The Taming of the Electron: A Story of Electric Charge and Discharge for Lighting and Electronics

The TAMING of the ELECTRON

A STORY OF ELECTRIC CHARGE AND DISCHARGE

FOR LIGHTING AND ELECTRONICS

John L. Plumb

Published by John Plumb at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 John L. Plumb

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1 - BEN FRANKLIN'S ELECTRICAL FIRE

Electric Charge

Lightning

The Lightning Rod

CHAPTER 2 - ELECTRONS AND PHOTONS

Electron Waves

Charge

The four forces

CHAPTER 3 - LIGHTNING

CHAPTER 4 - MAKING LIGHT IN A GAS

Open arc lamps

Electric breakdown in low-pressure gas

Gas discharge lamps

Lamp starting

CHAPTER 5 - GENERATING HIGH VOLTAGE

Nikola Tesla

A-C lightning

High voltage supplies

CHAPTER 6 - ELECTRIC DISCHARGE IN SOLIDS

Dielectric strength

Electric breakdown damage

CHAPTER 7 - POLYETHYLENE INSULATION

Needle-electrode experiments

PEA experiments

CHAPTER 8 - MAKING LIGHT IN A SOLID

CHAPTER 9 - ELECTRIC BREAKDOWN IN A TRANSISTOR

The MOSFET

The oxide

CHAPTER 10 - SUMMATION

ACNOWLEGMENTS

About the Author

Connect with the Author

PREFACE

The following is an account of interesting and important engineering work done through the years to gain understanding of electricity and the electron, to avoid damage that can result from the tremendous energy that can be expended by electrons in neutralizing electric charge and to instead convert this electrical energy into light for illumination or for information display. The dimensions of the devices described range from kilometers, in the case of lightning, to nanometers, in the case of silicon microchips, a range of over twelve orders of magnitude. This historical sketch of the electron and its properties, power and usefulness will demonstrate how applied physics and design engineering have led to a better understanding of the mechanisms of electric breakdown, materials less susceptible to destructive electric breakdown and devices to control and utilize the energy expended in electric breakdown.

Your author has had first hand experience in product development of gas discharge lamps for lighting and solid-state thin-films for displaying information. These are applications of non-destructive electric breakdown to produce useful light, specifically in a high-pressure sodium lamp and in an a-c thin-film electroluminescent display. In the former, striking a breakdown to arc requires a high voltage pulse and control of the subsequent arc current. In the latter the generation of bright luminescence by controlled electric breakdown and the prevention of catastrophic breakdown must both be accomplished.

This brief history of electric charge and discharge is a revised edition of an earlier e-book under a different title: Electric Breakdown - The Lightning Rod to the Zener Diode. published in

2013.

1 - BEN FRANKLIN'S ELECTRICAL FIRE

Electric charge and discharge

Electric Charge

The sparks seen and the shocks felt from the discharge of static electricity aroused suspicion in ancient peoples. Amber, the amber-colored hydrocarbon from the fossilized wood of prehistoric trees, when rubbed seemed to live. The ancient Greeks knew that rubbed amber would exert a mysterious attractive force on other objects. The Greek word elektor meant sun or shining one and so implied source from a distance. They called amber elektrum or elektron.

In the first century in Rome, among the numerous works of a historical or scientific nature of Gaius Plinus Secundus, better known as Pliny the Elder, was his encyclopedia of thirty seven books, the Historia Naturalis, in which are found the properties of materials such as amber. In the year 79 he was in command of the Roman fleet at Naples, and the great eruption of Mt. Vesuvius unfortunately triggered his curiosity. It caused his death by suffocation after he had sailed to investigate.

It was not until the 1500's, that the Englishman appointed physician to Queen Elizabeth, William Gilbert, being both physician and physicist, in 1573 found that a great number of substances when rubbed had the power to attract lighter objects. He used the Greek term electric to apply to this force of attraction and called the rubbed substances electrica and the phenomenon electricity. Not until a hundred years later, in 1672, Otto von Guericke, a German physicist, developed a machine to turn a sulfur sphere at high speed with a crank and pulleys. The sulfur sphere when rubbed would quickly develop this force of attraction and would produce a spark and a snap (evidence of electric breakdown in air) when another object was brought near to it. Inventors built friction devices to generate larger and larger force and produce brighter sparks and louder snaps.

Advancement in the understanding of electricity was made six years later in 1732 by Stephen Gray, a dyer who was injured in his workplace and pensioned. In England he showed that some objects could conduct the electric virtue, referring to the power of attraction, which could be passed to another object, and even through air if the objects were brought close to each other, but that the objects had to be insulated from the ground. Gray was the first to distinguish between conductors and insulators, and he was among the first to compare and point out the similarity of the spark and snap with lightning and thunder.

A decade later a Frenchman, Du Fay, proposed that there were two kinds of electricity, such that materials possessing the same kind would repel each other and materials possessing different kinds would attract each other. He called the materials vitreous, being hard and brittle like glass, and resinous, being softer and more pliable like today’s plastic. He did not realize the possibility that this electricity (which we call electric charge) may be the same, but that there may be an excess in one material and a deficiency in another.

Today, electric charge is stored in capacitors of various forms. A capacitor is simply an insulating material, dielectric, between two conducting electrodes. One of the earliest capacitors, the Leyden jar, was named after the University of Leyden, one location of two where it was invented. There to a Dutch physicist, Peter van Musschenbroek, his jar was said to have delivered him a violent shock. The original Leyden jar was simply a glass flask containing water. Through an insulating stopper closing the flask inserted was a wire that extended down into the water. A modification had the glass covered inside and out with tin foil and inside iron filings or lead shot on the bottom, presumably to hold the tin foil to the glass with conducting material. The charge was effectively stored on opposite sides of the glass, excess on one side and deficiency on the other, the tin foil spreading the contact. It was said that, When the wire was touched with one hand after charging the jar from rubbed electrica, a violent shock could be felt, especially if the tin foil outside the jar was touched by the other hand. In touching both the outside and inside of the capacitor, they had provided a direct path for electric current though their human body.

A charged Leyden jar showing discharge path directly across the jar via a person, represented by the resistor and switch, or through earth (solid line: person represented by a resistor, dotted line: leaky insulators represented by resistance and capacitance)

In France the Abbe Jean-Antoine Nollet in one demonstration had a line of 148 soldiers joining hands and in another a line nine hundred feet long of soldiers, each man connected to the next with iron wire, to which he delivered shocks simultaneously. Georg Mathias Bose in Germany had performed similar experiments. In London, a William Watson, showed that an electric charge could as fast as light be sent across the Thames and back, more than two miles, and he published articles on the state of electrical knowledge.

In 1743 Benjamin Franklin had become a highly respected printer, publisher and promoter in Philadelphia, when on a visit to family in Boston, he met Archibold Spencer of England, a physician and lecturer. Franklin was shown electrical demonstrations that Spencer was giving in lectures in the American colonies, and Franklin acted as agent for Spencer the following year in Philadelphia. Spencer’s electrical demonstrations employed a glass tube, which after being rubbed would attract other objects or deliver a spark. Peter Collinson, London merchant and friend of Franklin, with an interest in natural science, sent Franklin a glass tube, similar to that being used in Europe in electrical experiments, and a 1745 magazine article, from a Dutch publication, on the present state of knowledge of electricity at the time.

Franklin and his wife had only two children (a small family for the time), lived with modest financial needs, successfully managed a printing business, post office and stationery shop out of their house and owned other printing business and other property. Franklin decided to free himself from the demands of business and turn the management of his shop over to his foreman, whom he then made a partner, but retained editorship of his newspaper, the Philadelphia Gazette, and his almanac, Poor Richard‘s. Franklin turned himself fully to the challenge of electrical experimentation that he had already begun. He soon became skilled at giving electrical demonstrations of his own. He bought some apparatus from Spencer, improved some, and made some for others.

Three friends - a lawyer, a silversmith and a clergyman - experimented together with Franklin, and in 1747 Franklin wrote Collinson telling of experiments they had carried out using the electric tube. In another letter to Collinson he gave details of his observations of electric charge, which he called electrical fire. He had placed an iron shot, or ball, over the mouth of a dry bottle (an insulator), suspended by a silk thread (an insulator) a cork ball against the side of the shot, charged the shot from his glass tube, and found the cork ball to be repelled. He wrote, They had electrified the shot and found the cork ball to be repelled four to five inches, about according to the quantity of electricity. He had observed the force of repulsion between like charge shared between the iron and cork balls.

Franklin’s experiment with a charged iron ball resting on an insulating bottle and repelling a suspended cork ball. Charge is being drawn to earth by a person holding a metal needle having a sharp point.

He then discovered the importance of pointed conductors in attracting charge. Franklin wrote: When in this state (the charged iron shot and cork ball repelling each other), if you present to the shot the point of a long, slender, sharp bobkin (sewing needle) at 6 or 8 inches distance, the repellency is instantly destroyed and the cork flies back. A blunt body must be brought within an inch to produce the same effect. They observed that the cork ball was not repelled by the shot in the presence of dust, water vapor, smoke or heat. (The charge leaked away.) When he had placed about six to eight inches away from the iron shot the point of an iron needle held in the hand, the needle drew off the charge to his hand, and the cork ball quickly returned to the shot. When the needle was held by an insulating wax handle, he had