Six Great Men Of Electricity

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Electrical energy is an accepted fact of life, but little thought is given to the time and effort put in by the scientists of yesteryear who developed the standard we accept today.

Electrical energy has been a subject of experimentation and perseverance for centuries.

While some names have been recognised and given huge amounts of credit for either discoveries or developments, many others have either been ignored or completely forgotten about.

The following names of people have given the modern world such a widely used energy source.

William Gilbert 1544-1603

William Gilbert experimented with iron ore and inherent magnetic properties. Gilbert proposed a theory that the Earth was a giant magnet and that all materials were either ‘electrics’ or ‘non-electrics’. Today we say all materials are either conductors or insulators.

Benjamin Franklin 1697-1790

Benjamin Franklin developed the concept of positive and negative charges. His experiments he used a kite to ‘bleed off’ large electrical charges from clouds in stormy weather. His experiments led to a mechanical device being developed to produce large charges of static electricity.

Aleksandra Volta 1745-1851

Aleksandra Volta developed the concept of current flow and corrected Galvani’s ideas on dynamic electricity. He produced the voltaic cell for continuous current flow.

Andre Ampere 1775-1836

Andre Ampere showed that two parallel conductors carrying a current could attract or repel each other. Another of his creations was introducing the solenoid to the electrical world.

Georg Ohm 1789-1854

Georg Ohm worked on the theory of resistance of conductors and how to calculate values of resistance.

Michael Faraday 1791-1867

Michael Faraday is not the father of electromagnetism as often claimed, but had considerable advanced knowledge of electromagnetism. He discovered the concept of induction, where a conductor in moving through a magnetic field has electricity induced in it.

Everything around us occupies space and has mass. All matter whether it is solid, liquid or gas, is built up of numbers of small and distinct particles called molecules. These particles can be broken down into something like 100 different elementary substances.

By combining these elementary particles in various proportions, all the different materials that we know of can be formed. These are called elements.

Electricity is formed by the flow of electrons through a conductive element such as metal.

Many of the great men of electricity discovered their unique and world changing theories by accident. Through experimentation, they stumbled across patterns that could be measured and later on controlled. This research enabled some of the fantastic devices that we now take for granted, all via electricity.

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Source by Laurence Stanway