- What does jewelry have to do with electricity?
Well, I'll tell you, and along the way,
I'm gonna involve gods and sheep and death by lightning bolt
and women who turn into trees
and bleeding people for their own good
and giant diamonds and how compasses work
and creative insults.
Ready?
Let's go.
♪ Electricity ♪
Let's start with jewelry.
Turns out, if you have a piece of jewelry made out of amber,
like this, and you rub it with fur, like this,
you can get the amber to pick up
little pieces of feathers and fluff like this.
Pretty cool, huh?
Right now we would call that static electricity,
or maybe even magic.
But 1600 years ago, it inspired a Greek philosopher
named Thales of Miletus to say,
"All things are full of gods."
So how in the world did Thales know about amber?
Well, we can't really tell, none of his work survived.
We mostly know about Thales through Aristotle
and many of Aristotle's books are missing.
So we could only make an educated guess.
Some people like to imagine him as this intrepid scientist
studying the world around him.
I even saw one video where a cartoon Thales
was wandering through the countryside
rubbing sheep with amber.
- [Man] What!?
- But Thales was not a scientist,
he was a philosopher who interpreted the known world.
So in his honor, let's do a thought experiment.
Imagine a jewelry salesperson
who stored their amber jewelry in fur to protect it.
One day, they noticed the amber
would attract little pieces of fluff
and folded that property into a known Greek myth.
This is where amber comes from according to the poet, Ovid.
The sun had many children, including a son named Phaethon.
One day Phaethon stole his father's flying chariot
and drove it recklessly throughout the sky.
And Jupiter, the god, not the planet,
hit him with a thunderbolt,
and he fell off the chariot and drowned in a river.
His sister stood at the riverbank crying for so long
that the gods got sick of all the negativity
and turned them into trees and their tears into amber.
Although this story does not end well for Phaethon
or his sisters, it does end very well for the salesmen,
who could then increase the price of amber,
as it was not just jewelry,
it was a small piece of the gods.
Irrespective of how it was discovered,
nothing much happens with electricity
for further 2,000 years.
And that brings us to a doctor practicing
in Elizabethan England named William Gilbert.
In 1600, Gilbert wrote a book on magnets
that was quite popular at the time.
Gilbert's popularity and success is a bit of a mystery,
as from his paintings,
we can tell he wasn't very good looking, sorry,
and from his book,
we can tell he was cranky and not very charming.
For example, he said that most of his contemporaries
were "lettered clowns, grammatists, sophists, spouters,
"and the wrong-headed rabble, to be denounced,
"torn to tatters and heaped with scorn."
His fame initially came from being an excellent doctor,
which is really hard to imagine
as doctors at the time cured people
by either bleeding them or giving them mild poisons.
He must've been good at that,
as he practiced with great applause
and he was even made Queen Elizabeth's personal doctor,
although she was smart enough
not to let him or any other doctor touch her.
Anyway, like most men at the time of the Renaissance,
otherwise known as Renaissance men,
William Gilbert had a hobby.
William's hobby was studying magnets.
Many years before, Chinese people had figured out
that if you took a small magnet and put it on a pivot,
it would always point north, and that's what a compass is.
William Gilbert was the first person to propose,
like we believe today, that it points north
because the earth is a giant magnet.
In the middle of his 18 years of studying magnets,
William Gilbert also studied the amber effect
as it seemed like it might be a type of magnetism.
After careful study, William Gilbert figured out
that although static electricity looks a little bit
like magnetic attraction, it is very different.
One, magnets are permanent and electrics need to be rubbed.
Two, magnets work on dry days
or on humid days or underwater just fine,
electrics don't work very well on humid days
and don't work at all underwater.
Three, magnets can only pick up certain kinds of metal,
whereas electrics can pick up everything.
Gilbert then scoured the earth
for every object available in 1600,
from waxes to giant diamonds,
and found that a whole host of items
would attract little pieces of fluff if you rubbed them.
Because it was different than magnets
and because it was first discovered with amber,
he named it after the Greek word for amber,
which is, wait for it, elektron.
He Latinized it and called it the electrious force
and that in English was called electric force.
And that's where electricity gets its name.
For all his careful study,
William Gilbert made one major mistake.
He knew that magnets could attract and repel.
You put a north and a south together, they attract,
you put a north and a north together, they repel,
but he didn't know that electrics could repel as well.
In fact, it would take over 70 years,
and a German scientist with a wackadoodle,
one could honestly say stupid philosophy
with a stinky ball on a stick, to prove him wrong.
And that story is next time
on "The Secret History of Electricity".
♪ Electricity ♪
Thanks for watching my video.
If you liked it, please remember to give a thumbs up.
If you didn't like it, please forget to give a thumbs down.
Also, feel free to put a comment in there,
especially if it's nice.
And tell me if you agree with my idea
about how Thales discovered electricity,
or if you have a better philosophy,
or tell me if you think that William Gilbert
wasn't that ugly after all.
Thanks so much and have a great day.
(lively music)