On Positive and Negative Electrons

Abstract

The illustrious founder of our society will forever occupy a prominent place in the history of physical science, not only for his experimental researches in electricity and his invention of the lightning rod, but also for his theoretical views. Franklin tried to explain all electrical phenomena that were known in his time by means of a single electric fluid, which he supposed to be present in certain definite quantities in all ponderable bodies, when in their natural or unelectrified state, and in larger or smaller quantities in positively or negatively charged bodies. The rival doctrine was that of two electric fluids, which in the days before Maxwell served as the foundation of the mathematical theory of electricity and which was adopted by those physicists who, like Riemann, Weber and Clausius, sought to account for electrostatic and electrodynamic phenomena by one fundamental law for the mutual action of electric particles.

Lecture, delivered April 17, 1906. Proc. Amer. Philosophical Soc. 45, 103, 1906.