2.

2 The Coulomb Law 11

for point charges qi was discovered experimentally by Coulomb, who pub-

lished his observations in 1785.

Fig. 2.2 Charges and lines of force.

Later it became known that the law had been observed earlier by Cavendish
who, however, never published his findings. Coulomb used for his observa-
tions a so-called torsion balance consisting of a vertical rod or fibre with
another fibre attached horizontally at its lower end. At one end of this hor-
izontal fibre a small chargeable sphere was mounted and at the other end
a piece of paper to stabilise the system in a rotation. If another charge of
the same magnitude is brought close to the mounted charge, at a distance
r say, the latter experiences a repulsion evidenced by a rotation of the hori-
zontal fibre through an angle 0. The corresponding torque is proportional to
8. By selecting various values of r (nr,n = 1 , 2 , 3 , .. . ) Coulomb arrived at
the law now named after him for the case of repulsive charges. For charges
which attract each other Coulomb modified his experiment. His experiments
did not establish the proportionality to the charges themselves. This was
more or less assumed in analogy to masses in Newtons law of gravitation.
It was Gauss who later recognised that Coulombs law permits the definition
of charge. In recent times the Coulomb law has, of course, been subjected
to much more critical investigations. Thus the power of -2 of r has been
verified up to deviations of less than
Cavendish, on the other hand, assumed a law of force of the form

and then designed his experiment to determine n. His experimental setup

consisted of two concentric conducting spherical shells connected by a con-
ducting wire from one to the other. He charged the exterior shell and then
removed the wire together with the exterior shell. The interior shell then
provided no evidence of a field in its neighbourhood. From this Cavendish
concluded that n = 2, because in this case the interior of a charged spherical