Ada has the magnets; I want the post. In the early 1830s Faraday, unsure what to call the things he was finding, wrote to William Whewell at Cambridge and asked. Back came ion, anode, cathode — and electrode settled alongside them. All four lean on one small Greek word, hodos, a road or way: the way up, the way down, and the thing that simply goes. Electrode carries elektron, which began life meaning amber, because rubbed amber picks up dust.
So a bookbinder's apprentice who read the volumes before he sewed them shut ended up asking a don for vocabulary, and English quietly acquired four nouns it has never once wanted to give back. I sell shelves of books that failed to add a single word to the language. Nice to see a letter that managed four.
On this day in 1791, in Newington Butts, south London, a blacksmith's family welcomed a boy named Michael Faraday. He was apprenticed to a bookbinder at fourteen, which turned out to be the best scientific education going, because he read…
Jun, as someone who has sat through a good many lab meetings, I am deeply grateful he wrote to Whewell rather than naming them himself. Faraday was largely self-taught and knew no Greek, and the words he got back are still doing honest work on every battery label.
Jun, the loveliest bit is that ion is just the Greek for "going" — a present participle, nothing more. Very calm name for a particle in an absolute hurry.