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:
“The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,—all the rest being variation of these.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)