The Ampere SI Base Unit Physics Research Kieran Rigby Project

Andr Marie Ampre

In the fraction of time this man spent on Earth, Ampre managed to educate himself with advanced mathematical and scientific principles by the age of 12, as well as gaining much credit for laying down the basis to electrodynamics. Discovering a way to measure electrical current, Ampre had the unit for such quantity named after him for his significant contribution. Although Ampres achievements were at least to say impressive, it was thought that he continued the work of another physicist from Denmark named Hans Christian rsted. The work done by rsted links directly to the work of Ampre; initially, rsted found that there was a link between electricity and magnetism and to confirm this he noticed that when an electric current passed near a compass needle, it deflected from magnetic north, showing a link between the two topics. When Ampre heard about these experiments, he immediately put all other work with chemistry and other subjects on hold so he could delve further in to rsteds ideas. Ampre came to a hypothesis that magnets werent needed to show that conductors have an effective force on each other and after producing this idea he designed the electrodynamic balance which was essentially the following: The square CDFE was a conductor which could move freely like a pendulum from left to right. The line AB (near the bottom) was a conductor which was fixed in place and couldnt move. In the experiment, Ampre observed that parallel conductors were attracted to each other when the current was travelling in the same direction, whereas the conductors attracted each other when the current flowed in opposite directions. This meant that the current in a conductor generated a magnetic field. In further experiments, Ampre discovered that if you coiled an electrical conductor, it acted like a bar magnet thus having a positive and negative terminal. However, one of his main discoveries which lead to a method of measuring electrical current and a device to do it with (ammeter) was that a magnetic field only existed if an electrical current was present and the larger the electrical current, the larger the magnetic force. Ampre developed a measuring instrument now commonly known as an ammeter, by hanging a needle from a string so it was touching a conductor. When an electrical current was passed through the conductor, the needle would be affected by the magnetic force and would move away from the conductor and therefore the larger the current the further out the needle would go. In 1881, the first ever International Electrical Congress was held in Paris, displaying the latest technological achievements, such as the light bulb and electric tram. However the participants also discussed what names should be given to electrical units. Through the suggestion of Hermann von Helmholtz (a German physicist), the unit for electrical current was named after Ampre as the flow of one coulomb per second.