The Development of Electricity
Have you ever cared to trace back the ordinary characteristics of your current lifestyle to where they began? I am not talking about who made that cell phone that you use on a daily basis. Before Gates and Jobs, there were others to whom we truly owe our misplaced gratitude.
Shortly after Einstein’s energy-mass equivalence formula entered the world, we have been working at harnessing different resources. Innovating started with energy and lead to commercial use of electricity, heat, water, radio, and much more. Although it is true that the world today exists because of energy, harnessing energy is the actual fundamental practice to which we owe our current lifestyle privileges.
Harnessing energy is how we got from the stone age to the industrial revolution. From living in the dark to landing on the moon. From the printing press to this impressive piece of hardware on which this was typed. Important men and women throughout history have brought us to where we stand today. Innovators and inventors like Benjamin Franklin, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, and many many others deserve our respect. Pioneers of electricity paved the way to modern life, but in doing so they have given us a problem. Where do we get all of this energy?
Electricity is a secondary form of energy. Simply put; electricity is the flow of electrons. Electrons are negatively charged particles and as long as there is a power source with a closed circuit, electricity will continually flow. This discovery was immensely important to science. It meant we could harness this form of energy by having wires connect to a power source in a circle and siphon off energy as it flows through for our own use. Not only can we harness this energy for personal use, we can also adapt that principle to all forms of energy.
Energy is essentially eternal. The first law of thermodynamics tells us that energy can not be created nor destroyed, it can only change forms. Electricity is not the only secondary form of energy. In fact, there are many secondary forms of energy: electricity, heat, mechanical, chemical, nuclear, solar, and gravitational. These forms are the most commonly known and they are largely what we manipulate for personal use today.
Because of the Law of Conservation of Energy, we have a basis to collecting these secondary forms and manipulating them for our own immediate and future uses. This is so important that our day to day lives unknowingly revolve around this simple idea.
The World Energy Council, WEC for short, is a UN-accredited global energy body that is comprised of most of the world’s countries. Being around for nearly 100 years and spreading across 90 countries, this committee handles anything and everything energy related. The WEC conducted and publicly released a survey of the entire planet’s energy consumption statistics and projected statistics in the future. This survey is free for anybody to download and purely states the findings without bias or political influence. Their focus lies on the world’s current and future projected energy gathering methods. Covering topics such as: “Coal, Oil, Natural Gas, Uranium & Nuclear, Hydro Power, Bioenergy & Waste, Wind, Solar PV, Geothermal, Peat, Marine Energies, and Energy Efficiency”, this incredibly in depth survey can be used by anybody to further understand growing concerns of energy use and its shortcomings.
Nuclear energy may be one of the most impressive use of scientific understanding to advance the world as we know it. All methods of gathering energy from the world are impressive but this one deserves some praise.
Many professionals in the math and science field would agree that the discovery of the equivalency E=MC² is the most important to date. It is personally one of my favorite mathematical equations in history.
Albert Einstein was a “26 year old patent clerk that did physics in his spare time” (0:50–1:30 in the video below) that bestowed upon us the mass-energy equivalence formula that changed the world forever.
It is as simple as he says, a random person that looked into physics in their spare time changed the world as we know it. We could emulate this simple idea in our lives. You do not need to devote all of your time to studying advanced theoretical physics, but becoming informed and understanding the changes that need to be made is a great starting point.
I am not telling everyone that reads this to go out and manifest a new equation or concept that will change the future. I would simply like to offer readers a new perspective on how they too can make a difference.
Everybody uses electricity in their homes and they do not look into how or from where they get this energy. I encourage my readers to use a bit of your spare time to learn about your personal energy needs and how you meet them. Spread the information to your friends and family, we can all become more informed together and begin to understand the current dilemma. Things will not change overnight, but you may be the spark we need.
