Electrical charge refers to the level of electricity that a body has.
In the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE ), the first meaning of the term load refers to the act and result of loading . The concept, however, has multiple uses.
The level of electricity present in a body is known as electric charge . Let us remember that electricity is a force manifested through the rejection or attraction between charged particles, which is generated by the existence of elementary particles called protons (positive charge) and electrons (negative charge).
What is electric charge
It can be said that electric charge, therefore, is a physical property of certain particles. That matter with an electric charge generates an electromagnetic field that, in turn, influences it: there is an interaction between this field and the electric charge. While electric charges of different types attract, those of the same type repel.
Science has shown that, within the framework of a physical process, the electrical charge present in an isolated system always remains stable . This means that the result of the sum of the negative charges and the positive charges never changes. Or in other words: the creation or elimination of electrical charge in an isolated system is not recorded.
The unit of electrical charge is called a coulomb . This physical quantity, whose name honors Charles-Augustin de Coulomb , expresses the amount of electricity of an element. A coulomb is defined as the level of charge that an electric current with an intensity of one ampere carries in one second.
Electric charge is a physical property of certain particles.
Human beings and electricity
As is the case with many concepts that today are part of the different sciences, human beings began to experiment with their environment and look beyond centuries ago. Already in Ancient Greece , for example, it was known that if amber was rubbed against a piece of animal skin it acquired the property of attracting certain light bodies, such as feathers and pieces of straw. This discovery was made by Thales of Miletus , a philosopher who lived between the 7th and 6th centuries BC. C., that is, about two and a half millennia ago.
If we travel back in time to a more recent era, the doctor William Gilbert , originally from England, observed in the 17th century that certain materials behaved in a similar way to that described in the previous paragraph, although in these cases the attraction could be exerted on bodies. heavier. It is important to note that amber receives a name in Greek whose pronunciation is close to ēlektron , which is why Gilbert decided that all these materials were considered "electric."
It was then that the concepts of electricity and electric charge emerged. It is worth mentioning that William Gilbert carried out such extensive work that he left studies in which we can clearly differentiate electrical phenomena from magnetic ones.
Other contributions to the understanding of electrical charges
Stephen Gray , another scientist born in England, was the one who discovered that if certain elements are connected with electrical materials, phenomena of attraction and repulsion occur. For his part, the French physicist Charles du Fay was the first to talk about two different types of electric charge, although it was only with the studies of Benjamin Franklin that it was possible to see that after rubbing two bodies, the electricity of each one was distributed at certain points. where there was a greater degree of attraction , and that is why he decided to use the concepts of positive and negative charge.
These observations were only formally raised in the first half of the 19th century, in part thanks to the experiments that Michael Faraday , a British physicist, carried out on electrolysis, which opened the doors to the study of the link between electricity and matter. .