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the development of the bridge and the reason behind
terming it as “Wheatstone Bridge” :
Samuel Hunter Christie
Samuel Hunter Christie was a British mathematician and physicist
born on 22 March,1784 in London. He was a Fellow Of The Royal
Society in 1826. His primary interests were in studying Earth’s
Magnetism and designing improvements to the magnetic compass.
He delivered his Bakerian Lecture in 1833 which was on ”
Experimental Determination of the Laws of Magneto-Electric Induction
in different masses of the same metal, and its intensity in
different metals.” and was awarded with Bakerian medal
for the same. Christie’s research paper was a printed
version of his Bakerian Lecture for 1833, it was 50 pages
long; christie used current pulses inplace of steady
currents obtained through magnetoelectric induction ,
which was discovered by Michael Faraday only 15
months earlier. Christie used long and tedious method
for deriving the relation and his research paper reflects that he was
unfamiliar with the ohm’s law. Moreover, it is evident from his work
that he was unknown to the idea of current running through the
closed loop and believed that the current is created independently in
different parts of the circuit. He also finds correctly that the
conducting power is proportional to the cross-sectional area.
In his paper he published the revolutionary ‘diamond ’ method , the
forerunner of Wheatstone bridge in a paper on magnetic and
electrical properties of metals as a method for comparing resistances
of wires of different thicknesses. He is credited with proposal of
Wheatstone Bridge , however his method went unrecognised until
1843 when Charles Wheatstone proposed it in the Royal Society as a
method for measuring resistances in electrical circuit. Though
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