Errors in History: First Recorded Mentions of Electricity and Thales of Miletus
I was going through Park Benjamin Jr.'s The Intellectual Rise in Electricity (1895) and it provided an interesting look at the earliest history of electricity and magnetism. The most notable aspects were the historical myths that he dispels. This will be a short post to try to help promote better historiography. The first point of note is that Thales of Miletus (typically pronounced "tahlees" or "taylees") is often given credit as the first to record observations of the attractive nature of amber. Sources such as Wikipedia list that Thales rubbed amber with fur to produce attraction, and in another article Wikipedia gives four different citations to substantiate the claim; other sources say it was silk , but it seems it is always Thales of Miletus. And yet, the only references we have to substantiate the claim - that Thales ever commented on the "amber effect" - are the work of Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers , who quotes Aristot