The Dawn of Amateur Radio in the U.K. and Greece: A Personal View

Thales, who was born in 640 B.C., was a man of exceptional wisdom and one of the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece. He was the father of Greek, and consequently of European philosophy and science. His speculations embraced a wide range of subjects relating to political as well as to celestial matters. One must remember that even up to the 18th century there was no clear distinction between philosophy and science, both being products of the human mind in its attempts to explain reality.

Thales had studied astronomy in Egypt so he was able to draw up accurate tables forecasting when the River Nile would be in flood. But he first became widely known by anticipating an eclipse of the sun for May 585 B.C., which happened to coincide with the final battle of the war between the Lydians and the Persians. He had used some tables drawn up by Babylonian astronomers, 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 course this could have been very dangerous, but he had foreseen it and had supported the string through an insulator. He observed that this electricity had the same properties as the static electricity produced by friction.

But long before Franklin many other scientists had carried out research into the nature of electricity.