Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity -- Jim Al-Khalili BBC Horizon

At the dawn of the 19th century, in a basement in Mayfair, the most famous scientist of the time, Humphrey Davy, built an extraordinary electrical apparatus four meters wide and twice as long, containing stinking piles of acid and metal with the that had been created to pump more.

electricity

that had never been possible before; In fact, it was the largest battery the world had ever seen and with it Davy was about to propel us into a new era; that moment would take place at a conference at the Royal Institution in front of hundreds of London students. Big and good, full of anticipation filled the seats in the hope of witnessing an exciting new electrical marvel, but what they would see that night would be something truly unique, something they would remember for the rest of their lives using just two simple carbon rods.

Humphrey Davy was about to unleash the true potential of

electricity

. Electricity is one of the most amazing phenomena in nature and the most powerful manifestation we have ever seen is lightning. This is the

story

of how we first dreamed of controlling this primordial force of nature and how we would finally achieve it. Become Their Master is a 300-year

story

of dazzling leaps of imagination and extraordinary experiments is a story of maverick geniuses who used electricity to light our cities to communicate across seas and air to create a modern industry and give us the digital revolution, but In this film we will tell the story of the first scientists who began to discover the mysteries of electricity.

Is there something alive there? They studied its curious link with life. They built strange and powerful instruments to create it and even tamed lightning. these men who really laid the foundation of the modern world and it all started with a spark imagine our world without electricity it will be very cold and silent in many ways it will be like the beginning of the 18th century where the story begins this is the Royal Society in London at the beginning of 1700, after years in the wilderness, Isaac Newton finally took control of it after the death of his archenemy Robert Hooke Newton brought his own people to key positions to help shore up his new position, the new head of The Demonstrations who took place were Frances Hawkes, 35 years old.

Notes from the Royal Society in 1705 reveal how hard Hawks tried to imprint her personality on her weekly meetings, producing increasingly spectacular experiments to impress her teachers. In November he came up with this rotating glass sphere. He was able to remove the air inside using a new machine, the air pump on his machine, a handle allowed him to spin the sphere one by one, the tangles in the room were removed and Francis placed his hand against the sphere where the audience was. . About to see something amazing inside the glass sphere, a strange ethereal light began to form dancing around his hand, a light that no one had seen before, that's fantastic, a suit, beautiful blue glows mark the shape of my hands , but then they spin around the board.

There is something alive there, it is difficult to really understand why this dancing blue light meant so much, but we must keep in mind that at the time when natural phenomena like this were considered the work of the Almighty, this was still a period when even in La Isaac Newton's theory God was constantly intervening in the behavior of the world and that is why it made sense to many people to interpret natural phenomena as acts of God, so when a mere mortal meddled in the work of God it was almost beyond belief. rational understanding. Hawks, we never realized.

Upon realizing the full significance of his experiment, he lost interest in the shiny sphere of it and spent the last years of his life building increasingly spectacular experiments for Isaac Newton to test his other theories. He never realized that he had unknowingly started an electrical revolution before Hawke's Bay electricity had spread. It has been simply a curiosity, the ancient Greeks rubbed amber which they called electron to obtain small discharges and even Queen Elizabeth was the first to marvel at the power of static electricity to raise feathers, but now Hawkes's bee machine could generate electricity with just the turn of a handle and you could see it. and perhaps even more important, his invention coincided with the birth of a new movement that spread throughout Europe called the Enlightenment.

Enlightenment intellectuals used reason to question the world and their legacy was radical politics, iconoclastic art and philosophy or natural science, but, ironically, Hawkes B's new machine was immediately adopted by most of these intellectuals, but by conjurers and street magicians, and those interested in electricity called themselves electricians. One story goes that at a dinner attended by an Austrian count, the electrician had placed some feathers on the table and then charged them. a glass rod with a silk scarf, then surprised the guests by raising their feathers with the rod, then charged himself using one of Hawkes B's electric machines and gave the guests electric

shock

s presumably to screams of delight, but to your ps2. resistance placed a glass of cognac in the center of the table he charged it again and lit it with a spark from the tip of his finger there was a trick called electric beatification in which the victim sits in an isolated chair and on top of his head hangs a metal crown that does not touch his head and then, if the crown is electrified, an electric discharge occurs around the crown that looks exactly like a halo, that is why it is called electric beatification, like England and the rest did of Europe.

Mad about electricity, the shows got bigger and the more curious electricians began to ask deeper questions, not only how can we make our shows bigger and better, but also how can we control this incredible power and, for some, This amazing electric fire can do more than just entertain one. One of the first breakthroughs would never have happened if it hadn't been for a terrible accident. This is Charterhouse in central London. For the past 400 years it has been a charity home for young orphans and the elderly and at some point in the 1720s it also became their home. to a Steven Gray Steven Gray had been a successful Canterbury silk dyer.

He was used to seeing electric sparks jump from silk and they fascinated him. Unfortunately, a crippling accident ended his career and left him destitute, but he was then offered a new life here at Charterhouse and with it the time to carry out his own electrical experiments here at Charterhouse, possibly in this very room, the great chamber. . Steven Grade built a wooden frame from the overhead beam, suspended two swings with a silk rope. He also had a device like this, a falcon B. machine for generating static electricity now with a large audience and attendance made one of the orphan children who lived here at Charterhouse lie on the two swings.

Gray placed a gold leaf in front of him. He then generated electricity and charged the child through a connection. rod of gold leaf, even feathers left on the boy's fingers, some audience members claimed they could even see sparks coming from his fingertips, showbiz, but to the curious and inquisitive mind of Stephen Gray, This said something else, too, electricity could move from the machine. to the boy's body to his hands but the silk rope stopped him in his tracks. It meant that the mysterious electrical fluid could flow through some things but not others. It led Gray to divide the world into two different types of substances to which which he called insulators and insulating conductors had electrical charge inside them and did not let it move like silk or hair, glass and resin, while conductors allowed electricity to flow through them like child or metals, It's a distinction that remains crucial even today, just think of these power towers they work with.

According to the same principle that was used almost 300 years ago, cables are conductors. The glass and ceramic objects between the cable and the metal of the tower are insulators that stop electricity from leaking from the cables to the tower and to the ground. Like the silk ropes in Gray's experiment in the 1730s, Gray's experiment may have amazed everyone who saw it, but it had a frustrating drawback, as Gray was unable to contain the electricity he was generating for long time, it came out of the machine at the child and quickly left, the next step in our story came when we learned how to store electricity, but that would not take place in Britain but on the other side of the channel, in continental Europe, on the other side Electrical research was carried out here in Leiden, Holland, and it was here that a professor came up with an invention that many still consider the most significant of the 18th century and which in one form or another can still be found in almost all electrical devices today.

Was Pieter van mushin Brooke, as opposed to Hawkes, who was a gray mission? Brooke was born into academia but, ironically, his breakthrough came not because of his rigorous science but because of simple human error: he was trying to find a way to store electrical charge ready for his demonstrations and you can almost hear his train of thought as he try to solve this. If electricity is a fluid that flows a bit like water, then maybe you can store it the same way you can store water, so Mission Brooke went to his lab to try. To make a device to store electricity in motion Brooke began to think literally, he took a glass jar and poured some water, then placed inside it a piece of conductive wire that was connected at the top to an electric speed machine falcon and then put the jar.

In an insulator to help keep the charge in the jar, he then tried pouring the electricity into the jar produced by the machine through the wire into the water, but no matter how hard he tried, the charge just wouldn't stay in the jar, so one day. by accident he forgot to put the flask on the insulator but he charged it while it was still in his hand finally holding the flask with one hand he touched the top with the other and received an electric

shock

so powerful that he was almost knocked to the ground. write that it is a new but terrible experiment that I advise you never to try and I, who have experienced it and survived it by the grace of God, would do it again for the entire kingdom of France, so I will follow your advice and not touch the above , but instead I'll see if I can get a spark out of it, the sheer power of the electricity that flew out of the jar was greater than anything seen before and even more amazing, the jar was able to store that electricity for hours and even days, in honor of the city. where Motion Brooke made his discovery, they called it the Leyden jar and its fame spread throughout the world and very quickly from 1745 to the rest of the 1740s, the news of this, the so-called Leyden jar, goes global and extends from Japan in East Asia to Philadelphia. in eastern America it became one of the first globalized fast science news but although the Leyden jar became a global electrical phenomenon no one had the slightest idea how it worked you have a jar of electrical fluid and it turns out you get a bigger shock from the jar, if you allow the electrical fluid to drain into the ground, why is the discharge greater if the jars leak?

Why isn't the discharge greater if you make sure all the electrical fluid remains inside the jar? That's how it was in the middle of the 18th century. Electrical philosophers took up this challenge. Electricity was indeed a fantastic wonder. It could cause electric shock and sparks. It could now be stored and moved. But what electricity was, how it worked and why all these things were nothing less than a complete mystery after ten years. A new breakthrough would come from an unexpected quarter of a man politically and philosophically at war with the London establishment and, even more surprising to the British electrical elite, that man was simply an American colonialist.

This painting by Benjamin Franklin hangs here at the Royal Society. In London, Franklin was a passionate supporter of American emancipation and saw the pursuit of rational science and particularly electricity as a way to push back against ignorant false idols and, ultimately, their intellectually elitist colonial masters, and This is mixed with a deeply egalitarian democratic idea that Franklin and his allies have that is a phenomenon open to all here is something the elite doesn't really understand and we could understand it here is something the elite can't really control but we could control and hereThere is something above all of which is a source of superstition and we, rational, egalitarian and potentially democratic intellectuals, will be able to reason it without seeming slaves to magic or mystery, so Franklin decided to use the power of reason to rationally explain what many They considered a magical phenomenon.

Lightning This is probably one of the most famous scientific images of the 18th century. It shows Benjamin Franklin, the heroic scientist flying a kite in a storm, proving that lightning is electrical, but although Franklin proposed this experiment, he almost certainly never performed it. It is much more likely that his most significant experiment was another that he proposed but did not even carry out, in fact it did not even happen in the United States, it took place here in a small town north of Paris called Mali. The French adored Franklin, especially his anti-British politics, and took it upon themselves to conduct their other lightning experiments without him.

I arrived at the same spot where that experiment took place in May 1750. George Louis LeClair, known throughout France as the Comte de Buffon, and his friend Thomas Francois de Labarre erected a 40-foot metal pole, more than twice as tall than this one, supported by three wooden staves right outside a delicatessen here in Mali. The metal pole rested at the bottom inside an empty wine bottle. Franklin's big idea had been that the long pole would capture the lightning bolt, run it through the metal rod, and store it in the wine bottle at the base, which functioned like a Leyden jar, then he could confirm what lightning actually was.

It was all his French followers had to do was wait for a storm and then on May 23, the heavens opened at 12:20, a loud clap of thunder was heard as lightning struck the top of the pole, an attendant ran Towards the bottle, a spark left a cross between the metal and his finger with a loud crack and a smell of sulfur burning his hand. The spark revealed what the lightning really was. It was the same as electricity produced by man. It is difficult to overestimate the meaning of this moment Not only that nature had been dominated, but the wrath of God itself had been placed under the control of humanity, it was a kind of heresy.

Franklin's experiment was very important because it showed that thunderstorms produce or are produced by electricity and that this electricity can be reduced. a force of nature that is waiting to be harnessed next. Franklin turned his rational mind to another question: why did the Leyden jar produce the largest sparks when held in his hand, why didn't he just drain off all the electricity and take advantage of his experience? As a successful businessman, he saw something that no one else had and that he liked: money in a bank, electricity can be in credit, what he called positive or debit, negative for him, the Leyden jar problem is an Accounting problem, Franklin's idea was that everyone had it around them.

An ideal American economy The Quinn's idea was that electricity was actually simply a positive charge that flowed to cancel the negative charge and he believed that this simple idea could solve the mystery of Leyden's jar. As the jar becomes charged, the negative electric charge is poured out. along the cable and in the water, if the bottle rests on an insulator, a small amount accumulates in the water, but if, instead, someone holds the bottle while it is charging, the positive electrical charge is absorbed through their body from the ground to the outside of the jar trying to cancel out the negative charge inside, but the glass, which acts as an insulator, prevents the positive and negative charges from canceling out, so the charge just grows and grows on both sides of the jar. glass and then touch the top of the jar with your other hand.

It completes a circuit that allows the negative charge on the inside to pass through the hand to the positive charge on the outside, ultimately canceling it out. The movement of this charge causes a massive discharge and often a spark. The modern equivalents of the Leyden jar are the capacitor and It is one of the most ubiquitous electronic components. It is found everywhere. There are several smaller ones scattered across this computer circuit board. They help smooth out electrical surges and protect sensitive components in even the most modern electrical circuits. They solve the mystery of Leyden. Jar and recognize lightning as simply a species of electricity were two big hits for Franklin and the new Enlightenment movement, but the forces of commerce that helped fuel the Enlightenment were about to throw up a new and even more baffling electrical mystery, a completely new type. of electricity this is the English Channel in the 17th and 18th centuries a good fraction of the world's wealth flowed through this expanse of water from all corners of the British Empire and beyond on its way to London spices from India sugar from the Caribbean wheat from America tea from China but of course it was not just trade, new plants and animal specimens from all over the world arrived in London, including one that particularly fascinated the electrician called the torpedo fish, it has been the stuff of fishermen's tales, it Its stinger was said to be capable of knocking down a grown man, but when electricians began investigating the sting, they realized that it felt eerily similar to a discharge from a Leyden jar.

Could it actually be an electric shock? But first, many people dismiss torpedo fish as a cult. some said it was probably just the fish biting others it couldn't be a shock because without a spark it just wasn't electricity but to most this was a very strange and unexplainable new mystery and would take one of the strangest yet. brilliant figures of British science to begin to discover the secrets of the torpedo fish this is the only image that exists of the pathologically shy but exceptional Henry Cavendish this only exists because an artist drew his coat while it was hanging from a hanger and then filled in the From memory, His family was incredibly wealthy, they were the Devonshires who still owned Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, but Henry Cavendish decided to turn his back on his family's wealth and status to live in London, near his beloved Royal Society, where he could dedicate himself. calmly to his passion. experimental science when he heard about the electric torpedo fish he was intrigued a friend wrote to him about it my first experience with the effects of the torpedo I exclaimed that this is certainly electricity but how and to discover how a living being could produce electricity he decided to make his own artificial fish these are his plans for the fish-shaped Leyden jars that were buried under the sand when the sand was touched they discharged giving a nasty shock his model helped him convince himself that the real torpedo fish was electric but he still came out with a persistent problem, although both the real and Cavendish's artificial fish gave him powerful electric shocks, the real fish never caused sparks.

Cavendish was perplexed, how could it be the same type of electricity if they both didn't do the same type of things? Cavendish spent the winter of 1773 in his laboratory trying to find an answer and in the spring he had a brain wave. Cavendish's ingenious response was to point out a subtle distinction between the amount of electricity and its intensity that the real fish producing the same color of electricity is simply that it was now less intense. For a physicist like me, this marks a crucial turning point because it is the moment when two genuinely innovative scientific ideas first emerge, what Cavendish calls the amount of electricity we now call electric charge and its intensity is what he calls the potential voltage difference, so the clash of the jars Leyden was high voltage but low charge, while the fish was low voltage and high charge and it is possible to measure that hidden at the bottom of this tank under the sand is the Mar Murata torpedo and its electric beam, you can see his eyes sticking out of the sand.

This is an adult female and I am going to try to measure the electricity she emits with this bait. I have this fish attached to a metal rod and hooked. to an oscilloscope to see if I can measure the voltage as it catches its prey, so here it goes, oh there's one and there's another, the fish gave a shock of about 240 volts, the same as mains electricity, but approximately ten times less than the Leyden jar. well, that would have given me a pretty unpleasant shock and I can only try to imagine what it must have been like for 18th century scientists to witness this an animal a fish producing its own electricity Cavendish had shown that the torpedo fish generated electricity but he didn't know if it was the same type of electricity as that produced by an electric machine, the electric discharge produced by a torpedo is the same as that produced by an electric machine or there are two types depending on the type that is generated artificially.

Or is there a type of animal electricity that only exists in living bodies? A great debate that divided opinion for several decades and from that bitter debate arose a new discovery: the discovery that electricity does not have to be a brief shot or spark, but can actually be continuous and the generation of electricity continues. would ultimately propel us into our modern era, but the next step in the history of electricity would occur due to a fierce personal and professional rivalry between two Italian academics: this is the University of Bologna, one of the oldest in Europe. At the end of the 18th century, the city of Bologna was governed from papal Rome, which meant that the university was powerful but conservative in its thinking, it was steeped in traditional Christianity, one in which God ruled the earth from heaven, but the way he ruled the world was hidden.

Of us, mere mortals, we were not meant to understand him just to serve him and one of the brightest stars of the university was the anatomist Luigi Eliseo Galvani but in a neighboring city a rival electrician was about to reprimand Galvani this is Jávea only one hundred fifty kilometers from Bologna, but at the end of the 18th century, politically separated worlds, it was part of the Austrian Empire, which placed it at the very heart of the European liberal Enlightenment, in its thought politically radical and obsessed with the new science of electricity, it was also his home. for Alessandro Volta Alessandro Volta could not have been more different from Galvani, from an old Lombard family, he was an arrogant, charismatic young man, a real womanizer and sought controversy, unlike Galvani, he would like to show his experiments on an international stage to anyone jumping public. ideas were not limited by religious dogma Galvani like Benjamin Franklin and the European Enlightenment he believed in rationality scientific truth like a Greek god would throw the ignorant to the ground superstition was the enemy reason was the future both men were fascinated by electricity and both brought their different ways of seeing the world that influenced it Galvani had been attracted by the use of electricity in medical treatments, for example, in 1759, here in Bologna, electricity was used in the muscles of a paralyzed man One report said it was a beautiful sight to see the mastoid. rotate the head, the biceps, bend the elbow, in short, to see the strength and vitality of all the movements that occur in each paralyzed muscle subjected to the stimulus.

Galvani believed that these types of examples revealed that the body functioned using animal electricity, a fluid that flows from the brain. through the nerves to the muscles where it is set in motion and whoever devised a series of gruesome experiments to test it now first prepared a frog, he writes, the frog is skinned and gutted, leaving only the attached lower limbs containing only the cruel nerves. I left my frog mostly intact, but exposed the nerves that connect to the frog's legs, then used the hawk bee electrical machine to generate the electrostatic charge that would build up and travel along this arm and out through this copper wire, then connected the load takes one wire to the Frog and another to the nerve just above the neck, let's see what happens.

Oh, and the frog's leg twitches just as it makes contact. There we go now for Galvani. What was happening there was that there is a strange and special type of entity in them in the animal muscle that he calls animal electricity. It is not like any other electricity. It is intrinsic to living beings but to Volta animal electricity smacked of superstition and magic. took place in rational and enlightened science Volta saw the experiment completely differently than Galvani he believed that it revealed something totally new to him: the legs jumped as a result of the release of animal electricity from within them, but due to artificial electricity from outside, thelegs were simply the indicator that they were only contracting due to the horse's electricity. being a machine in Bologna, Galvani reacted furiously to the jumper's ideas, he believed that Volta had crossed a fundamental line from the electrical experiment to the kingdom of God and that this was equivalent to heresy to have a kind of spirit like electricity, produce it artificially and say that that spirit that living force that agency was the same as something produced by God that God had put in a living human body or in the body of a frog that seemed sacrilege to them because it was eliminating this boundary between the realm of the divine of God and the mundane realm of the material.

Spurred on by his religious indignation, Galvani announced a new set of experimental results that would prove Volta wrong. During one of his experiments he hung his frogs from an iron wire and saw something totally unexpected if he connected a copper wire to the frog's wire. He dangled and then touched the other end of the copper to the nerve, it seemed to him that he could make the frog's leg move without any electricity. Cavani concluded that there must be something inside the frog, even if it was dead, that continued for a time after death to produce some type of electricity and the metal wires somehow released that electricity for the next month.

Galvani's experiments focused on isolating electricity from this animal using combinations of frogs and metal Leyden jars and electrical machines for Galvani. These experiments were a test. that electricity originated within the frog itself the muscles of the frog were Leyden jars that stored the electrical fluid and then released it in a burst. On October 30, 1786 he published his findings in a book of animal electricity. Galvani was so sure of his ideas that he sent a copy of his book to Volta, but Volta simply couldn't digest Galvani's idea about animal electricity; He thought that electricity had to come from somewhere else, but from where in the 1790s here at the University of Pavia almost certainly in this lecture hall that still bears his name Voltar began his search for the new source of electricity his Suspicions centered on the metals that Galvani had used to make his frog legs tremble.

His curiosity had been aroused by a strange phenomenon that he had encountered. When testing combinations of metals, he discovered that if he took two coins of different metals and placed on the tip of his tongue and then placed a silver spoon on top of both, he obtained a kind of tingling sensation similar to the tingling sensation felt when tasting a discharge from a Leyden jar. Volta concluded that he could taste the electricity and that it must come from the contact between the different metals in the coins and the spoon. His theory went against Galvani's: the frog's leg changed not because of its own animal electricity but because it was reacting to the electricity of the metals, but the electricity his coins generated was incredibly weak, how could he make it stronger? ?

Then an idea occurred to him while he was reviewing the scientific papers of the great British scientist Henry Cavendish and in particular his famous work on the electric torpedo fish that he went back and took a closer look at the torpedo fish and in particular the repeating pattern. of cameras on his back. He wondered if it was this repeating pattern that held the key to his powerful electrical discharge, perhaps each chamber was like his coins and spoon, each generating. A small amount of electricity and perhaps the powerful shock of the fish are the result of the chamber pattern repeating itself over and over with increasing confidence in his new ideas.

Volta decided to fight back by building his own artificial version of the torpedo fish, so he copied the torpedo fish. repeating his pattern but using metal, this is what he did, he took a copper metal plate and then placed a piece of cardboard soaked in dilute acid on top, then on top he took another metal and placed it on top while here it was exactly the same. Something like Galvani's two wires, but now Volta repeated the process. What he was doing here was building a pile of metal. In fact, his invention was known as the battery, but it's what he could do.

That was the really incredible revelation. Volta then tested the stack on him. Himself taking two wires and attaching them to each end of the pile and bringing the other ends to touch his tongue, he could really taste the electricity, this time it was more powerful than normal and it was constant. He had created the first machine battery. It was no longer an electrical and mechanical machine, it was simply a purely electrical machine, so he demonstrated that a machine that imitated the fish could work, that what he called metal or contact with electricity of different methods could work and that he considered his last winning move.

In the controversy with Galvani, what the jumpers demonstrated was that all the phenomena of animal electricity could develop without any animals being present, so from the voltaic point of view it seemed that Galvani was wrong, there is nothing special about electricity in animals is electricity and can be completely imitated by this artificial battery, but the biggest surprise for Volta was that the electricity it generated was continuous, in fact it poured out like water in a stream and like in a stream where it is called the measure of the amount of water flowing. a current, so the electricity flowing out of the battery became known as electric current 200 years after Volta, we finally understand what electricity really is.

Atoms in metals, like all atoms, have electrically charged electrons surrounding a nucleus, but in metals atoms share their outer electrons. with each other in a unique way, meaning they can move from one atom to another if those electrons move in the same direction at the same time the cumulative effect is a movement of electric charge this flow of electrons is what we call electric current A Within weeks of publishing details of its stack, scientists were discovering something incredible about what it could do. The effect of it on ordinary water was completely unexpected. The constant flow of electrical charge in the water was tearing it apart into its constituent parts, the gases oxygen and hydrogen.

Electricity heralded the dawn of a new era, a new era in which electricity ceased to be a mere curiosity and began to be genuinely useful with a constant flow of electricity. New chemical elements could be isolated with ease and this laid the foundations of modern chemistry, physics and industry. changed the entire panel made Volta and the fate of international celebrities sit alongside the powerful and the rich in recognition a fundamental measure of electricity the vault was named in his honor but his scientific adversary did not fare so well Luigi Eliseo Galvani died on December 4, 1798, depressed and poor for me, although it is not the invention of the battery that marks the crucial turning point in the history of electricity, it is what happened next, it took place in the Royal Institution of London, it was a moment that marked the end of one era and the beginning of another, overseen by Humphrey Davy, the first of a new generation of electricians, confident young men fascinated by the possibilities of direct electric current, so who in 1808 built the largest battery in the world that filled an entire room beneath the Royal Institution he had completed. 800 individual voltaic batteries linked together, you must have hissed and breathed sulfur fumes in a dark room lit by candles and oil lamps of centuries-old technology.

Davy connected his battery to two carbon filaments and brought the ends together so that the continuous flow of electricity from the battery flowed through the filaments across the gap resulting in a constant, blindingly bright spark. Lights emerged from the darkness. Davy's arcs of light really symbolize the end of an era and the beginning of our era, the age of electricity, but there is a really creepy coda to this story. In 1803, Galvani's nephew won, Giovanni Aldini arrived in London with a terrifying new experiment. A convicted murderer named George Forster had just been hanged on new doors and when the body was removed from the gallows, he was taken directly to the conference room where Eldini began his macabre work using a voltaic battery, he began applying an electrical current to the body of the dead man, then Eldini placed one electrical conductor in the dead man's anus and the other at the top of his spine.

The limp corpse of Forester sat upright and his spine arched and twisted for a moment it seemed as if the corpse had come back to life, it seems as if electricity could have the power of resurrection and this had a profound impact on a young girl. writer named Mary Shelley Mary Shelley wrote one of the most powerful books and lasting stories based in part here on Lake As Frankenstein tells the story of a scientist. Galvin is probably based on Eldini who brings a monster to life using electricity and then, disgusted by his own arrogance, abandons the creation of it such as Davey's arc lamp that this book symbolizes. changing times the end of the era of miracles and romance and the beginning of the era of rationality industry and science and it is that new era that we explore in the next program because at the beginning of the 19th century scientists realized that Electricity was intimately connected to another of nature's mysterious forces, magnetism, and that understanding would completely transform our world.

Electricity is one of the greatest forces in nature, and by the mid-20th century, we had harnessed its two We light and power our modern world, hundreds of years of scientific discoveries and inventions brought us here, but it would take the eccentric genius of one man to unlock the full potential of electrical energy in the winter of 1943. Nikola Tesla looked at the cities along along the Manhattan skyline for the last time Tesla had been born in a world powered by steam and lit by gas but before his eyes he saw a new world a transformed world a world powered by electricity his fragile world lonely and still mourning the death of one of his beloved pigeons, this extraordinary and eccentric genius knew that his life's work was done and lay down on his bed to die.

It would be three days before someone found his body. Just over 200 years ago, the first scientists discovered that the Electricity could be much more than simply a static charge; It could be made to flow in a continuous stream, but they were about to discover something. It is profound that electricity is connected to magnetism. Harnessing the link between magnetism and electricity would completely transform the world and allow us to generate seemingly unlimited amounts of electrical energy. This is the story of how scientists and engineers discovered the nature of electricity and then used it in an extraordinary century of innovation and invention, but not before one of the most shocking engineering rivalries in the world was finally brought to an end. history.

Our story begins in London at the beginning of the 19th century with a young man who would advance our understanding of electricity as much as any other. Another, on February 29, 1812, a 20-year-old self-taught bookbinder named Michael Faraday came here to the Royal Institution of Great Britain, he was surrounded by the great and good of academia and was about to listen to one of the minds most important scientists of the time Faraday, the son of a blacksmith, had finished his formal education when he was only 12 years old. He would never make it to college, but he wasn't done learning because he was fascinated by science.

Faraday worked long and hard during the day. During the day he burned books, but at night he read all the scientific literature he could find. He loved to learn new things about the world and he had this constant desire. This passion to understand why things were the way they were. Reading scientific articles was one of them. But to really satisfy his hunger for knowledge, Faraday was desperate to see the experiments themselves and finally got his chance when he was given a ticket to attend one of the last lectures by England's greatest chemists at the time, Sir Humphrey Davy. . young Faraday's life forever after seeing Devi o inspired and full of ideas Faraday knew what he wanted to do with his life he was determined to dedicate himself to promoting science and that is just what he did after a year Devi had Appointed assistant at the Royal Institution, with Devi as his patron and well, his boss, Faraday studied all manner of chemistry, but what would inspire his greatest breakthroughs with the invisible forces of electricity and magnetism in 1820, both of which were studied by A Danish scientist Hans Christian Oersted, who had made an extraordinary discovery, passed an electric current through a copper rod and brought it to the needle of a magnetic compass and saw that it caused the needle to rotate towards the earth.

It was remarkable, he had demonstrated for the first time that electric currents cancreate a magnetic force. had united electricity and magnetism today we call it electromagnetism and it is one of the fundamental forces of nature versus the discovery unleashed a whole new discourse of inventive activity around the fields of electricity, you can almost see electrical experimenters competing against each other. Yeah. To find new links between electricity and the other powers of nature at the Royal Institution, Faraday set out to recreate Ted's work on Earth that would mark his first steps towards fame and fortune and, through his rigorous research, concluded that there must be a flow of forces acting between the wire and the compass needle the device he designed to demonstrate that would change the course of history Faraday created a circuit using a battery like this a pair of wires and a bath of mercury now the circuit continues through these copper poles and this wire hangs freely.

Now it hangs from the mercury because mercury is a good conductor. It completes the circuit when current passes through the circuit. Generates a circular magnetic force field around the cable. It now interacts with the magnetism of a permanent magnet that Faraday had placed in it. in the middle of the mercury together they forced the cable to move Faraday had shown that this invisible force really exists and could see its effect circular motion this beautiful device was the first to convert electric current into continuous motion basically it is the first electric motor ever created Faraday was About to take this experiment further, one of the lasting effects of Faraday's discovery of a bit of irritation in 1821 was that it demonstrated that there was a relationship of some kind between electricity, magnetism and motion.

Faraday explored this relationship in detail and proposed an even deeper approach. The difficult challenge of using magnetism and motion to generate electricity finally brought his obsession, hard work and determination to fruition. The breakthrough came on October 17, 1831, when Faraday took a magnet like this and moved it in and out of a coil of wire that he could detect a small electric current in the coil moving in one direction and then in the other direction. other. Faraday learned that he had discovered something a few days later; instead of moving the magnet across the coil of conductive wire, he set up the equivalent experiment by moving a conductive copper plate across the magnetic coil. magnetic field, he did not know it at the time, but when his rotating disk passed through this magnetic field, billions of negatively charged electrons were deflected from their original circular course and began to drift towards the edge, a negative charge accumulated on the outer edge of the magnetic field. disk that left a positive charge in the center and once the disk was connected to the wires, electrons flowed in a constant current.

Faraday had generated a continuous flow of electrical current, unlike a battery, his current flowed while his copper disk was rotated. created electrical energy directly from mechanical energy, although Faraday's discovery of induction was extraordinarily important in its own right and had profound effects for the understanding of electricity and technology for the rest of the 19th century, but what he did Faraday was to open a decade of powerful research because it gave him the clue as to how he should pursue his goal, Cerf, while Faraday continued his work trying to understand the very nature of electricity. Inventors across Europe were less interested in science and more interested in how electricity could generate income, which is actually quite remarkable.

What is certainly true from a contemporary perspective is that, in general, no one seems to care much about what electricity is, there are no great theoretical debates about whether what really interests them is as a force of a fluid according to a principle or as a power. enWhat can electricity do? Faraday, living in a world of steam power, was educating the scientific community about the nature of electricity, but at the same time another breakthrough was made in how we might use it. This will be the first device that really brought electricity to light. from the laboratory and into the hands of ordinary people the Telegraph The key to understanding the Telegraph is to understand a special type of magnets and electromagnets basically a magnet created by an electric current the first electromagnets were developed independently by William Sturgeon in Great Britain and Joseph Henry in America, and just as Faraday had discovered that by coiling his wire he could increase the current produced by moving magnets, Henry and Sturgeon discovered that by adding more coils to their current-carrying wires they could create a more concentrated magnetic field, basically the more coils , the more turns, the stronger the magnet, so if I run a current through this electromagnet, you can actually see the effects of the magnetic field.

These are the standard school experiments of sprinkling iron filings on the magnet. I give it a touch to see the iron. The filings follow the contours of the field, this allows us to visualize the effects of magnetism to make an even stronger electromagnet. Henry and Sturgeon discovered that they could place certain types of metal inside the electromagnetic coil. The reason why iron is so effective is fascinating because you can think about it. It is considered to be made up of many small magnets, all pointing in random directions. At the moment, this is not a magnet. The small magnets inside are aligned similar to the needles on a compass.

If you see that they all point in different directions, but when you apply a magnetic field they all line up, they all combine these magnets and cumulatively increase the strength of the electromagnet, so what Henry and Sturgeon did was place two electromagnetic coils on each arm of their horseshoe to create something that had many, many times more power and We can see the power of this horseshoe electromagnet if I turn it on and use something a little larger than iron filings. These little pieces of iron. The strength of the magnetic field that keeps them in place.

What's important to remember, of course, is that this electromagnet only works on everyone. the moment a current passes through it, as soon as I turn off the current, the magnetism disappears. Early experimenters demonstrated this power by lifting metal weights. Henry even made one big enough to lift a ton and a half of metal. Impressive, but it doesn't change the world. but he places that magnet much further away at the end of a wire and suddenly you can make something happen according to your command in an instant. This ability to control a magnet from a distance is one of the most useful things we have discovered if electricity can be made visible at a great distance from the original energy source, then you have a source of instantaneous communication.

By the mid-1840s, Samuel Morse had developed a messaging system based on how long an electrical circuit was turned on or off over a long period. current pulse for a - a short burst for a point that allowed messages to be sent and received by using a simple code. Early contemporary commentators from the Victorian era reflect on the fact that the electricity in a telegraph is literally making their world a smaller place. a kind of rhetoric throughout the 19th century when people talked about the telegraph about how greater communication and greater understanding will make war obsolete because we all understand each other better.

I mean, in retrospect, it seems hopelessly utopian in the 1850s, Europe and the United States were criss-crossed across the land. telegraph cables, but the dream of instant global communication was frustratingly out of reach, this was because there was not yet a cable capable of carrying messages between two of the world's greatest powers, Great Britain and the United States, many experts were convinced that a working Atlantic cable was impossible. But those who disagreed knew that if they could solve this problem, they could make a lot of money, and in the 1850s, an American businessman and British engineers joined forces to show that this could be done.

One attempt after another ended in disaster, heavy cables kept breaking in rough seas and storms. Finally, on July 29, 1858, two parts of a cable were joined together in the mid-Atlantic. You see, a single cable was simply too large to have been carried by a single ship, then one end was taken to Newfoundland and the other end to the southwest of Ireland. Six days later, the first direct link was established between the two most powerful nations in the world, the project was hailed as a great success and Queen Victoria sent a formal message of congratulations to President Buchanan, but before the celebrations were over, the things started to go well. very wrong this is the original notebook of chief engineer brights you can see here the original message from queen victoria it is now only 98 words but it took 16 hours to transmit it the telegraph operators on the other side found it very difficult to decipher the message the electrical signals that they were receiving were blurry and distorted and kept asking for the words to be repeated over and over again so you can see here repeat after sending wait to receive no signal transmitting clearly across the Atlantic was not going to be as simple as people had hoped Over the next few days, several hundred messages were exchanged, but those that reached Newfoundland became almost impossible to decipher: just a jumble of dots and dashes.

There was a serious problem with the cable and it was getting worse, while the 1858 cable was never fully repaired and the end finally came when British engineer Wildmon Whitehouse mistakenly believed that by increasing the signal voltage he could force messages to arrive. to Newfoundland, the cable simply stopped working completely at that point, increasing the voltage by using more powerful batteries made sense. Most experts believed that electric current flowed through it. a wire like a fluid in a pipe increasing the voltage was the equivalent of increasing the pressure in the system by forcing current to the other end, but the Telegraph actually carried pulses or waves of current along the wire, not a flow continuous and for a long time.

As distances increased, these pulses became distorted, making it difficult to distinguish which was a short dot and which was longer. By studying the effectiveness of underwater wiring, scientists were beginning to understand that electrical current did not always flow like water, but also created invisible electromagnetic waves. waves or undulations and it is this advance that would lead to a new branch of research in the electromagnetic spectrum and solve the problems of the Atlantic Telegraph. In fact, the transatlantic cable was a giant, ambitious and enormously expensive experiment. The inability of science to keep pace with technology has been exposed and a new, more theoretical and to me much more exciting approach to understanding electricity began to develop armed with this new understanding of how electrical pulses actually moved along.

Along the cable improvements were made to its composition design and how it was laid, it would take another eight years of scientists and engineers working together before a functional cable was finally installed and on Friday 27 July 1866 a message was sent from Ireland to Newfoundland, clear and crisp: the Peace Treaty between Austria and Prussia had been signed, finally the dream of instant transatlantic communication had become a reality. The success of the 1866 cable makes the world a smaller place, once again a change from the world where information took days, weeks or months to travel to a world where information lasted two seconds or more. minutes to travel now is much more profound, I think, than anything that has happened in my lifetime, the invention of the Telegraph changed the lives of ordinary people, but it will be the advances in the way we use the electrical currents that continually flow the which will have an even greater impact because The inventors were developing a new way to use electricity to make something that every person in the world would want.

Electric light. Until the 19th century, we only knew one way to make our own light burn things, and by the mid-19th century we had perfected it. a very effective way to light our homes using gas. A typical British house in the 1860s would have been lit in the same way as this highly flammable gas would have been pumped directly into houses through a network of pipes, but these gas lamps were too dim for large outdoor areas. . So railway stations and streets began to be illuminated with a more powerful source of electric arc lights. The first arc lights were demonstrated by Michael Faraday's mentor, Sir Humphrey Davy, at the Royal Institution as early as 1808, and worked by passing a continuous spark of electricity throughof two carbon rods, but its intense white glow was too bright for homes for an electric light to compete with gas, it would need to be subdivided into many smaller, less powerful and softer lamps.

Whoever managed to bring electric light to every home in the country would be guaranteed fame and fortune and in the early 1880s the most famous, most prodigious and most fiercely competitive inventor in the world had accepted the challenge the American Thomas Alva Edison Bert Edison the invention it was a passion it's what he loved to do he loved being in the laboratory the first What drove that passion is that it was a lot of fun for Edison. I think that's what he found most exciting, is that it was something he did well and it allowed all of his creativity to hit the floor.

Edison is Mr. Electrical Invention he is the man they trust he is the man they believe can do anything he is also the man who has his carefully cultivated connections with entrepreneurs where people are willing to put their cash where Edison's mouth is, so to speak, and back to the type of company for Edison money was probably the least important reason for Edison money was important for a reason to allow him to do the next project Edison had put together a group of talented young engineers at a cutting-edge laboratory in New Jersey 26 miles from Manhattan, Menlo Park would become the world's first research and development facility that would allow Edison's team to invent on an industrial scale.

They worked incredible hours. One of them talked about how he almost never saw his children because he was in the lab all the time. time, but they knew that they were in the middle of something really important, right, that if Edison was successful, if they were successful with Edison, that their future was secure, Edison's dream was to bring electric light to every home in the country and with his engineering team behind it. and the vision of an electric future ahead launched his campaign the race to bring electric light to the world would take place in the great cities of the time New York Paris London Edison's Menlo Park team set out to develop a totally different form of lamp electric the incandescent light bulb in fact Edison's light bulb design was not that new or unique French Russian Belgian and British inventors have been perfecting similar light bulbs for more than 40 years and one of them, the Englishman Joseph Swan, had been developing his own version of an incandescent bulb lamp both Swan and Edison bulbs work by passing an electric current through a filament now a filament is a material through which the electric current flows with more difficulty than through the copper wire in the rest of the circuit and it depends on the idea of ​​resistance now inside this jar I have a filament made of a common pencil turned on and we can see what happens when I pass a current through it on an atomic scale, the atoms in the filament prevent the flow of electricity, so more energy is needed. to force it through and this energy is deposited in the filament in the form of heat.

Now, as it heats up, its resistance increases, which again raises its temperature until it glows red hot. Now one of the first materials that Edison used for his filaments was platinum with its relatively high temperature. Melting point platinum could be heated to a hot temperature without melting, it could also be drawn into thin strands and the thinner the strand, the more resistance it offered to the current passing through it, but platinum was expensive and did not offer enough endurance. The race was on to find a better alternative and the solution came when the Menlo Park team switched to a method Swan was also developing using a vacuum cleaner to prevent cheaper carbon filaments from burning too quickly.

Edison and Swan tried all kinds of different materials for their filaments. everything from raw silk and parchment to cork. Edison even tested his engineer's beard hair. He finally decided on bamboo fiber, while Swan used a treated cotton yarn. Edison and Swan's light bulb designs were very similar. Finally they reached an agreement and partnered to sell electricity. light bulbs in the UK today many people still believe that Edison single-handedly invented the light bulb, while Swan has become a footnote in history, but the incandescent light bulb was only part of the Edison's strategy. He had also invented an entire electrical system of plugs, wires, and meters to navigate.

With it and being a brilliant businessman, he developed a new and innovative way of distributing electricity. Edison knew that the key to making money with his system was to generate electricity at a central station and then sell it to as many customers as possible. It seems obvious. Us now, but until then anyone who wanted to use electricity had to have their own noisy generator to do so. Edison's ambition was enormous. He wanted to illuminate the fastest growing and most exciting city in the world. New York in the summer of 1882. Edison carved out a unique position at the center of 19th century science and invention, had patented a state-of-the-art incandescent light bulb, had accumulated unprecedented knowledge of electrical engineering and, above all, had cultivated a reputation among the American public as a great inventive genius that journalists hung on his every word and the financial muscle of Wall Street was quick to throw behind his new ideas, his vision of electrifying Manhattan and then, by The rest of the world, of course, was apparently within reach because Edison and his team were about to launch their most expensive and risky project yet, America's first DC-generating power plant just before. 3 p. m.

September 4, 1880: Thomas Edison, surrounded by a group of bankers, dignitaries and journalists, entered the JP Morgan building, right behind me, pressed one of Edison's patented switches and 100 of his incandescent light bulbs began to light. shine. He turned to a nearby reporter and said, "I have fulfilled everything I promised half a mile away, at the new Pearl Street Edison power plant, which cost half a million dollars and four years of hard work had come to life. The currents They arose through buried cables running in each direction. Of course, it might seem obvious to us now, but in New York in the early 1880s, the idea of ​​burying electrical cables underground seemed like an unnecessary expense, this street.

It would have been crisscrossed by hundreds of wires used for Telegraph telephones and arc street lighting, looking up you would have seen a tangle of black spaghetti blocking the light Edison knew this dangerous situation had to change and in order to make so much money. However electricity needed to be rebranded, it had to be considered safe, so Edison is arguing for greater safety of its low DC voltage. system and 400 round lines you can argue that you have a much safer system than electric arc lighting for streets or gas lighting for indoor lighting you don't have to worry about fires you don't have to worry about electrocution this is all much safer because of the system it created with this underground system burying every cable was not only very expensive but it was a logistical nightmare because this was one of the busiest square miles in the world.

Edinson chose this area for a reason: the rich and important influencers of Wall Street because for Edison's system to make money for all these rich clients he had to be within a mile of his power plant and this was because Edison calculated that the The thickest cable you could afford would only carry an adequate amount of your DC current to customers within this range. great leap forward because for the first time dozens of customers could be supplied by a single power plant, but there was a big problem. Edison's grid could never be economical to light America's new suburbs;

They just didn't have the customer concentration needed to build these expensive power plants. How do we stick to Edison's way of generating and distributing electricity? The world would be a very different place. We would have to have power stations dispersed no more than a mile apart, even in the center of our towns or cities. and it would be extraordinarily expensive to even provide power to smaller communities, but someone who had the answers to these problems was about to enter history, someone who would help create the modern world and who would play an integral role in one of the greatest consequences . in scientific history his name was Nikola Tesla and he was right under Edison's nose Nikola Tesla was a Serbian inventor who was born in Croatia and who worked briefly for Edison after arriving in New York at the age of 28 European introvert a thinker profound was everything Edison was not Edison and Tesla could not be more different in the way they handled their appearance and their mannerisms and the way they constructed a public image of themselves.

Edison didn't care at all what clothes he was wearing and if he spilled chemicals on his good Sunday suit then he spilled chemicals on his good Sunday suit he was, you know, basically the very diverse type of slacker, the only type Tesla, on the other hand, even when a young man in his 20s is thinking about her appearance, how she meets people, she cares about her clothes, he cares about her manners, in fact, he even cares about what her clothes are like. photographs, his portraits and he always wants to make sure he has a nice three-quarter profile so that he doesn't I don't see that the fact that he has a slightly pointy chin, the life and death of Nikola Tesla is one of the most fascinating stories and At the same time tragic stories of scientific brilliance, cutthroat business, and shocking public relations stunts that the American public may have been captivated by Edison's performance. new direct current power plants, but Tesla was less impressed: he dreamed that electricity could be transmitted across entire cities or even nations and thought he knew how it could be done using a different type of electric current.

Electrical experts know that the smaller the current sent by a cable, the lower the losses through resistance and, therefore, the longer the cable could be. Tesla proposed using a method of transmitting electricity where currents could be reduced without a drop in the amount of electrical energy at the other end, it was called alternating current alternating current is exactly there, it is an electric current that alternates between moving in one direction and then in the opposite direction very quickly, unlike a direct current which moves only in one direction, Tesla was interested in alternating current because, like other electrical engineers in the late 1880s he realized that a As you raise the voltage of any current you transmit from point A to point B, it will be more efficient to have a higher voltage and since the amount of electrical energy in a wire is its voltage multiplied by its current, increasing the The voltage means that the current in the cables could be reduced and therefore the losses due to resistance will be less;

However, he does not want very high voltages on the order of, say, 20,000 volts entering his home, so he must reduce the current being sent. It is transmitted remotely to your home and to do so you need a converter or transformer. Alternating current allows you to use a transformer to make that change from the high transmission voltage to the lower voltage that you are going to use in consumption, perfecting the technology. transmitting electricity hundreds of miles from where it was generated would mark a huge step towards the modern world and a rich and stumbling industrialist or was already developing the solution his name was George Westinghouse Westinghouse believed that alternating currents were the future but he had a big drawback if Well it was fine for electric light, unlike direct current, there was no practical motor that could run on it and no one believed it ever existed apart from Nikola Tesla, Tesla as an inventor liked to say that the first thing he What you have to do is not build something, but imagine it, think about it, plant it and you had what modern psychologists would call an eidetic memory, you could basically remember everything you saw and then visualize it in three dimensions and they often say that people would have this ability.

You see an arm's length here and you see it in three dimensions in that space and all the indications are that this is Tesla had that ability this is a Tesla egg it is a replica of the one that Tesla used to demonstrate his greatest Great breakthrough and one of the most important inventions of all time. He showed how rotary motions could be produced directly from an alternating current, essentially one that could be generated thousands of kilometers away. This was something that had never been seen before.done before when Tesla was working on alternating current. current engine, he was thinking big and he wasn't just tinkering with a small component of the engine and saying "wow, if I can improve it a little, it will work", he is actually thinking about a complete system that involves the generator, the cables to the engine and the motor itself is a complete maverick he is thinking outside the box he is doing things very differently from any of his fellow contemporary inventors Tesla's solution was ingenious he fed more than one alternating current into his motor and timed them to keep going In sequence with each other, the first alternating current energized a coil of wire inside the motor creating an electromagnetic field that attracted the central moving part of the motorist towards it and then faded away.

The second superimposed current fed the next reel dragging the film part further before it faded and the same thing. for the third and fourth coils, the result was a rotating magnetic field strong enough to spin the motor or, in this case, its egg. Tesla designed an entire electrical system around this so-called polyphase transmission, which meant a noisy, smelly power plant that generated a lot of useful energy. Alternating current could now be located far from populated areas and, for the first time, large power plants could be built anywhere, on the outskirts of a city or in a Niagara-like waterfall, and the power could then be distributed over long periods of time. distances and serve all the people in the area. a major city or metropolitan center Tesla's breakthrough was the last piece of the puzzle, but he still had to convince the world that his solution was better than the direct current method advocated by Edison Edison continued to implement his direct current system by building power plants electric vehicles throughout New York State, the then Tesla met George Westinghouse, the man who could make his dreams come true, in July 1888.

Westinghouse made a bid for Tesla's patents, which has become part of the mystery and the folklore that surrounds the entire history of Nikola Tesla and from which it is difficult to separate oneself. Fact of Fiction Tesla was paid seventy-five thousand dollars for his alternating current patents and was offered two dollars 50 for each horsepower that his motors would generate. This should have guaranteed him great wealth for the rest of his life, but that is not what happened, it is clear. We now know that at that time the air conditioning system was a much better method of transmitting electrical energy and you would think that with Tesla's advances nothing could stand in the way of AC/DC's success, but one man still totally believed in his direct current inventions, from light bulb filaments to switch sockets to generators, and he was not willing to spend millions of dollars to change them.

Edinson, the battle lines were drawn. Westinghouse and Tesla went head-to-head with Edison for the lucrative New York business. lighting contracts two completely different systems fighting for one ultimate prize: the opportunity to illuminate the United States and then the world; This will be known as the War of the Currents. Both sides tried to undercut each other, but Edison believed his beloved direct current was better than alternating current because it was safer to touch an Edison wire with its low voltage painful but relatively harmless, while alternating current wires carried a much higher voltage and touching them could be fatal, so what Aaron was trying to do was define his DC system again. just like the safe system, it is better than Electric Street park lights, it is better than gas and now it is better than high voltage AC incandescent light, it is the system which is safe, it adopts Edison system, can be sure it will be safe, Edison claimed that AC was a more dangerous type of current than direct current and highlighted every accident for his Westinghouse workers and every fire caused by short circuits.

It was a powerful message because in the 1880s many people were still terrified of electricity that could shock and even kill in an instant and the reasons why they were still not free for many were understood. The idea of ​​introducing this invisible killer into his home was completely ridiculous, so the weapon used in the Current War was fear and a little-known electrical engineer, Harold P. Brown, was about to take it on. Taking the fight against AC to a whole new level was going to turn out to be one of the most extreme and negative advertising campaigns in history.

Brown had come up with a unique and theatrical way to demonstrate the deadly power of AC and was eager to share it with the world. On a warm summer afternoon in July 1888, he gathered 75 of the country's best electrical engineers and journalists to witness a spectacle they would never forget. Brown's plan was extremely macabre. He had paid a team of street urchins to round up stray dogs wandering around Manhattan. On stage he addressed his audience. I have asked you here, gentlemen, to witness the experimental application of electricity to various brutes. His demonstration involved electrocuting dogs with direct and alternating current in an attempt to prove that alternating current killed them more quickly and was not just dogs.

Brown went on to do public shows killing a calf and even a horse and moved on from dogs to larger animals because he wanted to prove that the AC form of electricity was so dangerous that it could kill any large mammal, including humans. Brown had convinced American politicians that the most humane method of executing convicted criminals should be with alternating current generated by Westinghouse machines. Edison's lawyers even suggested a new term to describe the electrocution in this way: be Westinghouse and precisely from 6:30 to 00:00. On the morning of August 6, 1890, William Kemmler, a 45-year-old man, was strapped to a wooden chair and carefully fitted with soaked electrodes, and while 26 officials and doctors watched from an adjoining room, Kemmler said goodbye to the chaplain of the prison. and awaited the execution of William Kemmler marked the lowest point in the War of the Currents but it would not mark the end because Nikola Tesla was about to do something that had never been seen before, something so wonderful and daring that he would still be alive.

Forever in the memory of those who saw that Tesla had been developing a method of generating very high frequency alternating currents and on May 21, 1891 at a meeting of the best electrical engineers he demonstrated it in an almost magical demonstration of astonishing power and wonder and unused. Any safety chain mail from the last pins of thousands of volts produced by a Tesla coil passed through his body and through the end of a laboratory that held Tesla's alternating current had such a high frequency that it passed through his body without causing serious damage or even pain, these demonstrations demonstrated that it correctly handled alternating currents at extremely high voltages that could be safe.

Westinghouse and Tesla won the current war in 1896. The new power plant at Niagara Falls was completed using Westinghouse AC generators. To produce Tesla's polyphase cars, enormous amounts of power could eventually be transmitted from the Falls to nearby Buffalo and then a few years later the Niagara plant was supplying power to New York City itself and today almost all the electricity generated in the world is produced this way. using Tesla's system, but Tesla's story does not end in fame and fortune, although he made significant contributions to many other areas of science and invention to save George Westinghouse from ruin, after a stock market crash, Nikola Tesla was an exceptionally talented man and we owe him a lot, but he was also enormously complicated and unfortunately later in life he became increasingly problematic, he was obsessed with the number three counting out loud as he walked and developed strange things. phobic of germs and women who wore pearl jewelry in many ways his brilliant mind simply spiraled out of control as Tesla's life fell apart he withdrew from people and found emotional solace elsewhere he became obsessed with pigeons and He was regularly seen feeding them here in Bryant Park in downtown Manhattan, he even fell in love with a particularly unusual white bird and when it died, he was left heartbroken as an old man.

Tesla was left almost bankrupt and just living as a semi-recluse in this hotel. He spent his last years here in room three. three to seven from The New Yorker Hotel sad, confused and destitute Edison became an American hero and his company would be part of General Electric still today one of the largest multinational corporations in the world in January 1943 the story of Nikola Tesla was coming to his end but as he looked across the Manhattan skyline for the last time he saw a sky lit with twinkling lights and a million lives transformed by his genius. The ability to generate and transmit electricity and the invention of machines to use it have changed our world in ways.

We could not have imagined that we can now generate billions of watts of electricity per second, every hour, every day, and whether we do it using coal gas or nuclear fission power plants, it all depends on the principles discovered and developed by Michael Faraday, Nikola Tesla and all. To the other early electrical engineers of an amazing era of invention, we now take electricity for granted and have forgotten how magical and mysterious a force it was, but there is one thing we should never forget today without it, the modern world would collapse around us and our lives will be very, very different in the next episode we tell the electrical revelations that led to a revolution in our understanding of this amazing force on August 14, 1894 an excited crowd gathered in front of the Oxford Museum of Natural History, this enormous building Gothic house hosted the annual meeting. of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, more than two thousand tickets had been sold in advance and the museum was already full waiting for the next talk by Professor Oliver Lodge.

His name may not be familiar to us now, but his discoveries should have made him as famous as some of the other great electrical pioneers in history, people like Benjamin Franklin, Alessandro Volta or even the great Michael Faraday would unknowingly put in A series of events that would revolutionize the Victorian world of brass and telegraph cables set in motion at this conference. It would mark the birth of the modern electrical world, a world dominated by silicon and massive wireless communication. In this program we discovered how electricity connected the world through transmission computer networks and how we finally learned to unravel and exploit electricity at the atomic level after centuries of man's experiments with electricity a new era of real understanding was being born these tubes are not connected to any power source but still illuminate the invisible effect of their electricity an effect that is not limited only to the wires through which it flows in the mid 19th century A great theory was proposed to explain how this could be.

The theory says that around any electrical charge and there is a lot of electricity flowing over my head there is a force field. These fluorescent tubes light up simply because they are under the influence of the force field of The power cables above The theory that a flow of electricity could somehow create an invisible force field was originally proposed by Michael Faraday, but it would A brilliant young Scot named James Clark Maxwell is missing to prove that Faraday was right and not through experimentation but through mathematics. All of this was a far cry from the typical 19th century way of understanding how the world works, which was essentially seeing it as a physical machine before Maxwell's scientists often built strange machines or devised wondrous experiments to create and measure electricity, but Maxwell was different.

He was interested in numbers and his new theory not only revealed the invisible force field of electricity, but also how it could be manipulated. It would prove to be one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time. Maxwell was a great mathematician and he saw electricity and magnetism in a completely new way, he expressed it all in terms of very compact mathematical equations and the most important thing is that in Maxwell's equations there is an understanding of electricity and magnetism as something linked. and as something that can occur in waves. Maxwell's calculations showed how these fields could be perturbed in a way similar to touching the surface of water with your finger.

Changing the direction of the electric current would create a wave through these electric fields andalternating current would produce a whole series of waves that would carry energy. Maxwell's mathematics told him that the changing electric currents would constantly send large waves of energy to his surrounding waves that would continue forever unless something absorbed them Maxwell's mathematics was so advanced and complicated that only a handful of people understood it at the time and although his work was still just a theory it inspired a young German physicist named Heinrich Hertz Hertz decided to dedicate himself to designing an experiment to prove that Maxwell waves really existed and here it is.

This is Hertz, his original apparatus and its beauty is in its pure simplicity. He generates an alternating current that runs along these metal rods with a spark that jumps across the space between these two spheres. If Maxwell was right, then this alternating current should generate an invisible electromagnetic wave that propagates to the surroundings. If you put a wire in the path of that wave, then in the wire there should be a changing electromagnetic field that should induce an electric current in the wire, so what Hertz did was he built this ring of wire. his receiver that he could carry in different positions in the room to see if he could detect the presence of the wave and the way he did it was to leave a very small gap in the wire through which a spark would jump if a current will pass. the ring now because the current is so weak that the spark is very, very weak and Hertz spent almost most of 1887 in a dark room looking intensely through a lens to see if he could detect the presence of this weak spark, but Hertz was not alone In trying to create Maxwell waves in England, a young physics professor named Oliver Lodge had been fascinated by the subject for years, but he had not had time to design any experiments to try to discover them, until one day In early 1888, while setting up an experiment on lightning protection, he noticed something unusual lodged and noted that when he set up his equipment and sent an alternating current around the wires, he could see bright patches between the wires and, with the applets running, he saw that These glowing patches formed a pattern, the blue glow and an electric pattern. the sparks occurred in distinct patches evenly spaced along the wires he realized they were the peaks and troughs of a wave an invisible electromagnetic wave Lodge had proven Maxwell right finally by accident Lodge had created Maxwell's electromagnetic waves around of the cables the big question had been answered Full of enthusiasm for his discovery, he prepared to announce it to the world in the summers and the scientific meeting organized by the British Association before, although he decided to go on vacation, his timing could not have been worse because back in Germany and at exactly the same time.

At the same time, Heinrich Hertz was also testing Maxwell's theories, finally Hertz found what he was looking for: a small spark and while carrying his receiver to different positions in the room, he was able to trace the shape of the waves produced by his device and verified each of Maxwell's calculations carefully and tested them experimentally. It was a tour de force of experimental science in Britain as crowds gathered for the British Association meeting. Oliver Lodge returned from his holiday relaxed and full of anticipation. This Lodge thought it would be his moment of triumph. When he was able to announce his discovery of Maxwell's waves, his great friend the mathematician Fitzgerald was supposed to give the opening speech of the meeting, but in it he proclaimed that Heinrich Hertz had just published surprising results, he had detected Maxwell's waves traveling through space. , we have snatched the Lightning from Jupiter himself and enslaved the omnipresent ether that announced well.

I can only imagine how Lodge must have felt when the Thunder was stolen. Professor Oliver Lodge had lost his moment of triumph, hit on the post by Heinrich Hertz, heard a spectacular demonstration of electromagnetic waves. What we now call radio waves, although he didn't know it at the time, will lead to an entire revolution in communications over the next century. Maxwell's theory had shown how electric charges could create a force field around them and that waves could propagate. through these fields like waves in a pond and Hertz had built a device that could actually create and detect the waves as they passed through the air, but almost immediately there would be another revelation in our understanding of electricity, a revelation that would involve once again to Professor Oliver.

Lodge and once again his Thunder would be stolen the story is set in Oxford in the summer of 1894. Hertz had died suddenly earlier that year and therefore prepared a memorial lecture with a demonstration that would bring the idea of ​​waves closer to a broader audience. Lodge had worked. At his conference he researched better ways to detect waves and borrowed new devices from his friends. He made some significant advances in technology designed to detect waves. This device generates an alternating current and a spark through it. gap the alternating current sends out an electromagnetic wave just as Maxwell predicted which is picked up by the receiver triggers a very weak electrical current through these two antennas now this is what Hertz had made great improvements in this was setting up this tube complete with filings of iron the weak electrical current passes through the filings forcing them to clump together and when they do they close a second electrical circuit and activate the bell so if I press the button at this end it activates the bell on the receiver and it does that. without connections between the two it is like magic.

You could imagine a full room, many people in the audience and what they suddenly see is like magic, a bell ringing. It's pretty incredible. It may not have been the most dramatic display for the audience. I had seen it before, but it still created a sensation among the crowd. The logis apparatus arranged in this way no longer seemed like a scientific experiment; in fact, it looked remarkably like those telegraph machines that had revolutionized communications, but without those long cables that stretched between the sender and the receiver. stations to the more worldly and knowledgeable members of the audience this was clearly more than showing that Master Maxwell was right this was a revolutionary new form of communication Lodge publishes lecture notes on how electromagnetic waves can be sent and received using their new improvements All over the world The world's inventors, enthusiastic hobbyists and scientists read the lodge reports with enthusiasm and began experimenting with Hertzian waves to completely different characters who would be inspired by it.

Both would bring improvements to the wireless telegraph and both will be remembered for their contribution to science and much more than Oliver. Lodge, the first was ghoulia mo Marconi Marconi was a very intelligent, astute and charming individual. He definitely had the Italian-Irish charm. He could apply this to almost anyone, from young people to world-renowned scientists. Marconi was not a scientist, but he read everything. He was able to take advantage of other people's work to set up his own wireless telegraph system and it is possible that, because he grew up in Bologna and it was quite close to the Italian coast, he saw quite a bit of the potential of wireless communications in relation to the use maritime.

When he was only 22, he came to London with his Irish mother to promote it. The other person inspired by the lodge conference was a professor at Calcutta's Presidency College named Jagadish Chandra Bose, despite his degrees from London and Cambridge, appointing an Indian as professor. Scientists in Calcutta have been battling racial prejudice. It was said that the Indians did not have the temperament necessary for exact science. Well, Bose was determined to prove this wrong and here in the archives we can see how quickly he got to work. This is a Report of the 66th meeting of the British and Liverpool Association of September 1896 and here is Bose, the first Indian in history to present at the meeting of the Association talking about his work and demonstrating his apparatus which he built and improved in the detector that Lodge described because in the hot, sticky climates of India he discovered that the metal filings inside the tube that Lodge used to make to detect waves rusted and stuck together, so Bose had to build a bigger detector. practical using a coiled cable.

Instead, his work was described as a sensation. The detector was extremely reliable and could operate on board ships, so it had great potential for the vast British naval fleet. It was the center of a vast telecommunications network that spanned almost the entire world and was used to support an equally vast maritime network of merchant and naval vessels that were used to support the British Empire, but Bose, a pure scientist, did not I was interested in the commercial potential. of wireless signals, unlike Marconi, this was sort of a cutting-edge new field, but Marconi was not a trained scientist, so things emerged quite differently, which may have been why it progressed so fast in the first place and he was very good at making connections with the people he needed to make connections with in order to get the job done.

Marconi used his connections to go straight to the only place that had the resources to help him: the British Post Office was an enormously powerful institution. When Marconi first arrived in London in 1896, these buildings were newly completed and were already moving with the Empire's electronic postal and telegraph services business. Marconi had brought his Telegraph system from Italy claiming that he could send wireless signals to unheard of distances and the post office. Chief Engineer William Priest immediately saw the potential of the technology, so the Priests offered Marconi the Post Office's vast financial and engineering resources and began work on the roof.

The old post office headquarters was right there, between this roof and that. Marconi. and the post office engineers would practice sending and receiving electromagnetic waves, the engineers helped him improve his apparatus and then the priests and Marconi together demonstrated it to influential people in the government and the Navy, what the priests did not What they realized was that even as he was proudly announcing the successful partnership with Marconi Mail, he was making plans behind the scenes, had applied for a British patent for the entire field of wireless telegraphy and was planning to create his own company, when he was granted the patent all hell broke loose in the scientific world In the community, that patent was in itself revolutionary.

You see, patents could only be drawn on things that were not public knowledge, but Marconi had hidden his equipment in a secret box and this was when he was finally granted the patent. Marconi ceremoniously opened the box. I was eager to see what inventions were inside the batteries, forming a circuit, iron filings in the tube to complete the circuit, ringing the bell at the top, nothing they hadn't seen before and yet Marconi had patented everything . The reason why Marconi is famous is not because of that invention, he did not invent the radio well, but he improved it and turned it into a system.

Lodge does not do that and that is why he remembers Marconi and that is why we do not remember Lodge, the scientific world was up in arms here. There was this young man who knew very little about the science behind his team about to make a fortune from his work, even his greatest supporters, the priests, were disappointed and hurt when he discovered that Marconi was about to go it alone and establish his Lodge's own company and other scientists. He began a frenzy of patenting every little detail and improvement they made to his equipment. This new atmosphere surprised Bose when he returned to Britain.

Bose wrote to his home in India disgusted by what he found in England: money, money, money all the time, what all-consuming greed. You could see the money madness of the people here, his disillusionment with the changes he saw in the country he revered for its scientific integrity and excellence is ultimately palpable, although it was his friends who convinced Bose to take out his only patent on His discovery of a new type of wave detector was this discovery that would lead perhaps to an even greater revolution for the world. he had discovered the power of crystals. these were places where the older techniques used iron filings which are complicated and difficult and it doesn't work well and here is a completely new way of detecting radio waves and it will be the center of a radio industry.

The discovery of BOCES was simple but would really shape the modern world when some crystals were touched with metal to test their electrical conductivity.They can display some pretty strange and very strange behavior. Take this crystal for example, if I can touch it in exactly the right place with the tip of this metal wire and then connect it to a battery, it generates a pretty significant current, but if I change my connections to the battery and try to pass the current in the opposite direction, it is much less, it is not a complete conductor of electricity, it is a semiconductor and found its first use in the detection of electromagnetic waves when it boasted of using a crystal like this in its circuits.

From the tuber filings he discovered that it was a much more efficient and effective detector of electromagnetic waves; It was this strange property of the junction between the wire known as a cat's whisker and the glass that allowed current to pass much more easily in one direction than the other which meant it could be used to extract a signal from electromagnetic waves in that direction. At the time no one had any idea why certain crystals acted this way, but for two scientists and engineers the strange behavior had a profound and almost miraculous practical effect with crystals as detectors now.

It was possible to transmit and detect the real sound of a human voice or music in his Oxford lecture in 1894. Oliver Lodge had opened a Pandora's box as an academic and had not been able to foresee that the scientific discoveries of which he had been a part had such The commercial potential that Paton had managed to obtain the crucial means of tuning a receiver to a particular radio signal was bought by Marconi's powerful company, although perhaps the worst outrage for Lodge would come in 1909 when Marconi was awarded the Nobel Prize. in Physics for wireless communication it is difficult to imagine a greater snub towards the physicist who narrowly missed Hertz in the discovery of radio waves and who would later show the world how they could be sent and received, but despite the snub Lodge remained magnanimous using the new transmission technology that resulted from his work to give credit to others, as this rare film of his shows that pets made a breakthrough, he discovered how to produce and detect waves in space, thus bringing the ether to a practical use leveraging , engineers continued to refine and perfect our ability to transmit and receive electromagnetic waves, but their initial discovery was ultimately a triumph of pure science from Maxwell to Hertz to launch, but still the very nature of electricity itself remained Without explaining what created those electrical charges and currents in the first place, although scientists were learning to exploit electricity they still didn't know what it actually was, but this question was being answered with experiments that looked at how electricity flowed through different materials there.

By the 1850s, one of Germany's great experimentalists and a talented glassblower, Heinrich Geissler, created these beautiful display pieces that Geisler pumped. Most of the air came out of their intricate glass tubes and then small amounts of other gases were pumped in, then an electric current was passed through them, they glowed with dazzling colors and the current flowing through the gas looked tangible, although They were designed exclusively for entertainment for more than For the next 50 years, scientists or guys without tubes have the opportunity to study how electricity flowed. Efforts were made to pump more and more air out of the tubes.

Could electric current pass through nothing through a vacuum? This is a very rare book movie of the British scientist who created a vacuum good enough to answer that question his name was William Crookes the criminals created tubes like this he pumped in as much air as he could so it was as close to a vacuum as possible What could he do then when he passed an electric current through the tube he noticed a bright glow at the other end a lightning bolt seemed to shine through the tube and hit the glass at the other end it seemed like we could finally see electricity the lightning bolt became known as lightning cathode and this tube was the precursor to the cathode ray tube that was used in televisions for decades.

Physicist JJ Thompson discovered that these beams were made up of small negatively charged particles and since they were carriers of electricity they were known as electrons because the electrons only moved in one direction from the heated metal plate across the positively charged plate in the At the other extreme, they behaved in exactly the same way as BOCES semiconductor crystals, but while BOCES crystals were naturally temperamental, you had to find the right place for them to work, these tubes could be constantly manufactured, became known as valves, and soon replaced crystals in radio sets everywhere. These discoveries would lead to an explosion of new technology.

Early 20th century electronics is all about what can be done with tubes, so the radio and tube industry is built in the early years of television. is built and valves the first computers were built with valves these are the things that the electronic world is built with after having discovered how to manipulate electrons flowing through a vacuum, scientists were now interested in understanding how they could flow through other materials, but that meant understanding the things that made up the atoms of the materials, it was in the early years of the 20th century that we were finally able to understand exactly what atoms were made of and how they behaved and therefore what was really electricity on an atomic scale at the University of Manchester, in the study of Ernest Rutherford.

The team was studying the internal structure of the atom and producing an image to describe what an atom looked like. This revelation would ultimately help explain some of the most puzzling features of electricity. In 1913, the image of the atom was one in which there was a positive charge. nucleus in the middle surrounded by negatively charged orbiting electrons in patterns called shells, each of these shells corresponds to an electron with a particular energy now, given a pulse of energy, an electron could jump from an inner shell to an outer shell and the Energy had to be just right, if it was not enough, the electron would not make the transition and this boost was often temporary because the electron would then fall back to its original shell.

In doing so, it had to release its excess energy by spitting out a The photon and the energy of each photon depended on its wavelength or, as we would perceive it, its color. Understanding the structure of atoms now could also explain nature's great electric light shows, like the guys without tubes. The type of gas through which the electricity passes defines its color. The rays have a blue tint due to the nitrogen in our atmosphere. In the highest parts of the atmosphere, the gases are different and so is the color of the photons they produce, creating the spectacular Aurora.

Understanding atoms, how they fit together in materials and how their electrons behave was the end. key to understanding the fundamental nature of electricity this is a Wimshurst machine and is used to generate electrical charge. Electrons are released from these discs and initiate a flow of electricity through the metal arms of the machine. Now metals conduct electricity because the electrons are very weakly bonded. within their atoms and can therefore slosh around and be used to flow as insulators of electricity. On the other hand, they do not conduct electricity because the electrons are very tightly bound within the atoms and are not free to move in the flow of electrons and therefore electricity through them.

Materials were now understood, conductors and insulators could be explained, what was more difficult to understand were the strange properties of semiconductors. Our modern electronic world is built on semiconductors and would grind to a halt without them. Jagadish Chandra Bose may have come across his properties in the past. 1890s, but no one could have foreseen how important they would become, but with the outbreak of the Second World War things were about to change here at Oxford, this newly built physics laboratory was immediately handed over to the war research effort that the investigators were here. tasked with improving the British radar system Rader was a technology that used electromagnetic waves to detect enemy bombers and, as its accuracy improved, it became clear that the valves were simply not up to the job, so the team had to resort to the old incentive valve technology they used.

Semiconductor crystals now did not use the same type of crystals that Bost had developed, but instead used silicon. This device is the receiver of silicon crystal as a small tungsten wire coiled and touching the surface of a small silicon crystal. It's amazing how important a device is. It was the first time that silicon was really exploited as a semiconductor, but for it to work it had to be very pure and both sides in the war put a lot of resources into purifying it. In fact, the British had better silicon devices, so there must have been some silicon cause already at a time when we were just starting, you know, and being in Berlin, the British had better silicon semiconductors because they had help from laboratories in the US particularly the famous Bell Labs and it was not long before physicists realized that if semiconductors could replace valves in radar perhaps they could replace valves in other devices as well such as amplifiers. simple vacuum tube with its unidirectional flow of electrons had been modified to produce a new device by placing a metal grid in the path of the electrons and applying a small voltage to it, a dramatic change in the strength of the beam could be produced, these valves worked as amplifiers, converting a very weak electrical signal into a much stronger one.

An amplifier is something and once it's really simple, it just takes a small current and turns it into a big bead, but in other ways. It changes the world because when you can amplify a signal you can send it anywhere in the world as soon as the war ended. German experts Herbert Matarae and his colleague Heinrich Volker began to build a semiconductor device that could be used as an electrical amplifier and here is that first functional model that matters, a car embel made, if you look inside you can see the small crystal and the wires that They make contact with it, if you pass a small current through one of the wires this allows a much larger current to flow through the other, so it acted as a signal amplifier, these small devices could replace large and expensive tubes in long distance telephone networks, radios and other equipment where a weak signal needed to be amplified.

Matarae immediately realized what he had created, but his bosses were initially uninterested. That was until a magazine article appeared announcing the discovery at Bell Labs. A research team there had stumbled upon the same effect and were now announcing their invention to the world. They called it the transistor that they had in December 1947 and that we had at first 48. but just life, you know, they had the effect a little earlier, but curiously the transistors were just not good, although the European device was more reliable than the Bell Labs' most experimental model, nor did they live up to their promise, they worked, they were simply too delicate.

They were looking for a more robust way to amplify electrical signals and the breakthrough came about by accident. Russell, an expert on silicon crystals at Bell Labs, noticed that one of his silicon ingots had a really strange property: it seemed to be able to generate its own voltage, and when he tried to measure this by connecting it to an oscilloscope, he noticed that the voltage changed everything. time. The amount of voltage generated seemed to depend on the amount of light in the room, so by casting a shadow on the glass, he saw the more light it meant that the voltage went up, what's more, when he turned on a fan between the lamp and the glass, the voltage began to oscillate with the same frequency as the fan blades cast shadows on the glass, one of the old colleagues noticed immediately. that the ingot had a crack that formed a natural joint and this small natural joint in an otherwise solid block acted like the much more delicate joint between the end of a wire and a crystal that he boasted of having discovered, except that here it was sensitive. to turn on theingots had cracked because each side contains slightly different amounts of impurities, one side has a little more of the element phosphorus while the other has a little more of a different impurity, boron, and the electrons seem to be able to move from the phosphorus side to On the boron side, but not the other way around, the photons of light shining on the crystal were pulling electrons from the atoms, but it was the impurity atoms that were driving this flow.

Phosphorus has one electron that is left over and boron is willing to accept another, so the electrons tend. flow from the phosphorus side to the boron side and, importantly, only flowed in one direction across the junction, the head of the semiconductor team, William Shockley, saw the potential of this unidirectional junction with the inner crystal , but how would it be possible to create a crystal with two junctions in it that could be used as an amplifier? Another Bell Labs researcher named Gordon Teal had been working on a technique that would allow just that. He discovered a special way of growing single crystals of the semiconductor germanium at this institute.

Research teams grow semiconductor crystals the same way teal did at Bell Labs, only here they grow them much larger. At the bottom of this IVA is a container of hot, shiny molten germanium, as pure as you can get. Inside there are a few atoms of whatever. Impurity is required to alter its conductive properties. Now the rotating arm above has a seed crystal at the bottom that has been submerged in the liquid and will slowly rise again as the germanium cools and hardens, forming a long crystal like an icicle below the seed in its entirety. length is a unique and beautiful germanium crystal.

Teil discovered that as the crystal grows, other impurities can be added to the vats and mixing them gives us a single crystal with thin layers of different impurities that create bonds within the crystal. two junctions in it was Shockley's dream, applying a small current through the very thin center section allows a much larger current to flow through the entire triple sandwich of a single crystal like this, hundreds of small ones could be cut solid blocks, each of which would contain the two junctions that allow the movement of electrons through them to be precisely controlled. These small and reliable devices could be used in all types of electrical equipment.

You can't have electronic equipment that we have without tiny components and you get the strange effect that the smaller they get the more reliable they become, it's a win-win situation: the Bell Labs team received the Nobel Prize for their invention that changed the world, while a European team was forgotten. William Shockley left Bell Laboratories and in 1955 established his own semiconductor laboratory in rural California, recruiting the best physics graduates in the country, but the celebratory atmosphere did not last long because it was almost impossible to work for Shockley, as people left his company because they just didn't like the way he treated them, so the fact that Shockley was the one who sees that door is the reason you have Silicon.

Valley, you start that whole process of spin-offs and growth and new companies, and it all starts with Shockley being such an impactful human being that the startups were competing with each other to create the latest semiconductor devices, like such small transistors. that large quantities of them could be incorporated into an electrical circuit printed on a single portion of semiconductor crystal. These small and reliable chips could be used in all types of electrical equipment, most famously in computers, a new era had dawned today, microchips are everywhere. It transformed almost every aspect of modern life, from communications to transportation and entertainment, but perhaps most importantly, our computers have become so powerful that they are helping us understand the universe in all its complexity.

A single microchip like this today can contain around 4 billion transistors. It's amazing how far technology has come in 60 years. It is easy to think that with the great advances we have made in the understanding and exploitation of electricity, there is little left to learn about it, but we would be wrong, for example, by making circuits smaller and smaller. that a particular characteristic of electricity that had been known for over a century was becoming increasingly problematic: resistance, a computer chip must continually cool down if the fan is removed, this is what happens while firing 100 120 130 degrees 200 degrees and it was cut, that only took a few seconds and the chip is well and truly cooked.

You see how the electrons flow through the chip, not only do they travel unhindered, but they collide with the silicon atoms and the energy is lost. These electrons produce heat. Sometimes this was useful. Inventors made electric heaters and ovens and every time they got something to glow red hot, it was a light bulb, but resistance in electronics and power lines is the biggest waste of energy and a big problem. Resistance is believed to waste up to 20 percent of all the electricity we generate, it is one of the biggest problems of modern times and a way is being sought to solve the resistance problem.

What we think of as temperature is actually a measure of how much the atoms of the material vibrate, and if the atoms vibrate, the more likely electrons flowing through them are to collide with them, so in general, the hotter it is. The material, the higher its electrical resistance and the colder it is, the lower the resistance, but what if? you call something close to absolute zero minus 273 degrees Celsius, well, absolute zero, there is no heat at all and therefore atoms do not move at all, what then happens to the flow of electricity, the flow of electrons , using a special device called a cryostat that can keep things close to absolute zero we can find that inside this cryostat in this coil there is mercury, the famous liquid metal and it is part of an electrical circuit.

Now this equipment measures the resistance in mercury, but look what happens when I lower it. the mercury in the coldest part of the cryostat there is the resistance has been reduced to absolutely nothing mercury like many substances that we now know that have this property is called become superconducting, which means that they have no resistance to the flow of electricity, but these Materials only work when they are very, very cold, if we could use a superconducting material in our power cables and in our electronics, we would avoid using much of our precious electrical energy through resistance, the problem of course is that Superconductors had to be kept at extremely low temperatures then, in 1986, a breakthrough was achieved in a small laboratory near Zurich, Switzerland.

IBM physicists recently discovered its superconductivity and the class of materials that is considered one of the most important scientific breakthroughs in many decades: this is a block of the same material. Made by researchers in Switzerland, it doesn't look very extraordinary, but if you cool it with liquid nitrogen something special happens, it becomes a superconductor and, because electricity and magnetism are so closely linked that they give it equally extraordinary magnetic properties, this magnet is suspended levitating. Above the superconductor, the exciting thing is that although cold this material is well above absolute zero, these magnetic fields are so strong that not only can they support the weight of this magnet, but they should also support my weight.

I'm about to levitate, it's very Very strange feeling when this material was first discovered in 1986, it created a revolution; Not only had no one considered that it could be a superconductor, but it was doing so at a much warmer temperature than anyone had thought possible. We are tantalizingly close to reaching room temperature. superconductors we have not reached that point yet, but one day a new material will be found and when we put it in our electronic equipment we will be able to build a cheaper, better and more sustainable world. Nowadays, materials have been produced that exhibit this phenomenon at the type of temperatures that are obtained. in their freezer, but theorists cannot fully explain these new superconductors, so without a complete understanding, experimenters are often guided by both luck and proper scientific understanding.

Recently, a lab in Japan hosted a party where they broke up. Dosing their superconductors with a variety of alcoholic beverages they unexpectedly discovered that red wine improves the performance of the superconductors. Electrical research now has the potential to once again revolutionize our world if superconductors can be found at room temperature our addiction the power of electricity is only increasing and when we fully understand how to exploit superconductors a new electrical world will be upon us it will lead To one of the most exciting periods of human discovery and invention, a new set of tools, techniques and technologies to once again transform the world, electricity has changed our Just a few hundred years ago the world was seen as a marvel mysterious and magical, then picked out of the laboratory with a series of strange and wonderful experiments, and finally captured and put to use.

It revolutionized communications, first through cables and then as waves through distant electrical currents. -reaches fields that feeds and illuminates the modern world today we can hardly imagine life without electricity defines our era and will be completely lost without it and yet still offers us more we find ourselves once again at the beginning of a new era of discoveries new revolution, but above all there is one thing that all those who deal with the science of electricity know that their story is not over yet.