THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF ELECTRICITY - TECHNOLOGY - 2024

The antecedents of electricity do not have an exact and definitive starting point in humanity's timeline. Electricity as a physical phenomenon in nature has accompanied man since prehistoric times, always surrounded by the fascinating and the mysterious.

Different phases of the background of electricity

In the ancient world

Many phenomena related to static electricity and magnetism have attracted human observation since ancient times, beginning with the fascination and equal fear of lightning during electrical storms and the subsequent thunder.

Even ancient cultures ended up explaining these phenomena by giving them mystical, cosmic or divine properties.

The best example is the number of gods identified with thunderstorms: Zeus in Greece, Jupiter in Rome, Thor in Scandinavia, Raijin in the Shinto religion, Indra for the Hindu religion, and Perun in the Slavic mythology.

The man was particularly curious when he observed that this electrical phenomenon was replicated, on a much smaller scale, when cat fur fabrics were rubbed on certain materials. If it happened in dark spaces, they could see a kind of spark between the surfaces.

This effect was first recorded around 600 years BC by the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus. He managed to experiment with amber and various types of fur to create an electrical discharge. To his surprise, the rubbed surface also attracted very light objects to its surface.

In ancient Egypt, certain fish in the Nile were known to emit some kind of electrical discharge.

They called them “Thunderstorms of the Nile”, a name that leaves total evidence of having already made the connection -symbolic or speculative- with the atmospheric phenomenon of lightning.

Some sources assure that both in Greece and Rome some "torpedo fish" were used to treat certain diseases, such as sleeping arthritic legs with electric shock or for intense headaches, both cases to relieve pain. If so, it could be considered the first electroshock therapy in history.

There is a theory that the light from the famous Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was electrical in nature in some capacity.

Historical reports indicate that the light could be seen almost 30 miles out at sea and that it was so bright that it could blind sailors and burn enemy ships.

Proponents of this theory admit that the power source of the lighthouse is a total mystery, but that an electric light is the only possible explanation for such light intensity. A large arc lamp with a large concave mirror could have created that effect.

Middle Ages and Renaissance

From Ancient Greece to the Middle East and China, the existence of the lodestone was discovered in nature; that they were pieces of mineral iron with the intriguing property of attracting certain metals.

Some were discovered near the city of Magnesia, in ancient Byzantium, from which the words "magnetism" and "magneto" come from. The Chinese discovered that this mineral magnet passed its magnetic properties to a piece of steel coming into contact with it.

The Chinese also discovered that by placing a lodestone or a thin magnetized splinter of steel on a light material floating in a container of water, it aligned itself with the magnetic north of the earth. That's where the compass came from.

In 1600 AD and after almost 1200 years of western scientific vacuum, William Gilbert, an English physician in the service of Queen Elizabeth, published a book entitled De Magnete, where he first used the word "electricity" from the Latin electricus., which in turn comes from the Greek term elektron; both words to name the amber material.

In this work, Gilbert presented his ideas based on years of experiments conducted on static electricity, magnetism, and gravity.

With this he founded a scientific interest in scholars of the time that simply grew and spread throughout Europe and then to the United States.

The road to power plants

Starting in the 18th century, efforts to understand, capture, and control electricity had no rest. The idea was to produce electrical energy out of the phenomena of nature already observed and studied for centuries.

Benjamin Franklin's famous kite experiment in 1752 during a storm proved that the energy of lightning was indeed electricity.

For the next 150 years, many inventors and scientists tried to use electricity to power appliances and devices in a campaign to market it as corporate-funded and distributed products:

• In 1831, Michael Faraday created the first electric motor, demonstrating a relationship between electrical energy through mechanical energy and motion.
• In 1837, Samuel Breese Morse created an electromagnetic circuit capable of transmitting pulses, along with a key representing letters and numbers with dots and lines; the telegraph and the morse code.
• In 1857, Heinrich Geissler invented the vacuum pump in which electricity propagated differently. It was the forerunner of the neon fluorescent light bulb.
• In 1879, Thomas Edison created a reliable electric light that was able to withstand energy and maintain light for a long time; the incandescent lamp. After two years he designed and built the first power plants; in London, giving power to thousands of lamps, and in New York.
• By the late 1880s, several cities in the United States had small Edison-designed power plants, but they only powered a few blocks.

References

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