Symbol
The conventional symbol for current is, which originates from the French phrase intensité de courant, or in English current intensity. This phrase is frequently used when discussing the value of an electric current, especially in older texts; modern practice often shortens this to simply current but current intensity is still used in many recent textbooks. The symbol was used by André-Marie Ampère, after whom the unit of electric current is named, in formulating the eponymous Ampère's force law which he discovered in 1820. The notation travelled from France to Britain, where it became standard, although at least one journal did not change from using to until 1896.
Read more about this topic: Electric Current
Famous quotes containing the word symbol:
“Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me ...
I do not know it—it is without name—it is a word unsaid,
It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol ...
Do you see O my brothers and sisters?
It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal life—it is Happiness.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)