History of electricity

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The history of electricity, that is the human understanding thereof, dates back to the ancient Greek and Parthian civilizations, over two thousand years ago. According to Thales of Miletus, writing at around 600 BC, the Greeks had found that rubbing fur on various substances, such as amber, would cause a particular attraction between the two. The Greeks noted that the amber buttons could attract light objects such as hair and that if they rubbed the amber for long enough they could even get a spark to jump.

An object found in Iraq in 1938, dated to about 250 BC and called the Baghdad Battery, resembles a galvanic cell and is believed by some to have been used for electroplating, indicating that the ancient Babylonians may have had some knowledge of electroplating.

1 Modern
2 Timeline
3 References
4 See also
5 External Links and Additional References

[edit] Modern

Leyden jars, Museum Boerhaave, Leiden [3]

Italian physician Girolamo Cardano returned to the subject of electricity in De Subtilitate (1550)^[1], distinguishing, perhaps for the first time, between electrical and magnetic forces. In 1600 the English scientist William Gilbert, in De Magnete, expanded on Cardano's work and coined the modern Latin word electricus from ἤλεκτρον (elektron), the Greek word for "amber".^[2] The first usage of the word electricity is ascribed to Sir Thomas Browne in his 1646 work, Pseudodoxia Epidemica.

Gilbert was followed in 1660 by Otto von Guericke, who invented an early electrostatic generator. Hiraga Gennai developed the elekiter in Japan in the mid 18th century. Other pioneers were Robert Boyle, who in 1675 stated that electric attraction and repulsion can act across a vacuum; Stephen Gray, who in 1729 classified materials as conductors and insulators; and C. F. Du Fay, who first identified the two types of electricity that would later be called positive and negative.

The Leyden jar, a type of capacitor for electrical energy in large quantities, was invented at Leiden University by Pieter van Musschenbroek in 1745. William Watson, experimenting with the Leyden jar, discovered in 1747 that a discharge of static electricity was equivalent to an electric current.

Franklin Kite Plaque

In June, 1752, Benjamin Franklin promoted his investigations of electricity and theories through the famous, though extremely dangerous, experiment of flying a kite during a thunderstorm. Following these experiments he invented a lightning rod and established the link between lightning and electricity. If Franklin did fly a kite in a storm, he did not do it the way it is often described (as it would have been dramatic but fatal). It is either Franklin (more frequently) or Ebenezer Kinnersley of Philadelphia (less frequently) who is considered as the establisher of the convention of positive and negative electricity.

Franklin's observations aided later scientists such as Michael Faraday, Luigi Galvani, Alessandro Volta, André-Marie Ampère, and Georg Simon Ohm whose work provided the basis for modern electrical technology. The work of Faraday, Volta, Ampere, and Ohm is honored by society, in that fundamental units of electrical measurement are named after them.

Volta discovered that chemical reactions could be used to create positively charged anodes and negatively charged cathodes. When a conductor was attached between these, the difference in the electrical potential (also known as voltage) drove a current between them through the conductor. The potential difference between two points is measured in units of volts in recognition of Volta's work.

Nikola Tesla

In 1800 Volta constructed the first device to produce a large electric current, later known as the electric battery. Napoleon, informed of his works, summoned him in 1801 for a command performance of his experiments. He received many medals and decorations, including the Legion of Honor.

By the end of the 19th century electrical engineers had become a distinct profession, separate from physicists and inventors. They created companies that investigated, developed and perfected the techniques of electricity transmission, and gained support from governments all over the world for starting the first worldwide electrical telecommunication network, the telegraph network. Pioneers in this field included Werner von Siemens, founder of Siemens AG in 1847, and John Pender, founder of Cable & Wireless.

The late 19th and early 20th century produced such giants of electrical engineering as Nikola Tesla, inventor of the polyphase induction motor; Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph; Antonio Meucci, an inventor of the telephone; Thomas Edison, inventor of the first commercial electrical energy distribution network; George Westinghouse, inventor of the electric locomotive; Charles Steinmetz, theoretician of alternating current; Alexander Graham Bell, another inventor of the telephone and founder of a successful telephone business.

Thomas Alva Edison

The rapid advance of electrical technology in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries led to commercial rivalries, such as the so-called War of the Currents between Edison's direct-current system and Westinghouse's alternating-current method. Often, concurrent research in widely scattered locations led to multiple claims to the invention of a device or system.

[edit] Timeline

1600:William Gilbert publishes De Magnete, Magneticisque Corporibus, et de Magno Magnete Tellure ("On the Magnet and Magnetic eyes, and on That Great Magnet the Earth"), Europe's then current standard on electricity and magnetism. He experimented with and noted the different character of electrical and magnetic forces. In addition to known ancient Greeks observations of electrical properties of rubbed amber, he experimented with a needle balanced on a pivot, and found that the needle nondirectionally affected by many materials such as alum, arsenic, hard resin, jet, glass, gum-mastic, mica, rock-salt, sealing wax, slags, sulphur and precious stones as amethyst, beryl, diamond, opal, sapphire. He noted that electrical charge could be stored by covering the body with a non-conducting substance like silk. He described the method of artificially magnetizing iron. His terrella (little earth), a sphere cut from a lodestone on a metal lathe, modeled the earth as a lodestone (magnetic iron ore) and demonstrated that every lodestone has fixed poles, and how to find them.^[3] He considered that gravity was a magnetic force and noted that this mutual force increased with the size or amount of lodestone and attracted iron objects. He experimented with such physical models in an attempt to explain problems in navigation due varying properties of the magnetic compass with respect to their location on the earth, such as magnetic declination and magnetic inclination. His experiments explained the dipping of the needle by the magnetic attraction of the earth, and were used to predict where the vertical dip would be found. Such magnetic inclination was described as early as the 11th century by Shen Kuo in his Meng Xi Bi Tan and further investigated in 1581 by retired mariner and compass maker Robert Norman, as described in his pamphlet, The Newe Attractive. The gilbert, a unit of magnetomotive force or magnetic potential, was named the in his honor.

1663:Otto von Guericke (brewer and engineer who applied the barometer to weather prediction and invented the air pump, with which he demonstrated the properties of atmospheric pressure associated with a vacuum) constructs a primitive electrostatic generating (or friction) machine via the triboelectric effect, utilizing a continuously rotating sulfur globe that could be rubbed by hand or a piece of cloth. Isaac Newton suggested the use of a glass globe instead of a sulfur one.

1729:Stephen Gray and the Reverend Granville Wheler experiment to discover that electrical "virtue," produced by rubbing a glass tube, could be transmitted over an extended distance (nearly 900 ft) through thin iron wire using silk threads as insulators, to deflect leaves of brass. This has been described as the beginning of electrical communication.^[4] Thia was also the first distinction between the roles of conductors and insulators (names applied by John Desaguliers, mathematician and Royal Society member, who stated that Gray "has made greater variety of electrical experiments than all the philosophers of this and the last age."^[5]). Georges-Louis LeSage built a static electricity telegraph in 1774, based upon the same principles discovered by Gray.

1734:Charles François de Cisternay DuFay (inspired by Gray's work to perform electrical experiments) dispels the effluvia theory by his paper in Volume 38 of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, describing his discovery of the distinction between two kinds of electricity: "resinous," produced by rubbing bodies such as amber, copal or gum-lac with silk or paper, and "vitreous," by rubbing bodies as glass, rock crystal or precious stones with hair or wool. He also posited the principle of mutual attraction for unlike forms and the repelling of like forms and that "from this principle one may with fame ease deduce the explanation of a great number of other phenomenon." The terms resinous and vitreous were later replaced with the terms "positive" and "negative" by William Watson and Benjamin Franklin.

1745:Pieter van Musschenbroek of Leidon (Leyden) independently discovers the Leyden (Leidon) jar, a primitive capacitor or condenser (coined by Volta in 1782 (derived from the Italian condensatore), with which the transient electrical energy generated by current friction machines could now be stored. He and his student Andreas Cunaeus used a glass jar filled with water into which a brass rod had been placed. He charged the jar by touching a wire leading from the electrical machine with one hand while holding the outside of the jar with the other. The energy could be discharged by completing an external circuit between the brass rod and another conductor, originally his hand, placed in contact with the outside of the jar. He also found that if the jar were placed on a piece of metal on a table, a shock would be received by touching this piece of metal with one hand and with the other, touching the wire connected to the electrical machine.

1745:Ewald Georg von Kleist of independently invents the capacitor: a glass jar coated inside and out with metal. The inner coating was connected to a rod that passed through the lid and ended in a metal sphere. By having this thin layer of glass insulation (a dielectric) between two large, closely spaced plates, von Kleist found the energy density could be increased dramatically compared with the situation with no insulator. Daniel Gralath improved the design and was also the first to combine several jars to form a battery strong enough to kill birds and small animals upon discharge.

1752:Benjamin Franklin establishes the link between lightning and electricity by the flying a kite into a thunderstorm and transferring some of the charge into a Leyden jar and showed that its properties were the same as charge produced by an electrical machine. He is credited with utilizing the concepts of positive and negative charge in the explanation of then known electrical phenomenon. He theorized that there was an electrical fluid (which he proposed could be the luminiferous ether, which was used by others before and after him, to explain the wave theory of light) that was part of all material and all intervening space. The charge of any object would be neutral if the concentration of this fluid were the same both inside and outside of the body, positive if the object contained an excess of this fluid, and negative if there were a deficit. In 1749 he had documented the similar properties of lightning and electricity. such as both an electric spark and a lightning flash produced light and sound, could kill animals, cause fires, melt metal, destroy or reverse the polarity of magnetism, and flowed through conductors and could he concentrated at sharp points. He was later able to apply the property of concentrating at sharp points by his invention of the lightning rod, for which he intentionally did not profit. He also investigated the Leyden jar, proving that the charge was stored on the glass and not in the water, as others had assumed.

1753: C. M. (of Scotland, possibly Charles Morrison, of Greenock or Charles Marshall, of Aberdeen) proposes in the February 17th edition of Scots Magazine, an electrostatic telegraph system with 26 insulated wires, each corresponding to a letter of the alphabet and each connected to electrostatic machines. The receiving charged end was to electrostatically attract a disc of paper marked with the corresponding letter.

1774: Georges-Louis LeSage builds an electrostatic telegraph system with 26 insulated wires conducting Leyden jar charges to pith ball electroscopes, each corresponding to a letter of the alphabet. Its range was only between rooms of his home.

1791: Luigi Galvani discovers galvanic electricity and bioelectricity through experiments following an observation that touching exposed muscles in frogs' legs with a scalpel which had been close to a static electrical machine cuased them to jump. He called this "animal electricity". Years of experimentation in the 1780's eventually led him to the construction of an arc of two different metals (copper and zinc for example) by connecting the two metal pieces together and then connecting their open ends across the nerve of a frog leg, producing the same muscular contractions (by completing a circuit) as originally accidentally observed. The use of different metals to produce an electrical spark is the basis that led Alessandro Volta in 1799 to his invention of his voltaic pile, which eventually became the galvanic battery.^[6]

1795: Don Francisco Salvá Campillo proposes an electrostatical telegraph using a separate wire for each letter of the alphabet, a Leyden jar to transmit a spark across these wires, but at the receiving end, there are 26 people instead of electroscopes. Upon receiving a shock, each person would call out an assigned letter of the alphabet.

1799: Alessandro Volta, following Galvani's discovery of galvanic electricity, creates a voltaic cell producing an electrical current by the chemical action of several pairs of alternating copper (or silver) and zinc discs "piled" and separated by cloth or cardboard which had been soaked brine (salt water) or acid to increase conductivity. In 1800 he demonstrates the production of light from a glowing wire conducting electricity. This was followed in 1801 by his construction of the first electric battery, by utilizing multiple voltaic cells. Prior to his major discoveries, in a letter of praise to the Royal Society 1793, Volta reported Luigi Galvani's experiments of the 1780's as the "most beautiful and important discoveries," regarding them as the foundation of future discoveries. Volta's inventions led to revolutionary changes with this method of the production of inexpensive, controlled electrical current vs. existing frictinal machines and Leydon jars The electric battery became standard equipment in every experimental laboratory and heralded an age of practical applications of electricity.^[7] The unit volt is named after his contributions.

1800: William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle discover electrolysis by passing a voltaic current through water, decomposing it into its elements hydrogen and oxygen.

1802: Gian Domenico Romagnosi, Italian legal scholar, discovers that electricity and magnetism are related. He published his account in an Italian newspaper, but this was overlooked by the scientific community.

1820: Hans Christian Ørsted, Danish physicist and chemist, unites the separate science electricity and magnetism. He develops an experiment in which he notices a compass needle is deflected from magnetic north when an electric current from the battery he was using was switched on and off, convincing him that magnetic fields radiate from all sides of a live wire just as light and heat do, confirming a direct relationship between electricity and magnetism. He also observes that the movement of the compass-needle to one side or the other depends upon the direction of the current. Following intensive investigations, he published his findings, proving that a changing electric current produces a magnetic field as it flows through a wire. The oersted unit of magnetic induction is named for his contributions.

1820: André-Marie Ampère, professor of mathematics at the Ecole Polytechnique, a short time after learning of Ørsted's discovery that magnetic needle is acted on by a voltaic current, conducts experiments and publishes a paper in Annales de Chimie et de Physique attempting to give a combined theory of electricity and magnetism. He shows that a coil of wire carrying a current behaves like an ordinary magnet and suggests that electromagnetism might be used in telegraphy. He mathematically developes Ampère's law describing the magnetic force between two electric currents. His mathematical theory explains known electromagnetic phenomena and predicts new ones. His laws of electrodynamics include the facts that parallel conductors currying current in the same direction attractand those carrying currents in the opposite directions are repel one another. One of the first to develop electrical measuring techniques, he built an instrument utilizing a free-moving needle to measure the flow of electricity, contributing to the development of the galvanometer. In 1821, he proposed a telegraphy system utilizing a one wire per "galvanometer" to indicate each letter, and reported experimenting successfully with such a system, however in 1824, Peter Barlow reported its maximum distance was only 200 feet, so was impractical.^[8] In 1826 he publishes the Memoir on the Mathematical Theory of Electrodynamic Phenomena, Uniquely Deduced from Experience containing a mathematical derivation of the electrodynamic force law. Following Faraday's discovery of electromagnetic induction in 1831, Ampère agreed that Faraday deserved full credit for the discovery.

1820: Johann Salomo Christoph Schweigger, German chemist, physicist, and professor, builds the first sensitive galvanometer, wrappping coil of wire around a graduted compass, an acceptable instrument for actual measurement as well as detection of small amounts of electric current, naming it after Luigi Galvani.

~1825: William Sturgeon, founder of the first English Electric Journal, Annals of Electricity, found that leaving the iron inside a helical coil of wire connected to a battery, greatly increased the resulting magnetic field, thus making possible the more powerful electromagnets utilizing a ferromagnetic core. Sturgeon also bent the iron core into a U-shape to bring the poles closer together, thus concentrating the magnetic field lines. These discoveries followed Ampere's discovery that electricity passing through a coiled wire produced a magnetic force and that of Dominique François Jean Arago finding an iron bar is magnetized by putting it inside the coil of current-carrying wire, but Arago had not observed the increased strength of the resulting field while the bar was being magnetised.

1826: Georg Simon Ohm states his Ohm's law of electrical resistance in the journals of Schweigger and Poggendorff, and also published in his landmark pamphlet Die galvanische Kette mathematisch bearbeitet in 1827. The unit ohm (Ω) of electrical resistance has been named in his honor.

1829 & 1830: Francesco Zantedeschi publishes papers on the production of electric currents in closed circuits by the approach and withdrawal of a magnet, thereby anticipating Michael Faraday's classical experiments of 1831.

1831: Michael Faraday began experiments leading to his discovery of electromagnetic induction, though the discovery may have been anticipated by the work of Francesco Zantedeschi. His breakthrough came when he wrapped two insulated coils of wire around a massive iron ring, bolted to a chair, and found that upon passing a current through one coil, a momentary electric current was induced in the other coil. He then found that if he moved a magnet through a loop of wire, or vice versa, an electric current also flowed in the wire. He then used this principle to construct the electric dynamo, the first electric power generator. He proposed that electromagnetic forces extended into the empty space around the conductor, but did not complete that work. Faraday's concept of lines of flux emanating from charged bodies and magnets provided a way to visualize electric and magnetic fields. That mental model was crucial to the successful development of electromechanical devices which were to dominate the 19th century. His demonstrations that a changing magnetic field produces an electric field, mathematically modelled by Faraday's law, would subsequently become one of Maxwell's four equations. These consequently evolved into the generalization of field theory.

1832: Baron Pavel L'vovitch Schilling (Paul Schilling) creates the first electromagnetic telegraph, consisting of a single needle system in which a code was used to indicate the characters. Only months later, Göttingen professors Carl Friedrich Gauß and Wilhelm Weber constructed a telegraph that was working two years before Schilling could put his into practice. Schilling demonstrated the long-distance transmission of signals between two different rooms of his apartment and was the first to put into practice a binary system of signal transmission.

1833: Heinrich Lenz states Lenz's law, if an increasing (or decreasing) magnetic flux induces an electromotive force (EMF), the resulting current will oppose a further increase (or decrease) in magnetic flux, i.e., that an induced current in a closed conducting loop will appear in such a direction that it opposes the change that produced it. Lenz's law is one consequence of the principle of conservation of energy. If a magnet moves towards a closed loop, then the induced current in the loop creates a field that exerts a force opposing the motion of the magnet. Lenz's law can be derived from Faraday's law of induction by noting the minus sign on the right side of the equation. He also independently discovered Joule's law in 1842; to honor his efforts, Russian physicists refer to it as the "Joule-Lenz law."

1835: Joseph Henry invents the electric relay (or in a broad sense an amplifier), is an electrical switch by which a the change of a weak current through the windings of an electromagnet will attract an armature to open or close the switch. Because the can control (open or close) another much higher power circuit, it is in a a broad sense, a form of electrical amplifier. The made a practical electric telegraph possible. He was the first to coil insulated wire tightly around an iron core in order to make an extremely powerful electromagnet, improving on William Sturgeon’s design, which used loosely coiled uninsulated wire. He also discovered the property of self inductance independently of Michael Faraday.

1836: Dr. David Alter invents and demonstrates to witnesses the first American electric telegraph in Elderton, Pennsylvania. In a later interview in the book, Biographical and Historical Cyclopedia of Indiana and Armstrong Counties he states: "I may say that there is no connection at all between the telegraph of Morse and others and that of myself...Professor Morse most probably never heard of me or my Elderton telegraph." In 1840 he invents an electric buggy, forerunner of the automobile. His inventions also include an electric clock and a short range type of telephone, forerunner to Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. He is also credited with the origins of Spectrum Analysis by his the idea that every element has its own emission spectrum and an expansion of spectrum analysis to include the optical properties of gases.

1837: Samuel Morse developes an alternative electrical telegraph design capable of transmitting long distances over poor quality wire. He and his assistant, Alfred Vail develope the Morse code signalling alphabet. In 1838 Morse successfully tested the device at the Speedwell Ironworks near Morristown, New Jersey, and publicly demonstrates it to a scientific committee at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The first electric telegram using this device was sent by Morse on May 24, 1844 from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., bearing the message "What hath God wrought?"

1840: James Prescott Joule formulates Joule's Law (sometimes called the Joule -Lenz law) quantifying the amount of heat produced in a circuit as proportional to the product of the time duration, the resistance, and the square of the current passing through it.

1854: Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, physicist and one of the founders of spectroscopy, publishes Kirchoff's Laws on the conservation of electric charge and energy and used to determine currents in each branch of the circuit.

1854: the first transcontinental telegraph system spanned North America by connecting an existing network in the eastern United States to the small network in California by a link between Omaha and Carson City via Salt Lake City. The slower Pony Express system ceased operation a month later.

1865: James Clerk Maxwell publishes his landmark paper [[A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field]], in which Maxwell's equations demonstrated that electric and magnetic forces are two complementary aspects of electromagnetism. He shows the associated complimentary electric and magnetic fields of electromagnetism travel through space, in the form of waves, at a constant velocity of 3.0 × 10⁸ m/s. He also proposes that light was a form of electromagnetic radiation and that waves of oscillating electric and magnetic fields travel through empty space at a speed that could be predicted from simple electrical experiments. Using available data, he obtains a velocity of 310,740,000 m/s and states "This velocity is so nearly that of light, that it seems we have strong reason to conclude that light itself (including radiant heat, and other radiations if any) is an electromagnetic disturbance in the form of waves propagated through the electromagnetic field according to electromagnetic laws." Also see his "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, 1873."

1866: the first successful transatlantic telegraph system was completed. Earlier submarine cable transatlantic cables installed in 1857 and 1858 failed after operating for a few days or weeks.

1878: Thomas Edison, following work on a "multiplex telegraph" system and the phonograph, invents an improved incandescent light bulb. This was not the first electric light bulb but the first commercially practical incandescent light. In 1879, he produces a high resistance lamp in a very high vacuum lasting hundreds of hours. While the earlier inventors had produced electric lighting in lab conditions, Edison concentrated on commercial application and was able to sell the concept to homes and businesses by mass-producing relatively long-lasting light bulbs and creating a complete system for the generation and distribution of electricity. In 1882 he switches on the world's first electrical power distribution system, providing 110 volts direct current (DC) to 59 customers.

1881: Nikola Tesla Serb-American inventor, physicist, mechanical and electrical engineer, conceives of wireless power transmission. Tesla's later patents and theoretical work form the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor, as part of the electrification movement of the Second Industrial Revolution. In 1887, he constructs the initial brushless alternating current induction motor. In 1888 he develops the principles of his Tesla coil with which he was later able to generate alternating current (AC) of a million volts and began working with George Westinghouse's labs, where he developed ideas for AC polyphase systems which would allow transmission of electricity over large distances at much higher efficiency than the direct current systems promoted by Edison. Tesla and Westingouse eventually prevailed in this War of Currents. At the 1893 World's Fair Tesla and Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were Tesla's fluorescent lights and single node bulbs. In 1900 he established a wireless power transmission facility to be known as Wardenclyffe. Tesla was granted Patent 685012 (Primary Class 178/43, telegraphy/space induction) for the means of increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations.

1888: Heinrich Hertz demonstrates the existence of electromagnetic waves by building an apparatus that produced and detected UHF radio waves (or microwaves in the UHF region). He also found that radio waves could be transmitted through different types of materials and were reflected by others, the key to radar. His experiments explain reflection, refraction, polarization, interference, and velocity of electromagnetic waves.

1897: J. J. Thomson discovers the electron.

1911: Superconductivity was discovered by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, who was studying the resistivity of solid mercury at cryogenic temperatures using the recently- discovered liquid helium as a refrigerant. At the temperature of 4.2 K, he observed that the resistivity abruptly disappeared. For this discovery, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1913.