Summary:
- In 1785, French physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb conducted a groundbreaking experiment that helped establish the fundamental principles of electricity and electrostatics.
- Coulomb used a torsion balance to measure the force between two electrically charged objects, demonstrating that the force between them is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
- This "Coulomb's law" became a cornerstone of our understanding of how electric charges interact, and laid the foundation for the field of electrostatics, which studies the behavior of stationary electric charges.