I was reading a wiki article moments ago about discovery of electron, I suddenly remembered a question which my friend asked yesterday that how electricity discovered before discovery of electron (negative charge).
I went on some other websites including wiki and got that people knew somewhat what is negative charge and what is electricity (to a very very small extent).
But when we come to a time which is not more than 600 years ago the changes can be observed.
Wiki article on electron says that "In the early 1700s, Francis Hauksbee and French chemist Charles François de Fay independently discovered what they believed were two kinds of frictional electricity—one generated from rubbing glass, the other from rubbing resin. From this, Du Fay theorized that electricity consists of two electrical fluids, vitreous and resinous, that are separated by friction, and that neutralize each other when combined.American scientist Ebenezer Kinnersley later also independently reached the same conclusion. A decade later Benjamin Franklin proposed that electricity was not from different types of electrical fluid, but a single electrical fluid showing an excess (+) or deficit (-)."
The same article further says that Between 1838 and 1851, British natural philosopher Richard Laming developed the idea that an atom is composed of a core of matter surrounded by subatomic particles that had unit electric charges.
Further data compiled by other resources also depict the same difference in time(I m not including further researches as this question is about history).
Since i have a very little knowledge of electricity, and I always heard people relating these two and saying that electricity originate from knowledge of charge.
So I mm hoping for help.
Best Answer
I am going to take your question literally as regards "discovered", not because I want to be pedantic, but because the effects of electrostatics must have started any human with curiosity wondering about nature. In other words, seeing a lighting strike hitting a tree and hearing the thunder was possibly one of earliest of the Earth's physical phenomena that got humans thinking beyond themselves.
I think you have to make an important distinction here. Electrostatics was known about / discovered since since the first caveman (or cavewomen) put on a fur from an animal, and later saw sparks in their cave, or saw lighting.
I use these examples because our knowledge of electrostatics stayed at much the caveman level, until, as the other answers also say, Thales of Miletus, investigated the effect, around 500 BCE. Mostly, the effect on daily life was due to the triboelectric effect.
SOURCE: Wikipedia Electrostatics
But although predictions could be made, (Coulomb's Law, Gauss's Law) etc, it was not until Faraday and Maxwell managed to link electricity and magnetic effects together than that substantial progress on the causes of electricity, which I would define here as the flow of current, especially the sustained controlled flow, was made.
I would concentrate on the year 1832, when Michael Faraday published the results of his experiments. You have to remember, that up to and beyond the 1900's, the atomic nature of matter was not accepted by many eminent physicists, including Max Planck. It was the experiments of Rutherford and others that started to convince mainstream physics of the existence and possible structure of an atom composed of an atomic nucleus with an (arbitrary assignment of positive charge), and an electron, taken as having negative charge.
In 1897, the electron itself was discovered:
SOURCE Nobelprize.org