Did the Ancients invent electricity?

[Grave_n_idle]

they likely thought it was a way to turn silver into gold.

Why? Because people who came before us were stupid?

Seriously, is this not a lesson we've learned yet?

I'm saying that I do not beleive they understood the concept of the electric current and et all.

In the same terms we do? Who knows?

We know they had the technology for electrical storage. There's some evidence to suggest they may have had a primitive electric light. The construction of primitive Leyden jars suggests that they understood some of how current is moved, and how it is arrested.

I don't know if they had math to calculate resistances and conductances the way we do, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't 'understand' the concepts.

[Minnas]

As I'm sure it's been stated here before, invent is not the proper term. Discover is more accurate.

[Greed and Death]

Why? Because people who came before us were stupid?

Seriously, is this not a lesson we've learned yet?

Not stupid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy
Just didn't understand nuclear chemistry.

You don't need to understand nuclear chemistry to understand that gold in suspension adhere's to silver if you apply a current.

I'm not saying they would, of necessity, constructed the same kind of molecual rationals, but there's no reason to assume they thought they were transmuting.

the knowledge of currents dates to 1646.
"The Lodestone and the Understanding of Matter in Seventeenth Century England", Philosophy of Science 4 (1): 75–95
Technically you use a solution not a suspension to electroplate gold.
Read Aristotle or other authors of the time. You burn a piece of wood you releasing the fire and air elements.

[SaintB]

Why? Because people who came before us were stupid?

Seriously, is this not a lesson we've learned yet?

I'm saying that I do not beleive they understood the concept of the electric current and et all.

In the same terms we do? Who knows?

We know they had the technology for electrical storage. There's some evidence to suggest they may have had a primitive electric light. The construction of primitive Leyden jars suggests that they understood some of how current is moved, and how it is arrested.

I don't know if they had math to calculate resistances and conductances the way we do, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't 'understand' the concepts.[/quote]
I'm pretty sure that while they may have been able to harness it they had no documented understanding of how. How would ancient man explain the flow of electrons from one atom to another, how would they explain the positive and negative charges, how would they know about an electron? People are quite capable of doing things without understanding how they do them, or why they work. The Chinese invented gunpowder, does the men they knew what exactly made it work? No, they thought that the chemicals used to make black powder where inherently a mixture of the elements of earth and fire. Its not stupidity, its lack of sophistication.

[Greed and Death]

Now that electroplating is done. There was another possibility I read somewhere else.
At the time they though getting shocked by electric fish was a cure all, and the battery was designed to simulate the shocks of eels.

[JuNii]

I was watching History Channel and they said something about an Ancient Egyptian Battery. I've done some reading and I'm not sure what to think. Do you think the Ancients invented electricity and if so or not why?

I'm pretty sure Electricity was around long before the Ancients.

however, were they the first to harness it?

dunno... if they have the patent paperwork, I guess then we can honor their claim...

[Hanibar]

I think I saw this on Mythbusters, Ancient Mesopotamians (I think) invented an ancient "battery"

[Voltairian Prospects]

Wait, are you suggesting the Ancient women had vibrators?!

Cities abuzzzzzzzzzz and all!

Goodness no, miss. Get your mind out of the gutter!
It's crowded down here.

Oh, come on... you know it was funny

[Charlotte Ryberg]

In the same terms we do? Who knows?

We know they had the technology for electrical storage. There's some evidence to suggest they may have had a primitive electric light. The construction of primitive Leyden jars suggests that they understood some of how current is moved, and how it is arrested.

I don't know if they had math to calculate resistances and conductances the way we do, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't 'understand' the concepts.

I'd love to hear whether the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians powered their cities like the Big Apple but if photography had not been invented or had been uninvented due to the fall of Roman civilization it'll be hard to prove it.

[Cameroi]

electricity wasn't invented, at least not by anything human. it was there all along as part of the universe.
what humans discouvered were ways of generating and using it.
materials technology just wasn't there well enough to do anything very practical with electricity up until a very few centuries ago.

potentially the means existed to make integrated circuit electronics in the ancient art of multicolor inlayed glass manufacturing with existed in very very ancient times in some cultures. but of course no method of micromasking is known to have existed in such times. likewise solar cells and all sorts of things.

the problem is, to be able to do anything useful with any of those things, you need a whole bunch of them at the same time, not just one technique to do one small part of it.

as long as there has been manufacture of different kinds of metal, and the harvesting of fruit trees, i mean if insert pins/nails/spikes, one of each of two different kinds of metal into a citrus fruit, you'll get a voltage difference of potential between them that will make a very small current flow through a wire. but if you don't have a wire, or any way of making one, what then?

even if you go back there from now, once you're there, where are you going to find anything resembling wire?

well maybe if you're royalty or something and can get your hands on gold jewlry wire or something like that. and you can always use bits of graphite for resistors, wind coils, again if you can get your hands on anything resembling wire, and or good conducting metals, capacitors are just an insulator between metal layers.

so you could have many of the pieces of the early days of electronics even, so the question is one of knowing actually what they were doing, and undersanding it enough to do anything really useful and practical with it.

like heroditus spinning teakettle is another example of that kind of thing.
mostly when something like this was known, it was closely guarded secret knowledge of a few
who used it, allowed it to be used, only to bamboozle the marks, in their temples.

or perhaps, i should say, in a bit more fairness, create and atmosphere of mystery and thus spiritualness.

[Bears Armed]

Now that electroplating is done. There was another possibility I read somewhere else.
At the time they though getting shocked by electric fish was a cure all, and the battery was designed to simulate the shocks of eels.

There was an article in New Scientist magazine, maybe two or three years ago, about Roman use of the 'Electric Ray' (or 'Torpedo'), which is native to the Mediterranean, to relieve the symptoms of Migraine and Gout: Were you thinking of this?
(It couldn't have been 'Electric Eels' that they used, because those are actually native only to South America...)

[Grave_n_idle]

In the same terms we do? Who knows?

We know they had the technology for electrical storage. There's some evidence to suggest they may have had a primitive electric light. The construction of primitive Leyden jars suggests that they understood some of how current is moved, and how it is arrested.

I don't know if they had math to calculate resistances and conductances the way we do, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't 'understand' the concepts.

I'd love to hear whether the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians powered their cities like the Big Apple but if photography had not been invented or had been uninvented due to the fall of Roman civilization it'll be hard to prove it.

I doubt that they had huge and developed webs of current, the way we do. There's just no real archeological evidence for it. On the other hand, I wouldn't be too surprised if we started discovering such evidence. I'm just a healthy skeptic.