Electron flow Vs conventional current flow

By ‘direction of current’  in metallic conductors, we mean the direction in which current  passes through the load. In other words, it is its direction through the external circuit,  never  within the source of potential difference. During the eighteenth century, the great  American scientist and statesman  Benjamin Franklin  (17061790), along with others, believed that an electric current was some sort of mysterious ‘fluid’  that  flowed inside a conductor from a high-pressure area to low pressure area. He naturally labelled high pressure as being ‘positive’  pressure, and low pressure as being ‘negative’  pressure and so he believed that an electric current  fl owed  from  ‘positive to negative’  – i.e. in a direction  opposite  to that of the drift of free electrons! Franklin’s mistaken theory on current direction was, unfortunately, reinforced during the following century, as result of experiments in electrolysis conducted by the English scientist  Michael Faraday  (1791–1867). Electrolysis is a method of depositing (‘plating’) metal on an electrode immersed in an electrolyte. Faraday noticed during his experiments that metal was removed from the positive electrode and deposited on the negative electrode, from which he, too, concluded that current moved from positive to negative, although he rejected Franklin’s idea that it was a ‘fluid’, in favour of it being a ‘field’. Over the following years, various rules (e.g. to determine the direction of magnetic  fields)  were devised, based on the mistaken belief that current in metallic conductors  fl owed from positive to negative. So, as strange as it might seem and despite today’s knowledge about current in metal conductors being a  fl ow of free electrons, Franklin’s current direction is still widely used as a convention in a great many textbooks, and is known as  ‘Franklinian’  or, more commonly,  conventional  flow.