Now You Know!: It's All Greek to Me:

Ask any high school physics student and they'll tell you that electrons govern pretty much everything we do. We call electrons in motion an electrical current, and those radio waves that we hams are so fond of are the result of high frequency electrons traveling in our antenna conductors. Think of a 40 meter wave as an accidental tourist who wants to go somewhere (somewhere nice and warm, maybe a rare DX station). But how to get there? It needs some mode of transport -- think of electrons as the transport providers.

We use our transmitters to move the electrons in our antennas to-and-fro to produce radio waves, hopefully to that rare DX destination. When the radio waves get there, they set electrons in another antenna in motion. That current -- electrons in motion -- is amplified and detected at the receiving location and a QSO is made.

But why do we call them electrons? The ancient Greeks noticed that amber attracted small objects when rubbed with fur; apart from lightning, this phenomenon is thought to be man's earliest known experience of electricity. Back in the year 1600, the English physician William Gilbert -- in his treatise De Magnete http://rack1.ul.cs.cmu.edu/is/gilbert/ -- coined the New Latin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Latin term electricus to refer to this property of attracting small objects after being rubbed. Both electric and electricity are derived from the Latin Älectrum, which came from the Greek word ήλεκÏÏον (Älektron) for amber. Now you know!

Source:

The ARRL Letter

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