William Gilbert

We can get into electrodynamics from classic electrodynamics.

In 1600, William Gilbert proposed in his De Magnete that electricity and magnetism, while both capable of causing attraction and repulsion of objects, were distinct effects.

Mariners had noticed that lightning strikes had the ability to disturb a compass needle.

The link between lightning and electricity was not confirmed until Benjamin Franklin's proposed experiments in 1752 were conducted on May 10th by Thomas Francois d'Alabarde of France using a 40-foot-tall iron rod instead of a kite, and he successfully extracted electrical sparks from a cloud.

And why not explore this fringe idea? I mean, all gigantic breakthroughs in science and society were once considered fringe.

Am I wrong? Leonardo da Vinci, William Gilbert, uh, Nicolaus Copernicus, um, hell, Nikola Tesla.

It seems that the biggest influences in scientific thinking and modern technology came from spiritual people, people on the fringe.

Even today with the highly venerated Rupert Sheldrake.

In 1282, the properties of magnets and the dry compasses were discussed by Al-Sharaf Umar II, a Yemeni physicist, astronomer, and geographer.

In 1600, William Gilbert published his On the Magnet and Magnetic Bodies and On the Great Magnet, the Earth.

In his work, he describes many of his experiments with his model Earth called the terrella.

From his experiments, he concluded that the Earth was itself magnetic and that this was the reason compasses pointed north, whereas previously some believed that it was the pole star Polaris or a large magnetic island on the North Pole that attracted the compass.

Think of the early printed chronicles that list planete in lists of celestial objects.

By the time of the Renaissance, scholars like William Gilbert and later Copernicus were using the word to describe the bodies he argued orbited the sun, not the Earth.

So English kept the Greek wanderer sense, but started applying it to a new astronomical model.

The telescope changed everything in the early seventeenth century.

Exactly, which is fascinating.

And then a guy called William Gilbert in 1600 coined the Latin phrase electricus.

So every single time you hear the word electricity, it comes specifically from amber because of its static electrochemical properties, which is pretty amazing, I think.

And amber, you know, it went...

At the same time, the materials that were attracted to the amber repelled each other.

The phenomenon remained no more than a curiosity until Elizabethan times, when the English physician William Gilbert discovered that substances other than amber also had such properties and coined the term electric to describe their behavior, and the attractive force the Greeks had observed so long ago came to be known as electricity.

The experiments now became fast and furious.

When two amber rods were rubbed, or electrified as it was said, with fur, they, uh, repelled each other.

No fue hasta los años 1600 cuando las personas comenzaron a estudiar seriamente estos efectos.

Un médico inglés llamado William Gilbert empezó a elaborar teorías sobre la electricidad y publicó sus ideas en un libro llamado De Magnete.

La acumulación gradual de observaciones y experimentos durante los años 1700 transformó la electricidad de algo puramente místico en un tema digno de una investigación seria.

El ámbar y la fricción se convirtieron en puertas de entrada hacia la comprensión de una fuerza fundamental de la naturaleza.

And eventually, people began to understand the bigger reason a compass works.

In the late 1500s, a English, an English physician and scientist named William Gilbert became deeply interested in magnetism.

He studied lodestones, experimented with magnetic materials, and eventually proposed something that completely changed the way people understood the compass.

He argued that the Earth itself behaves like a giant magnet, and that sounds obvious to us now because we grow up learning about the Earth's magnetic field.