Questions tagged [electricity]
The study of the presence and flow of electric charge. Charges, currents, fields, potentials. It has also sub-topics such as voltage, current and resistance.
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What is the oldest way to measure the voltage?
What is the oldest way to measure the voltage?
I mean the experimental way or apparatus.
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How did "Gauss's law" get its name?
Did Carl Friedrich Gauss derive Gauss's law? How did the Maxwell equation we call "Gauss's law" become known as that? In class, we went over how you derive it from Coulomb's law, but I don't ...
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Reconstruction of the details of Gauss-Weber "thermogalvanic chain"
In the physicist chapter of Gauss's bio on encyclopedia.com appears the following statement about Gauss-Weber's unpublished correspondence:
Stimulated by Faraday’s discovery of induced current in ...
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Where does Oliver Heaviside fit in the ranks of physicists/mathematicians? [closed]
It seems to me that he was able to reformulate Maxwell's equations in a more understandable form and in fact come up with vector calculus without finishing high school would arguably cause him to be ...
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Is there a concise but detailed history of electricity?
I have recently become fascinated by the history of electricity. I have researched and come up with the following observations:
Static electricity was discovered in early times, by phenomena such as ...
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How sensitive was the frog galvanoscope?
Frog galvanoscope is an instrument for detecting small voltages, made of a frog's leg.
Wikipedia notes:
The instrument is capable of detecting extremely small voltages, and could far surpass other ...
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Translation of Cabeo's Philosophia magnetica
Is there a translation of Niccolò Cabeo's work Philosophia magnetica into English (or other modern language)? The original text in Latin is available for example here but I can't find any translation (...
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Granville Wood's Telegraph -- do we know the data rate and range?
I realize this is more a history of engineering question but I do not see a SE devoted to this so I thought I would ask here.
https://suiter.com/granville-woods-railway-telegraphy-patent-no-373383/ ...
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How did Thomson claim that charge on hydrogen ion was equal to charge on electron without knowing charge on electron?
From "The Electron" by J. J. Thomson, published in The Scientific Monthly Vol. 20, No. 2 (Feb., 1925), pp. 113-115
https://www.jstor.org/stable/7115
[Continued discussion] previously ...
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Why were Cathode ray tubes first invented?
Cathode ray tubes have played a very important role in the development of physics around 1900. They have also served as a key component in old-fashioned TVs.
This is great and all, but what was the ...
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What was the first use/cite of "Watt's law"?
Yesterday I saw a reference to Watt's law being used for the power formula P = V I.
It's been over 40 years since I learned my basic electrical engineering fundamentals and this is the first time that ...
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How was the direction of current flow determined in the first battery or the first voltmeter?
I read Franklin started the positive negative naming convention of electricity.
Now early scientists had to pick a direction for the battery and voltmeter. I don't understand how this was done.
If you ...
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Published expository account of Franklin's work on electricity?
Is there a good (or even mediocre) published expository account of Benjamin Franklin's work on electricity?
From what I have read and heard, it appears that
Franklin may have been the first to ...
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What material was the wire with which J.P. Joule did his experiment, with which he arrived at his law of heat dissipation from a resistor?
I have searched in Internet, but I have not found the material.
It couldn't be copper, because a short circuit would occur, and it couldn't be Nicrom, because Nicrom was not developed until 1905, and ...
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Why is the magnetic force on a current-carrying wire sometimes called the Laplace force?
Educated in the UK, I've been used to calling the force on a current-carrying wire in a magnetic field 'the motor effect force'. But I'm increasingly aware of another (less clumsy?) name for it: 'the ...
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