Electricity

The presence of either a positive or negative electric charge produces an electric field. The motion of electric charges is an electric current and produces a magnetic field. In most applications, Coulomb's law determines the force acting on an electric charge. Electric potential is the work done to move an electric charge from one point to another within an electric field, typically measured in volts.


Electricity plays a central role in many modern technologies, serving in electric power where electric current is used to energise equipment, and in electronics dealing with electrical circuits involving active components such as vacuum tubes, transistors, diodes and integrated circuits, and associated passive interconnection technologies.


The study of electrical phenomena dates back to antiquity, with theoretical understanding progressing slowly until the 17th and 18th centuries. The development of the theory of electromagnetism in the 19th century marked significant progress, leading to electricity's industrial and residential application by electrical engineers by the century's end. This rapid expansion in electrical technology at the time was the driving force for the Second Industrial Revolution, with electricity's versatility driving transformations in industry and society. Electricity is integral to applications spanning transport, heating, lighting, communications, and computation, making it the foundation of modern industrial society.^[1]

Cultural perception

It is said that in the 1850s, British politician William Gladstone asked the scientist Michael Faraday why electricity was valuable. Faraday answered, "One day sir, you may tax it."^[96][97][98] However, according to Snopes.com "the anecdote should be considered apocryphal because it isn't mentioned in any accounts by Faraday or his contemporaries (letters, newspapers, or biographies) and only popped up well after Faraday's death."^[99]


In the 19th and early 20th century, electricity was not part of the everyday life of many people, even in the industrialised Western world. The popular culture of the time accordingly often depicted it as a mysterious, quasi-magical force that can slay the living, revive the dead or otherwise bend the laws of nature.^[100]: 69 This attitude began with the 1771 experiments of Luigi Galvani in which the legs of dead frogs were shown to twitch on application of animal electricity. "Revitalization" or resuscitation of apparently dead or drowned persons was reported in the medical literature shortly after Galvani's work. These results were known to Mary Shelley when she authored Frankenstein (1819), although she does not name the method of revitalization of the monster. The revitalization of monsters with electricity later became a stock theme in horror films.


As the public familiarity with electricity as the lifeblood of the Second Industrial Revolution grew, its wielders were more often cast in a positive light,^[100]: 71 such as the workers who "finger death at their gloves' end as they piece and repiece the living wires" in Rudyard Kipling's 1907 poem Sons of Martha.^[100]: 71 Electrically powered vehicles of every sort featured large in adventure stories such as those of Jules Verne and the Tom Swift books.^[100]: 71 The masters of electricity, whether fictional or real—including scientists such as Thomas Edison, Charles Steinmetz or Nikola Tesla—were popularly conceived of as having wizard-like powers.^[100]: 71


With electricity ceasing to be a novelty and becoming a necessity of everyday life in the later half of the 20th century, it required particular attention by popular culture only when it stops flowing,^[100]: 71 an event that usually signals disaster.^[100]: 71 The people who keep it flowing, such as the nameless hero of Jimmy Webb's song "Wichita Lineman" (1968),^[100]: 71 are still often cast as heroic, wizard-like figures.^[100]: 71