- How did the feather change the course of history?
Well, I'll tell you, and along the way,
I'll talk about class prejudice,
the true father of electricity,
and electrifying hot pokers, a live chicken,
and "flying" children.
Ready?
Let's go.
♪ Electricity ♪
- The real story of electricity begins in 1729
with a man named Steven Gray.
Stephen Gray was born in 1666 in the town of Canterbury,
to a lower-class family of clothing dyers.
Grey was fascinated with science
and did self-funded research in a wide variety of topics,
from telescopes to microscopes,
to an attempt to capture the Canterbury Ghost.
Through his work on telescopes,
Gray became friends with the Royal Astronomer,
a man named John Flamsteed.
King Charles II, you remember, the slutty king?
He created the position of Royal Astronomer in 1675,
to have a more accurate study of the stars
to help with navigation.
Unfortunately, for Gray and for Flamsteed,
Flamsteed and Isaac Newton got in a battle over star maps,
after which Isaac Newton blackballed Flamsteed
and anyone connected to him.
Dying cloth is dangerous and backbreaking work,
and all Stephen Gray wanted to do was study science,
but because of Newton's animus,
he couldn't get published or assistance.
His finances actually improved a little bit,
in 1713, when Isaac Newton's assistant,
Francis Hauksbee, died,
as then Newton hired a new assistant,
a French man named John Desaguilers,
to be his new assistant.
Desaguilers succeeded in managing
the notoriously prickly Newton,
as well as Newton's enemies, including Gray and Flamsteed.
Finally, in 1719, when Gray was 54 years old,
Desaguilers and Flamsteed managed to get Gray
a position at the Charterhouse.
Now, the Charterhouse was a retirement home
for poor soldiers, and Gray was never a soldier.
However, he argued that his work on astronomy
was for the government,
and therefore, he was sort of a soldier.
Anyway, for the next 10 years,
nothing of note came from the Charterhouse.
Then on May 1st,
1729,
he made a surprising discovery with a feather.
Gray was playing with a tube that had corks in it,
to keep out the dust, and he wondered
if the corks affected the power of the tubes.
Gray then charged up the tube
and watched if a feather behaved differently
if it was released near the center or near the end.
To his surprise, the feather released near the end
attached to the cork instead of to the glass,
even though he'd never rubbed the cork.
Gray had discovered electric communication.
This is important, before this date,
nobody knew electricity could flow at all.
Gray quickly extended the experiment
to see how far electricity could flow.
He placed a small stick in the cork
and an ivory ball at the end of the stick
and found that the ball could be electrified
by rubbing the glass tube, without touching the ball at all.
Gray then tried a thick twine called packthread
as his "line of communication," and it worked very well.
However, if the twine touched the ground,
the experiment stopped working.
By draping a length of twine
off the highest tower in the Charterhouse,
Gray managed to make feathers attract
to a ball of ivory 34 feet away.
He then went searching for a higher tower.
Luckily for Gray, and for science,
he had another wealthy friend,
this one, a man named Granville Wheler.
Wheler was an amateur scientist
and a distant relative of Flamsteed,
and was happy to take over his large estate
to Gray's strange studies.
Wheler thought of conducting electricity long distance
by suspending packthread with silk string.
Gray thought that was a great idea,
as silk is far thinner than packthread, and he hoped,
would prevent the loss of "electric virtue."
They threaded twine, held up by silk string,
through Wheler's hallways and a ballroom,
with one end of twine connected to a glass tube,
and the other end to an ivory ball.
Rubbing the tube at one end
attracted feathers to the ball, 765 feet away.
Gray and Wheeler became frustrated
by how often the silk string would break.
Therefore, they decided to replace the silk string
with thin metal wire.
It was stronger, but it didn't work.
They were surprised to find
that it wasn't just the thickness that mattered,
but what the material was made of.
They had discovered that materials
could be placed into two categories,
those that would let electricity flow easily: conductors,
and those that would prevent electricity
from flowing easily: insulators.
On August 5th, 1729,
Gray noticed that the experiment worked,
even when the charged glass tube
did not even touch the packthread,
but was just placed close to it.
The electricity would be induced to move
without actually touching.
For that reason, this process was called induction,
or charging without touching.
And, of course, Gray was the first person to discover it.
Gray and Wheler spent the next 30 months
electrocuting anything they could get their hands on,
including an umbrella, a hot poker, a large tablecloth,
and a map.
Gray wrote that Wheler even suspended
a large chicken upon the tube by its legs,
and found the breast of the chick was strongly electrical.
They happily found that everything they played with
fit neatly into either one of those two categories,
of insulator or conductor.
On April 8th, 1730, Gray moved from live chickens
to live children.
On that day, he took an eight or nine-year-old boy
and suspended him from a wooden structure
with silk strings, as if he was flying.
When Gray placed the charged rod near the boy's feet,
little feathers and fluff would be attracted
to the boy's hands and head.
This was a strange and dramatic demonstration of induction
that became a popular parlor trick for years afterwards,
Grey's fortunes improved in 1730, when his friend,
a man named Cromwell Mortimer,
was made the editor of the Royal Society's magazine.
Newton did not object,
because he had died three years earlier in his sleep,
possibly from mercury poisoning.
Finally, he could be published,
and in January, 1731, Gray told the world
all he had discovered about electricity.
Unfortunately, his success was short-lived,
as just a few years later, he fell seriously ill.
Mortimer visited Gray on his sick bed,
where Gray described his plans
for a floating world with electric forces,
if God would spare his life a little longer.
He died the very next day.
Gray had discovered that electricity moved.
He discovered conduction, insulation, and induction.
He really is the true father of electricity.
However, most scientists at the time
were interested in the important studies of gravity,
they weren't interested in the trivial studies
of feathers moving,
as discovered by some lower-class merchant.
Luckily, a wealthy French nobleman
with the elegantly cumbersome name
of Charles Francois de Cisternay du Fay,
had the Royal Society's papers translated into French,
and read Gray's report.
In the course of just eight months,
with the help of little pieces of gold,
he managed to make the first rules of electricity,
and he was half-right.
And that story is next time,
on The Secret History of Electricity.
♪ Electricity ♪
- Thanks for watching my video.
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And if you don't like it,
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Also feel free to ask me any questions
and I'll respond to any comment, and have a good day.
(upbeat music)