Short answers, pulled from the story.
Oliver Heaviside coined the term inductance in May 1884 to describe a property that had baffled scientists for decades. This action transformed the clumsy phrase coefficient of self-induction into a single, elegant word.
Michael Faraday began the discovery of electromagnetic induction in 1831 with an experiment involving an iron ring and two separate coils of wire. Faraday observed a momentary deflection in a galvanometer only at the exact instant the battery was connected or disconnected.
The unit of measurement for inductance is the henry, which was named after Joseph Henry, an American physicist who discovered this effect independently of Michael Faraday. The symbol L used to represent it honors Heinrich Lenz, who formulated the law describing the direction of this opposing voltage.
The inductance is proportional to the square of the number of turns in the coil, meaning that doubling the number of loops quadruples the inductance. Coiling the wire into a solenoid can increase that inductance by thousands of times compared to a straight wire.
Mutual inductance is a phenomenon where the magnetic field of one circuit passes through another, creating a voltage induced in the second circuit. This principle is used to step up or step down voltages in power distribution systems, allowing electricity to be transmitted efficiently over long distances.
The frequency at which resonance occurs is determined by the values of the inductance and capacitance, and it can be tuned to select specific signals in radio receivers. The quality factor, or Q factor, determines how sharp the resonance is, with high Q circuits having very narrow bandwidths and low Q circuits having broader responses.