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
A very good summary is at https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/who-invented-electricty and is of ELI5 level.
Essentially, over a long period of time more and more people began to understand what and how electricity behaved. Benjamin Franklin, often credited as the discoverer of electricity, was merely another link in the chain.
Electricity, as we now know, is the movement of electrons between the shells of atoms. Some atoms have a space where an electron could fit, and are thus positively charged, and some have too many and are negatively charged.
In conductors like metals, the atoms’ electrons are loosely connected and are somewhat of a ‘sea’, shared easily between neighbouring atoms. Insulators have tightly bound electrons. Semiconductors are complicated and somewhere in between.
The biggest breakthrough in understanding electricity generation was that electricity and magnetism are part of the same phenomenon. A moving electrical current has a magnetic field; a moving magnetic field generates an electric current. Almost all electricity generation (excluding solar and batteries) is done by spinning magnets near coils of wires, causing electrons to be pushed out.
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