Speaker
Description
The research examines the strategies followed by Alessandro Volta to define and measure the "force" of electricity around the late 1780s, when both aspects—conceptual definition and quantitative experimental measurement—had not yet found (and will not for various decades find) a clear and coherent formulation. Not dissimilar to what happens in similar situations today, Volta very ably intertwined four different components: fundamental physics, experimental physics, instrument design, metrology. At a fundamental level, he identified electrical "tension" as a proper physical quantity expressing the "force" of electricity and proceeded developing electrometers and experimental operation aiming to measure it consistently according to linear scales and referred to a reproducible standardized unit. The research also considers the parallel elaboration that Charles Augustin Coulomb was developing on the grounds of a very different concept of electrical "force", inspired by Newtonian gravitation. Some reflections on educational and museum applications are also proposed.
