11. Faraday, Maxwell, Helmholtz, Marconi and Edison

 Communications in the modern world. Transistors
 everywhere.


 Dr. William Gilbert was born in Colchester on 24th May 1544, and died
 0n the 10th of December 1603.

 The poet Dryden wrote:=

 "Gilbert shall live till loadstones cease to draw
 of British fleets the boundless ocean awe"

 A lifelong bachelor, he took a medical degree at Cambridge in 1569 and
 moved to London in 1573, becoming President of the College of
 Physicians in London in 1600. He became a Fellow of St. Johns College
 Cambridge, and was appointed Court Physician to Queen Elizabeth I in
 1601.

 The Queen awarded him a pension to allow him to carry out his
 researches. He published, in 1600, his account of magnetism, entitled
 "De magnete", much of it based on the work of Peter Peregrinus (1269)
 which had been forgotten. Gilbert, who wrote in Latin, believed in
 experimentation and showed that power of a magnet was not destroyed by
 garlic! He also attacked the view of St. Augustine that the power of a
 magnet was destroyed by diamond. The important point about his work is
 that he actually performed experiments with magnets, made from
 lodestones, of which a large deposit had been recently discovered in
 Devon. Most of his work done with spherical magnets, which he termed
 "Terella", little earths.

 He suggested that the earth was a magnet and demonstrated the
 phenomenon of dip .Gilbert clearly showed that the static electric
 force differed from magnetism and showed that static electricity could
 be demonstrated using other bodies than the amber of the ancients. He
 noticed that it was at its best in England with a "dry easterly wind".

 Gilbert followed Copernicus, but believed that the force maintaining
 the planets in their orbits was magnetism. He derides the common view
 at marine fossils had been deposited by the flood, and regarded the
 stars as infinitely distant. His work was quoted in extenso by Galileo,
 Kepler and Stevin. But G. also considered that lodestones possessed
 life & therefore a soul. His court appointment was confirmed by James 1
 and his work on magnetism was commended by Francis Bacon Lord
 chancellor in his Novvum Organum.

 After his death his cosmological speculations were published as "De
 mundo nostro sublunari philosophia novia Amsterdam" 1651

 Williams L.P.
 Michael Faraday - a biography
 Chapman & Hall 1965

 Overhage C.F.J.
 The Age of Electronics
 McGraw Hill 1962