Electronics W1: History of Electricity and Electronics

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

An American diplomat and natural philosopher, he proved that lightning and electricity were the same.

George Westinghouse (1846-1914)

An American entrepreneur and engineer who invented the railroad and the air brake. He opened the first major power plant at Niagara Falls using alternating current. An able adapter of other people's research, purchased their patents and expanded on their work. His first patent was received for a train air brake. In 1869, he formed the Westinghouse Air Brake Company. Eventually, he held 360 patents and founded six companies.

James Wimshurst

Created the Wimshurt machine that used the same concept of, but this time, made use of rotating glass disks.

Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922)

Inventor of the telephone. In the1870s, funded by the fathers of two of his students, Bell studied how electricity could transmit sound.

Thomas Edison (1847-1931)

In 1879, he focused on inventing a practical light bulb, one that would last a longtime before burning out. He used ordinary cotton thread that had been soaked in carbon. This filament didn't burn at all—it became incandescent; that is, it glowed. He designed and built the first electric power plant that was able to produce electricity and carry it to people's homes. The most productive electrical explorer. He invented the electric light bulb and many other products that electricians use or install.

Static Electricity

In 600 BC in Greece, Thales conducted an experiment. He made what is believed to be the first record of this form of electricity. He noted that it have properties that attract in the same way as magnetism.

Thomas Doolittle

A Connecticut mill worker who, in 1876, devised a way to make the first hard-drawn copper wire strong enough for use by the telegraphy industry, in place of iron wire. The young commercial electric and telephone industry quickly took advantage of the new wire.

Georg Simon Ohm (1789-1854)

A German physicist and the discoverer of Ohm's Law, which states that resistance equals the ratio of the potential difference to current.

Ferdinand Braum (1850-1918)

A German physicist who shared a Nobel Prize with Guglielmo Marconi (1874—1937) an Italian Physicist ,for contributions to the development of radiotelegraphy.

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)

A Serbian-American inventor who discovered rotating magnetic fields.

Henry Cavendish (1731-1810)

A reclusive, unpublished English scientist whose work was replicated several decades later by Ohm

Michael Faraday

An English scientist, who was the first one to realize that an electric current could be produced by passing a magnet through a copper wire. This process of generating current by the relative motion between a wire and magnetic field is called electromagnetic induction. Both the electric generator and electric motor are based on this principle. A generator converts motion energy into electricity. A motor converts electrical energy into motion energy.

Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (1745-1827)

An Italian physicist who invented the electric battery. The electrical unit "volt" is named for Volta.

Luigi Galvani (1737-1798)

An Italian physician and physicist, his early discoveries led to the invention of the voltaic pile

Alessandro Volta

An Italian scientist, made a great discovery. Created the first electric cell—then called the "voltaic pile". By connecting many of these cells together, he was able to "string a current" and create a battery. It is in honor of him that we rate batteries in volts. Finally, a safe and dependable source of electricity was available, making it easy for scientists to study electricity.

Benjamin Franklin

Discovered electricity with his famous kite-flying experiments in 1752. Created a device that involved spinning a big glass jug very fast and rubbed with different materials to generate bigger static electricity sparks.

Andrè-Maire Ampére (1775-1836)

French physicist who founded and named the science of electrodynamics, now know as electromagnetism. His name endures in everyday life in the ampere, the unit for measuring electric current.

Electricity

Kind of energy that can only be valued by the effects it gives. It is a fundamental part of the nature and it is one of the commonly used forms of energy. This word comes from the Greek word "elektron" which means amber.