Piezoelectricity The Greek word “piezo” means pressure. In 1880, the brothers Jacques and Pierre Curie (18 and 21 years old!) reported on a discovery that the following year W. G. Hankel called piezoelectricity, a descriptive name for the phenomenon, in which mechanical stress applied to a sample of some materials apparently creates electric charge on certain surfaces of the sample. 1,2 The total charge of the sample remains unchanged by the piezoelectric effect, but as a result of the mechanical stress, surface charge density is created. 3 If a conductive material covers the charged area, and a conductive path exists from there to an electrometer, a charge of equal in magnitude registers in the electrometer, but that charge belongs to the conductors, not the sample.