We owe the word electricity to a lump of fossilised tree resin
Rub a piece of amber and it picks up chaff and scraps of fabric. The ancient Greeks called the stone elektron, and that static trick eventually gave English the words electric and electricity. Stranger still, the name amber originally meant something else entirely: a waxy substance from sperm whales.
Amber is resin that oozed from trees, hardened and fossilised, which is why it sometimes traps bits of plants and animals. People have prized its orange, brown and occasionally red tones since Neolithic times and carved it as a gem since antiquity. Chemists recognise five classes. When it turns up in coal seams it is called resinite, and in New Zealand coal, ambrite.
The English word travelled from Middle Persian through Arabic, Latin and French and first meant ambergris, the grey whale product. From the late 13th century Romance languages stretched it to Baltic fossil resin, known as yellow amber, and English followed by the early 15th century; as ambergris fell out of use, the resin took over the name. Both substances wash up on beaches, which may explain the mix-up, though ambergris floats in water and amber sinks except in very salty brine.
Greek myth offered a lovelier origin: when Phaethon, son of the Sun, died, his grieving sisters became poplars and their tears hardened into amber. The Greek name is linked to a word for the beaming Sun. Pliny the Elder reported the claim of Nicias that sunset rays left a greasy sweat on the ground that tides carried to Germany, but Pliny also recorded the sounder view that it was pine-tree sap, noting the Latin name succinum, from the word for juice, and its pine-like smell when rubbed or burned. He even described Syrian women using amber spindle whorls that attracted leaves and chaff.
Amber fuelled long-distance trade. An Amber Road linked the Baltic to the Mediterranean; Germanic peoples shipped it to Pannonia, and the Romans were trading for southern Baltic amber by Nero's time. Rich sources included Gdańsk Bay and the Sambia Peninsula. In southern Italy, ancient peoples worked it into objects now shown at a museum in Policoro. China has written references from 200 BCE, and North America's first finds came from New Jersey in the early 19th century.
Source: Amber
