Scientific history of electricity

For ancient Greeks until the end of the 18th entry, the only form of electricity that could be studied under controlled conditions was static electricity, generated by rubbing glass with a fabric such as silk.

Electricity was rediscovered during the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In 1600, William Gilbert a British natural Philosopher in his book dealing with Earth as a magnet, he used term electricam, a Latin term that would serve as the basis for the English world ‘electricity’, ‘electric’, and ‘electrical’.

In his text, Gilbert tried to separate electricity from magnetism.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), demonstrated with his kite, and key experiment that lightning is an electrical phenomenon, thus proving that electricity exists in nature.

Franklin was internationally recognized for his research on electricity, and through his work, he invented the much needed lightning rod.

Technological applications from batteries and from the new understanding of electrical phenomena they engendered evolved in the early 19th century.

Volta of Italy, Oersted of Denmark, Ohm of Germany, Ampere of France and Faraday of Britain, whose investigations in the early 19th century established sufficient scientific understanding of electricity to suggest practical application.

Thomas Edison put electricity to work. Until Edison perfected the electric lamp in 1879, all light sources came from open flames that created soot, heat and often fire.

Practical applications emerged from the 1830s onwards, on a steadily expanding front. The first was the electric telegraph, powered initially by batteries. Then came arc-lighting, telephone, light bulb and electric motor.
Scientific history of electricity

Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915)

Leukemia was described in the intervening years but it was 1879 before Paul Ehrlich published his method for staining blood films. Paul Ehrlich, German scientist who won Nobel Prize winner in 1908.

He is credited with the first description of the human basophil in 1879. He is also noted for his work in immunology and chemotherapy.

Paul Ehrlich was born in a Jewish family on 14 March 1854 in Strehlen, Prussia. As a schoolboy and student of medicine he was interested in staining microscopic tissue substances.

Ehrlich was restless and uninspired student, studying at the University of Breslau, Strasburg, Freiburg and Leipzig in the 1870s. His tutor at the University of Strasburg was the first professor to introduce the chemical outlook into medicine. Under his supervision, Ehrlich discovered a new variety of mastcells through his staining experiments.

He earned a medical degree from Leipzig I 1878. Later he became an assistant in the medical clinic of the University of Berlin and continued his research on dyes. During his term at Charite hospital in Berlin, Ehrlich reputation as an expert stainer grew. His discovery of tubercule bacilli led him to collaboration with Robert Koch.

He also developed the first drug designed to kill a particular kind of disease causing microorganisms inside the body.

Ehrlich had a slight stroke on December 1914, and then, while on vacation in Bad Homburg suffered a second strike, which killed him on August 20, 1915.
Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915)

Bertram Brockhouse

Bertram Brockhouse
Bertram Brockhouse was “awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering contributions to the development of neutron scattering techniques for studies of condensed matter and particularly for the development of neutron spectroscopy.”

The work for which he was recognized was carried out in the 1950s and 1960s and it helped answer “the question of what atoms do!”

Bertram Brockhouse was born in Lethbridge, Alberta, in 1918 and briefly attended a one room prairie schoolhouse before the family moved to Vancouver, but the family was uprooted again in 1935 in the middle of the Great Depression.

They went to Chicago for three years to try to improve their precarious financial situation.

While in Chicago, Bertram began to design and repair radios, which probably sparked his later interest in physics and electronic equipment.

The family returned to Vancouver in 1938 and when war broke out, Brockhouse enlisted in the Royal Canadian navy.

In1944, he spent 6 months at the Nova Scotia technical College in an electrical engineering course and then he was assigned to the National Research Council in Ottawa.

Canada had made a commitment on nuclear energy in the late 1940s and 1950s and the Atomic Energy Project of the National Research Council was strongly supported by the Government both politically and financially.

Hr solved one problem after another and eventually came up with his own design for a triple-axis spectrometer.

The instrument enabled him to bombard solid materials with slow moving neutrons produced in the reactor.

That, in turn, allowed him to calculate the strength of the forces that bond atoms together.

His neutrons spectrometer was so successful that it is now used worldwide.

A special feature of hi spectrometer was its ability to vary three angles: the direction of the neutron beam, the position o the specimen and the angle of the detector.

With access to one of the world’s best nuclear reactor facilities and his new spectrometer, Brockhouse was able to explore the tiny inner-world of the atom for the next twelve years.

It was during this period that he and his neutron spectrometer accomplished the work that led to his Nobel Prize.

He was appointed professor of physics at McMaster University in Hamilton which had the only university-sited nuclear reactor in Canada at the time.

When Brockhouse was named as the recipient of the 1994 Nobel prize in Physics, he had already been retired since 1984.
Bertram Brockhouse

John Desmond Bernal (1901 – 71)

John Desmond Bernal (1901 – 71)
John Desmond Bernal, British physicist. His pioneering work in the field of X-ray crystallography enabled the structure of many complex molecules to be elucidated.

Bernal came from an Irish farming family. Brought up as a Catholic, he was educated at Stonyhurst and Cambridge, where he abandoned Catholicism and became (1923) an active member of the Communist Party.

After Cambridge, Bernal spent four years at the Royal Institution in London learning the practical details of X-ray crystallography from Sir William Bragg. When he returned to Cambridge in 1927 he planned a research program to reveal the complete three-dimensional structure of complex molecules, including those found exclusively in living organisms, by the techniques of X-ray crystallography.

In 1933 Bernal succeeded in obtaining photographs of single crystal proteins and went on to study the tobacco mosaic virus. It was not, however, Bernal’s own achievements in crystallography, as much as those of his pupils and colleagues, such as Dorothy Hodgkin and Max Perutz, that brought about the revolution in biochemistry and launched the subject of molecular biology.

In 1937 Bernal was appointed professor of physics at Birkbeck College, London. His attempts to develop the department were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. Despite his known membership of the Communist party and against the advice of the security forces, Bernal spent much of the war as adviser to Earl Mountbatten.

In 1945 he returned to Birkbeck College and in 1963 was appointed to a chair of crystallography. In the same year he suffered a stroke and although he continued to work for some time, a second and more severe stroke in 1965 paralyzed him down one side and virtually ended Bernal’s scientific life. His books include The Social Function of Science (1939), Science In History (1958), and the Origin of Life (1967).
John Desmond Bernal (1901 – 71)