Can someone explain how electricity was discovered and how it works?
Like how did we go from lamps and torches to being able to generate electricity and have it run basically everything?
In: Technology
Electricity is the movement of electromagnetic charge. Metals have the nice quality of having electrons that are very weakly bound to their nuclei, so much so that it’s very easy to push them in one direction through that metal, say, through a wire. Those electrons themselves move very slowly, and they only matter because they carry that charge. What that moving charge does for us varies: in a toaster or an old light bulb, forcing them through a “bottleneck” of sorts causes “friction”, which makes the wire heat up. In most things, electricity is used to make a motor spin.
A moving magnetic field will “push” charged particles (like electrons), and create a current in a metal wire. A current in a wire will do the opposite – create a moving magnetic field. Spinning is the easiest way to keep moving forever, so making a coil of wire spin around a magnet will create a a flow of electricity. Anything in the world that can make that coil spin – a wind turbine, a water turbine, a dog on a treadmill – can make electricity flow.
And an electric motor is just as simple – feed electricity through the wire, and it’ll make the magnet spin. Hook up your wheel or blender or ceiling fan to the magnet. In fact, any electric motor can also be a generator. The realization that these two things were the same force, in reverse of each other, was a step in realizing that magnetism and electricity are part of the same force, electromagnetism!
Batteries work a different way. They basically have one side with a ton of extra charge, and one side with a huge deficit. If you connect the two sides with a wire, electrons are going to want to move from one to the other, to balance it out. Think of it like two buckets, one filled with more water than the other – if you let the water flow, it’ll flow from one to the other until they even out. Attach something to the middle of that, and the electrons do work while they’re going – like putting a water wheel between the buckets.
Latest Answers