The various terms in modern usage in the numerous branches of electrical phenomena are all derived from electron which is the Greek word for amber. This seemingly peculiar selection of a term so foreign to the thing which it designates came about through the observation of Thaies, (600 B.C.) that amber when rubbed with some other substance displayed the eccentric behavior of attracting bits of pith and other light substances. A little later it was discovered that jet and some other substances possessed this same characteristic. Since jet acted like amber it was said to be Thus was obtained the prefix uelectr which is applied to almost all the phenomena associated with the manifestation of one of the many forms of energy. It took 2330 years to discover that metals also could be electrified. In 1786, L. Galvani, professor of physiology at the University of Bologna, Italy, was experimenting with a freshly killed frog, which he had hung up by the leg on a brass hook attached to an iron railing. Whenever a part of the frog touched the iron there was an instantaneous muscular contraction of some violence. With the dawn of the 19th Century (1800), Alessandro Volta, an Italian physicist, invented the voltaic, or primary cell. Volta had discovered that the muscular contraction in the frog's leg as observed by Galvani was caused by the flow of an electric current through the muscle and nerve fibres of the frog's leg, between the iron railing and the brass hook. From the names of these two men have been derived such words as voltaic, voltmeter, volt, etc., galvanic, galvanism, etc. Volta having established the fact of the existence of an electric current and how such a current could be generated, there opened up a new field of investigation which rapidly disclosed many of the natural laws governing the mechanics of this newly discovered energy. Michael Faraday and G. S. Ohm, with their contemporaries, formulated the laws governing the flow of electric current through
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Jan 1, 1994
Iwao Matsushima 
Open Access
