The History of Electricity

Did Edison invent the light bulb, Marconi the radio, Bell the telephone, Morse the telegraph?
The answers are no. They didn't invent the wheel. They were instrumental in making it better and,
in some cases, obtaining the patent.

Electrical history goes back before Christ and brings us to the computer age. Along this journey
you will discover it took several people, along the way, to make the light bulb glow.

The journey won't end with this book, as we are constantly discovering new inventions that will
someday even take us to the stars.

Benjamin Franklin's (1706-1790) kite experiment demonstrated that

lightning is electricity. He was the first to use the terms positive and negative
charge. Franklin was one of seventeen children. He quit school at age ten to
become a printer. His life is the classic story of a self-made man achieving
wealth and fame through determination and intelligence.

James Watt (1736-1819) was born in Scotland. Although he conducted no electrical experiments,
he must not be overlooked. He was an instrument maker by trade and set up a repair shop in
Glasgow in 1757. Watt thought that the steam engine would replace animal power, where the
number of horses replaced seemed an obvious way to measure the charge for performance.
Interestingly, Watt measured the rate of work exerted by a horse drawing rubbish up an old mine
shaft and found it amounted to about 22,000 ft-lbs per minute. He added a margin of 50% arriving
at 33,000 ft-lbs.

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824-1907) was best known in his invention of a new
temperature scale based on the concept of an absolute zero of temperature at -273°C (-460°F).
To the end of his life, Thomson maintained fierce opposition to the idea that energy emitted by
radioactivity came from within the atom. One of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 19th
century, Thomson died opposing one of the most vital innovations in the history of science.

Thomas Seebeck (1770-1831) a German physicist was the discover of the "Seebeck effect".
He twisted two wires made of different metals and heated a junction where the two wires met. He
produced a small current. The current is the result of a flow of heat from the hot to the cold
junction. This is called thermoelectricity. Thermo is a Greek word meaning heat.

Michael Faraday (1791-1867) an Englishman, made one of the most significant discoveries in
the history of electricity: Electromagnetic induction. His pioneering work dealt with how electric
currents work. Many inventions would come from his experiments, but they would come fifty to
one hundred years later.
Failures never discouraged Faraday. He would say; "the failures are just as important as the
successes." He felt failures also teach. The farad, the unit of capacitance is named in the honor of
Michael Faraday.

James Maxwell (1831-1879) a Scottish mathematician translated Faraday's theories into

mathematical expressions. Maxwell was one of the finest mathematicians in history. A maxwell is
the electromagnetic unit of magnetic flux, named in his honor.
Today he is widely regarded as secondary only to Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein in the world
of science.
Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) was one of the most well known inventors of all time with
1093 patents. Self-educated, Edison was interested in chemistry and electronics.During the
whole of his life, Edison received only three months of formal schooling, and was dismissed from
school as being retarded, though in fact a childhood attack of scarlet fever had left him partially
deaf.

Nikola Tesla was born of Serbian parents July 10, 1856 and died a broke and lonely man in New
York City January 7, 1943. He envisioned a world without poles and power lines. Referred to as
the greatest inventive genius of all time. Tesla's system triumphed to make possible the first large-
scale harnessing of Niagara Falls with the first hydroelectric plant in the United States in 1886.

October 1893 George Westinghouse (1846-1914)was awarded the contract to build the first
generators at Niagara Falls. He used his money to buy up patents in the electric field. One of the
inventions he bought was the transformer from William Stanley. Westinghouse invented the air
brake system to stop trains, the first of more than one hundred patents he would receive in this
area alone. He soon founded the Westinghouse Air Brake Company in 1869.

Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) born in Scotland, was raised in a family that was interested
and involved in the science of sound. Bell's father and grandfather both taught speech to the
deaf. A unit of sound level is called a bel in his honor. Sound levels are measured in tenths of a
bel, or decibels. The abbreviation for decibel is dB.

Heinrich Hertz (1857-1894) a German physicist, laid the ground work for the vacuum tube. He
laid the foundation for the future development of radio, telephone, telegraph, and even television.
He was one of the first people to demonstrate the existence of electric waves. Hertz was
convinced that there were electromagnetic waves in space.

Otto Hahn (1879-1968), a German chemist and physicist, made the vital discovery which led to
the first nuclear reactor. He uncovered the process of nuclear fission by which nuclei of atoms of
heavy elements can break into smaller nuclei, in the process releasing large quantities of energy.
Hahn was awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1944.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955). Einstein's formula proved that one gram of mass can be converted
into a torrential amount of energy. To do this, the activity of the atoms has to occur in the nucleus.
E = energy, M = mass, and C = the speed of light which is 186,000 miles per second. When you
square 186,000 you can see it would only take a small amount of mass to produce a huge
amount of energy.
Electric current
Electric current is the flow of electric charge. Natural examples include lightning and
the solar wind, the source of the polar aurora. The most familiar artificial form of electric
current is the flow of conduction electrons in metal wires, such as the overhead power
lines that deliver electrical energy across long distances and the smaller wires within
electrical and electronic equipment. In electronics, other forms of electric current include
the flow of electrons through resistors or through the vacuum in a vacuum tube, the flow
of ions inside a battery, and the flow of holes within a semiconductor.

Definition

The magnitude of an electric current is defined as the time derivative of electric charge:

Formally this is written as

or inversely as

(the amount of charge Q flowing per unit of time t) is I, from the German word Intensität,
which means 'intensity'.

Conventional current

Conventional current was defined early in the history of electrical science as a flow of
positive charge. In solid metals, like wires, the positive charges are immobile, and only
the negatively charged electrons flow in the direction opposite conventional current, but
this is not the case in most non-metallic conductors. In other materials, charged particles
flow in both directions at the same time. Electric currents in electrolytes are flows of
electrically charged atoms (ions), which exist in both positive and negative varieties. For
example, an electrochemical cell may be constructed with salt water (a solution of
sodium chloride) on one side of a membrane and pure water on the other. The membrane
lets the positive sodium ions pass, but not the negative chlorine ions, so a net current
results. Electric currents in plasma are flows of electrons as well as positive and negative
ions. In ice and in certain solid electrolytes, flowing protons constitute the electric
current. To simplify this situation, the original definition of conventional current still
stands.
There are also instances where the electrons are the charge that is physically moving, but
where it makes more sense to think of the current as the movement of positive "holes"
(the spots that should have an electron to make the conductor neutral). This is the case in
a p-type semiconductor.

Units

The SI unit of electric current is the ampere (A), which is equal to a flow of one coulomb
of charge per second.

Ohm's law

Ohm's law predicts the current in an (ideal) resistor (or other ohmic device) to be applied
voltage divided by electrical resistance:

where

I is the current, measured in amperes

V is the potential difference measured in volts
R is the resistance measured in ohms
Voltage
Voltage is an electric potential difference between two points; it is measured in volts.
Voltage is named in honor of the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta (1745–1827), who
invented the voltaic pile, the first chemical battery.

Explanation

Electrical potential difference can be thought of as the ability to move electrical charge
through a resistance. At a time in physics when the word force was used loosely, the
potential difference was named the electromotive force or emf - a term which is still used
in certain contexts.

Electrical potential difference ("voltage")

Between two points in an electric field, such as exists in an electrical circuit, the potential
difference is equal to the difference in their electrical potentials. This difference is
proportional to the electrostatic force that tends to push electrons or other charge-carriers
from one point to the other. Potential difference, electrical potential and electromotive
force are measured in volts, leading to the commonly used term voltage and the symbol
V (sometimes is used for voltage).

Voltage is additive in the following sense: the voltage between A and C is the sum of the
voltage between A and B and the voltage between B and C. Two points in an electric
circuit which are connected by an ideal conductor, without resistance and without the
presence of a changing magnetic field, have a potential difference of zero. But other pairs
of points may also have a potential difference of zero. If two such points are connected
with a conductor, no current will flow through the connection. The various voltages in a
circuit can be computed using Kirchhoff's circuit laws.

Voltage is a property of an electric field, not individual electrons. An electron moving

across a voltage difference experiences a net change in energy, often measured in
electron-volts. This effect is analogous to a mass falling through a given height difference
in a gravitational field.
Electric power
Electric power is the amount of work done by an electric current in a unit time. When a
current flows in a circuit with resistance, it does work. Devices can be made that convert
this work into heat (electric heaters), light (light bulbs and neon lamps), or motion, i.e.
kinetic energy (electric motors).

Electric power, like mechanical power, is represented by the letter P in electrical

equations, and is measured in units called watts (symbol W), after Scottish engineer
James Watt. The term wattage is used colloquially to mean 'electric power in watts'.

Description

In resistive circuits, instantaneous electrical power is calculated using Joule's Law, which
is named for British physicist James Joule, who first showed that electrical and
mechanical energy were interchangeable.

P = IV

where

P = power in watts
I = current in amperes
V = potential difference in volts

In reactive circuits, energy storage elements such as inductance and capacitance may
result in periodic reversals of the direction of energy flow. The portion of power flow
that, averaged over a complete cycle of the AC waveform, results in net transfer of energy
in one direction is known as real power. That portion of power flow due to stored energy,
that returns to the source in each cycle, is known as reactive power.

The unit for reactive power is given the special name VAR, which stands for volt-
amperes-reactive. In reactive circuits, the watt unit (symbol W) is generally reserved for
the real power component. The vector sum of the real power and the reactive power is
called the apparent power. Apparent power is conventionally expressed in volt-amperes
(V·A) since it is the simple multiple of rms voltage and current.

Power triangle
The relationship between real power, reactive power and apparent power can be
expressed by representing the quantities as vectors. Real power is represented as a
horizontal vector and reactive power is represented as a vertical vector. The apparent
power vector is the hypotenuse of a right triangle formed by connecting the real and
reactive power vectors. This representation is often called the power triangle. Using the
Pythagorean Theorem, the relationship among real, reactive and apparent power is shown
to be:

[edit]

Power factor

The ratio between real power and apparent power in a circuit is called the power factor.
Where the waveforms are purely sinusoidal, the power factor is the cosine of the phase
angle (φ) between the current and voltage sinusoid waveforms. Equipment data sheets
and nameplates often will abbreviate power factor as "cosφ" for this reason.

Power factor equals unity (1) when the voltage and current are in phase, and is zero when
the current leads or lags the voltage by 90 degrees. Power factor must be specified as
leading or lagging. For two systems transmitting the same amount of real power, the
system with the lower power factor will have higher circulating currents due to energy
that returns to the source from energy storage in the load. These higher currents in a
practical system may produce higher losses and reduce overall transmission efficiency. A
lower power factor circuit will have a higher apparent power and higher losses for the
same amount of real power transfer.

Capacitive circuits cause reactive power with the current waveform leading the voltage
wave by 90 degrees, while inductive circuits cause reactive power with the current
waveform lagging the voltage waveform by 90 degrees. The result of this is that
capacitive and inductive circuit elements tend to cancel each other out. By convention,
capacitors are said to generate reactive power whilst inductors are said to consume it (this
probably comes from the fact that most real-life loads are inductive and so reactive power
has to be supplied to them from power factor correction capacitors).

In power transmission and distribution, significant effort is made to control the reactive
power flow. This is typically done automatically by switching inductors or capacitor
banks in and out, by adjusting generator excitation, and by other means. Electricity
retailers may use electricity meters which measure reactive power to financially penalize
customers with low power factor loads (especially larger customers).
Kilowatt-hour

When paired with a unit of time the term watt is used for expressing energy consumption.
For example, a kilowatt hour, is the amount of energy expended by a one kilowatt device
over the course of one hour; it equals 3.6 megajoules. A megawatt day (MWd or MW·d)
is equal to 86.4 GJ. These units are often used in the context of power plants and home
energy bills.