History of Electricity
Since Ancient times, people knew what electricity was, but the problem
was how to create it or to channel it. The history of electricity began
as an ancient puzzle; a piece of amber, if rubbed on fur cloth, will attract
pieces of straw, but why? The history of electricity for the next thousand
years involved trying to find an answer to this question.
The history of electricity finally started to pick up steam in 1600 when
William Gilbert began investigating the phenomenon of the amber and
the straw and named the force “electricity”. High profile
players were involved in the history of electricity; everyone remembers
Benjamin Franklin’s famous experiment flying a kite in a storm
with a key at the end (but kids, don’t try that at home!). Ben
Franklin discovered that he could channel the electricity from the lightening
to the key and to his hand, but could have lost his life in the process.
The history of electricity continued with other experiments. In 1786,
Galvani found that if he touched a dead frog’s leg with a knife,
it would twitch. He thought that the electricity had originated in the
frog’s muscles. In 1792, Volta explained that the electricity did
not come from the frog, but from the combination of the metal plate and
the knife with the frog in between. Volta also showed that electricity
could travel through a wire, and he was honored to have his named immortalized
in the history of electricity in the form of the word “volt”.
Michael Faraday was one of the most pivotal figures in the history of
electricity, since he reasoned that if electricity could produce magnetism,
why couldn’t magnetism produce electricity. Finally, in the 20th
century, the history of electricity reached a high point with Edison and
Bell’s invention of the electric light bulb.
