ABSTRACT
Every exact science has to go through the earliest stage, but electrical science was the last of all the principal branches of Physics to outgrow it. While in the seventeenth century the greatest advances in Physics had occurred in the departments of mechanics and optics, which were among the oldest branches of natural science, the eighteenth century was remarkable for its developments in the realm of frictional electricity which had been opened up by William Gilbert and Von Guericke. The earliest observations of the conduction of electricity seem to have been made by Von Guericke. Following the work of Hauksbee, the electrical machine underwent a gradual evolution during the eighteenth century, when it greatly assisted the further investigation of the phenomena of frictional electricity. Johan Carl Wilcke’s wrote numerous papers on electricity and astronomy, but his most important book was his Tentamen theoriae electricitatis et magnetism.
