History Of Electricity

Electricity has become something we rely on to live our lives, but it was by no means an overnight discovery. Over the last two hundred years it has developed from a scientific phenomenon to part of everyday life. One of the first applications of electricity was the first incandescent light bulb in around 1870.

Although electricity obviously brought along some new dangers with it, it eliminated some of the old ones. For example, the gas lighting that was generally used in factories and homes before electricity used naked flames.

The Joule heating process takes place in light bulbs, and also in electric heating. Many people have condemned electric heating as uneconomic because effectively, heat energy is being used (in power stations) on mass to create heat for houses.

Some countries, for example, Denmark have issued a new legislation restricting the use of electric heating in new buildings, if allowed at all. Electricity is an extremely helpful source for refrigeration. As the demand for air conditioning increases so does the overall electricity demand which electricity utilities will have to cater for.

Electricity is of course used in telecommunication. The electrical telegraph was one of the earliest applications that electricity was used for, commercially demonstrated by Crooke and Wheatstone in 1837.

Global communication was made possible in the 1860s with the invention of intercontinental telegraph systems, followed shortly by a transatlantic telegraph system. More recently, fibre optics and satellite communication have taken a large share of the communications market, but without electricity both would be rendered useless.

Electromagnetism is most visibly apparent in the electric motor which of course provides an efficient and clean power motive. A motor that stays in one place, like a winch can easily be powered by a stationary power supply, but a moving motor like an electric car or scooter must carry its power supply along with it in the form of a battery, or it can gain electrical charge from sliding contact like with a pantograph.

Perhaps the most important invention of the 1900s is the transistor. It is a vital part of all modern electrical circuits and a modern integrated circuit may contain several billion miniaturised transistors in a region of only a few centimetres squared.

Technorati Tags: heating, lighting, power