Stephen Gray (scientist)
His interests lay with natural science and particularly with astronomy; he managed to educate himself in these developing disciplines, mainly through wealthy friends in the district, who gave him access to their libraries and scientific instruments.
He ground his own lenses and constructed his own telescope, and with this instrument he made a number of minor discoveries (mainly in the area of sunspots), gaining a reputation for accuracy in his observations.
Flamsteed was attempting to construct a detailed and accurate star-map of the heavens, in the hope that this would eventually solve the problem of longitude determination for ocean navigators.
Suffering from ill health, before long he was in London assisting John Theophilus Desaguliers, an acolyte of Isaac Newton and occasionally one of the Royal Society's demonstrators.
In 1720, through the efforts of John Flamsteed and Sir Hans Sloane (later President of the Royal Society) he managed to obtain a pensioned position at the Charterhouse,[1] a home for destitute gentlemen who had served their country, also linked to a boys' school.
Over the next few days, he extended the reach of his thread-wire (he only had a short piece of wire, and did not understand the significance of metal as a conductor) and found that it would carry from his balcony down into the courtyard below.
In the process, Gray and Wheler discovered the importance of insulating their thread 'conductor' from earth contact (the wall of the house) by using silk for suspension.
The next day they dropped the thread from the house tower to the garden and then extended it out across a paddock to a distance of 800 feet using paired garden-stakes with short spans of silk to keep the pack-thread from touching the ground.
These ideas fitted the facts slightly better than the two-fluid concept, especially after the invention of the Leyden Jar, and this single-fluid theory eventually prevailed.
Gray noted the crackling of 'electric virtue' resembled lightning (as did other experimenters), foreshadowing the great discoveries of Benjamin Franklin half a century later.
The fact is that electricity was not considered that important at the time, and the Society's magazine was not published for a couple of years due to financial constraints.
Sloan took an active part in promoting Gray, who received the Royal Society's first Copley Medal in 1731 for his work on conduction and insulation, and also its second in 1732 for his induction experiments.
