Long before electric power in homes became mainstream, the standard form of electricity in the United States was the DC system that Edison developed through General Electric. Over the next several years, “the direct current versus alternating current (AC)” debate captured attention, as Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse (who championed AC), competed for contracts. The station that powered the home used the direct current (DC) system developed by Thomas Edison. The glow was bright enough to read by, and this discovery would eventually lead to neon lighting a few centuries later.įast forward to September 1882, when a house in Appleton, Wisconsin became the first American home to be powered by hydroelectricity. In the early 1700s – decades before Franklin’s kite – English scientist Francis Hauksbee made a glass ball that glowed when rubbed while experimenting with electrical attraction and repulsion. The exploration of electricity went up a notch during the next century, though and things started heating up. The next major text about electricity, Experiments and Notes about the Mechanical Origin or Production of Electricity was published in 1675 by English chemist and physicist Robert William Boyle. But it wasn’t until two thousand years later, in the 1600s, that English physician and physicist William Gilbert published the first theories about electricity in his book, De Magnete. when Thales of Miletus discovered static electricity by rubbing fur on amber. The first documentation in the history of electricity dates all the way back to 500 B.C. But – amazingly – it has only been an everyday aspect of our lives for a little over a century.īack in 1752, when Benjamin Franklin demonstrated that lightning was electrical with his famous kite experiment, people couldn’t even fathom the many conveniences and luxuries that electricity would bring to the 20 th and 21 st centuries. Electricity is an essential part of modern life so vital that most of us cannot imagine a life without it.
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