HISTORY OF ELECTRICITY



Electricity is one of the most awesome phenomenon’s of nature and the most powerful manifestations of it which we have ever seen is – LIGHTNING.
It’s a 300 year long tale of dazzling experiments by various scientists and engineers which paved the way for the development of this sparkling force of nature.
It was in the beginning of the 18th century when people began to notice the astonishing effects of static electricity with which they could attract feathers with a silk rod or even lightning a candle with the help of static electricity. Initially these tricks were used by magicians to amaze people. But this was not all! Meanwhile there was the invention of Holksby machine which could produce static electricity. The machine was named after the scientists name only. This Holksby machine laid the foundation for the future development of electricity. The machine could produce electricity but the only problem was that there was no way we could store it.
But then around the mid of the 18th century, scientists came up with a new revolutionary invention of lightning jar which could store electricity. This lightning jar was accidently invented by a scientist. The jar took up a little charge and then was capable of giving a heavy shock. This behavior of the jar astonished the scientists. The lightning jar invented at that time closely resembles a modern capacitor. Anyhow, the scientists had found a way to store charge but yet the phenomenon occurring in the jar was unexplained. This was explained by a businessman rational thinker, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. Franklin is regarded as a scientist but he was a rational thinker who could think on possibly any logical subject. He was the one who explained the phenomenon occurring in the jar and he also proved that the lightning that appears in the sky was electricity and that electricity was also a force of nature.
With all these new ideas and inventions coming up, the whole Europe went electricity crazy!!
The electrical quantity ‘Voltage’ is named after an Italian scientist, ALESSANDRO VOLTA. This is because of the significant contribution he made to the “Enlightment Movement” (name given to the movement for advancement in electricity field). Volta discovered the “VOLTA PILE” which was just a setup of metal discs which could produce some continuous electricity. HE got this idea from the works of another scientist who had worked on the torpedo fish so as to study how the fish produced electricity, but was not able to derive a conclusion. Volta made the same arrangement he saw in the back of the torpedo fish using metal disc and was able to produce continuous electricity, though very small. He had unknowingly created the first battery and this work of Volta was greatly regarded by everyone as this opened the gates for the future inventions.
In 1808, a scientist named Sir Humphrey Davy arranged 800 Volta piles together and connected them with each other. He then drew two terminals out of it. Actually, he had created a battery of the size of a room. This demonstration was set before everyone and as the candles were blown off and Davy touched the two terminals together, a very bright and continuous spark glow out of it which enlightened the whole place and this marked the beginning of a new era. The era in which Humankind was about to harness a mighty force of nature, the Electricity.
Now as the humans had found a way to produce continuous electric current, but there was no way that this discovery could be made use of. And everyone knew, the person who could make something to use this energy was going to be very rich in the near future. And the person to do this was “Thomas Elva Edison” who could see the vast capital generating possibility, if he could develop something of the kind. He gathered a group of talented and young engineers from across the country and established his own research base. His base became the first research base in the world. All of them worked hard day in day out. Due to these continuous efforts Edison was close to developing an electric bulb, but the problem aroused in the selection of the material to be used as filament. He tried everything from platinum to even the beard hairs of his workmen as filament. But the result was not up to the mark. Then, he got an idea from the works of another scientist who was working on the same thing. And that idea was to create a vacuum in the bulb which delayed the burning or damaging of filament and thus he succeeded in making the electric bulb. Edison was now all set up and he decided to make power stations to provide the people with electricity. While Edison was setting up DC power stations all across New York, there was another person, Nikola Tesla, who was not satisfied with Edison’s idea of using DC current. He believed that AC and not DC, was the future. Using the experimental results of Faraday and Fleming, Tesla demonstrated that rotating effect can be produced using AC alone. He used his famous Tesla egg experiment to prove this.
As Tesla was in favor of using AC, Edison favored DC. This led to a rivalry between the two. Edison’s supporters drew new ways to show that AC was a harmful form of electricity and it was life threatening to all the mammals including humans. This was a major setback for Tesla who was working for AC development. At that time, Tesla was financed by businessman George Westinghouse and using his wealth Tesla created an experiment in which he allowed a very high frequency AC current to pass through his body, while he rested on an insulator and the current passed through his body without any pain and it was because of the high frequency, that Tesla was undamaged.
This experiment of Tesla, made a great impact on the people in driving out the fear out of them. Thus, the war of DC and AC came to an end. When Tesla was in his last years, he saw a world which he wanted to build. He saw the world lit up by his work. Tesla died in the year 1943.
Furthermore, in the beginning of the 20th century, there was a mathematician James Clarke Maxwell, who made four equations describing the inter-relationship between electric and magnetic fields. At that time, there were only few people who could understand mathematics at such a level and one of those few was Heinrich Hertz, who took on the task of experimentally proving Maxell’s equations. And he was successful in it!
Then came the discovery of wireless transmission for which the credit was given to Marconi. Though, Marconi received a Nobel Prize for wireless transmission, actually, he was not the one who developed it. It was developed by another scientist named Oliver. Oliver had done both the things that Marconi and Hertz were credited for. But his name just remains a footnote in history, because of his bad luck, I should say.
Following these advancements was the discovery of crystals (semiconductors) which was done by an Indian scientist Jagdish Chander Bose. And these crystals found an enormous use in the future which we witness today. But, nobody knew the potential of these crystals at that time.
With the introduction of the semiconductor materials in electrical and electronic instruments both efficiency and reliability has increased. We now live in a world full of electronics. We can’t even imagine this world without electricity. The understanding of proper and efficient use of electricity took hundreds of years of hard work of handful of great minds and now we are the one who witness this miracle and live in the world which those great pioneers must have imagined at that time.
All the credit goes to them and we should salute them for their mind boggling works.
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...