The Story of Electricity

Long before anyone said “electricity,” people noticed something odd about amber, the fossil tree resin: after rubbing, it could pull on light things. Ancient writers connect this to the Greek thinker Thales of Miletus. None of his own writing survives, though. What we have comes from later authors, who say Thales reasoned from the magnet and from amber that even “lifeless” things could move other things. So treat this one as an old tradition, not a lab notebook.

Neat fact Our word “electric” comes from ēlektron, the Greek word for amber.

William Gilbert, an English physician who served Queen Elizabeth I, published De Magnete in 1600. He tested many materials, showed that the Earth itself behaves like a giant magnet, and was the first to use terms like “electric force,” “electric attraction” and “magnetic pole.” He is often called the father of electrical studies.

Neat fact Gilbert coined the Latin word electricus, meaning “like amber.”

Benjamin Franklin wanted to prove that lightning is electricity. The famous telling says that in June 1752, in Philadelphia, he and his son flew a silk kite in a storm, with a metal key tied to the string and a dry silk ribbon in his hand, and used the key to charge a Leyden jar (an early way to store charge). The kite was never struck by lightning; it picked up charge from the stormy air. Historians still debate the details, because Franklin’s own account (October 1752) is short, and the fuller story comes from Joseph Priestley, writing years later. What is certain: French experimenters had already proved the lightning idea with Franklin’s proposed tall metal rod in 1752, and his work led to the lightning rod.

Neat fact Please never try this. A scientist named Georg Richmann was killed in 1753 while attempting a similar experiment.

Alessandro Volta stacked discs of zinc and copper with cloth soaked in salt water between them. The “pile” gave something new: a steady, continuous electric current instead of a single spark. He built it in 1799 and described it in a letter to the Royal Society of London dated March 20, 1800. Suddenly scientists everywhere could run experiments with current that kept flowing.

Neat fact The volt, the unit printed on every outlet and battery, is named after him. Napoleon invited him to Paris to demonstrate the pile in 1801.

During an evening lecture in April 1820, Hans Christian Ørsted noticed that a wire carrying current made a nearby compass needle swing. It was the first clear proof that electricity and magnetism are connected. That link is the basis of every motor, generator and transformer that came after.

Neat fact The discovery happened in front of an audience, during a lecture.

When Ørsted’s result was shown in Paris later in 1820, André-Marie Ampère showed that two parallel wires carrying current pull together or push apart, depending on which way the current flows. He turned it into math, and in 1827 he published the work that named the new field “electrodynamics.”

Neat fact The ampere (the “amps” on every breaker handle) was adopted as a unit in 1881 and named in his honor.

Georg Simon Ohm, a German schoolteacher, published a careful study in 1827 showing how current, voltage and resistance relate. Today we write it as Ohm’s law, and electricians use it every day. At first his work was coldly received, and he even left his teaching post over it. Recognition came later.

Neat fact Britain’s Royal Society awarded Ohm its Copley Medal in 1841, 14 years after the book that was once brushed aside.

Michael Faraday was a blacksmith’s son who started as a bookbinder’s apprentice and became Humphry Davy’s lab assistant. On August 29, 1831, using an iron ring wrapped with two coils of wire, he showed that a changing magnetic field makes current flow. That is electromagnetic induction. Later that fall he turned a copper disk between the poles of a magnet and got a steady current: the first generator (dynamo).

Neat fact Almost every power plant that spins a generator, from a hydro dam to a backup generator at a house, relies on what Faraday showed in 1831.

Many inventors had made things glow with electricity; arc lamps were already lighting some streets. In October 1879, at Menlo Park, New Jersey, Thomas Edison’s team got a carbon-filament lamp in a glass vacuum bulb to work well enough to be practical, and he was granted the patent on January 27, 1880. Just as important, Edison set out to build the whole system around the bulb: generators, wiring and fuses.

Neat fact In the patent, Edison lists things he tried as filaments: cotton and linen thread, wood splints, and coiled paper.

Edison’s Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan began serving customers on September 4, 1882, about a quarter square mile around it, with direct current (DC) at about 110 volts. Six huge steam-driven “Jumbo” dynamos did the work. It started with about 85 customers and about 400 lamps; within a year it served 513 customers. Edison was in J. P. Morgan’s office when the switch was thrown.

Neat fact The Jumbo dynamos were nicknamed after P. T. Barnum’s famous circus elephant. Between opening day and a fire in January 1890, the station had just one outage, lasting about three hours.

Edison’s DC had a big limit: it could not travel far without heavy losses, so stations had to sit close to customers. Alternating current (AC) could be stepped up to high voltage for travel and back down for use, with transformers. On March 20, 1886, William Stanley showed it working in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, stepping 500 volts up to 3,000 and back down to light about 20 businesses on Main Street.

Neat fact Stanley strung his wires through the elm trees along Main Street.

Nikola Tesla arrived in America in 1884 and worked briefly for Edison before going his own way. He worked out how a rotating magnetic field could run a simple, rugged AC motor, and filed a stream of patents. In May 1888, George Westinghouse, already the inventor of the railroad air brake and an AC believer, bought the rights to Tesla’s AC system of generators, transformers and motors.

Neat fact The tesla, a unit of magnetic field strength, was named for him in 1960.

Edison’s companies backed direct current. Westinghouse, using Tesla’s and Stanley’s ideas, backed alternating current. DC flows one way at a steady push. AC flips direction many times a second, and that is what lets a transformer raise the voltage for long-distance lines and lower it again for homes. That advantage, plus Tesla’s motor, is why AC won the grid. DC never went away, though: batteries, solar panels and the electronics in your phone all run on it.

Neat fact In 1892, Edison’s company merged with a rival to form General Electric, and the new company built AC equipment too.

Westinghouse won the contract to light the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago with an AC system, underbidding a DC proposal. More than 27 million visitors saw a city of lights, and the fair’s success helped Westinghouse win the work at Niagara Falls. The fair also needed someone to check all that wiring for fire risk, which leads to the next stop.

Neat fact A patent fight meant Westinghouse could not use Edison-style bulbs, so his team rushed out a new “stopper lamp,” sealed with a ground glass stopper, just in time for the fair.

The Adams power plant at Niagara Falls began delivering AC power on August 26, 1895, first to nearby industries, using Westinghouse generators and Tesla’s system. In November 1896, the power reached Buffalo, more than 20 miles away, where it ran streetcars. Large-scale hydro plus long-distance AC lines was the pattern the rest of the country, including California, would follow.

Neat fact Early protection was simple: in 1896 there was no switch that could safely interrupt a big short circuit on the line, so the system relied on lead and aluminum fuses.