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 Aristotle and Hippias, and the work of Aristotle, De Animus. But these accounts are, to say the least, dubious. The reference for Aristotle comes from the quote: 

"Thales, too, to judge from what is recorded about him, seems to have held soul to be a motive force, since he said that the magnet has a soul in it because it moves the iron." [De Animus, Book 1 Part 2]

While Diogenes states:

"Aristotle and Hippias affirm that, arguing from the magnet and from amber, he attributed a soul or life even to inanimate objects." [Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 1 Ch 1]

Thus we see that the evidence, so far, is thin. The other two references are hardly historical references at all. It's notable that no written works on Thales remain, and in fact his life has become something of mythology. Living between 626 - 545 BC, he predates Aristotle (384 - 322 BC) by several hundred years, and while Aristotle is a more reliable account, it makes no mention of Thales and amber. Meanwhile, Diogenes Laertius (fl. 3rd century AD) is quite far removed from Thales, and his account is perhaps more accurately described as gossip or legend. 

While these accounts aren't particularly convincing, there is a more notable account due to Plato (428 - 347 BC), whose lifetime was much closer to that of Thales. The dialog spoken by the eponymous character in Timaeus mentions the attractive nature of amber (and also mentions cupping glass, which was later mentioned by Gilbert among others):

The phenomena of medical cupping-glasses, of swallowing, and of the hurling of bodies, are to be explained on a similar principle; as also sounds, which are sometimes discordant on account of the inequality of them, and again harmonious by reason of equality. The slower sounds reaching the swifter, when they begin to pause, by degrees assimilate with them: whence arises a pleasure which even the unwise feel, and which to the wise becomes a higher sense of delight, being an imitation of divine harmony in mortal motions. Streams flow, lightnings play, amber and the magnet attract, not by reason of attraction, but because ‘nature abhors a vacuum,’ and because things, when compounded or dissolved, move different ways, each to its own place.

(Emphasis mine.)

This is much more convincing as the "first surviving mention of electricity," rather than the first recorded mention of it. Benjamin makes the same conclusion in his work. But note, there's a great likelihood that Thales would have encountered the amber effect (even primitive tribes have been known to play with static electricity in a recreational way). But the point is, that we have no convincing evidence to support the idea that Thales of Miletus truly was the first to record observations on electricity, nor that he included the amber effect in his theories of the soul. 

What's more interesting is that so many people have taken the above quotes, and inferred so much from them, such as the way Thales would have rubbed amber (with fur, with silk, etc). These ideas get repeated and conflated so often that they make it into published works, that get cited even if they are not related to the history of math and science! For instance, in Comprehensive Energy Systems, we find the following quote:

The earliest known discovery of electricity comes in 585 BC in a statement written by Thales of Miletus. Thales recognized the attractive powers of amber rubbed with animal fur as well as iron to lodestone. Thales attributed the objects to having some sort of soul, but what he truly discovered were the first observations of static electricity and magnetism.

 There is a reference for the this statement, available here, from Michael Fowler, which correctly cites that Thales of Miletus only makes mention of lodestone, and not of amber. The paragraph does read in a slightly jumbled way, that makes it seem like (a) Thales mentioned amber, and (b) there is an actual statement from Thales about it; but this is a mistake, for all that is meant is that there existed a discussion about lodestone which is attributed to Thales of Miletus. (Fowler's writing in fact references Benjamin's history of electricity.)

 While my research here was guided by Benjamin's writing, the same observations were found by Paul Iversen and Daniel Lacks in their 2012 paper "A life of its own: The tenuous connection between Thales of Miletus and the study of electrostatic charging."(doi:10.1016/j.elstat.2012.03.002 , sci-hub link). Benjamin is also listed as a reference for that paper, so it's worth mentioning again that it is a small feat to find these missteps, when most of the effort has already been carried out.