omers, but he did not succeed in
forecasting the exact day (May 28th) or the hour of the spectacular
event.

It can well be said that Thales was the first man ever recorded to
have cornered the market in a commodity: having foreseen a three-year
drought he bought up large quantities of olive oil and stored it for
sale at a later date.

But who could possibly have imagined that one of Thales' original
speculations would affect the Radio Amateurs of the 20th Century? He
believed that certain inanimate substances, like lodestones (magnetic
rocks) and the resin amber, possessed psyche (a soul).

Many centuries had to elapse before this soul was identified as
static electricity and magnetism and harnessed for the generation of
mains electricity which dramatically altered the pattern of life on
our planet--and also led to the creation of our hobby of Amateur
Radio.

About 400 years ago an English scientist called William Gilbert
(1544-1603), who had read about the unexplained observation of Thales,
also became interested in the intangible property and decided to call
it electricity, from the classical Greek word for amber, which is
electron.

CHAPTER ONE

THE DEVELOPMENT OF ELECTRICITY

The phenomenon which Thales had observed and recorded five
centuries before the birth of Christ aroused the interest of many
scientists through the ages. They made various practical experiments
in their efforts to identify the elusive force which Thales had
likened to a 'soul' and which we now know to have been static
electricity.

Of all forms of energy, electricity is the most baffling and
difficult to describe. An electric current cannot be seen. In fact
it does not exist outside the wires and other conductors which carry
it. A live wire carrying a current looks exactly the same and weighs
exactly the same as it does when it is not carrying a current. An
electric current is simply a movement or flow of electrons.

Benjamin Franklin, the American statesman and scientist born in
Boston in 1706, investigated the nature of thunder and lightning by
flying a child's kite during a thunderstorm. He had attached a metal
spike to the kite, and at the other end of the string to which the
kite was tied he secured a key. As the rain soaked into the string,
electricity flowed freely down the string and Franklin was able to
draw large sparks from the key. Of cours