Italian doctor Luigi Galvani found that you can connect a Leyden jar to dead animals and make them jump around. Traveling doctors were roaming rural New England, treating everything from asthma to dysentery with electric shock. Humphrey Davy was about to isolate several elements (calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium) for the first time with electrolysis. …and in the Netherlands, Hans
electrolyte. Stacked in layers, this arrangement produced a stable, continuous electric current, unlike earlier electrostatic machines or Leyden jars, which could only deliver brief bursts of electricity and could never provide any consistency.
Christian Ørsted started his investigation of electricity.
Hans Christian Ørsted
Ørsted was a brilliant mind. He grew up on an island off the coast of Denmark called Langeland. There was no formal school, but community members would take time to teach children arithmetic, drawing, and languages like German and French from people like the town’s mayor. He attended the University of Copenhagen and received a PhD in 1799. Soon after the invention of the voltaic pile was published, he began conducting his own experiments as a young man. He spent a few years traveling Europe to study with other researchers. At the time, people suspected a connection between magnetism and electricity, but nobody could find it. It sounds simple today, but researchers
Hans Christian Ørsted
would put a compass needle near batteries, Leyden jars, and high- voltage wires, and the connection could not be made. While teaching a class and demonstrating that a wire will produce heat when connected to a battery, he noticed that a nearby compass fluttered when the battery was connected. After meticulous experimentation,
Benjamin Franklin’s kite experiment really gave the field of study a kick start in the 1750s
The period between the late 1700s and 1820 was ripe for discovery in electricity. Finally, an experimenter could have a constant and reliable source of electricity. For the most part, few among the many experimenters had any idea what they were doing. There are stories of people tying lightning rods to elephants and other large animals.
all he could come up with was that there was a clear
connection between electricity and magnetism when a very high current was run through a wire. He found that a compass needle will deflect perpendicular to the conductor, demonstrating that the
we get technical
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