Ordinary world chords series#

He showed this happened because a tiny electric current flowed. Ian Johnston: In 1791, the Italian anatomist Luigi Galvani, while studying the effects of electric shocks on living organisms, was the first to perform that experiment familiar to any student of high school biology, that if you touch electrical conductors to the right spots on a frog's leg, it will kick. The latter hinted that the laws and operations of nature could not be reversed at Royal pleasure, whereupon it was intimated to him that someone in his position entertaining such an opinion ought to resign, and he resigned accordingly. Among this number was the patron George III, who requested that the president of the Society should advocate the use of knobs instead of points. But after the breaking out of the American Revolution, Franklin was regarded by many of the members as an enemy of England, and as such it appears to have been repugnant to their feelings to agree with his discoveries. Franklin had previously recommended the use of points, and the propriety of this recommendation had been acknowledged by the Society at large. Reading: During the year 1777, a dispute arose among members of the Royal Society, relative to the form which had been given to electrical conductors so as to render them most efficacious in protecting buildings from the destructive effects of lightning. And it's amusing to read in a contemporary encyclopaedia how this led to public controversy. But as a result of these experiments, he invented the lightning conductor. The most popular picture we have of him is standing bare-headed in the middle of a thunderstorm flying a kite, which, when you come to think of it, was an incredibly foolhardy thing to do. Many of his experiments involved studying lightning discharges. He was also the one who realised that the Earth behaved as though it had a giant magnet at its core.īut it wasn't until the 18th century that concerted efforts were made to find out the nature of electric charge by, among others, Franklin. Even after the Renaissance progress was slow, a catalogue of all those materials which were capable of being charged by rubbing was prepared by William Gilbert, physician to Queen Elizabeth I of England. They knew all these things but had no idea what they meant. The Romans knew that a certain kind of stone from the island of Magnesia would attract pieces of iron, and also that certain fishes gave you a nasty shock if you touched them, and their doctors actually prescribed this as a cure for gout. The ancient Greeks knew that when you rubbed amber, which they called electron, it would attract light feathers. On the fringes of science there have always existed odd pockets of knowledge which nobody quite knows what to do with, until suddenly a use is found and they take off.

Ordinary world chords series#

And he's important to the story I'm telling in this series of programs because he was one of the earliest experimenters in the field of study just then opening up electricity. And it had been invented some 20 years earlier by the American patriot, ambassador, political theorist, scientist and notorious womaniser Benjamin Franklin. It's played by stroking the rims of a set of glasses, just as you yourself must have done many times at the dinner table. It's an adagio for flute, oboe, and an instrument with a haunting, ethereal tone the glass harmonica.

Ian Johnston: The piece you're hearing now was written by Mozart in 1791, the very year of his death, for a strange collection of instruments.

So, let's join Ian Johnston, once at the University of Sydney Physics Department, for a real thought experiment, starting with this strange, almost familiar sound: Then I wave a magic baton and it's all there again, from Brian May (scientist and leading guitarist), to Heinrich Hertz and Faraday, without whom the 20th century would have been far less exciting. So, you're left with pianos, flutes and even bagpipes and didgeridoos. I want you to eliminate all electricity from your surroundings in your imagination, no radios, batteries, TVs, powerlines or CDs, and certainly no downloads through YouTube or things called websites. I'd like to start with a thought experiment. Robyn Williams: This is The Science Show, and today, part five of our series on music and physics.