Abstract
THE development of electrical science and its applications during the last century has led to the introduction of a host of names, units and definitions, many of them now household words. The history of these words, and of others which have been introduced, only to be discarded, is of considerable interest, and recalls the difficulties the pioneers experienced in explaining clearly new facts and phenomena*. Though many terms go back to Greek science and to the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the majority belong to the last century and the days since Faraday. The subject is an intricate one and it has not, we believe, been dealt with before so fully as by Prof. G. W. O. Howe, in a paper entitled “The Concepts and Language of Electrical Engineering” read to the Association of Engineers at Calcutta, and printed in the Engineer of September 2. In coining the words anode, cathode, ions, electrodes and others, Faraday was assisted by Dr. Whewell of Cambridge, whose encyclopaedic knowledge led someone to write, “You may roam where you will through the realm of infinity, and find nothing so great as the Master of Trinity”. Whewell had proposed the terms inductricity and inducteous, which fortunately, like the mac, bob, torn and dick of Heaviside, were not adopted. Prof. Howe does justice to the various individuals who have devoted their attention to the matter of units, as well as to the committees and congresses which have assisted in standardizing them.
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Nomenclature in Electrical Engineering. Nature 142, 506 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/142506c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/142506c0