William Gilbert founded the modern experimental study of electricity and magnetism with De Magnete (1600), a work that systematized decades of his own observations and coined the term "electricus" for bodies that, when rubbed, attract light objects. Gilbert was the first to distinguish electrical from magnetic phenomena, a conceptual separation without which the field's later history is incomprehensible. Francis Bacon cited him as a model of experimental method. In the Wikinventia genealogy, Gilbert occupies the place Aristotle occupies in biology: the one who turned a set of scattered observations into a coherent object of research.