently-occurring letters (this concept would be
formalized nearly a century later, where it would be known as Huffman coding and
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Morse
used for data compression). This way, the average time to transmit a typical piece
of text would be kept to a minimum, enabling more transmissions and thus more
revenue per unit time. He cleverly estimated the relative frequency of letters by
simply examining the collection of movable type in the print shop of a local newspaper. The letter e was by far the most common and so he chose a single dot to represent it. A single dash represented the next most common letter, t. Continuing
through all the letters of the alphabet in this manner produced a set of symbols that
eventually evolved into what you know as Morse code (even though Vail probably
did the bulk of its inventing). Although the Morse code we use today differs in
detail from that first version, Vail and Morse had essentially completed by 1838 the
use of simple on-off states to represent the entire alphabet and numbers in a practical way.
With these developments in place Morse finally felt ready to demonstrate his complete system. He and his partners succeeded in getting a contingent of congressmen
to agree to one such demonstration in early 1838. In attendance was Maine representative Francis Ormond Jonathon Smith, who was so impressed that he privately
demanded and received part ownership in the venture. He concealed this
business relationship from the public and his fellow congressmen while advocating
for federal monies to construct a prototype 50-mile telegraph link to demonstrate
practicality. Smith failed repeatedly and served out his term in office without having enjoyed any advantage from this flagrant conflict of interest. Indeed it took five
years of maneuvering before Congress finally agreed to a $30,000 appropriation for
the project, which was to link Washington, D.C. with Baltimore. Initial plans called
for the use of underground cables, to be installed using machines specially designed
by an acquaintance of Congressman Smith named Ezra Cornell. Unfortunately
underground installation proved impractically expensive and slow. That, plus concerns about reliability and maintenance expense killed off that idea. Cornells plan
B mounting overhead wires atop wooden poles became the standard method
of wiring up networks for the next century.
By 1844 the system was ready for the historic test. On May 24 the first official message, What hath God wrought? was sent from the Capitols Supreme Court chamber to the B&O Railroad depot in Baltimore. This message was not the first sent on
the system (many test messages preceded the ceremonial event, of course), but its
the one cited in most histories of the telegraph. Not only was the message not the
first sent on that telegraph link, it was not even sent on the first telegraph link. As
Jackson had taught Morse, competing telegraphs albeit crude, impractical ones
had been in operation in Europe for some years before the Washington-Baltimore test. Although these other telegraphs lacked the practical advantages of the
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Morse system, it would take time for the courts to resolve the question of inventorship.
The Morse system was simplicity itself, consisting of a battery, a switch (the telegraph key) and an electromagnetically deflected pencil that wrote on a moving strip
of paper. When an operator pressed the telegraph key, the switch closure connected
a battery to an electromagnet. The electromagnet moved the pencil one way for a
dot and the other for a dash, leaving a distinct written pattern on the paper tape as a
permanent record, allowing messages to be received continuously without a human
present. Morse, artist that he was, had used parts from a picture frame to construct
his first prototype (that historic artifact is on display at the Smithsonian Institute in
Washington, D.C.). His paper tape idea would exhibit remarkable longevity, surviving into the 1980s as a storage medium (with punched holes instead of squiggles
written in pencil) for early personal computers.
As the telegraphic art progressed Morse and his associates noticed that experienced
telegraph operators were transcribing Morse code by listening to the characteristic
clicks made by the pencil-deflecting apparatus, instead of following the proper
procedure of working off of the paper tape record. Operators had found that they
could decode much faster this way, so changes were made to exploit this chance
discovery. To enhance the sound, an electromagnetically-operated metal striker
quickly emerged as the preferred arrangement and, in many installations, the slow
and often-unreliable paper tape mechanism was abandoned altogether in favor of
the sounder alone.
Morse and his colleagues had constructed a telegraph capable of successfully spanning the 40- to 50-mile distance. The nearly instantaneous speed of electricity
contrasted with the several hours it took to deliver a message over that distance
even with the fastest horses. The telegraph that Morse had wrought would have
allowed him to hold Lucretias hand one last time.
Telegraph networks sprouted like kudzu over the next ten or so years. Morse remarried (to Sarah Elizabeth Griswold, a second cousin), fathered four more children
and finally won all of his patent battles in a Supreme Court decision delivered in
1854. He used the Courts decision as the proverbial big stick to amass a fortune.
Ezra Cornell purchased a telegraph company that had been forced into bankruptcy
and ultimately drove the formation of Western Union, which by the end of the Civil
War would become the worlds first telecommunications monopoly. With the
wealth that monopoly brings Cornell went on to co-found the university that bears
his name.
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Telegraphy under the hood: Project ideas
Having fulfilled his telegraphic dreams, Morse occupied the rest of his life with
more relaxing endeavors, including supporting George McClellan against incumbent President Lincoln, publishing strident screeds opposing the Emancipation
Proclamation on biblical grounds, and trying to convince the U.S. government that
Catholics in general (and the Pope in particular) presented an imminent military
threat. His warnings were foolishly ignored, which is why we now eke out a desperate, hardscrabble existence under the oppressive thumb of a totalitarian Papist
regime.
Morse was not like the other kids.
He clearly had some loose bits rattling around in his cranium, but none of that takes
away what he achieved. His vision and persistence, born of tragedy, did give us the
telegraph. The world would continue to shrink, thanks to that first triumphant annihilation of space and time.

Ampre showed that winding wire into a multi-turn coil intensifies the magnetism
produced by a current (see Chapter 2s projects). This magnification occurs because
the magnetic force exerted by one loop of wire adds to that exerted by all of the
other loops. In 1825, only a couple of years after Ampres first publications on the
subject, an English scientist, William Sturgeon, extended Ampres work and constructed the first electromagnet strong enough to lift its own weight. He had discovered that winding a coil around a bar of iron greatly intensifies a magnets strength.
Today we understand that the magnetism generated by subatomic processes within
the iron adds to that generated by current in the coil. Not long after Sturgeons
work, Yales Joseph Henry who would later serve as first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution demonstrated in 1827 that Sturgeons achievement by no
means represented a limit. By winding coils with multiple layers of multiple turns
of insulated wire on an iron core, Henry constructed giant magnets that were capable of lifting many times their own weight. His largest, completed in 1832, was able
to lift approximately 3600 pounds. He couldve gone further, but hed made his
point. Descendants of Henrys mighty magnets routinely perform yeoman duty in
junkyards around the world:
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FIGURE 32.
Electromagnetic crane
An advantage of an electromagnet is its ability to turn on and off, as Morse appreciated. Close a switch to enable current to flow, and the electromagnet is ready to lift
a junk car. Position the junk where you want it, open the switch, and gravity does
the rest. Rinse and repeat.
The simple on-off nature also means that it is easy to build a telegraph. The concepts and materials are readily accessible, and constructing one is well within the
capability of elementary-school students. The only moderately tricky part (and its
still not that difficult) is finding or building a sounder (the part that clicks), so well
offer a somewhat nonstandard choice that makes use of ubiquitous obsolete computer gear. You are encouraged to explore your own variations based on the themes
we present. That is, take our project ideas as a starting point, as opposed to treating
them as a rigid set of instructions to be followed slavishly. Improvise with materials
at hand if you dont happen to have exactly whats described here.
For both versions of our homebrew telegraph, you will need one healthy flashlight
battery (a D-size cell will last a good long time, but other sizes are fine, too), and
perhaps a battery holder (available from electronics stores, such as Radio Shack),
although adhesive tape or rubber bands can be used for temporary if tenuous
connections. Regrettably, the penny-and-aluminum foil cells dont have enough
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juice to get the job done (unless you make and connect a lot of cells). However, the
scrubpad battery will work, so if youre absolutely determined to build everything
yourself, thats a suitable cell.
Next you need a switch of some kind:
FIGURE 33.
Type used aboard the Titanic (left); and inexpensive modern key
The minimalist key on the right shows how little is required: A springy piece of
moving metal makes contact to a stationary piece of metal; its just a switch. A couple of binding posts allow us to make electrical connections to the key. What separates such a simple key from more professional ones, such as those used aboard the
Titanic (as in the photo above, left), are subtle but important qualities. The springiness of the return, the balance and mass of the moving arm, the feel of the key, the
gap between contacting surfaces, and the quality of the electrical contact all matter
greatly to the professional telegrapher, just as the particulars of a pianos action
matter to a professional musician. For a quick home project, however, simplicity is
perhaps the most important consideration. If youd rather buy than build, keys similar to that shown on the right are commercially available for only a couple of dollars.
If youre adventurous enough to build one, you can easily construct a functional
telegraph key out of a scrap piece of wood, thick wire, and a couple of screws and
washers. A typical metal coat-hanger is a terrific source of suitable wire its the
right thickness and of the right composition to have a useful natural springiness.
Carefully cut a piece (a wire-cutter isnt strictly needed, but yields better results
than, say, repeated bending to break the coat-hanger wire) about 3-4 (8-10cm) or
so. Use sandpaper to abrade away any surface varnish or paint, or otherwise remove
any insulation its essential that you get down to bare metal wherever you expect
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electrical contact. Then, simply screw one end down onto the wood base using a
pair of washers, as shown below. Another screw and washer form the other contact,
and you have a telegraph key. Rudimentary, yes, but it will get the job done.
FIGURE 34.
Crude but serviceable homebrew telegraph key

coat-hanger wire
wire
wire
wood base
Next, we need a sounder. As it happens, a simple one can be salvaged from a castoff computer. The small speaker used for warning beeps and such is a perfectly fine
sounder, and should be among the several items a good nerd rescues from an old
computer before recycling the rest. Although it isnt immediately obvious from
looks alone, a speaker works on pretty much the same principles as a classic telegraph sounder; they both depend on electromagnets pushing or pulling on something else:
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FIGURE 35.
Telegraph sounder (invented by Vail, c. 1850)
spring
movable striker
electromagnet
In the sounder originally invented by Vail, an electromagnet pulls a pivoted striker

bar downward when energized, making a nice, loud click as the striker hits its lower
limit of travel. A spring pulls the bar back upward when current through the electromagnet ceases.
A speaker differs only a bit. It has a diaphragm affixed to a freely movable coil of
wire wound around a cylindrical form. Current flowing through the coil generates a
force against a cylindrical permanent magnet that it surrounds and which is not free
to move. The movement of the diaphragm creates sound by pushing air around,
rather than by hitting a solid stop. Unlike a telegraph sounder, then, a speaker can
reproduce more than just on and off, but that doesnt preclude its use as an on-off
operated noisemaker:
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FIGURE 36.
Retro-modern mashup: Telegraph using PC speaker
1.5V battery
Although the figure shows a disembodied speaker in free air, putting the speaker in
some sort of an enclosure will help produce a much louder sound (thats why stereo
speakers are in boxes). Almost any box would be better than none. A cigar box or
something like it would be a great starting point. Carefully cut out a circular hole
just a bit smaller than the speaker, and then mount the speaker in the box. If you
compare loudness with and without the box, youll be impressed by how big a difference a box can make.
Box or no, each depression of the key causes the speaker to emit a clicking sound.
Build a matching set for a friend, use long wires, and youve taken your first steps
along the same trail that Morse blazed over 160 years ago.
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CHAPTER 5
The Great
Transatlantic Cable
The value of instant communication was obvious to everyone and telegraph networks expanded rapidly. By the start of the U.S. Civil War, much of the continental
U.S. was connected and it was easy to envision a day soon when essentially
the entire country would be linked by telegraph, thanks to the progressive annihilation of space and time.
Visionaries started to imagine how much smaller still the world would be if we
could connect all the continents together in a vast global network of telegraphs.
Sensible scientists didnt spend much time on such fanciful, impractical musings,
but progress often depends on a certain amount of studied ignorance, if not outright
foolishness. Money helps, too. A lot. That is, a lot of money helps to enable a lot of
foolishness.
In that context the name Cyrus West Field should be much better known than it is.
Im sure right now you are thinking, Cyrus who? He was the possibly foolish,
certainly visionary and definitely wealthy man who, by sheer force of will, almost
singlehandedly drove the Victorian equivalent of the Moon program: Laying a telegraph cable across the Atlantic.
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The Great Transatlantic Cable
Field, like Morse, was not a scientist. He wasnt an inventor, either, and never
aspired to be one. He was a businessman and, in the 1840s, he had the misfortune of
working for E. Root and Company, a New York paper wholesaler that was incompetently (and perhaps dishonestly) run. When the firm finally failed, the directors
gave Field a battlefield promotion, which mainly meant that, as new head of the
now-dead company, he was assigned the unpleasant task of informing creditors that
they werent going to get paid. After considering numerous alternatives, Field
found himself asking the directors for permission to resurrect the company. They
acceded and he succeeded brilliantly. The revived firm became hugely profitable
in a short time. He repaid all of the original creditors, with interest, even though he
was under no legal obligation to do so. Such noble ethics, plus his ability to turn the
company around in the first place, made his reputation as a brilliant, honest businessman. Having earned a fortune for himself and others, he retired in 1852 at the
age of 33.
Driven personalities rarely tolerate retirement well and Field was no exception. He
probably drove his wife and kids crazy with constant suggestions for improvement
here and there. One can imagine Mrs. Field gently suggesting to her Type-A husband that he find a new hobby, preferably something involving extended long-distance travel.
FIGURE 37.
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Cyrus Field, with the entire earth within reach
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As one of the wealthiest men in New York, Field was always being approached by
someone with a really great business idea. Sometimes hed listen politely with
feigned interest but most of the time, hed send these folks on their way. One day in
1853 an earnest caller, Frederick Newton Gisborne, arrived on his doorstep with a
letter of introduction from Fields brother. The gentleman a telegraph geek
breathlessly pointed out to Field that extending the telegraph out to Newfoundland
from its present New York terminus would cut the one-way communication time to
England by two whole days. So, instead of taking 14 days, a message could be sent
in 12 days. The government of Nova Scotia had already funded Gisbornes project
in 1851 but the effort had collapsed in bankruptcy amid charges of incompetence
and fraud. Gisborne hoped that Field would find the business case compelling and
give him the funds needed to complete the project and rescue his reputation.
Field thought about this for about a nanosecond and then told the poor guy that a
savings of two days was too trivial an improvement to make an investment worthwhile. He thanked Gisborne, then sent him packing.
As Field thought about it some more, he considered again that the problem with
Gisbornes plan was its lack of ambition. Looking at a globe, Field saw that it was
just a little bit further to go from Newfoundland to Ireland. Rather than cutting
communication time from 14 to 12 days, such a modest extension would cut it
down to zero. That, he knew, would be worthwhile. It would connect two continents for the first time in history and in so doing it would couple America and
Europe together in ways that would certainly lead to great wealth, world peace,
slimmer thighs and rosier complexions. All he had to do was build it.
First he had to establish whether the ocean floor would allow the practical laying of
a cable at all. He was surprised and delighted to discover that Lt. Matthew Maury
(later to be known as the father of oceanography, as well as the founder of the U.S.
Naval Academy) of the U.S. Navy had just completed the first-ever depth survey of
the Atlantic, along the very route of interest to Field. In 1856, Maury summarized
his findings in a letter to Field:
From Newfoundland to Ireland (there) is a plateau, which seems to have been
placed there especially for the purpose of holding the wires of a submarine telegraph, and of keeping them out of harms way.
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FIGURE 38.
Maurys oceanographic depth survey
St. Johns
Newfoundland
Valentia Bay
Ireland
As Field examined the actual depth profile (see Figure above), he was amazed at
the complete absence of dangerous features anywhere along the proposed route,
just as Maury had said. There were no deep trenches, no scary undersea mountain
peaks, just a relatively flat underwater road between St. Johns, Newfoundland and
Irelands Valentia Bay. Field must have felt an electric thrill upon reading Maurys
letter. Providence had provided.
Fields fortune, though substantial, was not nearly great enough for a venture of this
magnitude. He assembled a group of investors from his circle of wealthy friends
and started planning the project. He talked the British into underwriting part of the
venture and supplying a ship for cable-laying. He persuaded the U.S. Congress to
appropriate funds as well; the bill passed by a single vote (anti-British sentiment
still ran high, even forty years after the War of 1812). Since none of the investors
knew anything about electricity, let alone its use in telegraphy, Field sought out
experts, including Morse, who agreed to join in an advisory capacity. Continuing
his search for someone who would be a hands-on technical leader, he came across a
physician by the name of Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse.
Yes, physician, as in trained in the repair of malfunctioning meat. Whitehouse
was another in a long line of self-taught electrical geeks. His claims of expertise
rested mainly on his having built a telegraph in and around his home. His plan for
getting a telegraph to function across the Atlantic was simple: To go far, use a really
big battery: More volts = more miles. Simple. It was just a matter of scale.
It all sounded logical enough to paper magnate Field. At minimum, it was what he
wanted to hear. Whitehouses confidence swayed the other investors as well and the
project progressed rapidly. Every engineering challenge was seemingly overcome
with surprisingly modest effort. For example the problem of insulating a cable from
seawater had already been solved by the naturally thermoplastic rubber-like sap of
the gutta-percha plant (found mainly in Malaysia). Gutta-percha was in the process
of revolutionizing golf, having first found use in the core of golf balls in 1848. The
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versatility of gutta-percha extended to its use in dentistry, where it continues to be

used even today for temporary fillings. Of prime importance for Field was that no
less an eminence than Faraday himself had found that immersion in cold saltwater
at high pressure actually improves its electrical insulating qualities. Faradays
work, in fact, had enabled construction of an underwater telegraph cable between
Dover and Calais in 1851. The spanning of the English Channel with the 45km
cable linked England with the rest of Europe. Whitehouse based his cable on that
design, and asserted that the success of the Channel cable logically implied a similar success with the Transatlantic cable. He repeated to the investors that it was simply a matter of scale.
Although Whitehouse took the Channel cable as his model, he had some idea that
his own cable would probably have to be somewhat larger. While a fatter cable has
less electrical resistance (fatter pipe = easier flow), it also weighs more. Considering that they had to span 3200km the total weight of the cable was a serious concern. A young physics professor at the University of Glasgow named William
Thomson performed some calculations suggesting that, regrettably, a very thick
cable would be necessary. No two ships in existence were large enough to carry all
of Thomsons cable, however, so Whitehouse ignored the egghead professor, citing
his own better living through voltage solution to the problem. He did make use of
one of Thomsons other contributions, however. Amplifiers would not be invented
for another half-century and even Whitehouse understood that there would likely be
insufficient current to operate a conventional telegraph sounder. He was therefore
happy to have the professor focus on the problem of developing a more sensitive
receiver, although he would insist on trying out his own, inferior, receiver in competition with Thomson. As the story goes, Thomson was absentmindedly playing
with his monocle when he noticed that sunlight reflected off of its brass frame to
produce a wildly dancing spot of light on his studys walls. Because movement of
his monocle through a small angle produced a large lateral motion of the reflected
spot, here was a sort of an amplifier. In short order Thomson glued some small
magnets to the back of a tiny mirror and suspended the assembly on a fine thread.
Current flowing through a nearby coil caused the mirror to rotate, deflecting the
light from a kerosene lamp aimed at the mirror. A ruler measured the deflection,
allowing one to detect the presence or absence of a telegraph key depression.
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FIGURE 39.
Thomsons mirror galvanometer
Thomson was delighted to discover that currents far too feeble to operate an ordinary sounder would still produce quite-detectable indications with his apparatus.
Without his invention of the mirror galvanometer the transatlantic cable project
would have had no chance of succeeding.
The chance of succeeding may have indeed been slim, but Whitehouse did his level
best to drive it to zero by ignoring the recommendations of the only properly
trained person associated with the venture. With his vast expertise in blood-letting
and poultices to guide him, Whitehouse arbitrarily reduced the cable size until two
ships could carry the load. After that, the only tough job would be to count all the
money that the transatlantic telegraph would surely generate.
How could anything so simple fail to work?
The cable, though reduced in size by Whitehouse fiat, was still far too massive to be
transported from a factory to the ships. The solution was to build a wire factory on
shore, so that the cable could be loaded onto the ships as it was being made.
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FIGURE 40.
Cable being loaded aboard the Agamemnon (atlantic-cable.com)
The laying of the cable began in the summer of 1857 with two ships, the HMS
Agamemnon from Britain and the USS Niagara from the US, each carrying half the
cable.
FIGURE 41.
HMS Agamemnon (left) and USS Niagara (right); Wikipedia
Trouble arose almost immediately. The cable snapped, was repaired and then
snapped again. Apparently the mechanism that was supposed to maintain proper
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tension on the cable was not working as planned. The decision was made to defer
further attempts until a better cable-tensioner could be designed.
After a year of improvements, the team felt ready to try again. The Agamemnon and
the Niagara met in the middle of the Atlantic on June 26. Engineers connected the
two cables together, carefully insulated the splice with gutta-percha and signaled
that the ships could proceed to their respective destinations. As the Agamemnon
headed toward Ireland and the Niagara proceeded toward Newfoundland, the cable
broke no fewer than three separate times. An exasperated Field halted the attempt
until the problem could be studied further. Engineers improvised some adjustments
to the cable tensioner and finally signaled to Field that they were ready to try again.
The two ships proceeded carefully and by Aug. 5 both ends of the transatlantic
cable had reached their respective destinations. The cable ends were hauled ashore
and connected to the signaling apparatus. After a series of electrical tests, an official communication from Queen Victoria to President James Buchanan on August
16 marked the dawning of a new age. Raucous celebrations broke out in Britain and
America and Field was hailed as the man of the decade, if not the century. The natural human reaction, of course, was to compose polkas:
FIGURE 42.
Got cable? Then polka!
Fields celebratory mood was dampened by his knowledge that the 84-word communication from the Queen had actually taken 17 hours to send and decode. Many
retries had been necessary, and telegraphers had to guess at some of the text;55
something seemed to be wrong with the cable. Signals were weak and erratic.
55.The raw text as decoded on the American side was Dear Jim, Good show. Lets do
lunch! -- Love and kisses, Vic, leading to suspicion that interpolation was involved.
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Worse, efforts to send text at even a modest rate resulted in an unreadable smear
instead of discrete dots and dashes. Theyd have to do considerably better than 10
minutes per word (thats not a typo: 10 minutes per word).
As chief electrician, Whitehouse was under enormous pressure to fix the problems,
so the medical doctor resorted to his brute-force more volts = more goodness formula. Ordering the addition of progressively more batteries to boost the signal
seemed momentarily to improve communications but by the 23rd day after the
inaugural communications, the doctors incompetence had proved lethal to the
cable. Somewhere along the 3200 kilometer span, several kilometers beneath the
surface of the ocean, excessive voltage had blown a hole through an internal piece
of insulation and shorted out the cable.
Finger-pointing began immediately. Doubts even arose in some quarters about what
was now being called the Queens alleged congratulatory message. Investors
began to accuse Field of out-and-out fraud. Cable deniers claimed that the entire
enterprise had been a grand scheme to separate fools from their money. Given how
his life as a businessman had begun, these accusations hurt more than the technical
failure of the cable itself. The British, having underwritten part of the attempt (and
having also contributed the Agamemnon), convened a commission of inquiry to
investigate what had happened and to assess whether another attempt would be permitted. Field and his failure were international news and none of it was favorable to
Field.
Field was pained to see his name almost daily in newspaper headlines. He had gone
from man of the hour to fraudster of the century, all in the span of a month. Fortunately for him, civil war broke out in the U.S. in 1861, pushing his name off of the
front page for the duration.
The board of inquiry proceeded logically and deliberately while carnage swept the
not-very United States (more than 600,000 soldiers died over 2% of the entire
US population and more than the US has lost to date in all of its other wars combined). The board was shocked at several obvious problems. One was the choice of
a medical doctor as head electrician. Another was the dismissal of William Thomsons calculations. Perhaps most astonishing was that there wasnt even a vocabulary to describe the failure itself. Even butchers have words and associated
standards for quantities like weight and volume, but there was no corresponding set
of words and standards for the electrical arts. Eventually the creation of the volt,
ampere and ohm would mark the emergence of a new profession electrical engineering all as a direct consequence of the cables failure.
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As the Civil War drew to a close, so did the boards work. Despite all of the errors
of commission and omission, the board ultimately agreed that laying a cable across
the Atlantic was technically possible. Willingness to fund yet another attempt was
contingent on repairing the multiple deficiencies identified by the board, however.
Tinkerers like Whitehouse were out and professor Thomson was named scientific
head of the project.
Field promised to follow all of the boards recommendations and so funds were
provided for a final attempt. Thomson refined his calculations and concluded that a
suitable cable would be quadruple the weight of the previous one. Ships of the
Agamemnon/Niagara class would not be able to carry this cable, so additional ships
(and risky cable splices) would be necessary. Thomson also investigated details
such as the processing of the copper used in the cable, becoming enough of a metallurgist to understand the disproportionate sensitivity of copper to relatively small
amounts of dissolved oxygen. Keeping the oxygen content low enough to minimize
cable resistance would require careful manufacture, so Thomson oversaw the coppers careful manufacture.
At this point, someone elses colossal failure enabled the cable projects ultimate
success. The great civil engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel had built bridges, shipyards and Britains first large-scale railway system, the Great Western Railway
(along which, you may recall, Cooke and Wheatstone had deployed their ill-fated
needle telegraph). One fine day, Brunel got it into his head that what the world
really needed was a ship that could go from England to Australia without having to
stop for coal. The capstone of his career was to build a ship so large that 4,000 passengers at a time could enjoy the voyage. Regrettably Brunel had not bothered to
carry out any careful market research. As it happened only about 11 paying passengers, all apparently named Earl, were interested in traveling nonstop to Australia,
so the venture failed. A broken Brunel died in late 1859, leaving the gigantic ship
he had designed, the Great Eastern, abandoned for lack of almost any practical use.
Displacing 32,000 tons, a larger vessel would not exist until a half-century later, in
the age of Lusitania-class vessels.
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FIGURE 43.
Brunel and the Great Eastern (note size of anchor chain links!)
The Great Eastern was so large, in fact, that its hold could carry the entire load of
Thomsons larger cable, with ample space to spare. The Project purchased it for
pennies on the dollar, and it was quickly converted into a cable-laying ship. After a
brief pause caused by Lincolns assassination on April 15, 1865, Great Eastern
finally set sail from Valentia, Ireland on July 15, laying cable along the way. Engineers monitored the progress by continuously exchanging telegraph messages
along the cable. As the Great Eastern faded from view at Valentia, communications
continued uninterrupted, marking the first time in history that a ship hadnt disappeared when it disappeared.
A few problems arose here and there including compass deviations caused by
the massive amount of iron-jacketed cable, and suspicions of sabotage when several nail-like objects were found puncturing the insulating jacket. Fixes were
improvised, guards were posted, and the voyage continued.
Success was only a day away when a rogue wave suddenly pitched the Great Eastern upward. The rapid rise increased tension on the cable and snapped it. The crew
could only watch helplessly as the cable dropped thousands of meters into the dark
waters below.
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Field argued persuasively and successfully for funds to give it one last try. A year
later, on July 13, 1866, Great Eastern sailed again, this time without incident. On
July 27, after two largely problem-free weeks, the laying of the cable was complete.
After many careful checks, congratulatory telegrams were again exchanged, now
between Queen Victoria and President Andrew Johnson (Dear Andy, Good
show...). An exhausted but relieved Field joined in the festivities, this time without
worries.
The captain of the Great Eastern, James Anderson, started to search for the broken
cable from the previous years nearly successful attempt. On August 9 he started
dragging a grapple along the sea floor, hoping to snag the cable and bring it to the
surface. He miraculously snagged the cable and brought it to the surface several
times, only to have the cable slip off several times. In an amazing testament to
heroic persistence he finally succeeded a month later. He was later knighted for his
efforts. By September 7th, there were two functioning transatlantic cables. The
United States and Great Britain have been in continuous contact ever since. In
1965, the hundredth year of operation, the still-intact transatlantic telegraph cable
was ceremoniously decommissioned, having been made obsolete by advances in
communication. The cable remains in place, however, just where Field and the
Great Eastern put it more than a century ago.
Among its enduring legacies, the problems and success of the cable assured the creation of a new profession: Electrical engineering. The activity had been a subset of
subjects taught by university physics departments. The years immediately following the cable projects final triumph saw an increasing number of schools making
plans for separate electrical engineering departments in acknowledgment of the
subjects growing importance as a discipline in its own right. By the early 1880s,
schools such as Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
were offering courses of instruction and degrees in electrical engineering.
As for Field himself, the Transatlantic Cable Company charged $10 per word (perhaps equivalent to $500-$1000 today), and Field rapidly became wealthy beyond
all dreams of avarice. He shouldve retired in comfort but, alas, he later bet essentially every dollar he had on speculative stocks. He lost those bets and died nearly
penniless in 1892 at the age of 72. If it hadnt been for the diligence of his sons, the
family would have been destitute. Perhaps it is because of this unhappy end to an
otherwise glorious tale of persistence prevailing against all odds that Fields name
is little known today. He deserves better.
Queen Victoria elevated Thomson to the peerage for his invaluable contributions to
the project. He went on to important achievements in the field of thermodynamics
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(as well see later), and is better known today as Lord Kelvin (First Baron Kelvin of
Largs). The unit of absolute temperature, the kelvin, is named in his honor.
Thanks to Field and Thomson (and the Great Eastern) all continents would be
linked by telegraph by the first decade of the 20th century, in a prefiguring of the
modern interconnected world that we now enjoy.
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No More Wires
CHAPTER 6
No More Wires
Maxwell
Faraday suffered increasingly from serious ailments in his later years,
with symptoms consistent with a lifetime of exposure to toxic metals
(mercury chief among them). Although he lived to see the transatlantic cable laid, none of his surviving correspondence mentions it. Had
he been well enough to comprehend what Field and Thomson had
accomplished, he might have allowed himself to feel pride at having
made the enterprise possible in the first place. Given his Sandemanian sensibilities, of course, any such pride would have found expression as admiration for what Field and Thomson had achieved.
Faraday had managed another critically important achievement a decade or so
before passing away in 1867. He had begun a correspondence and friendship with a
young Scottish physicist, James Clerk (pronounced Clark) Maxwell, who was the
trained mathematician that Faraday was not. One of Maxwells first papers, published in 1855 when he was 24, was titled, On Faradays Lines of Force. His
translation of Faradays intuitive ideas into the quantitative language of mathematics not only did much to elevate Faradays stature in the eyes of the formally
schooled, it was also an important first step toward fulfilling a dream of Faraday
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Maxwell
who, like Oersted, believed that all powers derived from a common source. That
belief, plus his remarkable intuitive insights about the workings of nature, had left
him with a conviction that light itself had to be an electromagnetic phenomenon.
He had even carried out a number of experiments in an effort to prove it, but without much success. He attributed these failures to the experiments themselves, and
not to any fault with his hypothesis.
In conveying his beliefs to Maxwell, Faraday was passing the torch to perhaps the
one individual then alive who could succeed in the endeavor. Maxwell began by
systematically writing down the equations that summarized all that was then known
about electricity and magnetism. That part was easy, because there werent that
many equations. Ampere had provided the mathematical description of how an
electrical current could generate magnetism. To that Maxwell added his own mathematical description of Faradays discovery that a changing magnetic field generates an electric field. Maxwell could tell by inspection that this apparently
comprehensive set of equations could not describe light. However, inspired by his
belief in Faradays vision, Maxwell pressed on, almost arbitrarily adding one more
equation to produce the desired miracle. The added term was equivalent to declaring that a changing electric field could generate an electrical current. There was
then no experimental evidence to justify this declaration, but he pressed on, for he
recognized that the resulting set of equations described an electromagnetic dog
chasing its magnetoelectric tail: A changing magnetic field would give rise to a
changing electric field, which would give rise to a changing magnetic field, and so
on, with the dying of one generating the other. The equations described an electromagnetic wave as an eternal dance of mutual destruction and rebirth. They
described light.
Maxwell was not an experimentalist. He wasnt even able to suggest how to go
about setting up any relevant experiments let alone carry them out to provide
direct, physical proof that his equations were correct. However, his equations did
imply one specific and previously unsuspected relationship among light,
electricity and magnetism. By his reckoning, the speed of light should be expressible in terms of two separate physical constants one each from Amperes and
Faradays laws. When he plugged the best-known values for these constants into
his formula, what emerged was a velocity that was within 5% of the speed of light.
To him, that level of agreement couldnt be a coincidence. Light was almost certainly an electromagnetic wave. The calculation had yielded a tantalizing clue, but
almost certainly was unsatisfyingly short of certainly.
And thats where things stood for over a decade, for Maxwell regrettably did not
enjoy Faradays longevity. It is a tragic loss to our species that Maxwell died of
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No More Wires
stomach cancer at the age of 48, the same age that his mother died of the same ailment. Others would have to provide direct proof of his equations.
Maxwells equations would eventually give us wireless technology. And, in the
spirit of rebirth following death, Maxwells work would also inspire a young physicist named Albert Einstein born in the year of Maxwells death to a revolution in our understanding of the universe. These developments would be so
profound that the physics Nobelist Richard Feynman has opined that the US Civil
War would eventually fade into merely parochial significance, but Maxwells equations would forever be acknowledged as the crowning intellectual achievement of
the 19th century.
Hertz
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Prologue
CHAPTER 7
All Hail Our Silicon

Overlords
Prologue
The nine-month gestation had been fraught with one serious problem after another.
Now the wait was finally over and Federico Faggin at various times father,
mother and midwife expectantly approached his newborn. Hope tempered with
trepidation quickly bubbled over into elation as waveform after waveform happily
revealed the lusty cries of a healthy infant: The 4004 was alive and well! It was certainly a promising start for the microprocessor, but not even the other parents of the
4004 Stan Mazor, Ted Hoff and Masatoshi Shima could imagine just how
promising. With astonishing speed, its descendants would completely transform
human existence.
The Age of Mechanism

Had we known then what we know now, the birth of the microprocessor that January day in 1971 might have been celebrated the world over. Perhaps, as with the
first transatlantic telegraph cable and with Telstar the first communications sat-
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All Hail Our Silicon Overlords
ellite the achievement would have inspired verse and song. Raucous brass bands
would have accompanied fireworks and parades. And had carillons competed with
that exuberant cacophony for attention, it would have been particularly apropos, for
our story traces back in part to the mechanisms used to automate their playing.
When the art of modern clock-making began to develop in Europe in the 13th and
14th centuries, the mechanisms initially marked time by sounding a bell (typically
once or twice an hour), rather than providing a continuous display of time with the
now-familiar hour- and minute-hands [1]. These early clocks usually rang a single
bell, but a delightful musical tradition arose primarily in the Low Countries of
Holland and Belgium. Anyone who has examined the mechanism of an old-fashioned music box will recognize the barrel-and-pin arrangement eventually devised
to automate the playing of the carillon bells (Figure 1). As the clock mechanism
rotates the barrel, protruding pins strike levers that ultimately activate combinations
of bells in the corresponding sequence. Playing a particular tune merely involves
the insertion of pins in an appropriate pattern. The simplicity and flexibility of this
arrangement greatly facilitates the accommodation of a variety of musical
sequences. Paper maps of the pin locations provide a nonvolatile memory of individual musical selections, and enable rapid setup of new tunes. The template thus
represents a primitive but definite form of data storage, distinct from the mechanism (execution engine) that acts on the stored information.
Automatic carillon mechanism in the belfry of Ghent. (Photo
credit: Essentialvermeer.com.)
FIGURE 44.
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The Age of Mechanism
The next evolutionary step toward the computer takes us from Flanders to France.
Basile Bouchon of Lyon solved a problem in the textile industry in 1725 by adapting key aspects of the pin-and-barrel system. Bouchons father was an accomplished organ builder and familiar with automated carillons. The younger Bouchon
reconceived the pin-and-barrel as a perforated paper cylinder that could control the
patterns woven by looms. The invention enabled higher speed, better consistency,
and the accommodation of more intricate patterns. The fragility of perforated paper
motivated Bouchons associate, Jean Falcon, to substitute a chain of sturdy punched
cards for paper in 1728. This arrangement also had the advantage of easily allowing
editing of the programmed patterns, since individual cards could be exchanged
without having to replace the whole set.
Bouchons inspired adaptation greatly improved throughput and quality, but the
process was still incompletely automated: a human had to advance the template
manually, line by line. It was too easy for a fatigued or distracted weaver to forget
to do so from time to time, possibly ruining a piece. A fellow countryman, Jacques
Vaucanson, solved that problem logically enough with an automatic advance mechanism in 1745. The seemingly inevitable and obvious next step of combining Falcons card assembly with Vaucansons automatic advance system inexplicably took
a half century. Joseph Marie Jacquard finally took that last step, in 1801.
FIGURE 45. Left: Loom with Jacquard head, at the Manchester Museum of
Science and Industry. Right: Closeup of cards.(Wikipedia; photo credit:
George H. Williams)
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The Jacquard loom (more properly, the Jacquard head, as Jacquard did not modify
the loom proper) did indeed revolutionize the textile industry, but not in France.
Another revolution had recently taken place there, and it significantly muted the
domestic demand for the patrician patterns that Jacquards invention made practical. Instead, the Jacquard loom found a welcome home in England, where it made
once-exotic patterns, such as paisley, widely available for the first time.
The Jacquard loom and the French revolution had consequences that extended well
beyond textiles. The Revolution had caused a spike in hairdresser unemployment,
owing to fewer heads as well as a reduced demand for the elaborate hairstyles of the
detested upper class. Gaspard Clair Franois Marie Riche de Prony decided to put
many of these hairdressers to work as computers in the 1790s, to generate logarithmic and trigonometric tables. He organized them systematically into teams, each of
which was responsible for a particular computational module. He thus anticipated
the mass-production methods that would later dominate manufacturing. De Prony
noted with satisfaction that these computers did an excellent job.
Around 1822 Charles Babbage (later to hold the Lucasian professorship of mathematics at Cambridge, as Newton once had) began developing ideas for a purely
mechanical calculating machine [3][4]. He was motivated in part by frustration
with the errors inevitably found in published mathematical tables. Eliminating the
human element was essential to achieving his goal of perfection, and he drew inspiration from de Pronys organization of human computers in architecting his own
mechanical computer. His Difference Engine was to generate tables of logarithms
and trigonometric values automatically, using a particular mathematical approach
(the method of finite differences) to calculate polynomial approximations of
these functions. He elaborated on these concepts in the design of the vastly more
powerful Analytical Engine. It was to use two sets of Jacquards punch-cards
one to specify the operations (program), and another for the data on which the program would operate. Neither Engine was built in his lifetime, but the concepts
underlying their operation are breathtakingly modern. Particularly noteworthy perhaps is his explicit recognition of conditional operators as valuable.
A working Difference Engine was finally demonstrated in 1991, as part of a bicentennial celebration of Babbages birth. It took almost another decade to realize his
concepts for the associated printing mechanism. Figure 3 shows the completed Difference Engine on display at the London Science Museum. There are no known
plans by anyone anywhere to build an Analytical Engine.
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Our Friend, the Electron
Worlds first working Babbage Difference Engine, at the

London Science Museum. The printing mechanism is on the left. The
operating crank for the Engine is seen on the right. (Wikipedia: Difference
Engine.)
FIGURE 46.
Babbage died in 1871, just a few years too soon to see his idea of using Jacquards
(Falcons) cards for data storage adopted by government bureaucrats desperate to
solve a different set of problems.

John Shaw Billings was a supervisor for the 1880 U.S. census, and he saw serious
trouble ahead. Manual tabulation of the data was so slow that completing the 1880
census took nearly eight years. Billings and his colleagues estimated that the next
census would take half as many years longer, so it was evident to all that the methods theyd been using had reached a scaling limit. Belying the stereotype of an
indifferent, slothful bureaucrat, Billings took action, just as he had during the U.S.
Civil War, where hed served as medical inspector of the Army of the Potomac, and
just as he had in establishing the New York Public Library. Hed proved his powers
of persuasion in convincing steel magnate Andrew Carnegie to fund the construc-
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103
tion of thousands of public libraries, so he was the right man to get one of his subordinates, Herman Hollerith, to look into ways of mechanizing the process to speed
up the next census. Hollerith went to work immediately, and in short order invented
an electrical tabulator based on Jacquards punched cards (see Figure 4) [5][6]. The
card reader (see closeup on the right) used a movable bed of nails to make electrical contact through card holes to mercury-filled wells in the base.
FIGURE 47. Hollerith census tabulator, at the Computer History Museum.
Dials indicate current and total values of individual data fields. Punch
cards would be used with computers well into the 1970s. (Photos by author)
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To save time and money, Hollerith chose dimensions for the card that matched
those of the U.S. dollar bill at the time, allowing him to use components and whole
assemblies from pre-existing machines. Thanks to the speed and accuracy of Holleriths electrical tabulator, the 1890 census was finished in little over half the time
of the 1880 census, and that included a complete second run needed to overcome
skepticism about this new way of doing things. Holleriths Tabulating Machine
Company became the International Business Machines Corporation in 1924 after a
series of acquisitions and mergers. History records that a company called IBM
enjoyed some prominence in the computer business.
Aspects of Babbages work also ultimately inspired the creation of an analog
mechanical computer, the Differential Analyzer (Figure 5) [7][8]. Vannevar Bush,
Harold Hazen and their colleagues began working on the Analyzer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1920s, and were able to demonstrate an
operational unit by the early 1930s. Capable of solving sixth-order differential
equations, the versatile Analyzer was suitable for everything from early quantum
calculations to generating ballistics firing tables. The technical success of the MIT
Analyzer led to the adoption of the architecture at a number of other institutions.
The installation at UCLA is perhaps especially noteworthy for its contribution to
popular culture: The proximity to Hollywood helps explain why the UCLA Analyzer appears in movies such as When Worlds Collide and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers. These films, dating from 1951 and 1956, respectively, attest to the iconic
status of the Analyzer in the early postwar period.
FIGURE 48. Vannevar Bush (left) examining the Differential Analyzer in
operation. (Photo credit: MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science)
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As powerful and flexible as the Analyzer was, it did suffer from several deficiencies. Programming the Analyzer involved disassembling the previous setup, and
reassembling the new configuration of gears and linkages, for example. Merely setting up a problem for solution often took days of wrench-work that wouldve been
more familiar to automobile mechanics than to mathematicians. Indeed, computing
the solution often took less sometimes much less time than it took to set up
the Analyzer.
Inevitably, students were impressed into service as make-do mechanics to configure, operate and maintain the Analyzer. One of these students was Claude Shannon,
who had recently started his graduate studies at MIT after earning two bachelors
degrees (in mathematics and electrical engineering) at the University of Michigan
in 1936. By 1937, Shannons experiences with the Analyzer had motivated him to
invent the technology that would soon render obsolete the Analyzer and its
mechanical kin: digital electronics. Shannon was familiar with the then-obscure
work of George Boole [9], and realized that Boole's concepts could be applied to
the analysis and design of what we now call digital circuits. A 1938 paper derived
from, and titled the same as, his 1937 master's thesis, A Symbolic Analysis of
Relay and Switching Circuits, was immediately influential [10]. For virtually all
readers, it was their first exposure to the names and powerful ideas of Boole and
Augustus De Morgan. Shannons paper presented a rich formalism that transformed
into an engineering discipline what had previously been an ad hoc art. Considering
all that has followed from this work, its difficult to argue with the common assessment that it was the most important master's thesis of the 20th century.
Once binary logic was understood by a critical mass of engineers, it was only a
matter of time before fully electronic computers would turn their electromechanical
counterparts into museum pieces. Abetting that transition was the work of Alan
Turing. At virtually the same time that Shannon was inventing digital electronics,
Turing was establishing some of the foundational ideas of computer science. Perhaps chief among these was the concept of a universal machine (known today as a
Turing machine) that could implement any function that was computable. Such a
universal machine is now known as a Turing-complete computer. The influence of
Turnings ideas took somewhat longer to be felt, but that influence has been no less
profound than Shannons.
106
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Onward to the Fully Electronic Computer

The demands of the Second World War greatly accelerated the development of virtually all technologies. Computers both aided, and were aided by, these developments in no small measure. Only electromechanical analog computers had existed
before the war. By the wars end, electronic computers with recognizably modern
characteristics had come into existence, with fully digital programmable electronic
computers following soon after.
In Germany, Konrad Zuse constructed a succession of digital computers based on
relay logic. His third, dubbed the Z3, executed programs stored on paper tape, and
was operational by 1941. It was the first program-controlled digital computer possessing all of the essential characteristics of what we think of as a modern computer. Specifically, it was the first Turing complete machine [11]. (Although no
computer with finite memory can be Turing complete in the formal sense, the term
is colloquially applied to computers that would be complete if infinite memory
were available.) A reconstructed Z3 is on display at the wonderful Deutsches
Museum in Munich.
At approximately the same time as Zuse was demonstrating his relay-based Z3,
Clifford Berry and John Atanasoff of Iowa State College were building an electronic computer designed to solve systems of linear equations. As did the Z3, the
Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) used binary arithmetic. It also used dynamic
memory based on capacitive storage cells, properly implementing the necessary
refresh operations. Robert Dennard of IBM would reinvent capacitive dynamic
memory in integrated circuit form almost three decades later [12]. Although the
ABC was not programmable, its innovations were nonetheless influential. The
degree of this influence was the subject of protracted litigation that finally concluded in favor of the ABC team in 1973. Although the litigation may have ended,
the arguments clearly have not [13][14].
The war naturally also stimulated intense activity in the U.K. At Bletchley Park, a
secret effort dedicated to cracking German codes produced the Colossus computer
in 1944. It holds the distinction of being the first programmable digital electronic
computer. Somewhat ironically, however, it was not Turing complete, even though
Turing worked at Bletchley Park. The influence of the Colossus on subsequent
computer development was limited because of the secrecy that enshrouded the
work. Indeed, all ten Colossus machines in use by the end of the war and all
associated engineering documents were deliberately destroyed after the war, on
orders from Winston Churchill himself. The world at large thus knew nothing of the
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107
Bletchley Park achievements until the 1970s. Surviving alumni of the effort helped
to reconstruct the Colossus from memory, with success achieved in 2006 [15].
A computer of the era that did have great influence was the decimal-based ENIAC
(electronic numerical integrator and computer). The project that gave life to
ENIAC began with John Mauchlys pre-war desire to build a weather-forecasting
computer. The University of Pennsylvania professor redirected his efforts after war
broke out, to design a computer that would carry out the same sort of ballistics calculations that the Differential Analyzer could perform. Mauchly understood that an
electronic computer would be able to outperform a mechanical one by orders of
magnitude. Working with J. Presper Eckert, the ENIAC became operational at the
universitys Moore School of Electrical Engineering laboratories in 1945; it was the
first Turing-complete electronic computer [2]. Its complement of nearly 18,000
vacuum tubes helped account for its 150kW power consumption (and a mean time
between failures of a day or two). It could multiply two 10-digit decimal numbers
in a few milliseconds. A few hundred multiplications per second may be laughable
performance today, but it astonished at the time.
ENIAC in operation (Wikipedia). The rats nest of patch cables
used to program the computer are clearly visible on the left.
FIGURE 49.
ENIAC begat EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer; clearly

the Department of Cumbersome Acronyms was working overtime) at the Moore
School. John von Neumann authored an influential report on EDVAC, in which he
elaborated on some of Turings ideas. Unlike the decimal-based ENIAC, EDVAC
108
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would be a binary digital computer, and program instructions would share memory
with operands. This shared-memory structure is now known as the von Neumann
architecture, thanks to his sole authorship of the report. This assignment of credit
has been a source of annoyance to others working on the project, Mauchly and Eckert included [14]. Perhaps it is sufficient to note that success has many fathers, and
grand successes tend to stimulate many claims to paternity.
Mauchly and Eckert left the university to start their own computer company, the
Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. Through an acquisition in 1950, EMCC
became the Univac division of Remington Rand. The UNIVAC computer gained
fame for accurately predicting the outcome of the 1952 presidential election, where
human pollsters had not. Television network CBS had chosen to include UNIVAC
in their broadcast coverage largely as a publicity gimmick, and simply disbelieved
the machines predictions until hard data revealed that UNIVAC had been correct
all along. Later in the broadcast, news anchor Walter Cronkite apologized on camera. Overnight, the idea of an omniscient electronic brain gained currency in the
popular imagination. The 1957 Tracy-Hepburn film, Desk Set, plays on this notion,
and in fact opens with a sequence that features an IBM 650-series computer (the
first mass-produced computer) printing out the credits. IBMs computers would
famously come to dominate the mainframe world.
The evolution of the computer during this fertile period is mirrored in the rapidly
evolving etymology. Until the electronic age, a computer was a human who did calculations [16]. When devices such as the Analyzer appeared, the qualifier mechanical had to be added to distinguish the new from the old. The arrival of a still-newer
technology was acknowledged by the establishment of MITs Digital Computer
Laboratory in 1951. The subsequent dominance of digital computers eventually
made the qualifier digital unnecessary, and the retronym analog computer was created to distinguish the old from the new. Today, a computer is a digital computer in
all but a very few cases.
The links connecting UNIVAC to the 4004 include the first transistor computers,
the TX0 and TX2 built at MITs Lincoln Laboratory and the miniaturization
that transistors made possible. That miniaturization in turn kicked off the minicomputer revolution, led by Digital Equipment Corporation, whose founders, Ken
Olsen and Norm Andersen, had worked on the TX0. Their PDP-1 debuted in 1958,
and its interactive and more personal type of computing inflamed a desire among
engineers for still-smaller, even-more personal computers. With the invention of
the integrated circuit soon after DECs founding, the basic elements were in place
[17]. After a few generations of Moores law, and a small additional stimulus, the
microprocessor would be all but inevitable. By 1970, with Busicoms desire to
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109
make calculators, and Intels desire to sell them chips, the necessary conditions
were well satisfied.
Summary
As with all human stories, the path to the microprocessor was anything but a
straight line. Bits of art scattered over the globe and across centuries somehow
assembled organically to drive the narrative of this history. The random nature of
creation forces us to impose an a posteriori order that is arguably more of a Rorschach test than an objective recounting. Instead of starting with carillons, we could
have gone further back in time, to Heron of Alexandria, whose virtuosity with
mechanism included the construction of devices that are the direct ancestors of the
pin-and-barrel. We also couldve examined the contributions of Ada Byron King,
Countess of Lovelace, and her work with Babbage, or about the profound influence
of Turings ideas, but one must bound the story somehow, especially in a chapter of
a few pages. It is hoped that the incompleteness does not undermine the basic thesis
that, although the microprocessor may have been inevitable, the particular path
connecting it to automated carillons was probably not unique. If we were to re-run
the tape of history, it is unlikely that events would unfold in the same manner again.
But let the carillons chime in celebration, just the same.
References
110
1.
Thomas H. Lee, It's About Time: A Brief Chronology of Chronometry, IEEE

SSCS Magazine, July 2008.
2.
Herman H. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, Princeton

University Press, 1980.
3.
Charles Babbage, A note respecting the application of machinery to the calculation of astronomical tables, Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society of
London, read 14 June 1822.
4.
Babbage Difference Engine #2, http://ed-thelen.org/bab/bab-intro.html,

retrieved 22 Oct. 2008.
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References
5.
Herman Hollerith, The Electrical Tabulating Machine, Journal of the Royal

Statistical Society, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Dec., 1894), pp. 678-689. Also see his U.S.
patents 395781, 395782 and 395783, filed in September of 1884.
6.
Herman Hollerith, http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/builders/

builders_hollerith.html. (Retrieved 1 Nov. 2008.)
7.
Thomas H. Lee, Tales of the Continuum: A Subsampled History of Analog

Circuits, IEEE SSCS Magazine, October 2007. Ancestors of the MIT Differential Analyzer include the work of William Thomson (later to become Lord
Kelvin). In turn, Thomsons work represents a re-establishment of an analog
computing tradition that dates back to the Antikythera mechanism of Roman
times.
8.
Kent Lundberg, Vannevar Bushs Differential Analyzer, http://web.mit.edu/

klund/www/analyzer/, retrieved 20 Oct. 2008.
9.
George Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, Macmillan, London,1854. It may be downloaded in a variety of formats from http://
www.archive.org/details/investigationofl00boolrich.
10.
Claude Elwood Shannon, Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical

Engineers, vol. 57, pp. 713-723, 1938. His complete masters thesis (dated 10
Aug. 1937) may be downloaded from http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/
1721.1/11173/34541425.pdf?sequence=1.
11.
Konrad Zuse, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse, retrieved

1 Nov. 2008.
12.
Robert H. Dennard, Revisiting Evolution of the MOSFET Dynamic RAM - A

Personal View, IEEE SSCS Magazine, Jan. 2008. His article implies that he
was unaware of the ABCs use of dynamic memory.
13.
The Trial, http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/ABC/Trial.html, retrieved 1 Nov. 2008.
14.
Q&A: A lost interview with ENIAC co-inventor J. Presper Eckert, Computerworld, http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2006/0,4814,108568,00.html,
retrieved 1 Nov. 2008.
15.
Colossus Computer, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Colossus_computer, retrieved 1 Nov. 2008.
16.
David Alan Grier, When Computers Were Human, Princeton University Press,
2005.
17.
Thomas H. Lee, The (Pre)- History of the Integrated Circuit: A Random

Walk, IEEE SSCS Magazine, April 2007.
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Foreword

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Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15

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Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15

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Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15

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Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15

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Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15

Wireless heroes Jack Phillips (left) and Harold Bride

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Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15

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Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15

Greek stamp honoring Thales (note the amber and feather)

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Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15

From elektron to electricity

From elektron to electricity

Modern replica of Han Dynasty compass

Things About Stuff

Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15

Things About Stuff

Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15

From elektron to electricity

Things About Stuff

Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15

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Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15

From elektron to electricity

Portrait of William Gilbert

9. De Magnete, Magneticisque Corporibus, et Magno Magnete Tellure; Physiologia Nova,

Things About Stuff

Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15

Things About Stuff

Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15

From elektron to electricity

First appearance of electrica (De Magnete, Book 2, Chapter 2)

The excerpt translates very roughly as14

Things About Stuff

Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15

Why they call it The Enlightenment

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Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15

Why they call it The Enlightenment

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Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15

Von Guericke (l) and his generator, Die Elektrisiermaschine

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Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15

Why they call it The Enlightenment

Diagram from his book of Hauksbees glass globe machine

Things About Stuff

Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15

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Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15

It hurts when I do that

It hurts when I do that

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Thomas H Lee, rev. 9/20/15

Leyden jar of Watsons type (shown here being discharged)

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