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Who Invented Electricity
English physician William Gilbert published the first scientific study of electrical and magnetic
phenomena in 1600. Gilbert was the first to apply the term electric (Greek elektron) to the force that
such substances exert after rubbing. He also distinguished between magnetic and electric action.
Faraday made many contributions to the study of electricity in the early 19th century was also
responsible for the theory of electric lines of force.
The Italian physicists Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta conducted the first important experiments
in electrical currents. Galvani produced muscle contraction in the legs of frogs by applying an
electric current to them. Volta in 1800 announced the first artificial electrochemical source of
potential difference, a form of electric battery. The Danish scientist Hans Christian Oersted
demonstrated the fact that a magnetic field exists around an electric current flow in 1819, and in 1831
Faraday proved that a current flowing in a coil of wire could induce electro magnetically a current
in a nearby coil. About 1840 James Prescott Joule and the German scientist Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz
demonstrated that electric circuits obey the law of the conservation of energy and that electricity is a form of energy.
The Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz first advanced the electron theory, which is the basis
of modern electrical theory, in 1892. The American physicist Robert Andrews Millikan first accurately
measured the charge on the electron in 1909. The widespread use of electricity as a source of power
is largely due to the work of such pioneering American engineers and inventors as
Thomas Alva Edison, Nikola Tesla, and Charles Proteus Steinmetz.
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