ABSTRACT
In the early eighteenth century new experimental phenomena came to the fore that concerned electrical effects. Electricity was a word coined in 1600 by the Englishman William Gilbert, and it originally denoted the attraction that light objects, such as bits of straw, exhibited to pieces of the resin amber when a lump of the latter in their vicinity was rubbed by something like a cloth: the straw would then spontaneously jump to the nearby amber. Electricity is a common property of several materials, and consists of attracting light bodies of every kind placed at a certain distance from the electric body, after it has received a preparation that is nothing but rubbing it with wool, paper, cloth, the hand, etc. The name that was given to this property shows that it is in amber that it was first recognized, it is indeed very manifest there.
