1 January—Just as The Litchfield Monitor ended 2023, we’ll start 2024 on a positive note. And no silly alternative symbols this time. So let’s consider the anode, the positive pole.

The word “anode” comes from the Greek ἄνοδος (anodos—ano upward, odos path), meaning “ascent” or “way up” as the Brits say. (They also say “way out” when they mean “exit” and other funny things.) It was in fact coined in 1834 by a Brit, William Whewell (1794-1866), little known these days outside of Cambridge, where, in addition to being President of the Cambridge Union and Second Wrangler in his class as an undergraduate, he was Master of Trinity College for the quarter-century before his death as a result of his having fallen off a horse.

Irrelevant but none the less worth noting, the manure and mink set in Litchfield County (and everywhere else) never fall off horses; when they lose their seat, they’re invariably thrown. Even when they just fall off.

William Whewell was, among other things, a polymath Anglican priest, philosopher, economist, scientist, historian, translator, and, of course, wordsmith. Quite the Renaissance man.

Less irrelevant and worth noting for context, being Second Wrangler had nothing to do with horses, even back when they were a common means of transport. At Cambridge, as opposed to the wild west, an undergraduate who gains the top first-class hono(u)rs in mathematics still is known as the Senior Wrangler. And so on down the line—cathodically, as it were. Cathode—κάθοδος, kathodos, the way down—is another of William Whewell’s brilliant coinages, by the way. Oxford has top firsts and things like that, to be sure, but nothing as sexy as Wranglers.

Whewell came up with the words “anode, cathode, electrode, dielectric, ion” essentially as a favor for Michael Faraday, whom you’ve heard of, who needed names for his discoveries in electricity. “Scientist, physicist, linguistics, astigmatism” are a few of Whewell’s other brilliant coinages that he couldn’t of did without intimate knowledge of Greek and Latin.

Getting back to the anode, then, it’s certainly a positive pole. But only of a so-called electrolytic device, to which an external current is applied (through the anode, of course) to produce a chemical reaction. Remember electrolysis experiments in high school in which you separated water into hydrogen and oxygen by applying an electric current? In all events, the electrolytic process is used extensively in refining and plating metals.

(It should go without saying—but won’t—that where the anode is the positive pole, the cathode is the negative pole.)

So, more commonly for most of us, the electrolytically positive anode is (it doesn’t become, it just is) the electrochemically negative anode. Electrochemical (a.k.a. galvanic or voltaic) devices—notably batteries—use chemical reactions to generate electricity. Just the opposite of electrolytic devices, in which electricity generates chemical reactions. In other words, that little battery in your flashlight is a mini-generator just waiting to do its thing.

(It should go without saying—but won’t—that where the anode is the negative pole, the cathode is the positive pole.)

And there goes the anodic (or anodal) positive note for starting the new year. But Happy New Year anyway . . .