Q 01/05

The word 'electricity' derives from 'elektron', the ancient Greek word for what?

A) Amber

B) Lightning

C) Iron

D) Fire

Answer · why

A) Amber

William Gilbert coined 'electricus' in 1600 for the way rubbed amber attracts light objects; Thales had noted the effect around 600 BCE.

Q 02/05

Whose 1600 book De Magnete first carefully separated static electricity from magnetism?

A) Francis Bacon

B) William Gilbert

C) Isaac Newton

D) Robert Boyle

Answer · why

B) William Gilbert

Before Gilbert, electricity had been little more than a curiosity for two thousand years.

Q 03/05

Benjamin Franklin is said to have flown a kite in a storm in June 1752 with what tied to the string?

A) An iron nail

B) A copper coin

C) A metal key

D) A silver spoon

Answer · why

C) A metal key

Sparks jumping from the key to his hand showed lightning was electrical; his son William reportedly helped, and the key was borrowed from Benjamin Lox...

Q 04/05

A scientist attempting to replicate Franklin's experiment in St Petersburg in 1753 was killed. Who?

A) Mikhail Lomonosov

B) Thomas-François Dalibard

C) Pieter van Musschenbroek

D) Georg Wilhelm Richmann

Answer · why

D) Georg Wilhelm Richmann

He is thought to have been struck by ball lightning; Dalibard had safely done the rod version in France a month before Franklin's kite.

Q 05/05

Luigi Galvani discovered in 1780 that the legs of dead frogs did what when touched by an electric spark?

A) Twitched

B) Turned blue

C) Glowed

D) Stiffened permanently

Answer · why

A) Twitched

His 'animal electricity' theory was challenged by Volta, but it gave us the words galvanise and galvanic and inspired Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.