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Introduction

Once you have established those basic ideas about electricity, "like charges repel and unlike charges attract", then you have the foundation for electricity and can build from there. —Electric Charge, Hyperphysics Online

In reference to the physics and chemistry of electricity, charge, or more specifically, electric charge, is a fundamental property of matter that causes certain types of matter to generate and react to a force of attraction or repulsion to spatially separate matter that likewise manifests the property of electric charge.

Whatever constitutes electric charge constitutes it in two separate varieties, or polarities, assigned the names 'positive' and 'negative', or 'plus' and 'minus'. The force of attraction between electrically charged items of matter arises between oppositely-charged items—positive-negative—whereas the force of repulsion arises between like-charged items—positive-positive, or negative-negative.

Familiar examples of positively charged matter are protons, constituents of the nuclei of atoms, and familiar examples of negatively charged matter are electrons, constituents of atoms that surround their nuclei.

Given that the terms 'positive' and 'negative' serve only as labels to distinguish the two polarities observed in the electric charge of matter, 'positivity' and 'negativity' do not themselves imply anything about the fundamental nature of electric charge. Other labels connoting di-polarity, such as yin/yang or bitter/sweet, could serve for labeling.

The atoms that comprise the chemical elements of the periodic table, while consisting in part of the electrically charged particles, protons and electrons, do not themselves manifest an electric charge, because protons in the nuclei and the surrounding electrons are equal in number and quantity of charge, that balance ensuring that the atoms as a whole manifest no net electric charge—a state referred to as electrical neutrality.

Discovery and naming of electric charge

The ancient Greeks as far back as the beginning of the 6th century BCE, beginning with Thales of Miletus, had observed some of the simple phenomenology related to electric charge, Thales demonstrating it using the tree resin, amber, rubbed with cloth.

In 600 B.C. Thales, erudite philosopher and astronomer in the thriving Ionian port of Miletus, observed the special qualities of the rare yellow orange amber, jewel-like in its hardness and transparency. If rubbed briskly with a cloth, Thales showed, amber seemed to come alive, causing light objects—like feathers, straw, or leaves—to fly toward it, cling, and then gently detach and float away. Amber was similar to a magnet in its qualities, yet it was not a lodestone. As a youth, Thales of Miletus had studied in the sacred Egyptian cities of Memphis and Thebes. Perhaps it was there, under the burning sun, that this earliest of Greek philosophers first learned from the priests about the prized amber, with its seeming possession of a soul.