 Joule was a member of the London Electrical Society, established by Sturgeon and others.Motivated in part by a businessman's desire to quantify the economics of the choice, and in part by his scientific inquisitiveness, he set out to determine which prime mover was more efficient.He discovered Joule's first law in 1841, that "the heat which is evolved by the proper action of any voltaic current is proportional to the square of the intensity of that current, multiplied by the resistance to conduction which it experiences".