Abstract
The history of electrical units of measurement is only about 200 years long, but certainly convoluted. It is a story of numerous international conferences, congresses, committees, actions (and inactions), and changes in what has eventually become the international standard for electrical measurement: electric current. Electrical measurement is intricately linked to magnetic measurements, forming a cohesive system. This chapter describes the journey from tiny laboratory-based measurements to practical-sized units. The standard units have been, at various times, EMF, resistance, conductance, and magnetic units. The result so far is that the standard electrical unit of measurement is the SI ampere measuring the flow rate of electrical charge, with many the other units derived from combinations of the ampere and other base units. We can expect this saga to continue, as re-definition of the ampere is currently being considered by the SI community.
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Treese, S.A. (2018). Historical Electrical Charge and Current. In: History and Measurement of the Base and Derived Units. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77577-7_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77577-7_11
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