Henry, Joseph

Joseph Henry (December 17, 1797 – May 13, 1878) was an American scientist who served as the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, as well as a founding member of the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, a precursor of the Smithsonian Institution. During his lifetime, he was highly regarded.

Henry’s curiosity about terrestrial magnetism led him to experiment with magnetism in general. He was the first to coil insulated wire tightly around an iron core in order to make a more powerful electromagnet, improving on William Sturgeon's electromagnet which used loosely coiled uninsulated wire. Using this technique, he built the strongest electromagnet at the time for Yale. He also showed that, when making an electromagnet using just two electrodes attached to a battery, it is best to wind several coils of wire in parallel, but when using a set-up with multiple batteries, there should be only one single long coil. The latter made the telegraph feasible.

Using his newly-developed electromagnetic principle, Henry in 1831 created one of the first machines to use electromagnetism for motion. This was the earliest ancestor of modern DC motor. It did not make use of rotating motion, but was merely an electromagnet perched on a pole, rocking back and forth. The rocking motion was caused by one of the two leads on both ends of the magnet rocker touching one of the two battery cells, causing a polarity change, and rocking the opposite direction until the other two leads hit the other battery.

This apparatus allowed Henry to recognize the property of self-inductance. British scientist Michael Faraday also recognized this property around the same time; since Faraday published his results first, he became the officially recognized discoverer of the phenomenon.

The SI unit of inductance, the henry, is named in his honor. Henry's work on the electromagnetic relay was the basis of the electrical telegraph, invented by Samuel Morse and Charles Wheatstone separately.

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