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"Electricity Experiments History."
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The advent of electricity (1800-1900)
Covers the scientific developments of the 19th century, the great age of the machine when factory chimneys rose above industrial towns and manufacturers constantly improved technology to get a commercial advantage. Meanwhile, other scientists began to explore fundamental questions about the nature of humans and their ancestors.
Book
Spark from the Deep
How encounters with strongly electric fish informed our grasp of electricity.
Spark from the Deep tells the story of how human beings came to understand and use electricity by studying the evolved mechanisms of strongly electric fish. These animals have the ability to shock potential prey or would-be predators with high-powered electrical discharges.
William J. Turkel asks completely fresh questions about the evolutionary, environmental, and historical aspects of people's interest in electric fish. Stimulated by painful encounters with electric catfish, torpedos, and electric eels, people learned to harness the power of electric shock for medical therapies and eventually developed technologies to store, transmit, and control electricity. Now we look to these fish as an inspiration for engineering new sensors, computer interfaces, autonomous undersea robots, and energy-efficient batteries.
eBook
The Long Journey from Animal Electricity to the Discovery of Ion Channels and the Modelling of the Human Brain
This retrospective begins with Galvani’s experiments on frogs at the end of the 18th century and his discovery of ‘animal electricity’. It goes on to illustrate the numerous contributions to the field of physical chemistry in the second half of the 19th century (Nernst’s equilibrium potential, based on the work of Wilhelm Ostwald, Max Planck’s ion electrodiffusion, Einstein’s studies of Brownian motion) which led Bernstein to propose his membrane theory in the early 1900s as an explanation of Galvani’s findings and cell excitability. These processes were fully elucidated by Hodgkin and Huxley in 1952 who detailed the ionic basis of resting and action potentials, but without addressing the question of where these ions passed. The emerging question of the existence of ion channels, widely debated over the next two decades, was finally accepted and, a decade later, many of them began to be cloned. This led to the possibility of modelling the activity of individual neurons in the brain and then that of simple circuits. Taking advantage of the remarkable advances in computer science in the new millennium, together with a much deeper understanding of brain architecture, more ambitious scientific goals were dreamed of to understand the brain and how it works. The retrospective concludes by reviewing the main efforts in this direction, namely the construction of a digital brain, an in silico copy of the brain that would run on supercomputers and behave just like a real brain.
Journal Article
Picturing Benjamin Franklin’s Kite Experiment in the Nineteenth Century
In 1752, the American polymath Benjamin Franklin supposedly flew a kite near the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to confirm that lightning had the same properties of common electricity that electrical machines produced and Leyden jars served to store. Illustrations, vignettes and paintings frequently portray the famous experiment, showing Franklin, with a boy, flying the kite in an open field and amid a storm. Nonetheless, little is known or said about the elements of these illustrations and the reference the illustrators used to portray the experiment. This paper aims to discuss these matters in a thoughtful study of seven nineteenth-century illustrations depicting Benjamin Franklin’s kite experiment. I will show that the account by Joseph Priestley in his The History and Present State of Electricity, published in 1767, influenced these illustrations. I indicate that due to this influence, the illustrations present several departures from Franklin’s original account, leading to a mistaken iconography of how the experiment took place. I conclude with a discussion on how this study can contribute to a better use and understanding of illustrations depicting scientific episodes in science classrooms.
Journal Article
The Helmholtz model
A century and a half ago, Helmholtz’s model was at the forefront of development. There is no doubt that this model came into being because of the experimental data that was available at the time. Not only Helmholtz but also scientists like Nernst, Maxwell, and Pellat made their contribution to the double layer model. It is difficult to be precise about the date of origin of the Helmholtz model. Helmholtz formulated the definition of a double layer in 1853. It was in 1874 that Helmholtz pointed out the similarity between the double layer of platinum electrodes and a capacitor, but it was a capacitor with leakage (
Ann. Phys
. 226:483–495). Nevertheless, the 1879 article (
Ann. Phys.
243:337–382) is traditionally considered the foundational work. Perhaps this opinion should be revised in favor of the 1874 work. In addition to the theoretical model, this article briefly reviews the development of experimental methods for measuring double layer capacitance: the instruments used, the equivalent circuit, and so on. The author hopes that this article will be useful in the teaching of electrochemistry.
Graphical Abstract
Journal Article
Challenging Modeling for Ohm’s Law through Open-Ended In-depth Inquiry
Although Ohm’s law contains various possibilities in teaching and learning scientific inquiry, it is rare for students to experience an authentic inquiry. Thus, we designed an open-ended in-depth inquiry about Ohm’s law and made students conduct it. To do this, we developed a laboratory activity for students following a standard method of Ohm’s law experiment. After that, we induced them to discover the faults and difficulties in the existing inquiry method. And then, an open-ended in-depth inquiry experiment was conducted to solve the identified problems. Students considered various experimental equipment such as a Wheatstone bridge, a variable resistor, and graphite. They also developed to investigate contact resistance, device resistance, and thermal noise using creative techniques such as the 4-point probe method. We examined students’ learning through the activity and their recognition of it. As a result of the open inquiry, students can make various creative efforts to obtain reliable theoretical and experimental results. They showed diverse modeling activities like scientists and thought positively about the inquiry. This study expects science learning to be transformed into “doing science” to help students foster not only a broader understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry (NOSI) but a confirmation of the nature of scientific knowledge (NOSK).
Journal Article
Between Old and New Interpretations of Life: Animal Electricity at the First Congress of Italian Scientists
In 1839, collaborating with physicist Luigi Pacinotti, the Italian physician and historian of medicine Francesco Puccinotti announced a successful measurement of the existence of electrovital currents in live warm- and cold-blooded animals. To perform this measurement, they used the astatic galvanometer developed by Leopoldo Nobili. The experimental demonstrations took place in Pisa on the morning of October 13, 1839 as part of the First Congress of Italian Scientists. The experiment had been carefully prepared and tested ahead of the Congress in June and July of the same year. Two congressional commissions, composed respectively of doctors and physicists, discussed the results of the experiments and disclosed conflicting views. The physicists diplomatically expressed doubt, saying that the current measured might have been similar, although weaker, to that found in already dead animals and therefore could be traced to physicochemical processes. A debate developed at the Congress and continued afterwards. This significant episode helped keep the question of animal electricity open in Italy, stimulating the development of new electrophysiological studies in the following decade.
Journal Article
A Brief History of Cerebellar Neurostimulation
The first attempts at using electric stimulation to study human brain functions followed the experiments of Luigi Galvani and Giovanni Aldini on animal electricity during the eighteenth century. Since then, the cerebellum has been among the areas that have been studied by invasive and non-invasive forms of electrical and magnetic stimulation. During the nineteenth century, animal experiments were conducted to map the motor-related regions of cerebellar cortex by means of direct electric stimulation. As electric stimulation research on the cerebellum moved into the twentieth century, systematic research of electric cerebellar stimulation led to a better understanding of its effects and mechanism of action. In addition, the clinical potential of cerebellar stimulation in the treatment of motor diseases started to be explored. With the introduction of transcranial electric and magnetic stimulation, cerebellar research moved to non-invasive techniques. During the twenty-first century, following on groundbreaking research that linked the cerebellum to non-motor functions, non-invasive techniques have facilitated research into different aspects of cerebellar functioning. The present review provides a brief historical account of cerebellar neurostimulation and discusses current challenges and future direction in this field of research.
Journal Article
The poor woman’s energy: Low-modernist solar technologies and international development, 1878–1966
Solar energy often appears a resource without a history, perpetually novel and promising futuristic abundance. This overlooks a long episode of ‘low-modernist’ solar research in and for the global South. Focusing especially on India and detouring through Mexico, two important arenas for early solar experimentation, this article traces an alternative history of solar technologies as austere everyday fixes for developing countries. In parallel with the well-known postcolonial focus on high-modernist energy mega-projects, the narrow transnational community of solar experts retained a competing tendency to think small. At its heart lay a dualistic conception of the modern energy economy: flexible and resource-intensive grid electricity for urban centres, inferior off-grid devices to meet the minimal and static needs of the rural poor. This impoverished, feminized Third World projected user base resulted in persistent underinvestment and failed commercialization, helping to explain why solar technologies did not take off earlier. While solar experts emphasized the regional exceptionalism of the arid tropics, the teleological linkage between modernity and ever-rising energy abundance was rejuvenated from below as rural communities began to imagine the high-energy good life as a universal aspiration.
Journal Article
Not Quite So Freely as Air
In the early twentieth century, a rhetoric of freedom developed around networked electricity in North America, providing opportunities and challenges for industrializing states to define their responsibilities to their citizens. Vibrant forums within and between industrializing nations ranged widely over whether electricity was a right or a privilege—and where and for whom. Policymakers questioned whether the proper role for government was to provide public tax-funded electricity, to regulate the private sector, or to guide infrastructure development through targeted financing. These debates became particularly fierce over the role of electricity in eliminating disparities between urban and rural lifestyles. This paper traces the development of electrification programs in Ontario, Canada, and the rural United States as intentionally divergent outcomes of a transnational dialogue. In doing so, it explores early public interventions in electrification as experiments in governance.
Journal Article