Who discovered ac?

How so? I think you could draw up some characteristics of AC and list a number of phenomena that result from it. Your goal is then to find who first used it.

Example: electrostatic spark is full of dV/dt. A spark into a pile of foam beads will pretty well scatter them because of it (i.e., electrostatic induction).

Hmm, I haven't actually tested that. Sounds reasonable, but testing is good. Now I need a VdG and a pile of open cell styrofoam...

Tim

Faraday knew electricity can make magnetism and reasoned that magnetism could make electricity. He was the one that figured out that you had to *move* either the magnet or the coil.

Does it have to be open-cell? Packing peanuts are closed-cell, but would work as well and be cheaper than OC. (you can get little balls of OC at the crafts store.)

As to the OQ, I have no idea. It would have to have been subsequent to the invention of wire. ;-)

We might never know - it could have been the first guy who used a loop of wire and a magnet to move a compass needle, and who knows who that was?

Good Luck! Rich

Actually, AC means a kind of abstraction on the principles of electromagnetism, that came after Tesla's work. When the design of alternating current machinery became a REAL science, the man at the top was Charles Proteus Steinmetz.

I've also heard it said that, before Steinmetz, they were called imaginary numbers; now they're called complex numbers.

...which would be and interesting deviation from the current family tree:

Yes, people are complex - they have a real part, and an imaginary part. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

I think it could be argued that it was Tesla. His original Big Idea (while he was in the equivalent of High School!) was actually the concept of a rotating magnetic field and what could be done with the currents it would induce in nearby conductors.

Of course he didn't have the pure mathematical background of say Steinmetz, but the two men were definitely not working in quite the same arenas.

First I think it'd help if you specified which aspect of "AC" you mean. What it covers today is the entire history of electrical and magnetic phenomena from electrum and lodestones on, in a manner of speaking.

Mark L. Fergerson