In principle, the smallest unit of electric charge that can be isolated is the charge of a single electron. This is very small, and we rarely deal with electrons one at a time, so it is usually more c...In principle, the smallest unit of electric charge that can be isolated is the charge of a single electron. This is very small, and we rarely deal with electrons one at a time, so it is usually more convenient to describe charge as a quantity that is continuous over some region of space. In particular, it is convenient to describe charge as being distributed in one of three ways: along a curve, over a surface, or within a volume.
