From Scratch Series || Chapter 1: वैद्युतकषास्त्र (The electricity महायज्ञ) || Part 1: The Ancients; The Firsts

Hello people, 

Since my childhood, I've always tried to look at the world through the first principles. Hence, I didn't know what exactly to name the place where my interest lay, until I got to know about what Natural Philosophy is. Then I stepped into the world of computation and tried to look at it through the first principles. This led me spiraling down the rabbit hole of a history of this science. Full of crazy human endeavors and the creation of an entirely new world to the point the fictional thought of creating an artificial living being seems an achievable reality. But it all started with a stone, and clinging to it some chaff. This is the story of our world... This, is the story of computation. Welcome to the 'From Scratch' series. This is Chapter 1 || वैद्युतकषास्त्र: The story of electricity. 

Part 1 || The Ancients; The Firsts ||

The first(earliest) recorded instance of human observations of electric phenomena is of(as all the popular books say): Thales of Miletus(600 BC).

Thales of Miletus

Miletus

Thales was an Ancient Greek philosopher, from the Ancient Greek city of Miletus. His birthplace: Miletus, was an important trading port in the Greek world, now on the coast of Turkey. No original work of Thales has survived to the present-day, but we know about him and his works via secondary sources: 

-> Aristotle(384BC - 322BC):  In his book: Metaphysics- Aristotle mentions Thales and talks about his beliefs as: 

Book 1, Part 3, Verse 3: 

"Yet, they do not all agree as to the number and the nature of these principles. Thales, the founder of this type of philosophy, says that the principle is water(for which reason he declared that the earth rests on water), getting the notion perhaps from seeing that the nutriment of all things is moist, and the heat itself is generated by the moist and kept alive by it(and that from which they come to be is a principle of all things). He got this notion from this fact and the fact that the seeds of all things have a moist nature, and that water is the origin of the nature of moist stuff."

Although, there is no mention about electricity n stuff. That is mentioned in another one of his books: De Anima (Latin: On The Soul) ---> well, not exactly! What's mentioned is this: 

"Thales, too, to judge from what is recorded about him, seems to have held that the soul is something productive of motion, if indeed he said that the lodestone has a soul because it moves iron."

Aristotle

So, as we can see, there is no direct mention of Thales and any of his encounters with electricity or amber. This speculation was only made much later by other commentators. 

amber stone

However, the works of Diogenes Laërtus(180AD - 240AD) - A Greek Biographer, 'Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers' does mention this: 

"Aristotle and Hippias affirm that, arguing from the magnet and from amber, he[Thales] attributed a soul or life even to inanimate objects."

Diogenes Laërtus

Now, Diogenes provides two sources: 

1. Aristotle - We've already seen his inputs

2. Hippias- 5th century philosopher; Active during Socrates' times

Pliny the Elder

Other early mentions of Static electricity come from: Pliny the Elder(23AD - 79AD). In his book- 'Natural History'; Book 37; chapter 11 : 'Amber: the many falsehoods that have been told about it', Pliny the Elder majorly discusses the falsehoods and the absurd stories that have been woven around amber. Some of them go like this(these are some excerpts from his book - there are English and latin versions): 

He also explores the various tales woven around the origin of amber and also discusses about various properties of Amber, though, most about the properties of Amber has been written about in chapter 12: 'The several kinds of Amber: The remedies derived from it'. But, he later dismisses most of these tales as false and absurd quoting: 

"But for a person seriously to advance such an absurdity with reference to a thing so common as amber, which is imported every day so easily proves the mendacity of this assertion, is neither more nor less than to evince a supreme contempt for the opinions of mankind and to assert with impunity an intolerable falsehood."

But the excerpt we are most interested in is the one where Pliny affirms that amber attracts light weight objects such as chaff, straws, leaves, etc. : 

Note: Pliny does not state that the attraction of light objects occurs only when the amber is subject to rubbing or friction. This most probably is a modern interpretation.

After Pliny the Elder, there was a long silence regarding anything electricity. In this time (i.e. from 1st century AD to 16th century AD), we can find medieval scholars focusing on other fields of sciences, such as: 

-> Optics(eg. Alhezen's work on light and lenses)

-> Alchemy(eg. attempts to transmute materials rather than studying their electrical properties)

 

Plus, There was, during the Middle Ages, heavy influence of Aristotle's Natural Philosophy- which emphasized the four element theory(earth, water, air, fire). 

However, work on magnetism was still growing and advancing gradually. Let's follow the journey of magnetism here on(we'll see how that connects to electricity later).