What is static electricity?

Electricity is a silent invisible force of nature in a mighty genie in a bottle. We cannot see it, hear it or small it know about it only from the things it does. Perhaps this is why it took some 2500 years from the first hint to the time when man actually tamed the mighty genie and put it to work.

The first hint came with the strange antics of static electricity. The first man to notice this was a wise man of ancient Greece named Thalas. Thales rubbed a glassy stone and saw that this gave the stone the power to pick up bits of lint. The glassy stone, which looked like frozen honey, was amber. Its Greek name was elektron  from which we get our word electricity.     

The attraction in the rubbed amber was of course, static electricity, a hint of the mighty genie. Many man of many nations added their wisdom to the first observation as the story unfolded. William Gilbert lived in England at the time of Elizabeth I. He noted that the strange property in rubbed amber was also present .

Benjamin Franklin observed and set forth a theory to explain static electricity. He believed that the strange genie was present in all objects and, under certain conditions it flowed like water. He thought that electricity flowed between two objects such as the rubbed amber and the lint. One object had positive, or extra, electricity and the other had negative, or less than its share of electricity. The pulling power of static occurred because the positive and negative objects.