History of Electricity


History of Electricity is fascinating. Depite what you have learned, Benjamin Franklin did not "invent" power. In fact, the History of Electricity did not begin when Benjamin Franklin at when he flew his kite during a thunderstorm or when light bulbs were installed in houses all around the world.

The truth is that power has always been around because it naturally exists in the world. Lightning, for instance, is simply a flow of electrons between the ground and the clouds. When you touch something and get a shock, that is really static moving toward you.

Hence, electrical equipment like motors, light bulbs, and batteries aren't needed for electic power to exist. They are just creative inventions designed to harness and use electric power.

In the rich History of Electricity, the first discoveries were made back in ancient Greece. Greek philosophers discovered that when amber is rubbed against cloth, lightweight objects will stick to it. This is the basis of static shock.

The History of Electricity. We've all heard of famous people like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison, but there have been many other inventors throughout time that play a crucial part in the story of electric power.

Electricity Personalities

Benjamin Franklin

Franklin was an American writer, publisher, scientist and diplomat, who helped to draw up the famous Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. In 1752 Franklin proved that lightning and the spark from amber were one and the same thing. The story of this famous milestone is a familiar one, in which Franklin fastened an iron spike to a silken kite, which he flew during a thunderstorm, while holding the end of the kite string by an iron key. When lightening flashed, a tiny spark jumped from the key to his wrist. The experiment proved Franklin's theory, but was extremely dangerous - He could easily have been killed.

Galvani and Volta

In 1786, Luigi Galvani, an Italian professor of medicine, found that when the leg of a dead frog was touched by a metal knife, the leg twitched violently. Galvani thought that the muscles of the frog must contain electric energy. By 1792 another Italian scientist, Alessandro Volta, disagreed: he realised that the main factors in Galvani's discovery were the two different metals - the steel knife and the tin plate - apon which the frog was lying. Volta showed that when moisture comes between two different metals, electric power is created. This led him to invent the first electric battery, the voltaic pile, which he made from thin sheets of copper and zinc separated by moist pasteboard.

In this way, a new kind of electric power was discovered, electric power that flowed steadily like a current of water instead of discharging itself in a single spark or shock. Volta showed that electricity could be made to travel from one place to another by wire, thereby making an important contribution to the science of electric power. The unit of electrical potential, the Volt, is named after Volta.