Inspired by Science: The Protocol of the Universe

Chapter 1

Electromagnetism

But still try, for who knows what is possible…

- Michael Faraday

Fig: Amber and Feathers

Today we live in a world powering up Electric Bulbs, TV, Laptops, Wireless Phones and several thousands of applications. Even your wrist watch works only under the power of electricity. The story of how we happened to acquire this great power is the story of men working with curiosity. This is the story of electricity and magnetism.

Electricity:

Amber when rubbed in some animal fur can attract tiny feathers towards it. This was known since ancient times. The personal doctor of Queen Elizabeth I was intrigued by this property of amber. His name was William Gilbert. In the early 1600’s he first named it as electron which is the Latin word for amber. Later he renamed this force electricus, which is the Latin word for amber like. Another English natural philosopher named Thomas Browne, later in 1646 renamed electricus as electricity which is known to us today. People developed a fascination for this magical force. This was used by magicians to give a slight shock to people in the audience. Tiny sparks were also produced with some methods to amaze the spectators. It remained nothing more than a piece of curiosity to entertain people by magic tricks during the 16th Century. No one knew what electricity was, but a better understanding of nature was slowly emerging. The electricity produced by amber came to be known as static electricity. Its ability to produce sparks became the signature of this new force.

Vacuum:

Fig: Evangelista Torricelli

Producing a void space which is vacuum was thought to be impossible since Greek times. Many Greek philosophers like Aristotle addressed the idea, did many experiments on it and concluded that vacuums can’t be created. No matter how hard you try to remove air from a closed medium, it always gets filled by air from somewhere else. But one Italian scientist named Evangelista Torricelli when doing experiments with the liquid metal mercury, created vacuum in his test tube. He took a vessel and a test tube both full of mercury in it. He inverted the test tube by placing his finger in the mouth of it so that the mercury doesn’t leak through. Then he submerged his inverted test tube inside the vessel of mercury and released his finger. You can do the same experiment in water but you can find that the water level in the test tube does not drop due to pressure. But mercury is very heavy and hence the level of mercury drops in the test tube making a vacuum in it. Torricelli also discovered that at different altitude, the mercury level in the test tube varies. This is because at different altitude the air pressure varies. With this he discovered the barometer.

Fig: Barometer

Hauksbee machine:

Torricelli’s Vacuum fascinated many young scientists. Many started to experiment in this newly discovered voidness. During the 1640’s a German scientist named Otto von Guericke was experimenting with it. He created a vacuum globe made of Sulphur and rotated it using a lever apparatus. It produced a glow which amazed the audience. It works on the same idea of generating electricity by rubbing amber and fur to produce a static charge. When you rotate it, some static electric charge gets stored in the globe which produced tiny sparks and hence made the glow. One of the people who got fascinated by this apparatus was Sir Isaac Newton, asking his lab assistant Francis Hauksbee to create such a machine replacing the Sulphur globe with a glass globe. When the globe was rotated by a lever, Hauksbee put his hand over the globe. All the lights in the room were turned off. His hand imprint in the globe glowed in a blue color. The audience were surprised to see it. This was then called the Hauksbee machine.

Fig: Hauksbee machine

Neither Hauksbee nor Newton never realized the importance of what they had discovered. Perhaps it was one of the first electrical equipment ever built. But it was merely used only for magic shows. Hauksbee later lost interest in the glow and went on making other more interesting equipment for Newton. But this apparatus has made people ponder upon a deeper force of nature. Later versions of the same machine were made to charge other substances and even the human body. Magicians started to use it and performed far more spectacular tricks. Some lighted fire with the tip of their finger, some others charged their body to attract feathers and almost every Magician had one of these Hauksbee machines behind their screen.

Conductor and Non-conductor:

Fig: Stephan Grey Experiment

One such magician named Stephan Grey made the first remarkable discovery using this. He used a swing which was hung in a silk rope. A small boy would lie on the swing and stretch his hands down. Grey would send static electric charge to the boy using a Hauksbee machine. In the ground he put some tiny gold foils. These pieces of gold automatically got attracted and lifted to the boy’s hand. Grey found that electricity flows from the machine to the boy. But things like wood can’t pass them. Some substance conduct and some don’t. He found the difference between conductor and non-conductor.

Capacitor:

Fig: Pieter van Musschenbroek

Grey’s discovery fascinated a man named Pieter van Musschenbroek. His was not from London like the other pioneers, but from a place called Leiden in Netherland. If electricity flows like water in a conductor, maybe we can store it in some place, just like we store water. Through copper wire, a jar of water and a Hauksbee machine he tried to store electricity. He placed the jar of water in a wooden table which is a non-conductor, and passed electricity into the jar. He chose wooden table because it is a non-conductor and it would prevent charge to leak out and would help the charge retain inside the jar. Then he placed his hand on the jar expecting to get an electric shock. But nothing happened. He tried this experiment again and again and got frustrated. Then he took the jar in his hand and tried it. This time he got a heavy electric shock. He decided not to try it again. He discovered a device where we can store electricity. This device was named after the city where it was discovered. It was called Leiden jar. Even today it is used in almost every electrical equipment in the world. But now it has a different name as capacitor.

Fig: Leiden jar

Fig: Pieter van Musschenbroek

Even though Musschenbroek discovered a great equipment, he had no idea how and why it worked. In fact no one at that time knew what electricity is. That great realization happened in America. He was one of the freedom fighters who freed America from the hands of the Great Britain. He was one of the few people who actually signed in the declaration of independence for America. Yet his portrait still hangs in London as a great inventor. His name was Benjamin Franklin. He was America’s first postmaster. He was a man who likes to explain everything by proper reason. He made an attempt to explain lightning using reason. One of the famous experiments that he proposed was flying a kite in a rainy day with thunder and lightning and felt a shock from the lightning, proving that lightning is also the same as the previously man-made electricity. Although he proposed this experiment and even drew a picture of it, he actually never did that. He proposed another experiment, which also he never tried. But some people who were fascinated by Franklin’s experiments did it. In fact the experiment didn’t even happen in America. It happened in Paris. The French were fascinated by the anti-British ideas of Franklin and conducted his experiment.

Electricians:

Fig: Benjamin Franklin

They took a 40-foot-tall iron rod which was held vertically on a wooden stand. At the bottom of the rod was a wine bottle which acted as a Leiden jar. This was placed on the top of a hill and they waited for the lightning to come. One day when lightning came, a brave yet curious man went near it and placed his hand near the bottle. His hand got burned. This experiment revealed that lightning and the manmade electricity were one and the same. Franklin also believed that electricity has positive charge flowing to cancel out the negative charge. With his belief he thought he can solve the mystery of the Leiden jar. The mistake Musschenbroek did was he placed the jar in an insulator, so the circuit won’t close. Only in a closed circuit electricity will flow from positive to negative. As his body is a conductor, the experiment worked. Franklin was the first to realize this. Explaining lightning and Leiden jar was a huge achievement made by him. People who started to work on this were not magicians anymore. They were not doing something supernatural, but they were probing into one of the fundamental forces of nature. Followers of Franklin’s new line of research called themselves Electricians. It paved way for rational thinking to get rid of superstition.

Fig: Rod Lightning Experiment

Torpedo fish:

Fig: Benjamin Franklin

As trade through sea became commonplace, goods from all over the world were exchanged. Some of them which got exchanged were the specimens of plants and animals what came from the remote corners of the world. One specimen which fascinated these electricians was that of a fish called Torpedo fish. It has a sting in its tail which was capable of knocking down a grown man. Some fisherman who got hit by its sting reported that it felt strangely similar to that of a shock from a Leiden jar. Electricians started to investigate on it. Could its sting actually be an electric shock? Many dismissed this idea because no one saw a spark which came from the fish.

Henry Cavendish:

Then the brilliant Henry Cavendish who was a legend in the field of chemistry started to investigate on the Torpedo fish. His family were fantastically rich, but Cavendish decided to turn his back on his family’s wealth and status. He came to the Royal Society and worked in a tiny room in isolation and quietly pursued his passion for experimental science. He was an extremely shy character who even communicated to his servants in written notes. One of his friends who got a shock from the Torpedo fish wrote to him that it certainly was an electric shock. His friend asked him a question about how a living thing could produce electricity. This intrigued Cavendish and he started to think about it. At first he even created Leiden jar in the shape of Torpedo fish and buried under sand, to convince that they both might use the same kind of mechanism. Although the real fish and the Leiden jar both gave powerful electric shocks, the real fish never sparked. Cavendish was puzzled, how could it be that if they could produce the same kind of electricity and they both did not do the same kind of things.

Cavendish spent the entire winter of 1773 in his laboratory, trying to come with an answer. He pointed out the difference between the amount of electricity and its intensity. The real fish produced the same amount of electricity but it was just less intense. This marks a crucial turning point in the history of electricity. But in modern physics we use a different term to represent it. What Cavendish had referred to as the amount of electricity is what we now call Electric Charge. His intensity is what we call potential difference or Voltage. So in the case of Leiden jar shock it was high voltage but low charge whereas in the case of fish it was low voltage but high charge. Cavendish had shown this long before we perfected the technique to measure the charge and voltage. Yet it was a huge leap forward in our understanding of electricity. Out of this Cavendish had also shown that electricity need not be a brief shock or spark, but it could be continuous. Thus, the continuous current was born. The generation of continuous electricity would ultimately propel us into our modern age.

Volta vs Galvani:

Fig: Luigi Aloisio Galvani

Fig: Alessandro Volta

The next important step in the story of electricity was due to professional rivalry between two Italians. One of them was from Bologna University which is still the oldest operating university in the world. In the late 18th century, it was ruled by the Pope and Rome, which means the university was powerful and conservative in its thinking. It was influenced by Christianity and its traditional thinking. One of the university’s brilliant students was an anatomist Luigi Aloisio Galvani. In