Joseph Henry (born December 17, 1797, Albany, New York, U.S.—died May 13, 1878, Washington, D.C.) was one of the first great American scientists after Benjamin Franklin. He aided and discovered several important principles of electricity, including self-induction, a phenomenon of primary importance in electronic circuitry.
While working with electromagnets at the Albany Academy (New York) in 1829, he made important design improvements. By insulating the wire instead of the iron core, he was able to wrap a large number of turns of wire around the core and thus greatly increase the power of the magnet. He made an electromagnet for Yale College that could support 2,063 pounds, a world record at the time.
Henry also searched for electromagnetic induction—the process of converting magnetism into electricity—and in 1831 he started building a large electromagnet for that purpose. Because the room at the Albany Academy in which he wanted to build his experiment was not available, he had to postpone his work until June 1832, when he learned that British physicist Michael Faraday had already discovered induction the previous year. However, when he resumed his experiments, he was the first to notice the principle of self-induction.
In 1831 Henry built and successfully operated, over a distance of 2.4 km (1.5 miles), a telegraph of his own design. He became professor of natural philosophy at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) in 1832. Continuing his researches, he discovered the laws upon which the transformer is based. He also found that currents could be induced at a distance and in one case magnetized a needle by using a lightning flash 13 km (8 miles) away. That experiment was apparently the first use of radio waves across a distance. He aided Samuel F.B. Morse in the development of the telegraph by giving him 8 km (5 miles) of copper wire and writing a letter to Congress in 1842 encouraging it to support an 80-km (50-mile) test line. By using a thermogalvanometer, a heat-detection device, he showed that sunspots radiate less heat than the general solar surface.
In 1846 Henry became the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., where he organized and supported a corps of volunteer weather observers. The success of the Smithsonian meteorological work led to the creation of the U.S. Weather Bureau (later Service). One of Lincoln’s chief technical advisers during the U.S. Civil War, he was a primary organizer of the National Academy of Sciences and its second president. In 1893 his name was given to the standard electrical unit of inductive resistance, the henry.