That snapshot of two paragraphs written by Crookes is astounding. What an amazing power of scientific intuition. That it took several ingenious scientists several decades to discover and establish these insights as correct,with theories and proofs, tells us how remarkable it was to condense them into so little text. Everybody is delighted at your wonderfully lucid explanations of electricity, physics, discoveries. As am I. But I am also astounded at how brilliantly you choose these text snippets and show them to us. And your insight into the historical significance of these papers and books that we are not even aware of. You are the William Crookes of youtube
Thank you, thank you, thank you for that wonderful and lyrical compliment. I am honored to be compared to Crookes. Thank you again, you really made my day. Cheers, Kathy
No one, and I mean NO ONE, does a better job of covering these fascinating topics. I feel bad for skipping ahead to episode 36, but it was worth it. Thank you for what you do!
Thank for for generating so many of these consistently informative and entertaining videos. Over the years I have discovered that I generally find it impossible to really understand science until I learn the history and the phenomena behind it. This is exactly what you are providing in these videos. To me, this is a much more effective way to learn than by simply memorizing theories, laws, and formulas. I wish I had been taught this way when I was a young man. Please keep up the good work.
I fully agree Andrew. Until you see / understand the science - chemistry, biology or physics, even maths - in the context in which it was discovered and developed, it does not really make all that much sense. Most textbooks have only a tiny bit of history content, and as a consequence, not only make difficult concepts impossible, but also result in lack of interest.
How have I not seen your channel before? I found you only a few days ago and have been blown away ever since. Thanks for your excellent research and great delivery. PS: I work with tubes like this every day in my hobby. I owe my electronics career to these inventors, scientists and even the charlatans who were shameless promoters.
Kathy thanks for putting these videos online. I studied Electrical Engineering in my youth at Brooklyn Polytech but after a career in sales and marketing have forgotten much of the technical stuff, and never new of the fascinating stories of the people involved with all of the human quirks we all possess. It turns out that all of this was a very important part of the progress that has been made during the 20th century. Keep up the good work.
I am sooo enjoying these videos of yours thank.you from myself I have learnt so much, Easy to follow along, Fantastic research and methodical presentation with just a hint of humour to keep it all moving along nicely. then a great little cliff-hanger each time that gets my figure hitting the nxt button straight away. I can almost roll back the clock , you get a great sense of the back story, what was all going on at the time. One thing that I don't really understand particularly with this video is how considering folks had been seriously playing around with glass tubes , exotic gasses and electric sparks etc right back into the mid 17 hundreds I think you said , That it took so long to get to Edisons light bulb moment shall we say.. I'm surprised no one else hadn't stumbled on the filament some what earlier the ground work surly had been all done for him .. Lastly another quick thank you from me, as i have worked in TV land for over 20 yrs as a Soundy and doing post prod and i appreciate your high production values and quality dialogue.. nothing drives me crazier than listening to way off mic recordings of speech when you are trying to learn something... Many Regards keep the history lesson a coming.... Loving it If I really want to Geek Out big time I can head off to Mr Carlson's Lab ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-qqmegXoB7lA.html I can almost follow along and understand some of the vintage electronics there,, Or a another fav and great teacher is a fellow Kiwi at ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-fSoXIqBlg9M.html least I can understand what he is saying..
Kris, thank you for the lovely comments. About how long it took for a viable light bulb, that is an interesting question. A big handicap was the delay in making decent generators which took until the 1860s (the discovery that you could create electricity from moving coils near magnets was made in 1832 so...). Also, in the 1800s very bright public lights seemed a better bet than individual dim light bulbs and they tended to focus on arc lamps over incandescent. But it is totally mind blowing that the first electric lamp (with static electricity) in 1705! The first electric spark in a vacuum tube in around 1750! And the first arc lamp (powerful battery powered lamp) and the first understanding that current through thin filaments will make them glow in around 1809! I am also fantastically happy that you aren't driven nuts by my production "values". I really have been learning everything by myself on the fly. I am especially irritated with my lighting and a friend of mine (who is a sound technician) hates my sound quality. But I am trying. I will check out your recommendations. If you are a Kiwi you must (and I mean *must*) check out my videos on Rutherford. He was so interesting and always a kiwi to the core, one of my favorite scientists OF ALL TIME. Cheers, Kathy
Wow! I did not know that Crookes was so prescient about matter and energy in 1879 (~9:03) the year that Einstein was born. Did Einstein ever read this note to Professor Stokes? I doubt it but food for thought. Thank you, Kathy.
Amazing video, I was reading about electricity in physics and became curious about this topic so i searched for videos and this was exactly what i was looking for. You dragged me in, and now im much, much more excited to continue reading. Thank you!
I discovered your videos starting with the one you did on Tesla. I found it to be very eye opening to say the least. I have proceeded to view more of them, and you do a very good job of bringing these subjects to life! Good job and I am hooked!
I PERSONALLY LIKE EVERYTHING YOU DO. I'VE BEEN ENGAGED IN THE PURSUIT OF A DEGREE IN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING AND HAVE GRAZED AGAINST THE HISTORY. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING PRODUCED HAS BEEN EITHER MORE CLEAR OR CERTIANLY MORE INTERESTING THAN YOUR VIDEOS. YOU HAVE PEAKED MY INTEREST TO THE POINT THAT I HAVE VIEWED THEM NUMEROUS TIMES...EACH. I WISH I HAD THEM WHILE I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL. THANK YOU AND KEEP IT UP.
Hey I like the secret history of elect. Becaue u put this great emphasis on historic details that never get covered in text books but they are the real story. Great series thankyou
"e-l-c-tric-i-ty",reminds me of my days watching Sesami Street waiting for the the groovy animated count down pinball machine : 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8--n-i-n-e --ten!!💥
I started my own videos, essentially teaching myself after 15 years of technical and high school teaching. I find that I can't learn unless I am teaching...even if no one is watching. Your production is fantastic. Maybe mine can lool as professional as yours someday. 😁
Your video on Cathode Ray Tubes is superb and so useful for historians. I've just subscribed and plan to watch others while writing a book on artists' responses to the "secret history of electricity." I think that title is much better for your series. "Lightning Tamers" doesn't describe what all these scientists were doing, Thanks for making the videos!
I love the physics and engineering of the past. My house burned down but I once had a physics book with dozens of illustrations of simple machines of the day printed in 1923 and I loved that book, it was the oldest in my collection.
Absolutely love you going over the reasons these people had & why they thought what they did. It makes understanding the technology & the physics a lot easier when you understand what went into it. Thank you so much for giving life to these characters & stories.
Wow, wow wow! I'm now hopelessly hooked on this channel and my work is suffering (I work in science, so it is sort of work, isn't it...?). Such a great combination of science and history and so well presented in an engaging manner. Thanks Kathy.
Simply great and wonderfully explained. We will show you at our Space-Explorers-Club for kids with our newly found Crook'tubes in the cellar of Planetarium Berlin, Germany.. So all the best from Berlin 😊
Another amazing video. A list of all of them with links would be useful - perhaps I haven't found it yet. This video is from a few years ago. I like the 'Secret History of Electrcity name' because I think that describes ithe series better... Keep up the good work.
You forgot the Braun tube. "Cathode rays were discovered by Julius Plücker and Johann Wilhelm Hittorf." The earliest version of the CRT was known as the "Braun tube"
@@Kathy_Loves_Physics Kathy, I'm not good with marketing strategies, but I believe that your videos are really getting around! Recently, a friend of mine who works with high school students told me that one of her clients who is interested in science raved about them! You have a unique way of teaching that grabs one's attention.
Thank you Kathy, for so many wonderful videos. Very interesting; I wish we had you and Internet when my generation was growing up. There is just one thing that I think would increase the enjoyment of watching your work - please re-watch your video, concentrating on your gesticulation... and try to reduce your arm work. I think it is too vigorous and distracting, and I really think reducing it would generate more positive responses to your work. Please don't take me wrong. I like your videos and with this 'criticism' I am trying to help. Thank you.
Your presentation is wonderful and provides us with an opportunity to grasp some of history's great moments. The music in the background simply distracts.
Great video. Do you by chance know of any literature on "canal" rays? i recall reading about them very briefly once, where a tube used a perforated cathode. The cathode generated an orange glow in the opposite direction of the cathode ray, and was apparently a stream of positive ions. I'd love to know more but can't find any info.
Viorel I read a bit about them in Wikipedia’s article about Eugen Goldstein who according to them gave cathode rays their name and discovered the canal rays. I didn’t read his original work though.
Thank you very much for this fabulous video!! I have this doubt about image at 7:57 in the video. How is it reproduced the bending of the cathodic rays with a magnet? It's known that cathodic rays are invisible to the eye and just visible by the fluorescence they produce on fluorescing glass or minerals. Thank you in advance for your answer.
First of all Kathy, Congratulations, your programs are very interesting, very well documented and nicely presented. I have a dought if you can clarify for me,. When you talk about a cathode and an anode, obviously you are talking about DC current But in dose days, high voltages were achieved from induction coils,witch produce AC so then how they rectified them since there where no Rectifiers. Can you inform us please.
Not all induction coils produce AC. In fact, you only got AC when you make a tank circuit, or you have and capacitor or condenser with your interrupting battery. I explained it a lot better in my history of the Tesla Coil. Hope that helps
I'd probably go with "The spark", it kind of describes history and the origins of the human understanding of natures Electromagnetic phenomenon in a short snappy two word phrase. And the spark of creativity, a eureka moment is implied as well. If that is not an option then I do prefer "The lightening tamers" over "The secret history of electricity".
Bert Isevil that is so funny, my original title was “Spark”!! I’m not sure if it works for a video title “next time on the spark” but I will think about it. What I liked about “the secret history of electricity” is that it is searchable and doesn’t need a subtitle. However, it is confusing (what is secret?) and doesn’t imply that I’m telling the history of the people who discovered electricity. Grr, this marketing stuff is hard. ps. A friend recommended “the not so secret history of electricity” which is pretty funny at least.
'Spark' is a great title. It infers 'Spark of Genius', which fits great with the main theme is invention. 'Lightning Tamers' is very catchy, and evokes powerful imagery. But a major drawback is that it seems to keep you stuck in a primitive caveperson era. Or at best, up to Ben Franklin. The series goes well beyond taming lightning. But then again, you could say that any use of electricity is a form of tamed lightning. Like me using this computer. I agree that Secret History of Electricity comes with some problems. One of the biggest to me is that there's already an overabundance of conspiracy stuff out there. And I see the best role of an educational channel is to show people how accessible things can be when we put the effort in to learning them. Not that some secret handshake needs to be learned before you can make any progress. So yeah, 'Spark' by itself would have that problem of being too ubiquitous. But if you were to expand it a bit to something like 'Spark of Genius', then it would have reasonable searchability. And if you ever wanted to expand the topics to anything beyond electricity, the title still works with any kind of technological advancement. The Spark Of Genius is happening within the human mind. It is that instant when the gap is bridged from the realm of what is known into the unknown, enfolding just a bit more into that part of the world that humans can have mastery over. Variations could be something like 'Spark of Ingenuity', 'Spark of Creativity', 'Spark of Innovation', 'Spark of Brilliance', etc. If you went with that second one, then the title could have the abbr 'SpoC', as a Trek homage.
Or if you wanted to keep it short, one way to make it more searchable would be to put a twist on the spelling. Something like: - Sparc - Sparx - Sparkx - Sparq - Sparck And then to really get fancy, come up with a bacronym for what it means.
Crookes is deffo on the list of people who should be celebrated more. As well as his explorations into physics, he - like many of his bearded ilk - was fascinated by spiritualism (his version was called spiritism, which is subtly different in ways that don't matter), as back then it seemed perfectly natural that as previously hidden physical phenomena were uncovered, the realms of the departed would obviously be next. Quite scientific. The spiritualist society he founded is still going, and has a charity shop on the Caledonian Road in North London - I used to go past it on my way to work each day. sirwilliam.org/en/home/
Oh, quite. It must have been fabulous to be a physicist - especially a talented, innovative physicist - at the turn of the 20th century. So many new ideas, and so many amenable to experiment. I see Crookes published some 250-300 papers, although he wasn't entirely applauded as towards the end of his life there was a feeling that "he had sowed the wild oats of genius past his allotted time”. And the radiometer's cool enough, but it's not electricity - if you're going to get stuck into thermodynamics, we'll be here all year...
Crookes was also the guy who publicly set the alarm bells ringing about a coming Malthusian crisis if they didn't find new sources for nitrogen fertilizer,as they were running out of guano. Thomas Hager starts with this appeal in his book the Alchemy of Air. The invention of the Haber Bosch process solved that crisis
I'm a bit confused! How was it determined that the electrode emitting the glowing rays is negative? Is it because this electrode is connected to the negative terminal of the induction coil? If so, what led the designation of that particular terminal on the induction coil as negative to begin with? What if the battery were hooked up to the tube the other way around? I'd really appreciate it if you could answer my question. I just can't shake this mix-up with cathode and anode being positive or negative. It keeps bugging me.
Crookes did not mention "curved spacetime". He mentioned light not moving in a straight line. It is a fascinating philosophical question, whether space and time are metaphysical concepts or real physical things. According to basic reason, one can apply physical actions to physical things, but not to metaphysical concepts. Thus, one can bend a stick. One can bend a rod of iron. One cannot "bend" the goodwill of all unicorns, except in a metaphorical sense. To postulate that space and time can be physically bent requires one to cease using the words to represent metaphysical concepts, and to begin using them to represent physical things. Is it valid and sensible, to believe that time is a physical thing, and not the metaphysical concept of progression? Or that space is a physical thing, and not the metaphysical concept of 3 dimensions? If these are things, physical things that can experience physical actions that distort their forms, then how can they also be characteristics of all other things? All sticks and rods of iron occupy occupy both space and time. How can a physical thing "occupy" another physical thing, let alone all other physical things, all at once? All unicorns may be immoral, and all unicorns may lie incessantly. Yet the unicorn with the longest horn cannot also be the unicorn with the shortest horn, as well as every other unicorn, all at once. Not unless there is only one unicorn.
If you're a reader of science I highly recommend Isaac Asimov's book "The History of Physics". I've read it twice and hope to read it a third time before my untimely demise. That book, being dead tree format and all, isn't as entertaining as Kathy's videos but covers a lot of the same ground and is extremely informative.
I think the history of electricity might be better titled "The Early History Of Electricity" and perhaps encompass It's beginnings from video #1 to perhaps #8, and from #9 to the present be called "The Lightning Tamers - The Utility Of Electricity" . Just saying. I think both titles have merit, The History Of Electricity being the first half of the history, and The Lightning Tamers the later half, it being a sort of operating manual for electricity.
Does anybody happen to know how they were able to remove the oxygen from glass tubes back in the day? I've been searching for answer but haven't found one yet. I want to know how they first came up with evactuated chambers.
Amazing as always. Why don't the Cathode rays angle down towards the anode? That's a detail that's holding me back from understanding. Why do they shoot past the anode in a straight line, hitting the glass across from the Cathode? I know charge and magnetism are different things but isn't it similar, in that opposites attract? And speaking of magnetism, does the Cathode ray react differently towards the North and South poles of a magnet? I'm assuming it does.?. I'm so confused now. 🤦♂️ Isn't that how TVs worked? But back to my original question. How does the Anode work and what does it do in a Cathode ray tube. Does it create a sort of Faraday cage out of the glass or maybe the gas in the tube.?. Except for the vacuum...🤔😤🥵🙏 Love your videos.
Lots of questions let’s see how I can answer them. So the cathode has electrons and as they get heated they push away from the other electrons and if the voltage is pretty high they tend to go with a very high speed. They are attracted to the anode but if they’re going on a fast speed they basically don’t have time to be pulled towards it and just go in a straight line if that makes sense. Moving electrons, which is what is happening inside the current caring wire, move move differently by the north and the south pole of a magnet using the right hand rule. So if you use the other side of the magnet you would be moving the cathode ray in the other direction. Yes, the original televisions, CRT televisions or cathode ray tube televisions use with the catheter very moved by an electromagnet one electromagnet to move it left to right and one electromagnet to move it up-and-down. The intensity of the beam is controlled by the voltage and the intensity a different points made the picture if that makes sense.
That is an excellent question. William Gilbert (1600) came up with the idea that things can be electric in electrified if you rub them and then Steven Gray (1727) figured out that electricity moved and then Du Fay (1731) figure it out there’s two kinds of electrics and then Benjamin Franklin (1749) called them positive electricity and negative electricity. Therefore, by the time coulomb (around 1780) came along to find the relationship between electric forces there was discussion of electric charge.
The answer is in Kathy's video: How Benjamin Franklin Discovered the True Nature of Electricity ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-BEvLmgYvYX8.html Kathy's ‘History of Science’ playlist: ru-vid.com/group/PLepnjl2hm9tHcapb3u2RAXQP9ag1Y1vIp
Here's how much of an idiot I can be. I see these early models, and I think, "oh, that's nothing, they should be around today to see what we have". What an idiot. If it wasn't for these great thinkers, we wouldn't have what we have today. And to think, they built these experiments with crude tools and no electricity. These were the true geniuses.
