Note 24 — Contributions from The Museum of History and Technology: Paper 38 The Earliest Electromagnetic Instruments

The German word Kette has been translated as “circuit” throughout. Although the equivalence of these words is clear, for example, in Ohm’s work of 1826, the context in which Kette is sometimes used in 1820 and 1821 indicates that the concept of a “circuit,” in the sense of the wiring external to the source of electricity, has not been established. The wiring is regarded more as something incidental, used to “close” the cell, the cell being considered essentially the whole of the apparatus. This view underlies the many attempts to correlate the Oersted phenomena with cell materials and design, and with the use of such terms as “chemical magnetism” by Erman and others.