1. Nicholas Joseph Callan was an Irish physicist and Catholic priest known for his work on the induction coil.
19 Facts About Nicholas Callan
1. 2.
Nicholas Callan was born and raised in Dundalk, County Louth, where he attended school at an academy.
3.
Nicholas Callan introduced the experimental method into his teaching and had an interest in electricity and magnetism.
4.
Nicholas Callan was ordained a priest in 1823 and went to Rome to study at Sapienza University, obtaining a doctorate in divinity in 1826.
5.
In 1826, Nicholas Callan returned to Maynooth as the new professor of natural philosophy, where he began working with electricity in his basement laboratory at the college.
6.
Nicholas Callan invented the induction coil because he needed to generate a higher level of electricity than currently available.
7.
Nicholas Callan took a bar of soft iron, about 2 feet long, and wrapped it around with two lengths of copper wire, each about 200 feet long.
8.
Nicholas Callan connected the beginning of the first coil to the beginning of the second.
9.
Nicholas Callan found that when the battery contact was broken, a shock could be felt between the first terminal of the first coil and the second terminal of the second coil.
10.
Nicholas Callan thought of his creation as a kind of electromagnet; but what he actually made was a primitive induction transformer.
11.
Nicholas Callan had induced a high voltage in the second wire, starting with a low voltage in the adjacent first wire.
12.
Nicholas Callan experimented with designing batteries after he found the models available to him at the time to be insufficient for research in electromagnetism.
13.
Nicholas Callan found that he could use inexpensive cast-iron instead of platinum or carbon.
14.
Nicholas Callan was able to build a battery with just a single solution.
15.
Since instruments for measuring current or voltages had not yet been invented, Nicholas Callan measured the strength of a battery by measuring how much weight his electromagnet could lift when powered by the battery.
16.
Nicholas Callan discovered an early form of galvanisation to protect iron from rusting when he was experimenting on battery design, and he patented the idea.
17.
Nicholas Callan died in 1864 and is buried in the cemetery in St Patrick's College, Maynooth.
18.
The Nicholas Callan Building on the north campus of NUI Maynooth, a university which was part of St Patrick's College until 1997, was named in his honour.
19.
The Nicholas Callan Memorial Prize is an annual prize awarded to the best final-year student in Experimental Physics.