1. The most important advance in our modern world
Electricity
The most important advance in our modern world

2. What if our electricity was taken away
No telephone, telegraph, radio, television or computers
No lighting other than that produced by burn something
No cars busses or trains
No central heating
No music in our homes
Almost no industrial output
No advanced medical monitoring and diagnostics
Distribution of food and goods at a near standstill

3. Population growth in England

4. The Three effects of Electricity
Heating
Magnetic
Chemical

5. The Key Developments

6. 1700
Newton took control of The Royal Society. Head of demonstrations Frances Hauksbee demonstrates a blue glow by placing his hand close to an revolving evacuated glass sphere.
Elizabeth 1 the first marvelled at static electricity's power to lift feather.

7. 1720’s
Stephen Grey at Charterhouse charged up a boy and his hand picked up gold leaf and feather. This led to him realising that electricity could travel through some things and not other. He called them conductors and insulators.
Grey could not store electricity

8. 1746
Professor Pieter van Musschenbroek in Leiden Holland, discover the Leyden jar for storing electricity. The equivalent of the capacitors we use today.

9. 1750
Benjamin Franklin set out to explain lightning and designed experiments to prove his theories.
Later invented the lightning conductor

10. 1742
Georges-Louis Leclerc and Thomas-François Dalibard conducted Franklins experiment and stored a charge in a wine bottle acting as a Leyden jar.
Benjamin Franklin solve the problem of the Leyden jar

11. Henry Cavendish
Henry Cavendish made an artificial Torpedo fish using Leyden jars but the real fish did not produce a spark. Leyden jar high voltage low charge fish high charge low voltage. Fish produces about 240 volts. Ten times less than the Leyden jar.
He published very little but some years after his death Maxwell read his papers and realised he had actually discovered much that others had been given credit for

12. Galvani vs Volta
Luigi Galvani said that the body worked through body electricity which flowed from the brain to the muscles.
Alessandro Volta rejected Galvani and built the Voltaic pile (first battery) to backup his belief.

13. 1790’s
Alessandro Volta studied the structure of the torpedo fish and replicated it in metal to produce the pile. This was the first battery and it was now possible to produce constant electricity.

14. 1808
Humphrey Davy built the worlds largest battery in the Royal Institution. It filled a room with over 800 voltaic piles. He connected it to two carbon electrodes and when they touched they produce a blindingly bright light The arc lamp.

15. 1812
Michael Faraday a 20 year old book binder enters the Royal Institution.
Faraday got a ticket to see one of Sir Humphrey Davys last lectures and that changed his life.
Faraday became assistant to Royal Institution
Oersted discovered that if you pass an electric current through a wire it will deflect a compass needle
Faraday demonstrated circular motion
Faraday designed the first dynamo

16. Faraday’s Experiments

17. 1825
William Sturgeon (Britain) and Joseph Henry (America) invented the electro magnet

18. 1827
Ohms law published by Geog Simon Ohm
R =V/I
V=IR
I=V/I

19. 1858 First Transatlantic telegraph cable
The first message of 98 words took 16 hours to send
Cable soon failed when a British engineer thought it would work better at a higher signal voltage
A new successful cable was laid in 1866

20. James Clerk Maxwell
1n 1864 published his theory that light was an electromagnetic wave after he measured the speed electricity travels is the same as the speed of light
Developed the Maxwell equations which explained many of Faradays theories'

21. 1880’s Edison and Swan formed the Swan Edison Company
Edison lit the financial district of New York with his DC system and underground cables

22. Heinrich Hertz 1888
The young German physicist Heinrich Hertz is remembered as the first person to detect radio waves, and in doing so he also proved that Maxwell's calculations and theories were all correct.

23. Nikola Tesla
Tesla invented AC motors and designed AC transmission systems
Westinghouse were nearly crippled by high royalties on Tesla’s patents so Tesla came to a settlement with them
The battle of the currents also almost ruined Edison and the AC system finally won the day over his DC system

24. Guglielmo Marconi Did Marconi invent the radio?
What he did was to turn the research work of Maxwell, Hertz, Righi, Lodge and others into a practical and commercial communications system
In 1909 he shared the Nobel Prize for Physics, with Professor Karl Braun

25. The Inventers of the Transistor
John Bardeen
William Shockley
Walter Brattain

26. Key Transistor Events
23 December 1947 demonstration at Bell Labs of the first point contact transistor
Augusts 1948 Herbert F. Mataré and Heinrich Welker announced the transistron
July 4, 1951 Shockley announced the junction transistor
January 1954 first silicon transistor
In 1956 John Bardeen, Walter Houser Brattain, and William Bradford Shockley were honoured with the Nobel Prize in Physics
Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby independently invent the integrated circuit
Ted Hoff's invention of the microprocessor
Robert Noyce and Jack

27. Portable Power

28. Super Conductors
At a critically low temperature certain materials become superconductive and have no electrical resistance.
The phenomenon was discovered by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in 1911
Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer proposed the complete microscopic theory of super conductors in 1957 and were later awarded the Nobel Prize. Bardeen is the only physicist to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes as he shared the award for the invention of the transistor in 1956
In 1986, a new compound was discovered that broke the theoretical temperature limit that the theory (known as BCS theory) predicted for superconductivity. It had to be working in a different way.
We are still waiting for a brilliant mind to come along and explain
John Bardeen

29. UK Power Distribution

30. Power in the home

31. The Future Sustainability Alternative power sources The nuclear debate
Thinking the unthinkable