During the middle ages and before, the shock just before touching something large and metal must have been as common an occurrence on cold days as it is now. How did thinkers or “natural philosophers” explain static electricity before electricity itself was known?
Evil spirits
Here’s a little history. I’ve heard that ‘static cling’ was assumed to be magnetism. I don’t what they thought about static discharge, but I’ll guess they thought it was similar to lightening.
We’ve been here before:
To quote myself, concerning a couple of the guys in TriPolar’s link:
Funny, it was almost exactly one year ago. Maybe this is a question someone has every February, when they are just damn sick of the cold and cold-related things like static shock.
Elektron was the Greek word for amber, so the phenomenon has been known by words with the electr… root at least since Thales (the first Greek philosopher, and thus, in effect, the founder of the tradition of critical, scientific thought), who studied the electrostatic properties of rubbed amber. He was in his prime around 585BC. (We can pinpoint the date because he predicted a solar eclipse that modern astronomy tells us must have occurred in that year.)
So, in the middle ages (and long before) people - educated European people, at any rate - would have referred to electricity by some word recognizably similar to “electricity.” (No doubt the exact form varied from time to time and place to place.)
I’d be interested in seeing some sources for this. My understanding was that the use of “electric” in the modern sense only got going around the Enlightenment period, when Gilbert and Bacon and the like started experimenting with the properties of charge. It was apparently used before then, but just meant “amber-like” rather than “pertaining to charge.”
For what it’s worth, here’s the etymology entry on “electric” from the OED: