History Of Electricity
Electricity, as we all know is an extremely diverse and flexible energy form. It has been adapted over the last 200 or so years to the point where we can now use it for pretty much anything. One of the first applications of electrical power that was publicly available was LED lighting when the first incandescent light bulb was invented in the 1870s.
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 effect that is used in light bulbs is also used in electric heating. Electric heating, although easily controllable and versatile, could be deemed wasteful as heat has already been used to create this electricity in power stations.
Denmark (among a few other countries) has issued a new law restricting electric heating use in new buildings, if allowed at all. As well as heating, electricity provides a hugely beneficial source of refrigeration. As temperatures get hotter, the demand for air conditioning gets higher, increasing the amount of energy used, and so climate change is increasing in a snowball effect.
Telecommunication is of course another area dependent upon electricity; in fact the electrical telegraph was one of the first successful applications of electricity.
In the 1860s, global communication was made a possibility with telegraph systems going intercontinental, then transatlantic. Fibre optic technology and satellites have now taken a large chunk of the communications market but electricity still powers every communications application we have available to us.
You can visibly see electromagnetism best in an electric motor, which is one of the best providers of clean, motive power. A motor that doesn’t move, like that of a winch, can easily be powered by an external source, but an electric motor that needs to move with its application, like an electric scooter, must carry a power supply such as a battery along with it, unless it uses a pantograph like cable cars.
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.