that the conductivity varied with the temperature, being "lower in some inverse ratio as the temperature was higher."
He also observed that the same magnetic power is exhibited by every part of the same circuit, even though it be formed of wires of different conducting powers pieced into a chain, so that "the magnetism seems directly as the quantity of electricity which they transmit."
The current which flows in a given voltaic circuit evidently depends not only on the conductors which form the circuit, but also on the driving-power of the battery. In order to form a complete theory of voltaic circuits, it was therefore necessary to extend Davy's laws by taking the driving-power into account. This advance was effected in 1826 by Georg Simon Ohm[1] (b. 1787, d. 1854).
Ohm had already carried out a considerable amount of experimental work on the subject, and had, e.g., discovered that if a number of voltaic cells are placed in series in a circuit, the current is proportional to their number if the external resistance is very large, but is independent of their number if the external resistance is small. He now essayed the task of combining all the known results into a consistent theory.
For this purpose he adopted the idea of comparing the flow of electricity in a current to the flow of heat along a wire, the theory of which had been familiar to all physicists since the publication of Fourier's Théorie analytique de la chaleur in 1822. "I have proceeded," he says, "from the supposition that the communication of the electricity from one particle takes place directly only to the one next to it, so that no immediate transition from that particle to any other situate at a greater distance occurs. The magnitude of the flow between two adjacent particles, under otherwise exactly similar circumstances, I have assumed to be proportional to the difference of
- ↑ Ann. d. Phys. vi (1826), p. 459; vii. pp. 45, 117; Die Galvanische Kette mathematisch bearbeitet: Berlin, 1827; translated in Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, ii (1841), p. 401. Ci. also subsequent papers by Ohm in Kastner's Archiv für d. ges. Naturlehre, and Schweigger's Jahrbuch,
