The Spark that Broke the Atom

Abstract

We are once again brought back to Miletus, Greece, in 585 bc, where the respected scientist – philosopher Thales, discovered electricity by rubbing fur against amber and he could even produce a spark. Since this discovery, electricity remained, more or less, a matter of curiosity and an unresearched phenomenon, until the eighteenth century, when discovery of magnetic properties of lodestone (magnetic materials found in nature) by William Gilbert and his subsequent detailed comparison of electricity and magnetism were made. Preliminary experiments such as those by C.F. du Fay on two different forms of electricity (now known to be positive and negative charges) and by Benjamin Franklin on lightning kept electricity as an interesting research field, but perhaps only still a curiosity. However, once Alessandro Volta made a reliable source of electricity by constructing a battery using alternate layers of zinc and copper immersed in an electrolyte, and Michael Faraday invented the electric motor that could replace animal and manual labor in 1821, the field of electricity had made it into the engineering field and the research on electricity and magnetism became a very profitable necessity. Following the demonstration of the connection between electricity and magnetism by Hans Oersted and Andre-Marie Ampere, and analytical descriptions of circuit currents and voltages by George Ohm, the field became a bread-and-butter activity of scientists around the world. From here on and rightly so, scientific research was concerned with the field of electromagnetism for a long time. Even today, majority of inventions and tools resulted from such research.