Importance of Science History for my Understanding of Science

[EngineeringFuture]

There are so many concepts in science, especially Physics, that make absolutely no sense to me unless I begin to study the underlying history of the concepts. So please correct me when I'm wrong because I'm sure I am sometimes. The first concept I think about is Voltage. I was extremely familiar with Voltage way before I began to understand it. I was literally solving circuit problems, designing functioning circuits, and manipulating transistors before I began to understand why we had the concept of Voltage instead of just energy and current. I still think about this, but it began to make more sense when I stopped thinking about electrons. Galvani and Volta had no idea electrons existed. They just noticed that sometimes electric sparks would appear to be continuous for a long time in certain configurations(circuits). They noticed somehow that some chemicals made the flow of sparks much stronger than others. This leads to many questions:

1) How did Volta and Galvani measure electric current?

2) How did these early electric scientists distinguish between increasing the voltage and lowering the resistance if the only experimental output they could look at is current changing?

3) Was electromagnetism theory necessary to standardize electrical units?

 

[sophiecentaur]

1) How did Volta and Galvani measure electric current?

If they had sensitive and accurate apothecary scales, they could could use electrolysis and measured masses of the products at the electrodes. They had batteries of a sort so they'd surely have measured small masses in their daily routine.

3) Was electromagnetism theory necessary to standardize electrical units?

A current balance can be very crude but pretty good at detecting / measuring moderate currents.

Where there's a will there's a way. (And they had loads of time when all domestic chores were done by servants.)