- Imagine you happened to fall back in time,
to November 1705,
and imagine you happened to have been invited
to the Royal Society of London.
Then you could have seen an incredible sight.
Isaac Newton's assistant, 45-year-old Francis Hauksbee,
who was an expert in vacuum pumps,
demonstrating a strange device
with a glass tube on a spindle
that he could spin with a handle.
Then the room would be dramatically darkened,
and Hauksbee would have spun his glass
and placed his hand on the spinning tube.
And the tube would glow with an eerie purple light
that was, according to Hauksbee,
bright enough to read large print with
and be seen from 10 feet away.
How did this light bulb work?
How did Hauksbee think of it?
And how did it lead to the battery
and the first bright and long-lasting electric light,
nearly 100 years later?
Well, let me be your time traveler guide, James Burke-style.
Ready? Let's go!
♪ Electricity, electricity ♪
So, luckily, Hauksbee explained his motivation.
So in preparation for this talk,
he had read a report where a French scientist
who had noticed that the top of a barometer
would glow when shaken.
Since a barometer was just a vial of mercury upended
so that the top of the tube was a vacuum,
Hauksbee figured that a drop of mercury in a tube
that was evacuated with air would glow if he shook it.
So that's what he did, and he found to his delight
that it did glow a little bit.
Then, to make it easier to shake,
he put his tube on a spindle, which is how he discovered
that placing his hand on the spinning tube to stabilize it
made a significantly brighter light.
Finally, Hauksbee realized that by spinning this tube
and putting his hand on it,
he was creating a lot of static electricity,
which he demonstrated in a separate spinning glass
with threads in it,
that would become attracted to the outside of the sphere.
Hauksbee just needed to add
fluorescent crystals to the tube,
to absorb that purple and the UV light
and emit nice white light instead,
and he would have made a fluorescent light bulb
that he powered with electricity.
Static electricity.
By the way, you, too, light up a fluorescent bulb
with the static electricity,
if you use Saran Wrap to make the static electricity.
26 years after Hauksbee's bulb,
a rival of Hauksbee, named Steven Gray,
accidentally discovered that electricity can travel
when he rubbed a glass tube
and a feather stuck to a cork in the tube
instead of the tube itself.
Soon, Gray was picking up objects at great distances
and discovered that some objects conduct electricity,
conductors, and some don't, insulators,
and if you want stuff to stay electrified
you better hang it up with insulators like silk.
To demonstrate this, Gray took a young boy
and hung him up with silk thread,
and electrified him with a charged tube,
and watched as small objects
floated up to the child's hand like magic.
Gray then inspired a French scientist,
named Charles Cisterney Du Fay,
and Du Fay accidentally discovered
that a feather can dance between two rubbed objects
if they are made of different materials,
and decided that there are two kinds of electricity.
Which he called vitreous for glass-like
and resinous for wax-like.
In determining which category
all of the objects he could find fell into,
Du Fay realized that every solid object he could find,
even conductors, could stay electrified
if he rubbed it and put them on an insulating stand.
Du Fay's work was then read by a dramatic German
named Georg Matthias Bose,
who got bored with rubbing tubes by hand
and came up with the idea of charging objects on stands
with a Hauksbee machine.
After writing a bad poem about how great he was,
Bose then decided that putting a person on a stand,
and then electrifying them with a Hauksbee machine
would be a great way to do crazy
human electricity experiments.
Like electrify pretty women with a Hauksbee machine
and then have men give them shocking kisses.
Or my favorite, which I had to recreate,
of electrify himself
and then having a spark from his own hand or from a sword,
light alcohol on fire.
Let's watch that again in slow motion.
All good!
Yay!
Woo-hoo!
Bose even created his own electric light bulb,
which was in the form of a crown
that would spark and glow when near an electrified plate.
Meanwhile, the king of France was so enamored
of these kinds of demonstrations,
that he elevated his son's tutor, Abbe Nollet,
who had been Du Fay's assistant,
to be the resident electricity demonstrator at Versailles.
Although it wasn't exactly an official title.
And Nollet created globes filled with different gasses
that would spark when touched in a beautiful manner,
called an electric egg.
These experiments got even more shocking
when Nollet got a letter from his friend.
Pieter van Musschenbroek from Leyden, Denmark
sent him a story of how a jar full of water
could store electricity from a Hauksbee machine
and give it out in such a rush that he wrote, quote,
"I thought I was done for."
He also wrote that he only "survived by the grace of God,
"and I would not do it again for all the kingdom of France."
Challenge accepted!
Nollet immediately used these jars to shock everyone,
including 200 monks at a time,
and made a bit of money on the side selling Leyden jars
to other electrical wizards.
Meanwhile, in America, youngish Benjamin Franklin
became excited about electricity,
after he heard about experiments going on in Germany,
and wrote his friend, "I never was before engaged
"in any study that so totally engrossed
"my attention and my time.
"My friends come continually in crowds to see them,
"I have, during some months past,
"had little leisure for anything else."
Franklin then built his own Hauksbee machine,
but instead of having a person rub the glass,
Franklin's machine used a brush to rub the glass.
And Franklin then found that a volunteer
could get electrified by touching either the glass
or the brush, but not both.
As brushes pick up dirt, Franklin decided that the brush
was also picking up electrical fire.
So he named the brush's charge to be positive,
and the glass, as he assumed it lost electrical fire,
to be negative.
Franklin also made a lot of unique
and fun electricity devices.
Including a special frame that had gold foil,
which would spark and glow
as the electricity flowed through it,
one of the first examples of incandescence.
Franklin then found that electricity tended to go
and come from come sharp points over smooth surfaces
and wondered that if, as he considered
lightning clouds were made of electricity,
then maybe a sharp metal stick
could silently drain storm clouds of their electrical fire
and save humans from, what he called, their mischief.
But first, he had to prove that lightning was electric,
which he theorized you could do
with a large metal stick that wasn't stuck in the ground
but had a little point or kink in it,
and if a person could get electricity
from that pole during a thunderstorm,
then the pole must be draining electricity from the clouds,
and lightning must be the same as the electric sparks
they were getting, just on a much bigger scale.
In France, Abbe Nollet, the king's electrician,
who was also a priest, Abbe means friar,
thought Franklin's theory of electricity was rubbish,
sparks were sparks and lightning was judgment from God.
So, some enemies of Nollet decide to take up the challenge
and try to steal some electricity from the clouds.
And on May 10th, 1752, in Marly, France,
that is what they did.
In October of 1852,
Benjamin Franklin wrote that he had heard
"from Europe of the success of the Philadelphia experiment
"for drawing the electrical fire from clouds
"by means of pointed rods,"
but that he had done it in "a different
"and more easy manner" with a kite.
Side note, no, none of them actually
drained the clouds of electricity.
The rods and the kite were charged with inductance,
as the electrons at the top of the spikes
were repelled by the charges in the cloud,
but it still worked.
In fact, if it was hit by lightning,
they would have been killed.
Despite, or because of the success
of the Philadelphia experiment, Abbe Nollet was very upset,
and he and other religious leaders
railed against the lightning rod.
In Bologna, Italy, scientist Laura Bassi,
who had the town's only Hauksbee machine,
also became the first in town
to recreate the Marly experiment
of getting lightning from the clouds.
However, when she and her husband
tried to install lightning rods there were actual riots
and they had to take them down.
Bassi, who was allowed to earn her Ph.D.
to attract attention to the town,
wasn't allowed to actually teach at the university,
so she instructed her students at home
where she was free to teach about Franklin's theories
with her electricity machine.
And she also set up an outdoor system
to study atmospheric electricity,
which is how her student, Luigi Galvani,
who was a biologist, learned about electricity.
20 years later, Galvani and his wife,
who was also a biologist,
bought their own Hauksbee machine to electrify animals.
One day, they placed a dead dissected frog on the table
for an anatomy lecture, when an assistant,
accidentally, or for a lark,
touched the dead frog with an electrified prong
and was shocked to find the dead frog jump.
They were therefore galvanized,
which is the origin of the term,
to electrify every dead animal they could find,
and decided that all life is electric.
Just to double-check, they took some frog legs outside
to see if they would jump in an electrical storm.
And one day, the frogs jumped on a calm day,
and they realized that it was the combination of two metals,
the iron in the fence
and the copper wires holding the leg together,
that caused the frog to jump.
When Italy's premier electrician, Alessandro Volta,
heard about it, he thought that it was the metal
that electrified the frog,
especially after he got two metals
to make a live frog jump.
And after a few years playing with it,
Volta decided that it only worked when wet.
In 1800, Volta proved his theory,
by making a pile of metals with wet cardboard between them
that would give continual shocks.
(man speaks in foreign language)
Volta gave his device an odd name,
of artificial electric organ,
so most people called it a galvanic pile,
or, sometimes, after Franklin's term for Leyden jars,
a battery.
Volta published his paper in England and in France
and in Germany and in Italy, basically everywhere.
And in England,
the secretary for the Royal Society of London
let his friend read it.
And when that friend, named Anthony Carlisle,
and his friend made a pile, they accidentally found
that the ends of the battery would bubble
where one end was hydrogen and the other one was oxygen.
Batteries could do more than shock,
they could also electrically separate chemicals.
Volta's discovery happened just weeks before
a handsome chemist and poet named Humphry Davy
was given a lectureship
at the newly made Royal Society of London.
Davy then impressed everyone with his galvanic experiments
and then proved that Volta's pile worked due to chemistry
because the saltwater was working as an acid,
and therefore, the battery would be more powerful
if it had a more powerful acid in it,
which made Davy into a scientific superstar.
Anyway, Davy had heard that another scientist
had used a battery to make gold and silver glow,
just like Franklin did many years before,
and Davy also found that "a thin slip of platina,"
which is a platinum alloy,
glow with, quote, "a vivid light."
Which is why Davy is often, incorrectly,
credited with discovering incandescence.
Then, the next year, a Scottish surgeon,
named William Cruickshank,
was using a battery for biological experiments
and found that his pile kept on falling down,
so he placed the pile on its side called a trough battery.
This gave Davy the ability and the idea
of making a huge battery with 2,000 plates
of copper and zinc and gallons of acid
in the basement of the Royal Institute,
with wires to the lecture hall and laboratory.
He supposedly put it in the basement
'cause it smelled really bad.
In 1806 and 1807, Davy used this battery
to increase the number of known elements by 62%.
With this giant battery and his chemical experiment,
Davy demonstrated something that was amazing.
If he had two carbon rods,
and he put a big voltage between them,
as he started to separate it,
it would make a brilliant light.
Davy demonstrated what he called his arc lamp
on November 16th, 1809.
An audience member wrote that the light, quote,
"was so intense as to resemble that of the sun.
"It was a dazzling splendor."
Suddenly, the 100-year-old electric light
was bright enough and long-lasting enough
to be useful as public light.
However, it still took another 55 years
for anyone to make any profit off the arc lamp of Davy's,
and a further 20 years for anyone to make any money
off the incandescent lamp.
So how did that happen?
Well, I'll tell you next time on "The Lightning Tamers."
Thanks for watching my video.
If you're interested in learning more about these people
and where they came from and why they did what they did,
I have a lot more videos with more details
about the physics of it and their personal history.
So you can get lost watching that.
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very, very, very soon.
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Okay. Have a good day and stay safe.
Bye!
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