Nature of Electrivity and Magnetism

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Introduction:
This essay will explore the development of currently accepted ideas on the nature of electricity, magnetism. The paper will start in the Ancient Greeks and will continue to the present. In the process of developing our modern understanding of electricity, magnetism and electromagnetism, our predecessors carried out investigations which have now become accepted and replicated in modern classrooms. As new phenomena were observed, new explanations and conclusions were sought to explain. This led to a various amount of documented scientific arguments and different points of view on topic in the nature of electricity in which will be discussed in this paper. The topic of electricity is extremely large so the topics that will be described in this paper will be split into different sections of each area in electricity.

Properties of Charged Objects:
The Ancient Greeks were the first to discover the basic properties of electrically charged objects. It is believed that the phenomenon was found to be a nuisance to the spinners of Ancient Greece who used an amber distaff on their spindles when spinning wool. The distaff would become electrically charged and this would cause dust and fluff to become attracted to the distaff. It has been found that the Greeks discovered that a number of different materials could be charged not only the amber distaff and that all of these charged bodies could attract other uncharged bodies. They showed that not any non-charged material was affected by the charged material in fact this attraction was specific to the material.
In De Magnete in 1600, William Gilbert (1544–1603), a London physician completed different investigations with an instrument called a versorium. A versorium is needle set ...

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