History
The phenomenon was first described in 1802, as a "special fluid with electrical properties", by Vasily V. Petrov, a Russian scientist experimenting with a copper-zinc battery consisting of 4200 discs. Sir Humphry Davy first demonstrated the arc early in the nineteenth century by transmitting an electric current through two touching carbon rods and then pulling them a short distance apart. In 1801, at a lecture before the Royal Society, he produced a "feeble" arc, not readily distinguished from a sustained spark, between charcoal points. The Society subscribed for a more powerful battery of 1000 plates and in 1808 he demonstrated the large-scale arc. He is credited with naming the arc.
Read more about this topic: Electric Arc
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)