Electricity is a loose term that incorporates all manner of phenomena involves the presence of electric charges. Thus, clear-cut answers as to who discovered a variety of different phenomena would be difficult to give. The best answer to the question would be that a variety of people have been associated with the discovery process of what we now refer to as electricity. Thales of Miletus (600 BC) is generally regarded as one of the earliest researchers on electricity. He began by rubbing fur with other objects and found that they attracted each other. When he tried to do the same with amber, the friction made amber magnetic, unlike the case with some other metals like magnetite. Although Tales was wrong in attributing the attraction to a magnetic effect, science would later prove the relationship between magnetism and electricity. In some ways, the process of discovery of electricity did have its comic moments. Two maverick writers, Pliny the Elder and Scribonius Largus, knew of the “numbing effect” of the electric shock delivered by catfish and torpedo rays. Largus, in his Compositiones Medicae, prescribed the electric shock to gout and headache patients, who would be directed to touch the fish in the hope that the powerful jolt would be appropriate medicine for the illness.
Not much was built on that “shock therapy” for the next two millennia, and further advances only resumed around 1600, when an English physician called William Gilbert rekindled interest in electricity. After carefully studying electricity and magnetism, Gilbert distinguished the lodestone effect from static electricity produced through the rubbing of amber. He also came up with a new word, electricus, from the word electron, which is the Greek word for amber, which later was to develop into the English word electricity. William Gilbert might thus deserve the title of the modern father of electricity. In 1660, Otto Von Guericke came up with an unconventional machine that produced static electricity using a ball of sulfur. Later, Francis Hauksbee came up with experiments that produced static electricity. The Van de Graaf generator is a direct descendant of these rudimentary machines.
In later years, Robert Boyle hypothesized that attraction and repulsion was mutual and that electricity was transmitted through a vacuum. The distinction between conductors and nonconductors was to be made by yet another investigator, Stephen Gray. According to C.F. Du Fay, there are two kinds of electricity. Benjamin Franklin and Ebenezer Kinnersley were later to refer to the two kinds of electricity as negative and positive. The Leyden jar for storing static electricity that could afterward be discharged at once was invented in 1745, courtesy Pieter van Musschenbroek. Charles A. Coulomb completed a comprehensive quantitative study of electricity. Alessandro Volta was instrumental in the discovery of the electromotive force, or Ohm’s law, as well as Joule’s law on electric heating. In 1821 Michael Faraday emerged to give to the world the electric generator, which was improved by Hippolyte Pixii, who created a hand-driven model. This was the precursor to the modern power station, which though, was not to emerge until 50 years later. Thus, the discovery of electricity is an evolutionary, long-drawn-out process with many players who made significant contributions.
For more information on who invented electricity, refer to this article.
