It can well be said that Thales was the first man ever recorded to have cornered the market in a commodity: having foreseen a three-year drought he bought up large quantities of olive oil and stored it for sale at a later date.
But who could possibly have imagined that one of Thales' original speculations would affect the Radio Amateurs of the 20th Century? He believed that certain inanimate substances, like lodestones (magnetic rocks) and the resin amber, possessed psyche (a soul).
Many centuries had to elapse before this soul was identified as static electricity and magnetism and harnessed for the generation of mains electricity which dramatically altered the pattern of life on our planet—and also led to the creation of our hobby of Amateur Radio.
About 400 years ago an English scientist called William Gilbert (1544-1603), who had read about the unexplained observation of Thales, also became interested in the intangible property and decided to call it electricity, from the classical Greek word for amber, which is electron.
CHAPTER ONE
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ELECTRICITY
The phenomenon which Thales had observed and recorded five centuries before the birth of Christ aroused the interest of many scientists through the ages. They made various practical experiments in their efforts to identify the elusive force which Thales had likened to a 'soul' and which we now know to have been static electricity.
Of all forms of energy, electricity is the most baffling and difficult to describe. An electric current cannot be seen. In fact it does not exist outside the wires and other conductors which carry it. A live wire carrying a current looks exactly the same and weighs exactly the same as it does when it is not carrying a current. An electric current is simply a movement or flow of electrons.
Benjamin Franklin, the American statesman and scientist born in Boston in 1706, investigated the nature of thunder and lightning by flying a child's kite during a thunderstorm. He had attached a metal spike to the kite, and at the other end of the string to which the kite was tied he secured a key. As the rain soaked into the string, electricity flowed freely down the string and Franklin was able to draw large sparks from the key. Of course this could have been very dangerous, but he had foreseen it and had supported the string through an insulator. He observed that this electricity had the same properties as the static electricity produced by friction.
But long before Franklin many other scientists had carried out research into the nature of electricity.