Organized and supplemented facts from the movie: Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity by Jim Al-Khalili, BBC Horizon
The content from the movie by Jim Al-Khalili redesigned and developed for the purpose of this blog by Michal Polanski
Characters (a few added by me) and milestones in evolution of knowledge about electricity
The most spectacular
One of the most spectacular moments were when British chemist Humphry Davy (1778-1829) constructed in the cellar in Mayfair big battery and then to the gathered audience in lecture hall has put close to each other two carbon electrodes to show the spectators the light from an electric arc. He was a scientist as well as a celebrity.
Chronologically
(1) Francis Hauksbee (1660–1713). First systematic research and apparatus devoted to investigating electrostatic discharge or electrostatic repulsion.
(2) Stephen Gray (1666-1736). First systematic experiments with conduction. He distinguished for the fist time insulators like glass, hair, ceramic objects and conductors like metals.
(3) Pieter van Musschenbroek (1692-1761, Dutch physicist, Leiden). His first reasoning on electric phenomena was following: “if electricity is liquid like water it should be stored like water in a jar”. By human mistake not science when keeping with one hand the glass jar and with another touching charged top of electrode that another end was submerged in a water inside a jar he has experienced electric shock what confirmed that such a phenomenon may exist. He discovered the phenomenon of capacitance and his Leiden jar was the first capacitor in the history of electricity. Capacitors help to smooth out electric surges protecting electronic components even in most modern electric circuits.
(4) Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790, USA). He was obsessed about the phenomenon of lightning. His observations were followed by the reasoning that all objects in the world have some electric coating. Some of them have more of that coating what means that are positively charged. Another have less what he called negatively charged. And like in the US economy everything in this world tends to be equalized, neutralized so objects with excess charge (positive charge) when meet objects with deficit charge tend to equalize and the lightning is just an example of this process of passing charges from positively charged to insufficiently charged objects, because everything in the world tends to the balance or zero, to neutral state. Franklin can be associated with the new enlightenment movement. One of the first objects of the study of people interested in early electric phenomena discoveries was torpedo fish. Torpedo fish has electrical stings. Torpedo fish has what we can call today low voltage but high charge. The group of French people in Marly la Ville in France constructed an experiment to gather the electrical charge of lightning.
(5) Henry Cavendish (1731-1810). He distinguished between two phenomena. Two aspects of electricity in a current. Generally we owe to Cavendish the systematic observations when just electric shocks, sparks can be organized and observed as the continuous flow of electric charge – this means an electric current. When this is not just a single discharge but continuous, observable within some time frames flow of electricity. Thanks to him we distinguish between the amount of electricity – an electric charge. And its intensity – the potential difference or voltage.
(6) Luigi A. Galvani (1737-1798 Bologne, Italy). The rival of Alessandro Volta. He was attracted to the use of electricity in medical treatments and experiments. In 1759 he caused moves of muscles of paralyzed man by electric shocks. He was using Hauksbee machine to generate electric pulses, electric charge. He was falsely convicted that even the human body, every tissue has intrinsic amount of electricity. That electricity is intrinsic element to living beings. It was his obsessive thought of an assumption kind that did not want to turn out to be wrong. But was somehow wrong about at least the causative chain of what caused what in his experiments. He undervalued the metal elements thinking that have no electrical properties, have on potential to create electrical energy but only cause or release the electricity in the body. He was convinced that even dead bodies can produce or release electricity And wanted to prove A. Volta that he was wrong. The popular experiments with frog’s muscles should be attributed to Galvani. He was the first who systematically experimented this was. Hes treatise was called De animali electricitate. Due to being wrong by Galvani, Volta outperformed Galvani in his discoveries what was right and Galvani died in poverty.
(7) Alessandro Volta (1745-1827, Pavia, Italy). He was young and charismatic. He stated on the contrary to Galvani: “electricity comes from somewhere else but where?”. He used two different metal coins and attached metal spoon to them and touched two sides of it with his tongue what caused tingling experience. So he could prove that electricity came from conduct of different metals and frog twitches because reacts to electricity on the metal. After that discovery Volta was building a pile of metal, every single metal plate used to build a pile was submerged in acid prior to be put in a stack, and alternately plates of different metal have been used. Conducts of different metal worked and this way he tested the electricity. This way when creating pile of metal he constructed the first battery. Purely electrical machine imitating torpedo fish. Now the flow of electricity was continuous like water in stream and electricity was flowing through pile what was called an electric current.
After Volta the use of effect of the flow of the current on water. What is called an electrolysis of water. From Wikipedia:
Jan Rudolph Deiman and Adriaan Paets van Troostwijk used, in 1789, an electrostatic machine to make electricity which was discharged on gold electrodes in a Leyden jar with water. In 1800 Alessandro Volta invented the voltaic pile, and a few weeks later the English scientists William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle used it for the electrolysis of water.
Constant stream of current submerged into water generates pure oxygen and pure hydrogen. It stopped to be just a curiosity and became useful. This experiment gave foundations to chemistry and physics and modern industry. Pile of metal by Volta made him an international celebrity making him incredibly rich. The fundamental measure was made to his honor – volt.
(8) Humphry Davy (1778-1829, British chemist). In 1808 he created the largest battery. In the cellar so many batteries were generating a lot of sulfur (exactly: sulfur dioxide) fumes. And many people gathered in lecture hall in candle and oil lamp light to see how Davy put together two carbon filaments to generate constant, bright sparks of electricity.
(9) Giovanni Aldini (1762-1834, Bologne, Italy). He was the nephew of Luigi Galvani. He was experimenting on connecting to dead bodies the electricity. It was as if discovering the power of resurrection. Grizzly coda to the story of electricity. On 18th of January 1803 he came to London with terrifying experiment to show the influence of electric current on the dead body of the criminal hung George Foster the convicted murderer has been just hung at the Newgate and his body just cut down from the gallows was brought directly to the electric theater. Exactly his experiments inspired Mary Shelley to write her novel. Mary Shelley first visited Lake Como in Italy in 1818 and this place inspired her in her imagination and returned a few times in her novels of which the most important is probably Frankenstein. Aldini combined discoveries of Galvani and Volta for the first time.
He was the father of electrotherapy and application of electric current to the treatment of personality disorders.
To finish fundamental considerations about static charge it is necessary to mention the character not mentioned in the movie whose name served to name the basic electric unit in physics:
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (1736-1806, French military engineer and physicist). He is best known as the eponymous discoverer of what is now called Coulomb’s law, the description of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion.
Repulsive force that the two balls — [which were] electrified with the same kind of electricity — exert on each other, follows the inverse proportion of the square of the distance
(10) Michael Faraday (1791-1867, British, son of a blacksmith and self educated book binder, finished his education in age of 12 years old). Connection of electricity to magnetism. Move from static charge to the flow of continuous charge. As a young man he was working hard by day and reading scientific books in evenings on his own. He loved learning new things to understand why things worked as they were. On Saturday, 29 February 1812, he attended the first of a series of four lectures on the science of chemistry by Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution in London to see experiments by himself. He was full of ideas so Davy appointed him as his assistant. Initially he acquired a great deal of knowledge on chemistry but his curiosity has lead him to electricity and magnetism. Faraday and Davy were impressed by experiments of Hans Christian Ørsted on how electricity creates magnetic force.
In his own experiments in 1821, after rigorous considerations about possibilities how electric and magnetic forces can be linked to each other, he discovered that mercury was a good conductor and created experiment to show circular motion of copper rod around the magnet submerged in mercury bath. Because mercury is such a good conductor it completes the circuit. When the current runs through the circuit it generates circular magnetic force field around the wire what interacts with magnetism from permanent magnet that Faraday placed in the middle of mercury bath. Together they force the wire to move. Circular motion is the effect of invisible forces that he proved that exist. This device was the first that converted electric current into continuous motion. It was the first ever electric motor ever created.
He wanted to revert this process and to use the magnetism and motion to generate the electricity.
In another experiment, 17 October 1831, Faraday moved in and out magnet into the coil of wire to be able to detect tiny electric current moving one way and then the other.
In third experiment just after he was rotating a copper plate around the magnetic field. The spinning copper disk that cut through magnetic field, he did not know that billions of negatively charged electrons were deflected from the original circular course and began to drift towards the edge. A negative charge builds up at the out of the disk, leaving the positive charge at the center and once the disk was connected to wires the electrons flowed in a steady stream. Faraday had generated a continuous flow of electric current. The electric current flowed as long as copper disk was spun. He created electrical power directly from mechanical power.
The discovery of induction was strongly important and had profound effect on technology of XIX century and powerful research.
Faraday’s law of induction (briefly, Faraday’s law) is a basic law of electromagnetism predicting how a magnetic field will interact with an electric circuit to produce an electromotive force (EMF)—a phenomenon called electromagnetic induction. It is the fundamental operating principle of transformers, inductors, and many types of electrical motors, generators and solenoids. The electromotive force around a closed path is equal to the negative of the time rate of change of the magnetic flux enclosed by the path.
The farad (F) is the SI derived unit of electrical capacitance, the ability of a body to store an electrical charge.
(11) Hans Christian Ørsted (1777-1851, Danish physicist and chemist). He passed electric current through a cooper rod close to magnetic compass needle and saw needle rotating. It has been probably for the first time shown that electric current can create magnetism. Now we call this phenomenon the electromagnetism – the fundamental force in nature. He did numerous experiments to find the links between electricity and other powers of nature.
From Wikipedia:
On 21 April 1820, during a lecture, Ørsted noticed a compass needle deflected from magnetic north when an electric current from a battery was switched on and off, confirming a direct relationship between electricity and magnetism.
Important characters for this period not mentioned in the movie but giving their names to units, measures, laws of physics:
James Watt (1736-1819, Scottish engineer). His invention of steam engine gave generally his name to physical unit of power. Also electric power is expressed in watt unit.
André Marie Ampère (1775-1836, French scientist). Distinguished between electrostatics and electrodynamics. Applied mathematical apparatus to describe quantitative relationships between electric and magnetic phenomena. He combined magnetic induction around conductor with the current. Ampère’s circuital law relates the integrated magnetic field around a closed loop to the electric current passing through the loop. He was theorizing the existence of an “electrodynamic molecule” (the forerunner of the idea of the electron). The SI unit of electric current is the ampere, which is the flow of electric charge across a surface at the rate of one coulomb per second.
Georg Simon Ohm (1789-1854, German physicist and mathematician). Ohm’s law first appeared in the famous book Die galvanische Kette, mathematisch bearbeitet (tr., The Galvanic Circuit Investigated Mathematically) (1827) in which he gave his complete theory of electricity. In this work, he stated his law for electromotive force acting between the extremities of any part of a circuit is the product of the strength of the current, and the resistance of that part of the circuit. After Ohm has been named the unit of resistance – ohm.
Heinrich Friedrich Emil Lenz (Эмилий Христианович Ленц,1804–1865, Russian physicist). Lenz’s law states that the current induced in a circuit due to a change or a motion in a magnetic field is so directed as to oppose the change in flux and to exert a mechanical force opposing the motion. Lenz’s law is contained in the rigorous treatment of Faraday’s law of induction, where it finds expression by the negative sign. The direction of the back EMF (electromotive force) of an induced field opposes the changing current that is its cause.
James Prescott Joule (1818-1889). He discovered Joule’s first law in 1841, that the heat which is evolved by the proper action of any voltaic current is proportional to the square of the intensity of that current, multiplied by the resistance to conduction which it experiences.
(12) William Strugeon (1783-1850, British electrical engineer). He invented an electromagnet in 1825. On iron core with a coat of insulator there was wound copper wire.
(13) Joseph Henry (1797-1878, American). Independently to Faraday he invented the phenomenon of electromagnetic induction and self-inductance. He improved an invention of an electromagnet. The unit of electromagnetic inductance linked to the phenomenon of electromagnetic induction has been named to honor his work – henry (H). The inductance of an electric circuit is one henry when an electric current that is changing at one ampere per second results in an electromotive force of one volt across the inductor V(t) = L * (dI/dt), where V(t) denotes the resulting voltage across the circuit, I(t) is the current through the circuit, and L is the inductance of the circuit.
The discoveries made by Faraday has lead to the first practical device that became very important and used the electricity. The telegraph. The key to understand the telegraph is to understand the special kind of magnet. An electromagnet. Magnet created by electric current. The first electromagnet has been developed independently by William Sturgeon in Great Britain and Joseph Henry in America. They both discovered that adding coils to an electromagnet they can create more concentrated electric field. The more coils, the more turns, the stronger the magnet. To test the effect of magnetic field, iron fillings have been sprinkled on top of the magnet. Iron fillings follow the contours of magnetic field. This allows us to visualize the effects of magnetism. To make an electromagnet even stronger Henry and Sturgeon discovered that they could place certain kinds of metal inside the electromagnetic coil. The reason iron is so fascinating because we can see it has been made of lots of tiny magnets, all pointing in random directions at the moment this is not the magnet (U-shaped, horseshoe iron core). It is similarly like multitudes of random compass needles and every pointing different directions. But when we apply a magnetic field they all align together. They all combine all these magnets and they cumulatively add to the strength of electromagnet. So what Henry and Sturgeon did was placed two electromagnetic coils on each arm of the iron horseshoe to create something that was many many times more powerful. And electromagnet only works when the electric current is on. Impressive but not world changing. But it created the ability to control something at the distance. What is one of the most useful things that we ever discovered.
Electromagnetic induction was discovered by Michael Faraday, published in 1831. It was discovered independently by Joseph Henry in 1832.
Electromagnetic induction in my favorite Internet tutorial (course).
Not mentioned in the movie:
Wilhelm Eduard Weber (1804-1891, German physicist). Along with Carl Friedrich Gauss invented first electromagnetic telegraph. The unit of magnetic flux the weber is named to honor his work.
Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853-1928, Dutch physicist). In physics (specifically in electromagnetism) the Lorentz force (or electromagnetic force) is the combination of electric and magnetic force on a point charge due to electromagnetic fields. A particle of charge q moving with a velocity v in an electric field E and a magnetic field B experiences a force of F = qE + qv x B. Variations on this basic formula describe the magnetic force on a current-carrying wire (sometimes called Laplace force), the electromotive force in a wire loop moving through a magnetic field (an aspect of Faraday’s law of induction), and the force on a charged particle which might be traveling near the speed of light (relativistic form of the Lorentz force).
More precisely you can follow this document called Brief History of Electromagnetism where it has been done more precisely what discovery, formulation, statement of law of physics when happened and could be attributed to whom exactly.
Another series of “not mentioned” but to whom I want to refer on my blog as several electric phenomena I want to show from its first discoveries and intuitions about. This is how we learn and discover the world for the first time. For the first time everything is intuitive.
Felix Savary (1797-1841, French scientist). He discovered for the first time that a capacitor can produce electrical oscillations. During his experiment in 1826. He found that when a Leyden jar was discharged through a wire wound around an iron needle, sometimes the needle was left magnetized in one direction and sometimes in the opposite direction. He correctly deduced that this was caused by a damped oscillating discharge current in the wire, which reversed the magnetization of the needle back and forth until it was too small to have an effect, leaving the needle magnetized in a random direction.
Samuel Morse (1791-1872, American inventor). In 1832 used the phenomenon of magnetism to electromagnetic telegraphy. By 40s of XIX century developed alphabet to be sent and received using simple code of long and short electrical signals. The principle was how long the electrical circuit was switched on or off. Long pulse of current for long dash and short burst for a dot. This allowed for the messages to be sent and received by using a simple code.
By 1850s both Europe and America were covered with network of electric cables used to communication. But in 50s US businessmen and British engineers joint forces connected by cable both continents. During the attempts heavy cables kept snapping in heavy seas and heavy storms. In 29th July 1858 both parts of the cable one end from Newfoundland and the other from the South-West Ireland were spliced in the middle of Atlantic. 6 days later the first direct link between two powerful nations in the world was in place. The formal message of congratulations was sent from Queen Victoria to President James Buchanan. But since celebration things started to go wrong. Chief engineer Charles Bright original notebook: Queen Victoria original message was only 98 words long but it too 16 hours to transmit.
“The Queen desires to congratulate the President upon the successful completion of this great international work, in which the Queen has taken the deepest interest. The Queen is convinced that the President will join with her in fervently hoping that the electric cable, which now connects Great Britain with the United States, will prove an additional link between the two places whose friendship is founded upon their common interests and reciprocal esteem. The Queen has much pleasure in thus directly communicating with the President, and in renewing to him her best wishes for the prosperity of the United States.”
It was very hard to decipher message. The electric signal when received was blurred and distorted. Other side was asking for words to be repeated. Over and over again. Sending the signal through the Atlantic wasn’t as straightforward as people hoped. For next few days several hundred of messages were exchanged. But those arriving in Newfoundland were almost impossible to decipher. Just a jumbled mess of dots and dashes. There was a serious problem with the cable and it was getting worse. The 1958 cable was never fully repaired.
At the end British engineer Wildman Whitehouse mistakenly believed that by increasing the signal voltage could force the messages through to the Newfoundland. The cable simply stopped working altogether.
At time increasing the voltage using more powerful batteries made sense. Most experts believed that the electric current that flow through the cable like fluid in a pipe. Increasing the voltage like increasing pressure in the system forcing the current to flow through the cable to the other end. But the telegraph was actually carrying pulses or ripples of currents along the cable. Not a continuous stream. And over long distances these pulses will becoming distorted. Making difficult to tell what was the short dot and which was a longer dash.
By studying the effectiveness of the underwater cabling scientists were beginning to understand that the electric current didn’t always flow like water but was also creating invisible electromagnetic waves or ripples. And this breakthrough has lead to the new branch of research into electromagnetic spectrum and solved the problem of the Atlantic telegraph. In effect the Transatlantic cable was a giant, ambitions, hugely expensive experiment. The failure of science to keep pace with the technology have been exposed. And a new more theoretical and much more exciting approach to understanding electricity began to unfold.
Armed with this new understanding of how electric pulses moved along the cable. Improvements were made to its compositions, design and how it was laid.
It takes another 8 years of scientists and engineers working together before working cable was finally put in place. On Friday of 27th July 1866 the message was sent through the Atlantic. Clear and crisp.
The invention of the telegraph changed ordinary people’s lives but it would be breakthrough how we used the continuous flow of the electric current that would have even greater impact. Because inventors were developing the new ways of using electricity. To make something every person in the world would want. Electric light.
Until XIX century we only knew one way to make our own light. Burn things. By the middle of the XIX century we perfected a very effective way to light our house. Using gas. A typical British home in the 1860s would be lit by highly flammable gas pumped directly to the house by the network of pipes. But these gas lamps were too dull to be effective for large outdoor areas. Railway stations and streets begat to be lit by more powerful lights. Electric arc lights. The first arc lights were demonstrated by Michael Faraday’s mentor – sir Humphry Davy. At Royal Institution in 1808. And it worked by passing the continuous spark of electricity across two carbon rods. But their intense white glow was too bright for people’s homes. For an electric light to compete with gas we would need to be subdivided by smaller and more gentle lights.
In early 1880s the most competitive inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) was taken on the challenge. For Edison an invention was a passion It was what he loved doing. Edison loved to be in laboratory. The first thing that drove that passion is that it was a lot of fun for Edison. And it was that thing he found it was the most exciting. It was something he did well. It allowed all of this creativity to be involved to come do for it. He was that mister of electrical invention. Was the man they trusted, that was believed that could do anything. Carefully cultivated connections with entrepreneurs, with people willing to put their cash into his projects. For Edison money was probably the least important. But enabled him to fulfill every next project. He had assembled the group of young talented people in cutting edge laboratory in New Jersey, 26 miles from Manhattan. Menlo Park would become the world’s first R&D facility. Allowing Edison’s team to invent on an industrial scale.
Edison’s dream was to bring an electric light to every home in a land. And with his team of engineers behind him and the vision of the electric future ahead he launched his campaign. The race to bring electric light to the world was to play out to the greatest cities of the world New York, Paris, London. Edison’s Menlo Park team set about developing a totally different for of electric lamp – the incandescent light bulb. Edison’s light bulb design wasn’t all that new or unique. French, Russian, Belgian, British inventors have been perfecting similar bulbs for over 40 years. And one of them – an Englishmen Joseph Swan (1828-1914) had been developing his own version of incandescent lamp. Both Swan and Edison’s light bulbs worked by passing an electric current through a filament. A filament is a material in which the electric current flows through with more difficulty than it does through the copper wire in the rest of the circuit. And it relies o the idea of resistance. Atoms in the filament impede the flow of electricity so it takes more energy to force it through. And this energy is deposited in the filament as heat (see note about Joule’s first law in green). As it heats up it’s resistance goes up which again raises it’s temperature until it glows white hot. One of the first materials Edison used for his filaments was platinum. With it’s relatively high melting point platinum could be heated to white-hot temperature without melting it. It could also be stretched into thin strands and the thinner the strand the more resistance offered to the current passing through it. But platinum was expensive and didn’t offer enough resistance. 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 to stop cheaper carbon filaments from burning up too quickly. Edison and Swan tested all kinds of different materials for their filaments. Everything from raw silk and parchments to cork. Edison even tested his engineer’s beard hair. Eventually he settled on bamboo fiber while Swan used treated cotton thread. Edison and Swan’s light bulb designs were very similar. Eventually they came to an agreement and went into partnership to sell light bulbs in the UK. Today many people still believe that Edison alone invented the light bulb while Swan has become a footnote in history.
But his incandescent light bulb was only part of Edison’s strategy. He had also invented an entire electrical system of sockets, cables and meters to go with it. And being a brilliant businessman he developed a groundbreaking new way of distributing electricity. Edison knew that the key to make money from his system was to generate the electricity in a central station and then sell it to as many customers as possible. It seems obvious to us now but until then anyone who wanted to use electricity had to have their own noisy generator to make it (fake it till you make it -AL). Edison’s ambition was huge. He wanted to light the fastest-growing and most exciting city in the world New York. In the summer of 1882 Edison stood in a unique position at the center of 19th century science and invention. He had patented a cutting-edge incandescent light bulb. He had amassed an unprecedented knowledge of electrical engineering. And above all he had cultivated a reputation among the American public of being such a genius inventor that journalists hung on his every word and the financial muscle of Wall Street was quick to throw itself behind his new ideas. His vision to electrify Manhattan and then of course the rest of the world was seemingly within his grasp. Because Edison and his team were about to launch their most expensive and risky project yet – America’s first power station generating continuous direct current. Just before 3 PM on the 4th of September 1882 Thomas Edison surrounded by a gaggle of bankers, dignitaries and reporters entered JP Morgan’s building in Manhattan, flicked one of the Edison patented switches and 100 of his incandescent bulbs began to glow turning to a nearby journalist he said ‘I have accomplished all that I promised’. Half a mile from JP Morgan’s building on Pearl Street Edison’s new power station costing half a million dollars and four years of hard work had sprung into life. The currents surged through buried cables stretching out in each direction. Of course it might seem obvious to us now but in New York back in the early 1880s the idea of burying electric cables underground seemed like unnecessary expense. Typical streen in Manhattan would have been crisscrossed with hundreds of cables used for telegraphs, telephones and arc street lighting. Looking up you’d have seen a tangled mass of black spaghetti blocking out the light. Edison knew this dangerous situation had to change and for him to make as much money as he could electricity needed rebranding. It had to be considered safe. So Edison was arguing both for the greater safety of his DC low voltage system and 400 hundred round lines. He can argue that he has a much safer system than electric arc light for streets or gas lighting for indoor lighting. He doesn’t have to worry about fires, doesn’t have to worry about electrocution that all of this is much safer because of the system he’s created with this underground system.
Burying every cable was not only very expensive but was a logistical nightmare because this was one of the busiest square miles in the world. Edison chose the area of Wall Streen in Manhattan for a reason. Rich, important, influential. Because for Edison’s system to make money, all these wealthy customers had to be within a mile of his power station. And this was because Edison calculated the thickest cable he could afford would only carry an adequate amount of his continuous direct current to customers within this range. This was a huge leap forward because for the first time dozens of customers could be supplied by just one power station. But there was a big problem. Edison’s network could never be economical in ligting America’s new suburbs. They just didn’t have the concentration of customers needed to make buildings this expensive power stations worthwhile. How do we stuck with Edison’s way of generating and distributing electricity the world would be a very different place. We’d have to have power stations scattered around no more than a mile apart. Even in the centers of our towns and cities. And it would be extraordinarily expensive to even provide power for smaller communities.
But someone who held the answers to these problems was about to enter the story. Someone who would help create the modern world and who’d play and integral part in one of the biggest fallouts in scientific history. His name was Nikola Tesla. And he was right under Edison’s nose.
Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) was a Serbian inventor who was born in Croatia and who worked for Edison briefly after arriving in New York at the age of 28. European, introverted, a deep thinker. He was everything Edison wasn’t. Edison and Tesla could not be more different in the way that they handled herself (means the way) appearance and their manners and the way they constructed a public image for themselves. Edison could care less about the clothes that he had on and if he spilled chemicals on his good Sunday suit then he spilled chemicals on his Sunday suit he was basically the very various kind of slob, only guy. Tesla on the other hand even as a young man in his mid-20s is thinking about his appearance, how he comes across the people, so he cares about his clothes, he cares about his manner indeed, he even cares about how his photographs, his portraits are taken and he always wants to make sure that he has nice three-quarter profile, so you don’t see that the fact he has a bit of a pointy chin.
The life and death of Nikola Tesla is one of the most fascinating yet tragic stories of scientific brilliance, cutthorat business and shocking public relations stunts (means – i think -PR shocking effects, experiments for a big audience). American public may have been wowed by Edison’s new direct current power stations but Tesla was less impressed. He had a dream electricity could be transmitted across entire cities or even nations. And he believed, he knew how it could be done by using a different type of electric current. Electrical experts knew that the smaller the current sent down a cable the smaller the losses in it through resistance and so the longer the cable could be.
Tesla proposed using a method of transmitting electricity where the currents could be lowered without a fall in the amount of electrical power at the other end. It was called alternating current. It’s electric current that alternates between moving in one direction then the opposite direction very quickly. As opposed to a direct current which moves only in one direction. Tesla was interested in alternating current because like other electrical engineers in late 1880s he realized that as you raise the voltage of any current that you transmit from point A to point B is going to be more efficient to have a higher voltage. And since the amount of electric power in a cable is its voltage multiplied by its current. Increasing the voltage meant the current in the cables could be reduced and so losses due to resistance will be less. However too high voltages are unwanted. On the order to say 20 000 V coming into your home. So you need to step down the current that is being transmitted over distance into your home. And to do that you need a converter or a transformer. Alternating current allows you to use a transformer to make that switch from the high transmission voltage that you are going to use at consumption. Perfecting the technology to transmit the electricity hundreds of miles from where it was generated would mark a huge step towards the modern world. And a wealthy industrial entrepreneur was already developing the solution. His name was George Westinghouse (1846-1914).
Westinghouse believed alternating currents was the future but it had a big drawback. While it was fine for electric light unlike direct current there was not practical electric motor that could run on it. And no one believed that ever would be. Apart from Nikola Tesla. Tesla as an inventor liked to say that the first thing you need to do is not to build something but to imagine it, to think it through, to plan it what modern-day psychologists would call an eidetic memory. He could basically remember everything that he saw and then visualize it in three dimensions. And they often say that the people would have this skill see it about an arm’s length away out here and they see it in three dimensions in that space. And all the indications are is this is Tesla had that ability.
Tesla used metal egg to demonstrate his greatest breahthrough and one of the most important inventions of all time. He showed how rotary movements can be produced directly from an alternating current. Crucially one that could be generated thousands of miles away. This was something that had never been done before.
When Tesla was working on alternating current motor he was thinking big and he was not just tinkering with one little component of motor and saying “gee if I can make that a little bit better it will work out”. He’s actually thinking about an entire system that involves the generator, the wires to the motor and the motor itself. He is complete maverick. He’s thinking outside the box. He’s doing things differently than any of his fellow contemporary inventors. Tesla’s solution was ingenious. He fed more than one alternating current into his motor and timed them that they followed in sequence with each other. The first alternating current energized the coil of wire inside the motor creating an electromagnetic field which attracted the motor’s central moving part to it and then faded. The second overlapping current fed the next coil dragging the moving part around further before it faded and the same for the third coil and the forth. The result was a revolving magnetic field strong enough to make the motor or in this case his egg spin.
Tesla designed an entire electrical system around this called polyphase transimssion. This meant a noisy and smelly power station generating lots of useful alternating current could now be situated away from populated areas. And for the first time it was possible to build large power stations wherever you want. On the edge of town or a waterfall like Niagara and you can then distribute the power over long distances and then serve all the people in the major city or metropolitan center. Tesla’s breakthrough was the last piece of the jigsaw. But he still had to convince the world that his solution was better than the direct current championed by Edison.
Edison has continued to roll out his direct current system building power stations across New York State. But then Tesla met George Westinghouse. The man that could make his dreams into a reality. In July 1888 Westinghouse made an offer for Tesla’s patents which has become part of the mystery and folklore surrounding the whole Nikola Tesla story and where it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction. Tesla was paid 75 000 dollars for his alternating current patents and offered 2.50 $ for every horsepower his motors would generate. This should have guaranteed him vast wealth for the rest of his life. But that isn’t what happened.
These tubes are not plugged in to any power source. But they still light up. It’s electricity’s invisible effect. An effect not just confined to the wires it flow through. In the middle of the 19th century a great theory was proposed to explain how this could be that some invisible power can make fluorescent tubes light without wiring. The theory says that surrounding any electric charge and there’s a lot of electricity flowing in such situation is force field. These fluorescent tubes are lit purely because they’re under the influence of the force field from the power cables above. The theory that a flow of electricity could in some way create an invisible force field was originally proposed by Michael Farraday. But it would take a brilliant young Scotsman called James Clark Maxwell (1831-1879) who would prove Farraday correct. And not through experimentation but through mathematics.
Before Maxwell scientists had often built strange machines or devised wonderous experiments to create and measure electricity but Maxwell was different. He was interested in the numbers. And his theory not only revealed electricity’s invisible force field but how it could be manipulated. It would prove to be one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time. Maxwell was a mathematician and a great one. He saw electricity and magnetism in an entirely new way. He expressed it all in terms of very compact mathematical equations and the most important thing is that in Maxwell’s equations is an understanding of electricity and magnetistm as something linked and as something that can occur in waves. Maxwell’s calculations showed how these fields could be disturbed rather like touching the surface of water with your finger changing the direction of the electric current would create a ripple or wave through these electric and magnetic fields. And constantly changing the direction of the flow of the current forwads and backwards like an alternating current would produce a whole series of waves. Waves that would carry energy. Maxwell’s maths was telling him that changing electric currents would be constantly sending out great waves of energy into their surroundings. Waves that would carry on forever unless something absorb them. Maxwell’s maths was so advanced and complicated that only a handful of people understood it at the time. And although his work was still only a theory. It inspired a young German physicist called Heinrich Hertz (1857-1894, German physicist of Jewish origin).
Hertz decided to dedicate himself to designing an experiment to prove that Maxwell’s waves really existed.
Hertz’s original apparatus and its beauty in its sheer simplicity. It generates an alternating current that runs along metal rods of main apparatus with a spark that jumps accross the gap between these two metal spheres. Now if Maxwell was right then this alternating current should generate an invisible electromagnetic wave that spreads out into the surroundings. If you place a wire in the part of that wave then at the wire there should be the changing electromagnetic field which should induce an electric current in the wire. So what’s Hertz did was bulid this ring of wire. His receiver that he could carry around in different positions in the room to see if he could detect the presence of the wave and the way he did that was leave a very tiny gap in the wire across which a spark would jump if a current runs through the ring. Because the current is so weak that spark is very very faint. And Hertz spent pretty most of 1887 in darkened room staring intensely through the lens to see if you could detect the presence of this faint spark.
But Hertz wasn’t alone in the attempts to create Maxwell’s waves. Back in England a young physicist professor called Oliver Lodge (1851-1940) had been fascinated by the topic for years but hadn’t had the time to design any experiments to try to discover them. Then one day in early 1888 while setting up an experiment on lightning protection he noticed something unusual. Lodge noticed that when he set up his equipment and sent an alternating current around the wires he could see glowing patches between the wires and with a bit of tweaking he saw these glowing patches formed a pattern. The blue glow and electrical sparks occured in distinct patches evenly spaced along the wires. He realized they were the peaks and toughs of a wave an invisible electromagnetic wave. Lodge had proved that Maxwell was right. Finally by accident Lodge had created Maxwell’s electromagnetic waves around the wires. The big question had been answered. Filled with excitement at his discovery Lodge prepared to announce it to the world at that summer’s annual scientific meeting run by the British association. Before it though he decided to go on holiday. His timing couldn’t be worse because back in Germany and at exactly the same time Heinrich Hertz was also testing Maxwell’s theories. Eventually Hertz found what he was looking for. A minute spark. And as he carried his receiver around different positions in the room he was able to map out the shape of the waves being produced by his apparatus. And he checked each of Maxwell’s calculations carefully and tested them experimentally. It was a toud de force of experimental science. Back in Britain as the crowds gathered for the British association meeting Oliver Lodge returned from holiday, relaxed and full of anticipation. His great friend the mathematician Friz Gerald was due to the opening address in the meeting but in it he proclaimed that Heinrich Hertz had just published just astounding results. He had detected Maxwe;;’s waves travelling through space. We have snatched the thunderbolt from Jove himself and enslaved the all pervading ether he announced. Lodge felt his thunder stolen. Professor Oliver Lodge had lost his moment of triumph pipped at the post by Heinrich Hertz. Hertz’s spectaculat demonstration of electromagnetic waves what we now call radio waves even though he didn’t know it at the time it’s going to lead to a whole 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 spread through these fields on a pond. And Heinrich Hertz could actually create and detect the waves as they pass through the air. But almost immediately there would be another revelation in our understanding of electricity. A revelation that would once again involve professor Oliver Lodge. And once again his thunder would be stolen.
The story starts in Oxford in summer of 1894. Hertz had died suddenly earlier that year and so Lodge prepared a memorial lecture with a demonstration that would bring the idea of waves to a wider audience. Lodge had worked on his lecture. He’d reserach better ways of detecting waves and he’d borrowed a new apparatus from friends. He’d made some significant advances in the technology designed to detect the waves. Apparatus generating alternating current and a spark across gap between spheres. The alternating current sends out an electromagnetic wave just as Maxwell predicted that is picked up by the receiver. It sets off a very weak electric current thorugh two antenna. This is what Hertz had done. Logde’s improvement on this was to set up tubes full of iron filings. The weak electric current passes thorugh the filings forcing them to clamp together and when they do they close a second electric circuit and set of the bell. So if I push the button on this end it sets off the bell at the receiver. And it’s doing that with no connections between the two. It’s like magic.
This invention revolutionized telegraphcommunication but without those long cables stretching between the sending and receiving stations. To the more wordly and savvy members of the audience this was clearly more than showing the maestro Maxwell was right. This was a revolutionary new form of communication.
Lodge publised his lecture notes on how electromagnetic waves could be sent using his new improvements. All around the world. Inventors, amateurs, enthusiasts and scientists read Lodge’s reports with excitement and began experimenting with hertzian waves.
Two utterly different characters were to be inspied by it both would bring improvements to the wireless telegraph. And both would be remembered for their contribution to science far more than Oliver Lodge.
The first was Guillermo Marconi (1874-1937) very astute and charming individual. Definitely had the Italian Irish charm. He could apply this to almost anyone from sort of young ladies to world renowned scientists. Marconi was no scientist but read all he could of other people’s work. In order to put together his own wireless telegraph system. Born at Italian coast knew the potential of wireless communication in relation to maritime usage.fairly early on. Then aged only 22 he came to London with his Irish mother to market it.
The other person inspired by Lodge’s lecture was a teacher at the Presidency College in Kolkata called Jagadish Chundra Bose (1858-1937). Despite degrees from London and Cambridge the appointment of an Indian as a scientist in Kolkata had been a battle against racial prejudice. Indians was said didn’t have the requisite temperament for exact science. Bose was determined to prove this wrong. During meeting of the British Association in Liverpool September 1896 Bose first ever to present at the association meeting talking about his work and demonstrating his apparatus. Built and improved the detector that Lodge described. He found in hot Indian climate that metal filing inside tube that Lodge used to detect the waves became rusty and stuck together so both had to build a more practical detector using a coiled wire instead. His work was described as a sensation. The detector was extremely reliable. And could work on board ships so had great potential for the vast British naval fleet. Britain was the center of a vast telecommunications network which stretched almost around the world which was used to support an equally vast maritime network of merchant and naval vessels which were used to support the British Empire. But Bose a pure scientist wasn’t interested in the commercial potential of wireless signals. Unlike Marconi. Marconi wasn’t a trained scientist so he did come at things in a fairly different way which is may have been why he progressed so quickly in the first place and he was very good at forming connections the people that he needed to form connections with to enable his work to be done. Marconi used his connections to go straight to the only place that had the resourced to help him. The British Post Office was hugely powerful institution. When Marconi arrived first in London in 1896 British post buildings were newly completed and already heaving with business from the Empire’s postal and telegraphy services. Marconi had brought his telegraph system with him from Italy claiming it could send wireless signals over unheard of distances. And the post office engineering chief William Priest immediately saw the technology’s potential. So Priest offerend Marconi the great financial and engineering resources of the post office. And they started work up on the roof. They started sending and receiving signal between two roofs of two post office buildings. Signals of electromagnetic waves. Engineers from post office helped to improve the innovation and together they demonstrated it to influential people in government and the Navy. But Marconi was making plans behind the scenes. He applied for a British patent on the whole field of wireless telegraphy and was planning on setting up his own company. When the patent was granted all hell broke loose in the scientific community. That patent was itself revolutionary. Marconi in fact didn’t invent the radio. But made a lot of improvement that Lodge didn’t do that. This is why we remember Marconi and do not remember Lodge. Marconi bulit his fortune on invention of scientists. Bose was shocked. But he took one patent as well. Because he discovered the power of crystals.
When some crystals are touched with metal to test their electrical conductivity they can show the odd and vary behaviour. It does not fully conduct the electricity. But crystal is a semiconductor. Crystal was found to be much more effective detector of electromagnetic waves than metal fillings. Semiconductivity of crystal helped to extract signal from electromagnetic waves. With crystals now it became possible to broadcast and receive the exact sound of human voice or music.
Oliver Lodge missed all opportunities for patents. And the only he finally got about tuning signals has been bought by Marconi company. Worst indignation for Lodge was when Marconi in 1909 was granted a Noble prize in physics for wireless communication.
But still the very nature of electricity itself remained unexplained. What created those electrical charges and current in the first place?
In 1850s Germany’s glassblower Heinrich Geissler (1815-1879) invented gastubes that passed electrical current through them. And for next decades scientists had opportunities to study how electricity flow through these tubes. Efforts were made to pump more and more air out of the tubes. Could the electric current pass through the nothingness? Through the vacuum?
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A British scientist William Crookes (1832-1919) created vacuum good enough to answer that question. Finally he pumped out almost all air out of tube and created cathode ray tube, where white beam appear hitting glass on the other side of a tube.
Joseph James Thomson (1856-1940) found out that these beams were made up by tiny negatively charged particles. And because they were carriers of electricity they became known as electrons. Electrons move only one direction from the heated metal plate through the positively charged plate on the other end they behaved in exactly the same way as Bose’s semiconductor crystals. But whereas Bose’s crystals were naturally temperamental you had to find the right spot for them to work, these tubes could be manufactured consistently. They became known as valves and soon replaced crystals in radio sets everywhere.
Early XX century all radios, television sets and even computers were made on valves.
Now scientists knowing how electricity flow thorugh vacuum try to discover how it flows through other materials. Also made up materials, atoms.
So what the electricity was on the atomic scale. On Manchester University Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) team was studying the inner structure of the atom and producing a picture to describe what an atom looked like. By 1913 the picture of the atom was one with positively charged nucleus in the middle surrounded by negatively charged orbiting electrons. In patterns called shells. Each shell corresponds to the electron with particular energy. Now giving an energy boost an electron could jump from an inner shell to an outer one. And the energy had to be just right. If it wasn’t enough the electron wouldn’t make the transition. And this boost was often temporary because the electron would then drop back down again to it’s original shell. As it did this it had to give off its excess energy by spitting out a photon. And the energy of each photon depended on its wavelength or as we would perceive it its color. Understanding the structure of atoms could now also explain nature’s great electrical light shows. Just like Geissler’s tubes the type of gas the electricity passes through defines its color. And so is the color of the photon produced creating a spectacular auroras. Understanding atoms, how they fit together in materials and how their electrons behave was the final key to understanding the fundamental nature of electricity.
In James Wimshurst’s (1832-193) machine to generate electric charge electrons are rubbed off the discs and start a flow of electricity through the metal arms of the machine.
Metal conducts the electricity because the electrons are very weakly bound inside their atoms and so can slush about and be used to flow as electricity. Insulators on the other hand don’t conduct electricity because the electrons are very tightly bound inside the atoms. And are not free to move about. The flow of electrons and hence the electricity through materials was now understood. Conductors and insulators could be explained. What was more difficult to understand was the strange properties of semiconductors. Our modern electronic world is built upon semiconductors. And would grind to a halt without them. Jagadish Chandra Bose may have stumbled upon their properties back in the 1890s but noone was able to foreseen how important they were to become. But with the outbreak of the second world war things were about to change. British researchers in Oxford’s physics laboratory tried to improve the British radar system. Radars was the technology that used electromagnetic waves to detect enemy bombers. And as its accuracy improved it became clear that valves weren’t up to the job. So the team had to turn to the old technology. Instead of valves they used semiconductor crystals. Now they didn’t use the same sort of crystals that Bose had developed. Instead they used silicon. Silicon crystal receiver with tiny tungsten wire coiled down and touching the surface of a little silicon crystal.
It was the first time silicon had really been exploited as a semiconductor. But for it to work it needed to be very pure. And both sides in the war put a ot of resources into purifying it. The British had better silicon semiconductors because they had help from the laboratories in the US. In particular the famous Bell labs. And it wasn’t long before the physicists realized that if semiconductors could replace valves in radar perhaps they could replace valves in other devices too. Like amplifiers. The simple vacuum tube with its oneway stream of electrons had been modified to produce a new device.
By placing a metal grill in the path of the electrons and applying a tiny voltage to it a dramatic change in the strength of the beam could be produced. These valves worked as amplifiers turning a very weak electrical signal into a much stronger one. It was a big invention because if you can amplify a singal you can send it to anywhere in the world.
German expert Herbert Mataré (1912-2011) and Heinrich Welker started to build a semiconductor device that could be used as an electrical amplifier.
This tiny device could replace big expensive valves. In long distance telephone networks, radios and other equipment where a faint signal needed boosting. Matare’s bosses were not interested until paper of Bell labs researchers has been published. Their research team stumbled accross the same effect and now they were announcing their invention to the world. They called it the transistor.
In December 1947 they announced their invention but their transistor was just no good. European device was more reliable than Bell labs that was experimental model. it worked but was just too delicate. Search was on more robust signal amplifiers and the breakthrough came by accident. In Bell labs silicon crystal expert Russell Ohl (1898-1987) noticed that one of his silicon ingots had a really bizarre property. It seemed to be able to generate its own voltage and when he tried to measure this by hooking it up an oscilloscope he noticed that the voltage changed all the time. The amount of voltage generated seemed to be dependent on how much light was in the room. So by casting a shadow over the crystal he saw the voltage dropped. More light meant the voltage went up. When he turned a fan on between the lamp and the crystal the voltage started to oscillate with the same frequency that the blades of the fan were casting shadows over the crystal. One of Ohl’s colleagues immediately realized that the ingot had a crack in it that formed a natural junction and this tiny natural junction in an otherwise solid block was acting just like just more delicate junction between end of a wire and a crystal that Bose had discovered. Except here it was sensitive to light. The ingot had cracked because either sides contained slightly different amounts of impurities. One side had slightly more of the element phosphorus while the other had slightly more of a different impurity boron. And electrons seemed to be able to move accross from the phosphorus side to the boron side but not vice versa. Photons of light shining down onto the crystal were knocking electrons out of the atoms but it was the impurity atoms that were driving this flow. Phosphorus has an electron that is going spare. And boron is keen to accept another so electrons tended to flow from the phosphorus side to the boron side and crucially only flowed one way accross the junction.
The head of the semidonductor team William Shockley (1910-1989) saw the potential of this oneway junction within a crystal but how would it be possible to create a crystal with two junctions in it that could be used as an amplifier. Another researcher at Bell Labs called Gordon Teal had been working on a technique that would allow just that. He discovered a special way to grow single crystals of the semiconductor germanium. Now they are bing grown much much bigger than initially Teal created them. Glowing hot molten germanium just as pure as you can get it. Inside are a few atoms of whatever impurity is required to alter its conductive properties. Rotating arm above has a seed crystal at the bottom that has been dipped into the liquid and will be slowly raised up again. As the germanium cools and hardens it forms a long crystal like an icicle below the seed. The whole length is one single beautiful germanium crystal. Teal worked out that as the crystal is growing, other impurities can be added to the vat and mixed in. This gives us the single crystal with thin layers of different impurities creating junctions within the crystal. Applying the small current through the very thin middle section allows a much larger current to flow through the whole tripple sandwitch. From a single crystal like this hundreds of tiny solid blocks could be cut each containing the two junctions that would allow the movement of electrons through them to be precisely controlled. These tiny and reliable devices could be used in all sorts of electrical equipment. We cannot have the electronic equipment that we have without tiny components. 
And you get a weird effect that actually the smaller they get the more reliable they get it’s a win-win situation. The Bell Labs team were awarded the Nobel Prize for the world changing invention while the European team were forgotten.
William Shockley left Bell Labs and in 1955 set up his own semiconductor laboratory in rural California. Recruiting the country’s best physics graduates. But the celebratory mood did not last long because Shockley was almost impossible to work for. People left his company because they just disliked the way he treated them. So the fact that Shockley was actually such a git is why you have Silicon Valley. It starts that whole process of spin-off and growth and new companies and it all starts off with Shockley being such a shocking human being. The new companies were in competition with each other to come up with the latest semiconductor devices. They made transistors so small that huge numbers of them could be incorporated into an electrical circuit printed on a single slice of semiconductor crystal. These tiny and reliable chips could be used in all sorts of electrical equipment most famously in computers. A new age had doomed.
Today microchips are everywhere they’ve transformed almost every aspect of modern life from communication to transport and enetertainment.
But perhaps just as importantly our computers have become so powerful they are helping us to understand the universe in all its complexity.
A single microchip today can contain 4 billion transistors. It’s incredible how far technology has come in 60 years.
It’s easy to think that with the great leaps we’ve made in understanding and exploiting electricity there’s little left to learn about it. But we’d be wrong. For instance making the circuits smaller and smaller particular feature of electricity that had been known about for over a century was becoming more and more problematic – resistance. A computer chip has to be continuously cooled. If you take away the fan the temperature abruptly rises. It’s shooting up even to 200 degree Celsius. A few seconds and chip is fully cooked. Electrons flowing around the chip they do not flow not impeded. They are bumping into the atoms of silicon. And the energy being lost by these electrons is producing heat. Sometimes this was useful. Inventors made electric heaters and ovens. And whatever they got something to glow white hot, well that’s a light bulb, but resistance in electronic apparatus and in power lines is the major waste of energy and a huge problem. It’s thought that resistance wastes up to 20% of all the electricity we generate. It’s one of the greatest problems of modern times. And the search is on for a way to solve the problem of resistance. What we think of as temperature is really a measure of how much the atoms in a material are vibrating. And if the atoms are vibrating then electrons flowing through are more likely to bump into them. So in general the hotter the material the higher is electrical resistance. And the cooler it is the lower the resistance. But what happens if you cool something right down close to absolute zero -273 degree Celsius. Well at absolute zero there’s no heat at all. And so the atoms aren’t moving at all. What happens then to the flow of the electricity. The flow of the electrons.
Using a special device called a cryostat that can keep things close to absolute zero we can find out. In cryostat let be coil with mercury the famous liquid metal. And it forms part of an electric circuit and another equipment measures the resistance of the mercury. When we lower the mercury into the coldest part of the cryostat the resistance drops to absolutely nothin. Mercury like many substances we now know have this property it’s called becoming superconducting which means they have no resistance at all to the flow of electricity. But these materials work when they’re very very cold. If we could use a superconducting materials in our power cables and in our electronic apparatus we’d avoid losing so 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 made. In the small laboratory near Zurich Switzerland IBM physicists recently discovered the superconductivity in a new class of materials that is being called one of the most important scientific breaktroughs in many decades. They created material that is a superconductor in liquid nitrogen. And because electricity and magnetism is tightly linked that gives it equally extraordinary magnetic properties. Magnet is suspended levitating above the superconductor. They also achieved superconductivity properties in much warmer temperatures than anyone had thought possible. And we are tantalizingly close to getting room temperature superconductors. We are not there yet but one day a new material will be found and when we put that into our electronics equipment we could build a cheaper, better, more sustainable world. These new superconductors can’t be fully explained by the theoreticians so without a complete understanding experimentalists are often guided as much by luck as they are by a proper scientific understanding. Japaneese discovered that red wine improves the superconductors.
Electrical research now has the potential once again to revolutionize our world if room temperature superconductors can be found.