Abraham Bennet

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Abraham Bennet (* 1749 - May 5, 1799 in Wirksworth , Derbyshire ) was an English pastor , inventor and member of the Royal Society .

His parents were the schoolmaster in Whaley Lane, Cheshire Abraham Bennet and Ann, b. Fallowes. He was baptized on December 20, 1749 in Taxal, Derbyshire. It is not known whether he attended university. He was a teacher at Wirksworth Grammar School . After he was ordained in London in 1775, he was curate at Tideswell and the following year at Wirksworth. He also became principal in the village of Fenny Bentley.

He was interested in natural philosophy and the work of John Canton , Tiberius Cavallo and Alessandro Volta , whom he met in London in 1782. In 1786 he improved the Cavallo portable electrometer from 1779 and developed the gold leaf electroscope, which was used to research cosmic rays until the 1930s. He also invented a so-called multiplicator , a simple influenza machine, and observed the appearance of charges on evaporating liquids. He published his work in 1789 in New experiments on electricity . In the same year he became a member of the Royal Society.

He was also a member of the Lunar Society and the Derby Philosophical Society founded by Erasmus Darwin in 1783 .

Individual evidence

  1. Rev. Abraham Bennet 1749-1799. In: effectiveworth.org.uk. March 19, 2007, accessed January 10, 2015 .
  2. ^ Joseph F. Keithley: The Story of Electrical and Magnetic Measurements. John Wiley & Sons, 1999, ISBN 978-0-780-31193-0 , p. 36 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  3. P. Elliott: Abraham Bennet, FRS (1749-1799): a provincial electrician in eighteenth-century england. In: Notes and Records of the Royal Society. 53, 1999, pp. 59-78, doi : 10.1098 / rsnr.1999.0063 .