In 1752, America’s multi-talented Benjamin Franklin used a kite connected to a Leyden jar during a thunderstorm to prove that a lightning flash has the same nature as static electricity. In 1600, William Gilbert, an Englishman, distinguished between magnetism, such as that displayed by a lodestone, and what we now call the static electricity produced by rubbing amber. when the Greek philosopher Thales observed that after it is rubbed, amber (electron in Greek) attracts small objects. Scott, State University of West Georgia The Technological Development of Radio: From Thales to MarconiĪll electrically-based industries trace their ancestry back to at least 600 B.C. The History of the Radio Industry in the United States to 1940Ĭarole E.