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Electric words

February 3rd, 2010 by Gene

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It’s hard to fix something if you don’t have words to describe what went wrong. We’ll look back at how they did it. Today, on Engineering Works!

The problem started about 150 ago. That’s when the first transatlantic cable connected the east and west shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

Now, people could send telegrams across the ocean in minutes instead of letters by ship that took weeks. It doesn’t sound like much today, when you can call anywhere from anywhere on your cell phone, but back then it was a big deal.

It didn’t last. The cable failed a few weeks after the first message was sent. A group of engineers met to figure out what went wrong. Then they discovered they had another problem. Electricity carried the messages from one side of the ocean to the other. But nobody had words yet to describe electricity yet, especially the important ideas of current and resistance.

In the end, they borrowed the names of scientists who’d done important research into electricity to describe what they needed. You’ll probably recognize the words, even if you don’t recognize the people. Ampere, from Andre-Marie Ampere, to describe electric current. Ohm, from Georg Ohm, for resistance in a wire. Watt, from James Watt, available power. And volt, from Alessandro Volta, the amount of electrical – pressure – in a system.

We do have the words we need to get out of here, so we’re gone. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

For more, visit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/cable/

http://www.history-magazine.com/cable.html