"It required unusual inquisitiveness to pursue the development of scientific curiosities such as charged pith balls, the voltaic cell, and the electrostatic machine. Without such endeavors and the evolution of associated instrumentation, initially of purely scientific interest, most of the investigations that lead to the basic equations of electromagnetism would have been missed. ... We would have been deprived of electromagnetic machinery as well as knowledge of electromagnetic waves."

Source : Frederick Seitz (2012). “The Science Matrix: The Journey, Travails, Triumphs”, p.14, Springer Science & Business Media

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