Samuel Hunter Christie
This is his name. Born in England 236 years ago, Sir Chistie was an almost unknown scientist who, despite this, profoundly marked the world of weighing. He studied mathematics in Cambridge and in 1833 he managed to publish his “diamond” method in an article on the magnetic and electrical properties of metals, in which he explained that this method allowed to compare the resistances of the wires of different thicknesses. It was the precursor of the much more famous Wheatstone bridge, which we all know today as the configuration used to arrange 4 strain gauges, connected together, capable of amplifying the signal and reading the mechanical deformation received by the load cell on which they are positioned. However, the method was not recognized by the British scientific community. Only in 1843 Charles Wheatstone re-proposed it, in another article for the Royal Society, to measure resistance in electrical circuits. Although Wheatstone presented the project as Christie’s invention, it is his name, rather than Christie’s, now associated with the device.
Thanks Sir Samuel Hunter Christie, from now on we will talk about “Christie Bridge”, what do you say?