Symbol
The conventional symbol for current is, which originates from the French phrase intensité de courant, or in English current intensity. This phrase is frequently used when discussing the value of an electric current, especially in older texts; modern practice often shortens this to simply current but current intensity is still used in many recent textbooks. The symbol was used by André-Marie Ampère, after whom the unit of electric current is named, in formulating the eponymous Ampère's force law which he discovered in 1820. The notation travelled from France to Britain, where it became standard, although at least one journal did not change from using to until 1896.
Read more about this topic: Electric Current
Famous quotes containing the word symbol:
“Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty—his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double significance.... In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1934)