The first meaning of the term load refers to the act and the result of loading. The concept, however, has multiple uses.
The level of electricity present in a body is known as electrical charge. 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). See ABBREVIATIONFINDER.ORG for abbreviations related to 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 electrical charges of different types attract each other, those of the same type repel each other.
The science has shown that, in the context of a physical process, the electrical charge present on an isolated system remains always stable. This assumes that the sum of the negative charges and the positive charges never changes. Or put another way: that 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, named after Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, expresses the amount of electricity in 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.
As with many concepts that today are framed in the different sciences, the human being began to experiment with his environment and to look beyond for centuries. 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 in charge of Thales of Mileto, 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 physician William Gilbert, a native of England, observed in the seventeenth century that certain materials behaved in a similar way to that set out 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 should be considered “electrical.”
It was then that the concepts of electricity and electric charge arose. 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.
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 speak of two different types of electrical charge, although it was only with Benjamin Franklin’s studies that it was possible to appreciate that after rubbing two bodies, the electricity of each was distributed at certain points where there was a greater degree of attraction, and therefore decided to use the concepts of positive and negative charge.
Such observations were made formally only 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.
