Ohm, Georg (1787-1854)

Georg Ohm made one important and very famous discovery the empirical relationship between current flow, potential difference and resistance in an electrical conductor. He left the University of Erlangen, Germany, early due to his father's disapproval of his over-indulgence in dancing, billiards and ice-skating (although he later returned to complete his studies). He began investigating the relationship between current, potential difference and resistance in 1825. Two years later, he published his law, asserting that current flow through a wire was directly proportional to the potential difference and inversely proportional to the resistance. He used an analogy of heat flowing through a conductor to explain this law, believing that there was a connection between the flow of heat and electricity. However, the importance of this 'transport process' approach of electricity was not properly recognized until much later. The SI unit of electrical resistance is named after Ohm and so too is a now discarded unit of conductance, the mho (ohm spelt backwards).