Not a misspelling. I’m talking about the principal people involved in figuring out how electricity worked originally. How did Volta, Ampere, Franklin, and the others (the principals) discover the principles of electricity, and in the process, volts, amperes, and ohms?

One of the things I wanted to find out: Imagine you’re Georg Ohm, in the 19th century, and you want to figure out how this electricity thing works.

You don’t have meters to measure electricity. You don’t have Ohms, Volts, or Amperes. You don’t have Ohm’s law — Yet. And no one has defined any real measurement units of any kind.

How do you discover Ohm’s law under those circumstances? How can you determine that E =IR when there’s still not a common definition for Voltage or current and only a vague understanding that resistance is a thing?

I did some searching on the internet to see if I could figure out how Ohm did it, and what instruments he used, and what it was all based on. I was surprised at the lack of information available. I found a promising book by Joseph Keithley, The Story of Electrical and Magnetic Measurements, but it took a while to find a copy in the library. It was too expensive to buy without previewing, and I’m glad I waited. It is not the how-to guide I wanted it to be.

Keithley was undoubtedly a guy who knew his stuff. The book is obviously well-researched, and full of references. If you want to know the stories, it’s a good read.

If you want to reproduce the experiments, there’s a lot of detail left out. On the other hand, it opened my eyes to a lot of basic steps along the path that had never occurred to me. Such as the more-or-less accidental discovery of the relationship between electricity and magnetism, and the development of electrical current measurement based on that.

There will be future posts on this. Hopefully, I’ll be reproducing some of Ohm’s experiments. That’s the plan, at least. I have doubts I’ll be able to reproduce his meters, though.