History
The phenomenon was first described in 1802, as a "special fluid with electrical properties", by Vasily V. Petrov, a Russian scientist experimenting with a copper-zinc battery consisting of 4200 discs. Sir Humphry Davy first demonstrated the arc early in the nineteenth century by transmitting an electric current through two touching carbon rods and then pulling them a short distance apart. In 1801, at a lecture before the Royal Society, he produced a "feeble" arc, not readily distinguished from a sustained spark, between charcoal points. The Society subscribed for a more powerful battery of 1000 plates and in 1808 he demonstrated the large-scale arc. He is credited with naming the arc.
Read more about this topic: Electric Arc
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“History takes time.... History makes memory.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The history of medicine is the history of the unusual.”
—Robert M. Fresco, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll)