austral fluid, and magnetization consists simply in a separation of the two fluids to opposite ends of each molecule. Such a hypothesis evidently accounts for the impossibility of separating the two fluids to opposite ends of a body of finite size. The same idea, here introduced for the first time, has since been applied with success in other departments of electrical philosophy.
In spite of the advances which have been recounted, the mathematical development of electric and magnetic theory was scarcely begun at the close of the eighteenth century; and many erroneous notions were still widely entertained. Report[1] which was presented to the French Academy in 1800, it was assumed that the mutual repulsion of the particles of electricity on the surface of a body is balanced by the resistance of the surrounding air; and for long afterwards the electric force outside a charged conductor was confused with a supposed additional pressure in the atmosphere.
Electrostatical theory was, however, suddenly advanced to quite a mature state of development by Siméon Denis Poisson (b. 1781, d. 1840), in a memoir which was read to the French Academy in 1812.[2] As the opening sentences show, he accepted the conceptions of the two-fluid theory.
"The theory of electricity which is most generally accepted," he says, "is that which attributes the phenomena to two different fluids, which are contained in all material bodies. It is supposed that molecules of the same fluid repel each other and attract the molecules of the other fluid; these forces of attraction and repulsion obey the law of the inverse square of the distance; and at the same distance the attractive power is equal to the repellent power; whence it follows that, when all the parts of a body contain equal quantities of the two fluids, the latter do not exert any influence on the fluids contained in neighbouring bodies, and consequently no electrical effects are discernible. This equal and uniform
