Electricity isn’t just wires and outlets. Its history includes fake experiments, brutal PR wars, and vehicles that predate gasoline cars.
When you stop and think about it, it’s mind-blowing how we’ve harnessed electricity to build and power our societies. It almost seems like magic, taking the same natural phenomenon that powers our brains and muscles and using it to do everything else. We all learned in school how the discovery and use of electricity changed human society forever, sure, but the technology has been around for so long (power lines were invented earlier than you may realize) that we take it for granted. Even so, electricity is a topic that continues to surprise you the deeper you dig into it. You’ll even hear electricians say they don’t fully understand it, and that no one truly does. In that spirit, we want to look at a few things you might not have known about electricity.
Now, obviously, everyone’s schooling experience is unique. It’s possible you learned some or all of the following. If that’s the case, congrats, we’re glad your school was funded and your teachers cared. Regardless, we hope that at least a couple of the following are surprises and deepen your appreciation for the thing you don’t think twice about when plugging in your phone charger.Benjamin Franklin didn’t discover electricity, and his kite experiment may not have happened
Every American child knows the story that Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a storm with a key attached to the string and nearly electrocuted himself when lightning struck. Since this supposedly happened in the 1700s, before electricity became commonplace, the assumption is that Franklin discovered it. Not really. Humans had observed electricity for thousands of years, even if their understanding was more primitive than ours today.
BBC Science Focus provides an excellent précis on scientific discoveries related to electricity. Thales of Miletus was one of the first people in recorded history to observe static electricity, a Greek philosopher active around 585 BCE. We get the word electricity from the 15th century, and experiments in the following centuries expanded our knowledge of how to conduct it, insulate it, and store it, long before Franklin was born. It’s also important to note that Benjamin Franklin was a renaissance man, someone with many interests, not just electricity. Many scientists came after Franklin who dedicated their lives to studying the phenomenon in greater depth and shaped what we have today.
Perhaps more importantly, the historical record raises doubt about Franklin’s famous kite experiment. Though it’s written down as happening in June of 1752, no one knows for certain where Franklin did it — or whether he performed it himself. It doesn’t help that he neglected to tell people about it for months afterward and failed to clearly document that he was the one who conducted the experiment (via NPS). To be fair, there is some evidence for this account, rather than a whole-cloth fabrication like Washington’s cherry tree myth. Franklin was an incredible man who made many invaluable contributions, but his kite story may not be one of them.Lightning gets 5x hotter than the sun
That’s right, a bolt of lightning on Earth — a place famous for being in the Goldilocks zone of habitability — can somehow get hotter than our own resident star. Of course, there is a bit of nuance here. Lightning itself isn’t the one clocking in at 10 large.
