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Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod, a device that is now used to protect houses and other buildings from being struck by lightning during a storm. Franklin used the lightning rod to prove that lightning was made of electricity.
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Alessandro Volta invented the voltaic pile, the forerunner to the modern battery. The device was created to prove that animal tissue does not create its own electricity during a scientific debate with Galvani. This early battery was immediately recognized by other inventors and used to further their own experiments. Volta proved that electricity can travel over wires.
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Electromagnetic Induction - the production of current in a conductor as it moves through a magnetic field.
Michael Faraday discovered the relationship between and magnetic field and the electric current that it causes. -
In 1879, Thomas Edison demonstrated his first light bulb in Menlo Park. November of that year, he filed for a patent for a light bulb with a carbon filament. In the following years, he used bamboo filaments. Tungsten, the material he knew would work best, wasn't able to be made into thin wires at the time. His invention changed the way society functioned; it allowed people to not be bound to candles or daylight.
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On September 30, 1882, the first hydroelectric power station began operation on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin. The power station was initiated by Appleton paper manufacturer H.J. Rogers, who had been inspired by Thomas Edison's plans for an electricity-producing station in New York.
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Michael Faraday and Dr. William Cullen, the pioneers of refrigeration, made discoveries that led General Electric to make, reveal, and sell home refrigerators in the 1910s and 1920s.
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Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, German radiochemists, discover the process of fission in uranium.
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Scientists were working to find a device that could replace the vacuum tube. The vacuum tube was, then, the only way to amplify signals and serve as switching devices in electronics. Vacuum tubes were expensive, unreliable, consumed too much power, and got very hot. John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley (all with PhDs) patented their stab at the problem, and it became the first transistor.
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The first large wind farm in the U.S. was installed in California in 1980. People grew more aware of the environment, and their effect on it; this led to the development of lower impact designs, and more alternative eneregy resources.
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The Chernobyl nuclear power plant, in Ukraine, melted down in April of 1986. The meltdown killed one person instantly, and a total 30 in the following months. The Chernobyl plant had a unique design (one that has not been used since the accident) and the meltdown was a result of design flaws and inadequately trained workers.
