FROM SCRATCH SERIES || CHAPTER 1: वैद्युतकषास्त्र (THE ELECTRICITY महायज्ञ) || PART 8: The Two-Fluids of electricity

 PART 8 || The Two-Fluids of Electricity ||

Now, these past few scientists were total contemporaries of the time of Sir Isaac Newton. And now, we're gonna move on to our next man: who's almost a contemporary but we do move 10-20 years ahead. This time, Our guy is French. Et le nom est: Charles François de Cisternay Du Fay(1698 - 1739). 

Charles François De Cisternay Du Fay

Now, this Frenchie also called Dufay(reminds me oddly of Tupac), did, again, something HISTORIC, hang around to see HISTORY being created. 

Something about our man, I found some background on him in an article by Adolf Pabst, University of California, published on the website of the mineralogical Society of America. It says, Dufay was born in Paris, September 14, 1698 in a family of arms business apparently and also served in the military briefly as a lieutenant. And then joined the French academy of sciences(Academie Royale des Sciences) as a chemist. He died at a very young age, so there is no standalone book by him. But, we can find most of his works as memoirs in the journal of the Academy: Historie de l'académie Royale des Sciences: avec les mémoirs de mathematique et de physique pour les mêmes annés(French: History of the Royal Academy of Sciences: with the memoirs of mathematics and physics for the same years). His domaine majeur was chemistry and a glimpse of his work in chemistry is provided in this article. It provides an éloge(French: eulogy) by Bernard Le Bovier de Fontanelle(a French poet) where is mentioned Dufay's work on Crystal. Here's the excerpt they provided: 

In 1732, the king appointed Dufay superintendent, intendent of the Royal Gardens and in this capacity, he was an active botanist until his death in 1739. It is important to mention that mostly all of Dufay's work are in the form of memoirs NOT research papers. But what is a memoir? And for that matter, how is it different from a research paper?

Memoirs were mostly published in the 17th-19th century scientific works and is a detailed account of an individual's observations, experiments, or experiences in a particular field. Along with the experimental procedures and findings, it also included the scientist's thought process and motivations, anecdotes and historical context related to the research. But the primary point where memoirs differ from modern research papers, is rigor and rigidity in writing. A modern research paper follows a very rigid and strict format; and contains, data-collection, theoretical analysis etc. 

now, back to Dufay's work of our interests. Now, I am taking secondary sources(Linda Hall library's website article) for this because of the sheer difficulty I am facing in getting access to the pdfs of the original memoirs. And I also, do not deem this worth the pain. So, here, it is given that the standard tool for the electrical investigator was a glass rod, rubbed vigorously with a piece of cloth. But, it was also known that you could do similar kinds of experiments/demonstrations with a gum resin rod instead of a glass rod. The resin rod was rubbed on a piece of fur instead of cloth. 

In 1733, Du Fay discovered that: the electrified resin rod attracted the chaff that was repelled by the glass rod and vice versa. From 1733 to 1737 -> Du Fay published series of 8 memoirs setting out his two-fluid theory of Electricity. 

I asked chatGPT to get me excerpts from DuFay's original works but even chatGPT couldn't access those writings and got me stuff from Linda Hall Library's website itself. Although here are some key concepts of this theory as summarized by chatGPT: 

Here you have it, this, too, is HISTORIC and this is the first time that two "kinds" of complementary electricities were identified, and their properties observed. Although Dufay called these: 

-> Vitreous Electricity (glass-like)

-> Resinous Electricity (resin-like)