Early Electric Experiments and Birth of The Term
In 1749 Benjamin Franklin, the U.S. polymath and founding father, first used the term "battery" to describe a set of linked capacitors he used for his experiments with electricity. These capacitors were panels of glass coated with metal on each surface. These capacitors were charged with a static generator and discharged by touching metal to their electrode. Linking them together in a "battery" gave a stronger discharge.
Read more about this topic: History Of The Battery
Famous quotes containing the words early, electric, experiments, birth and/or term:
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration of the electric chair—
hanging like an oasis in his air
of lost connections. . . .”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“One man isn’t any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no term of comparison.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)