The Autobiography of an Electron

Description

The subtitle of The Autobiography of an Electron, by Charles R. Gibson, reads “Wherein the Scientific Ideas of the Present Time are Explained in an Interesting and Novel Fashion”. The book is certainly that: an interesting and easy to comprehend account of complex and often very abstract notions of modern science,especially physics.

The Autobiography of an Electron was first published in 1911, so the reader should expect explanations that reflect scientific knowledge at the beginning of the 20th century. Even so, the book seems to be a timeless account of facts and phenomena – the explanations it provides are as enlightening for today’s readers as they were at the time when the book came out.

The Autobiography of an Electron proposes to present science and scientific facts in everyday, non-scientific language and it delivers on the promise indeed. The book comes with chapters dealing with various different aspects of electricity, titles including How We Communicate with Distant Ships, How We Reproduce Speech, How We Produce Color, How We Made the World Talk, Our Relationship to the Atoms as well as accounts of personal experiences such as My X-ray Experience, all of them providing logically structured and simple explanations.

Charles R. Gibson was fascinated with science, especially with electricity.He wrote many other books in which he proposed to explain the most complex phenomena in plain language in order to passon his enthusiasm to everyone reading his books. His other writings include Chemistry and Its Mysteries, Electricity of To-Day, and How Telegraphs and Telephones Work. He even goes as far as to call using electricity a romance in his book entitled The Romance of Modern Electricity.
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