History of electricity
Early History of Electric Power
Date Event Pictures
1800-1819 Early electric experiments were performed with DC. In 1800, Alessandro Volta published a description of a silver/zinc battery, acknowledging that he did not know how it worked. In 1807, Humphry Davy constructed a practical battery (the picture will be immediately familiar to anyone who works with UPS systems), and demonstrated both incandescent and arc light. • Volta's famous bi-metalic frog twitch
(I did this one myself as a boy...)
• Davy's battery
1820 Hans Christian Örsted (1777-1851) discovers that an electric current can cause a compass needle to change directions. • Örsted's experiment
1831 Michael Faraday (1791-1867) builds the first electric generator, the "Faraday disk", proving that rotary mechanical power can be converted into electric power. The race for a practical generator begins. • Faraday's disk
1832-1860 Various generator schemes are tried, mostly employing permanent magnets to create the necessary magnetic field. Ampère and Pixii make the first hand-cranked version (1832); C.G. Page proposed a reciprocating analogue of the steam engine (1850); and H. Wilde made the commercially successful Alliance generator (1866) for powering arc lamps in lighthouses. (An interesting side note: much of the clever work to improve generators was done by instrument makers, such as E.M. Clarke of London, who used galvanic current to "cure" illnesses.) All of these generators employed permanent magnets. • Ampère/Pixii's generator
• Page's generator
• Wilde's lighthouse generator
1866 Werner Siemens (1816-1892) perfects the dynamo, a generator in which part of the generator's working current is used to power the field windings, eliminating both the need for permanent magnets and one of the basic limits to generating electric power. Several other inventors, including Wheatstone and Wilde, reached almost the same design at almost the same time, but there is no doubt that Siemens had
Date Event Pictures
1800-1819 Early electric experiments were performed with DC. In 1800, Alessandro Volta published a description of a silver/zinc battery, acknowledging that he did not know how it worked. In 1807, Humphry Davy constructed a practical battery (the picture will be immediately familiar to anyone who works with UPS systems), and demonstrated both incandescent and arc light. • Volta's famous bi-metalic frog twitch
(I did this one myself as a boy...)
• Davy's battery
1820 Hans Christian Örsted (1777-1851) discovers that an electric current can cause a compass needle to change directions. • Örsted's experiment
1831 Michael Faraday (1791-1867) builds the first electric generator, the "Faraday disk", proving that rotary mechanical power can be converted into electric power. The race for a practical generator begins. • Faraday's disk
1832-1860 Various generator schemes are tried, mostly employing permanent magnets to create the necessary magnetic field. Ampère and Pixii make the first hand-cranked version (1832); C.G. Page proposed a reciprocating analogue of the steam engine (1850); and H. Wilde made the commercially successful Alliance generator (1866) for powering arc lamps in lighthouses. (An interesting side note: much of the clever work to improve generators was done by instrument makers, such as E.M. Clarke of London, who used galvanic current to "cure" illnesses.) All of these generators employed permanent magnets. • Ampère/Pixii's generator
• Page's generator
• Wilde's lighthouse generator
1866 Werner Siemens (1816-1892) perfects the dynamo, a generator in which part of the generator's working current is used to power the field windings, eliminating both the need for permanent magnets and one of the basic limits to generating electric power. Several other inventors, including Wheatstone and Wilde, reached almost the same design at almost the same time, but there is no doubt that Siemens had