Memristor is two centuries old

An article in Nature Materials examines how this newcomer actually pre-dates the resistor and inductor..

In the latest edition of Nature Materials, Professor Leon Chua, who first coined the term 'memristor' - meaning a variable resistance device with pinched hysteresis behaviour - together with Professor Christofer Toumazou and Dr Themistoklis Prodromakis, examine how its experimental history has been observed for two centuries.

In the early 1970s, Professor Chua postulated the existence of a fourth circuit element, along with the resistor, capacitor and inductor, and in this paper the three academics describe evidence of memristor behaviour as far back as the early electrical studies of Humphrey Davy and later, Michael Faraday and Hertha Ayrton. 

They conclude that the memristor is not an invention, but a natural phenomenon found in many dissipative devices, predating the resistor - published by Ohm in 1827, and the inductor - published by Faraday in 1831.

Read the full article