It took us nearly 2000 years to come to a point where we know what electricity is, and how we can use it.
Let’s see the fascinating history of electricity, and I will describe it in a simple way as possible with pictures, so stay with me.
The story of electricity started when in Ancient greek Thales discovered that when we rub amber with rabbit skin, it acquires a unique power and it attracts lite things like paper and hair. Thales called this phenomenon ELECTRON because at that time amber is called electron.
English doctor William Gilbert who first check Thales’ experiment sees that this attraction property is not just in amber but in many objects like glass and he was the first person who called this property ELECTRIC.
In 1730 Stephen Gray found that when he rubs a rabbit skin with a tube of glass with cork on it, the feathers not only get attracted to the glass tube but also on cork, he then said that electricity is not the property of material but it’s a fluid that travels instantly from one thing to other.
After some time a scientist from the Netherlands develop Leyden jars, and now for the first time in history, we can store the electrical fluid and deliver it in the form of discharge. This Leyden jar was the first electrical conductor.
1750 Benjamin franklin enters the room, his most famous experiment was flying a kite with an iron key on it.
After this experiment, we know that thunder lightning is also electrical and how we can keep houses safe from it.
Franklin told us about current, charge, positive, and negative poles.
what we now call electricity is the circulation of positive or negative charges along the conductor.
After Franklin we still need to find how we can use this electrical current, is there any use of it or not?
It’s been 2000 years since Thales discovered attraction property on amber stone.
In 1800 an Italian scientist Alessandro Volta said that we need a closed circuit to circulate electricity as current. He invented the Voltac pile (the first electric generator in history), in the case of Layden jars we need to charge it again after each use, but the Voltac pile can be used several times at once.
In 1809 he carried out a demonstration of votlac pile in presence of Nepolean Bonapart, Nepolean got really impressed and rewarded Volta with the title of count and gave him a seat in his senate. Now we know how we can produce electricity continuously.
After some time Ampere discovered the electrical current and also found the basis of new theory electrodynamics which says that electricity in motion acquires new properties that earlier electricity doesn’t have, like magnetic effects.
The first use of electricity appears as the electric telegraph, in 1838 an English physician built the first telegraph line between London and Birmingham. In 1876 Graham bell invented the Telephone and in 1879 Edison invented the electric bulb after these inventions we got more use-cases of electricity.
In 1881, the first exhibition of electric gadgets happened, which was attended by almost 1 million people, in that exhibition, Edison’s bulb and Bell’s Telephone were the main attraction.
After Edison, we have almost everything production center, dynamo, transformers, and condensers, to do mass production and distribution of electricity. After some time we got so many inventions related to electricity that now we can’t live a day without it.
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source: here
image source: designed by me.
