Advice on How to Perform Electrostatics Experiments

I've been experimenting with the practical side of the history of electricity for over a year now. In this post, I'd like to gather some resources and notes for how to best perform the various electrostatics experiments that are rarely described in any detail. This page is a work in progress.

References

  • For a look at the history of electricity, there are many treatments. I'd recommend of course looking at my YouTube channel; for authoritative contemporary and modern references see Priestley's History; the Encyclopedia Britannica, 3rd edition (1797) or other editions for comparison; Heilbron's Elements of Early Modern Physics; or Park Benjamin's History. Whittaker's History is most concerned with theory and is not particularly well suited to practical history.
  • For advice on performing electrical experiments, see:
    • Encyclopedia Britannica, 3rd edition (1797). One of the most thorough yet concise contemporary treatments of electricity available, including history, practical advice, construction of machines, an overview of the theories of the day, and more. 
    • Sir William Snow Harris, A Treatise on Frictional Electricity (1867). The most comprehensive book about practical electrostatics experiments, including formulations of amalgams, construction of machines, explanation of types of glass and their manufacture, and much more. This should be the standard reference, written at a time when the experiments were still being performed, but the field had reached a level of maturity.
    • Hopkins, G. M. Experimental Science: Elementary Practical and Experimental Physics (1911). This is the twenty-seventh edition, which happens to be the one I have, in two volumes. Includes non-technical and experimentally-oriented chapters on frictional electricity as well as electromagnetics, optics, etc.

Materials

Forthcoming.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Translation of S. D. Poisson's Premiere Memoire sur la Distribution de l'Electricite a la surface des Corps conducteurs; (1812)

One of my pet projects over the last couple years has been translating the two parts of Simeon-Denis Poisson's Mémoire Sur la Distribution de l'Électricité à la surface des Corps conducteurs ;  (read 1812) into English. I didn't dedicate all that much time to it, the full memoires together are only 200 pages or so, so it shouldn't have taken so long, but in any case, 2021 has been a good year of translations for me, so I thought, I might as well put an hour every day into the translation. And now the first memoir is complete!  Translator's Preface The story of this work begins, for our purposes, with Charles Augustin Coulomb (1736-1806), the military engineer-turned-natural philosopher, who, beginning in 1785, published a series of seven memoirs on the topics of electricity and magnetism. Coulomb used his recently developed torsion balance  to make some of the earliest quantitative measurements of the electrostatic force. He performed these measurements using a fine
Read more

Translation of Gauss's Theoria Attractionis Corporum Sphaeroidicorum Ellipticorum Homogeneorum methodo novo tractata (1813)

This is a translation into English of Gauss's famous Theoria attractionis corporum sphaeroidicorum ellipticorum homogeneorum methodo novo tractata  published in the  Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis recentiores  in 1813 (Abbreviated variously as  Societ. Reg. Scient. , or Comm. Got. recent. ), a publication of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen. It was also published in Werke  vol. V, pp. 1-22. See this link on HathiTrust .  This is a rough draft, it should be accurate but may have typos or awkward wording. I have plenty of notes to share to explain what's going on in more modern language, so I'll update this page as I go. I have typeset the original Latin and the English translation in LaTex, so I'll post the sources as usual.  English LaTex source Latin LaTex source ENGLISH LATIN
Read more

Translation of J. D. Gergonne's Varities, Essai de dialectique rationelle (Essay about rational dielectic)

Inspired by Aris Makrides on hsm.stackexchange.com, I've decided to translate an old French paper by Joseph Diaz Gergonne, relating to logic. The paper is significant for being one of the earliest uses of the symbols $\subset$ and $\supset$ (which were written as C and Ɔ). Below you'll find the draft translation, which I may or may not revisit. I was able to finish the translation in one month by translating about 1 hour per day (to a rough draft).   Thanks to Calvin Khor, the typesetting for this translation is now much improved. I'll still leave the original LaTeX file here for anyone to tinker with as they see fit.  Some notes on terminology.  The most significant choice I had to make was how to translate étendue , which is defined by Larousse as dimension de quelque chose considéré dans l'espace qu'il occupe  (dimension of something considered in the space which it occupies). Direct translations might include extensiveness , or  extent ; I found these to not re
Read more