The History of Electricity

Physician William Gilbert published De Magnete, the first systematic experimental study of electricity and magnetism. Gilbert coined the term "electric" from the Greek word for amber and distinguished static electricity from magnetism, founding the scientific study of the subject.

Location: London, England

Benjamin Franklin's kite-and-key experiment demonstrated that lightning was electrical in nature, unifying atmospheric electricity with laboratory static electricity. The insight led directly to the lightning rod, the first practical application of electrical science and a milestone in the argument that nature's dangers could be mastered through experiment.

Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Alessandro Volta announced the voltaic pile, the first source of steady electric current, resolving the dispute with Galvani by showing "animal electricity" came from dissimilar metals, not tissue. For the first time, scientists could study continuous current rather than momentary static discharges, and the piles soon split water into hydrogen and oxygen, founding electrochemistry.

Location: Pavia, Italy

Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction — a changing magnetic field produces electric current — the principle underlying every generator and transformer. The discovery made mechanical power convertible into electrical power, though practical dynamos and distribution lay decades ahead. Hippolyte Pixii built the first hand-cranked generator the following year.

Location: London, England

Thomas Edison's Pearl Street Station, the first permanent investor-owned central power plant, began supplying direct current to 59 customers in lower Manhattan, including J.P. Morgan's offices and several newspaper presses. The plant demonstrated that centralized electricity could be sold as a service, opening the electrical utility industry.

Location: New York City, USA

George Westinghouse installed the first commercial alternating current system in Great Barrington, using transformers to step high transmission voltages down for safe indoor lighting. AC could carry power economically over long distances from large central stations — a structural advantage over Edison's low-voltage DC, which served only customers within about a mile of the plant.

Location: Great Barrington, Massachusetts, USA

Edison's company, claiming alternating current's high voltages were a public hazard, backed engineer Harold Brown's public demonstrations in which animals were electrocuted with AC and pushed legislation to limit AC installations; Westinghouse answered with engineering arguments and safety equipment. The two camps also colluded with Edison's rival Thomson-Houston to ensure the first electric chair (William Kemmler, August 1890) ran on Westinghouse AC generators, to brand AC as lethal. The campaign was fierce but did not alter the engineering verdict.

Location: New York, USA

At the Frankfurt international electrical exhibition, Oskar von Miller demonstrated long-distance transmission of three-phase alternating current over 175 km (109 mi) from a hydro station at Lauffen with roughly 75 percent efficiency — remarkable for its day. The demonstration and the 1893-96 Westinghouse installations at the Chicago World's Fair and Niagara Falls convinced engineers and utilities worldwide, and AC became the standard for power transmission.

Location: Frankfurt am Main, Germany

President Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration to lend money for building cooperative power lines, targeting a countryside where only about one farm in ten had electricity in 1930. With parallel programs abroad — Britain's national grid (1926 act), the Soviet GOELRO plan (1920), and postwar campaigns across Europe and Asia — rural electrification became one of the largest state infrastructure projects of the century.

Location: Washington, D.C., USA

The Soviet Obninsk plant became the first nuclear power station to deliver electricity to a commercial grid, a 5 MWe reactor proving the concept of civilian atomic power. It was followed by Calder Hall in Britain (1956) and Shippingport in the US (1957), beginning an era in which uranium would supply a growing share of world electricity.

Location: Obninsk, USSR

Britain privatized and restructured its electricity industry, separating generation, transmission, and supply and creating a competitive power market; Chile had pioneered the model in the 1980s and several US states followed in the 1990s. California's 2000-2001 crisis, with rolling blackouts and market manipulation by Enron traders, became the cautionary case that checked the deregulation wave and reshaped electricity market design worldwide.

Location: United Kingdom

Falling solar and wind costs drove the fastest capacity additions in the industry's history, while the generation mix shifted from coal toward renewables and natural gas in most major economies. Wind and solar reached the largest share of new capacity additions globally by the 2010s and electricity became the backbone of decarbonization policy — electric vehicles, heat pumps, and data centers pushing power demand to new records in the 2020s.