Faraday, Michael, 1791-1867; Physicists -- Great Britain -- Biography
'During its flow,' and this was the time when an effect was
expected--but here Faraday's power of lateral vision, separating, as it
were, from the line of expectation, came into play--he noticed that a
feeble movement of the needle always occurred at the moment when he made
contact with the battery; that the needle would afterwards return to
its former position and remain quietly there unaffected by the flowing
current. At the moment, however, when the circuit was interrupted the
needle again moved, and in a direction opposed to that observed on the
completion of the circuit.
This result, and others of a similar kind, led him to the conclusion
'that the battery current through the one wire did in reality induce a
similar current through the other; but that it continued for an instant
only, and partook more of the nature of the electric wave from a common
Leyden jar than of the current from a voltaic battery.' The momentary
currents thus generated were called induced currents, while the current
which generated them was called the inducing current. It was immediately
proved that the current generated at making the circuit was always
opposed in direction to its generator, while that developed on the
rupture of the circuit coincided in direction with the inducing current.
It appeared as if the current on its first rush through the primary wire
sought a purchase in the secondary one, and, by a kind of kick, impelled
backward through the latter an electric wave, which subsided as soon as
the primary current was fully established.
Faraday, for a time, believed that the secondary wire, though quiescent
when the primary current had been once established, was not in its
natural condition, its return to that condition being declared by the
current observed at breaking the circuit. He called this hypothetical
state of the wire the electro-tonic state: he afterwards abandoned
this hypothesis, but seemed to return to it in later life. The term
electro-tonic is also preserved by Professor Du Bois Reymond to express
a certain electric condition of the nerves, and Professor Clerk Maxwell
has ably defined and illustrated the hypothesis in the Tenth Volume of
the 'Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.'
The mere approach of a wire forming a closed curve to a second wire
through which a voltaic current flowed was then shown by Faraday to be
sufficient to arouse in the neutral wire an induced current, opposed
in direction to the inducing current; the withdrawal of the wire also
generated a current having the same direction as the inducing current;
those currents existed only during the time of approach or withdrawal,
and when neither the primary nor the secondary wire was in motion,
no matter how close their proximity might be, no induced current was
generated.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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