Who Discovered Electricity?
The history of electricity goes back more than two thousand years, to the time the Ancient Greeks discovered that rubbing fur on amber caused an attraction between the two. By the 17th century, many electricity-related discoveries had been made, such as the invention of an early electrostatic generator, the differentiation between positive and negative currents, and the classification of materials as conductors or insulators. In the year 1600, English physician William Gilbert conned the term electric, from the Greek elektron, to identify the force that certain substances exert when rubbed against each other. While many believe Benjamin Franklin to be the father of electricity, current findings seem to show otherwise. In 1752, Franklin is said to have performed the famous experiment of flying a kite during a thunderstorm, which led to the discovery that lightning and electricity were somehow related. Modern scientists know this to be something of a tall tale, since being hit by lightni
The curious thing about electricity is that it has been studied for thou sands of yearsand we still dont know exactly what it is! Today, all matter is thought to consist of tiny charged particles. Electricity, according to this theory, is simply a moving stream of electrons or other charged particles. The word electricity comes from the Greek word electron. And do you know what this word meant? It was the Greek word for amber! You see, as far back as 600 B.C. the Greeks knew that when amber was rubbed, it became capable of attracting to it light bits of cork or paper. Not much progress was made in the study of electricity until 1672. In that year, a man called Otto von Guericke produced a more powerful charge of electricity by holding his hand against a ball of spinning sulphur. In 1729, Stephen Gray found that some substances, such as metals, carried electricity from one location to another. These came to be called conductors.
