Name: 【TED-Ed】Electric vocabulary - James Sheils
Uploaded: 2014-12-29T19:06:20.000Z
Duration: 6 min 57 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'm going to try to shine a historical light on our language,

and tell you a story about the electric vocabulary.

An ancient Greek, called Thales of Miletus,

is thought to be the first person to observe

what we would today call electrical phenomena.

He discovered that a piece of amber, when rubbed with fur,

In Thales' language, amber was called electron.

For a long time, that was pretty much all anybody knew about the subject.

And nature had to wait around 2,200 years

William Gilbert, a 17th century English scientist,

discovered that with a careful experimentation,

a number of other materials could display the attractive properties

He also found that they could attract objects besides straw.

Sir Thomas Browne carried out some more experiments.

He didn't figure out anything different from William Gilbert,

The way he saw it, when you rub, say, a crystal with a cloth,

and say they possess the property of elasticity,

electric objects possess the property of electricity.

Charles du Fay was the next person to make an important new discovery.

He found that almost any object, except for metals and fluids,

after subjecting them to a combination of heating and rubbing.

In addition, he found that when two electrics are place near each other,

they sometimes attract and sometimes repel.

du Fay found that there were two distinct groups of electrics.

du Fay's descriptions of the physics are all lost to history.

Instead, it is the vocabulary of a charismatic young American

that we still remember and use to this day.

Benjamin Franklin heard of the work going on in Europe

He quickly learned how to make electric devices

that would de-electrify by producing very large sparks.

Franklin would often shock his friends with these machines.

and de-electrifying to charging and discharging weaponry.

It didn't take long for Franklin and others to realize

that it was possible to link these weapons of mischief together.

likened this grouping to cannons on a ship.

fired their cannons simultaneously, in a battery

This new technology raised an interesting question:

Was a lightning cloud just a large electrical battery?

Franklin's description of all this was as follows:

he called the "electrical fluid" that is common to all things.

this rubbing, or charging, causes a flow of this fluid,

or an electrical current, to move from the person to the glass.

Both the person and the tube become "electrics" as a result.

Normally, if the person was standing on the ground,

their electrical fluid would return to normal,

with an exchange from the common stock of the Earth,

Franklin said that an object with an excess of this fluid

and something lacking this fluid was negatively charged.

When objects touch, or are near each other,

the electrical fluid can flow between them

The bigger the difference in the fluid between the two objects,

the larger the distance the fluid can jump,

that determines if it gains or loses electrical fluid

These are du Fay's two groups of electrics.

You might have heard the phrase, "Opposite charges attract,