The Importance Of Electricity In Modern Times

Electricity has become something we rely on to live our lives, but it was by no means an overnight discovery. Over the last two hundred years it has developed from a scientific phenomenon to part of everyday life. One of the first applications of electricity was the first incandescent light bulb in around 1870.

The electric overhaul of society obviously brought many fresh new dangers with it, but it eliminated some of the old ones, like the naked flames of gas lighting that was commonly used in homes and factories then.

The Joule heating process takes place in light bulbs, and also in electric heating. Many people have condemned electric heating as uneconomic because effectively, heat energy is being used (in power stations) on mass to create heat for houses.

Some countries, for example, Denmark have issued a new legislation restricting the use of electric heating in new buildings, if allowed at all. Electricity is an extremely helpful source for refrigeration. As the demand for air conditioning increases so does the overall electricity demand which electricity utilities will have to cater for.

Electricity is of course used in telecommunication. The electrical telegraph was one of the earliest applications that electricity was used for, commercially demonstrated by Crooke and Wheatstone in 1837.

In the 1860s, global communication was made a possibility with telegraph systems going intercontinental, then transatlantic. Fibre optic technology and satellites have now taken a large chunk of the communications market but electricity still powers every communications application we have available to us.

You can visibly see electromagnetism best in an electric motor, which is one of the best providers of clean, motive power. A motor that doesn’t move, like that of a winch, can easily be powered by an external source, but an electric motor that needs to move with its application, like an electric scooter, must carry a power supply such as a battery along with it, unless it uses a pantograph like cable cars.

Arguably the most important invention of the 1900s, the transistor is an essential part of every modern electrical circuit. It is used to amplify or split electronic currents and a modern circuit could contain billions of very small transistors in only a few square centimetres.