O que é ELETRICIDADE? A História da Eletricidade: Da Grécia Antiga à Revolução Científica

Do you know how electricity works? What if I told you that the answer has changed over time. Today I will tell you about the history of electricity.

Hey Engineering Lovers, my name is Gustavo Pereira and today I'm going to tell you a little about the history of electricity And before continuing, if you're watching this video and haven't subscribed, take the opportunity now to subscribe, leave your like and activate the bell so you can be part of the largest community of engineering lovers on youtube, ok? Over the millennia, the phenomenon known as electricity has meant different things to different people. In ancient societies, electricity or more specifically lightning was the inspiration for some of the most powerful gods in pantheons around the world.

At the dawn of the Scientific Revolution, electricity was little more than a parlor trick. In the 19th century, the exploration of electromagnetism became a hugely profitable enterprise. Today, scientists understand the very atomic properties that power our world.

But even with this remarkable amount of knowledge, many questions remain about the mysteries of electricity, so much so that the 2,600-year history of electricity and the electromagnetic force more broadly is really just beginning. The study of electricity, like many scientific pursuits, has its origins in ancient Greece. Born in 624 BC, Thales of Miletus is one of the Seven Sages of Greece and a pre-Socratic philosopher who many identify as the world's first scientist.

Thales investigated the workings of the world, created mathematical theorems, experimented with magnetism, and recorded the first known observation of electrostatic phenomena. In his experiments, he rubbed different materials together to analyze their electrostatic effects. He noticed that amber, when rubbed against hemp or cat fur, gained a charge that could attract light materials such as dust or ash.

This ancient origin is built into the way we talk about electricity, because in Greek, the word for “amber” is elektron. Of course, Thales didn't know this at the time, but this attraction was caused by positively or negatively charged objects. Through a process known as the “triboelectric effect,” friction can cause electrons to transfer between objects, where a decrease in electrons is a positive charge and an increase in electrons is a negative charge.

Since opposite charges attract, Thales amber attracted the opposite charge found in dust and ash. For millennia after Thales, electricity remained an unexplained and often divinely explained natural phenomenon with a largely unexplored curiosity, but in the 17th century, static electricity would once again open the door to discoveries that would change the world. In the early 18th century, English scientist Francis Hauksbee, a former laboratory assistant to Isaac Newton, invented what he called an "electrostatic motor".

In 1705, Hauksbee discovered that if he placed a small amount of mercury in the glass of his modified version of Otto von Guericke's generator, evacuated the air to create a moderate vacuum, and rubbed the ball to form a charge, a glow was visible if he placed his hand on the outside of the ball. This remarkable discovery was unprecedented at the time. This glow was strong enough to be read.

Then, in 1729, an amateur scientist named Stephen Gray conducted electrostatic experiments that bizarrely involved suspending a boy with a silk rope, but he discovered that electricity could travel through the contact, creating the first ideas of electric current as well as conductors and insulators. While that was all well and good, none of these discoveries were initially of much use , and so these forms of electrical and static generation became parlor tricks practiced by artists known as "electricians. " But the spark, so to speak, was ignited and the scientists, many of whom marveled at these inexplicable electrified performances, decided to dig deeper into the matter.

One such scientist was Pieter van Musschenbroek who, while working in Leiden, Holland, created a jar that could effectively bottle up static electricity. Known as the Leyden Jar, this device is now used in all of our electronic devices today under another name, the capacitor. Benjamin Franklin also participated in a "flying boy" demonstration in Boston and, in 1752, began to discover the intricacies of lightning.

Franklin coined "positive" and "negative" in terms of electrical charge and also connected a collection of Leyden Jars to make what he called a "battery". Franklin thought that the device mimicked the configuration of a military artillery "battery" by the amount of leyden jars, and so called it a battery. Despite all these advances, knowledge of the properties of electricity was still a mystery, but that was about to change.

In the late 18th century, a scientific rivalry between Italian scientists Alessandro Volta and Luigi Galvani unearthed knowledge about the inner workings of electricity, how it operated in the human body, and crucially, how it could be stored as well as how it could produce a continuous flow. While working to disprove Galvani's claim that "animal electricity" was distinct from other forms of electricity, Volta created the voltaic pile, which was a tower of copper and zinc disks separated by paper soaked in brine and this was the world's first battery. Now the floodgates of invention have really opened.

In 1831, Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction and created the first electric generator. This is undoubtedly the greatest discovery of the electrical age, because with the electric generator, mechanical energy could be converted into electricity. Today, power plants, whether hydroelectric, wind, or even nuclear, use turbines and dynamos based on Faraday's science of electromagnetic induction.

With these revelations, Samuel Morse invented the telegraph and sent the first message in 1844 using electrical energy to send pulses. The clear commercial benefits of the telegraph, along with John Clerk Maxwell's equations on electromagnetism in the 1860s, created an unprecedented explosion of innovation in the minds of Thomas Edison. Thomas ended up developing the world's first power plant, and with Nikola Tesla's knowledge of alternating current, he made these plants possible.

Later, the Italian Guglielmo Marconi, who investigated a type of electromagnetic radiation known as radio waves, ended up creating Marconi's radio, which was the world's first radio and ended up receiving the Nobel Prize in physics in 1909. helped explain what exactly electricity was. But then, how does electricity work?

Electricity, along with magnetism, is part of one of the four fundamental forces of nature which are gravity, electromagnetism, weak nuclear force and strong nuclear force and it focuses on the interaction of charged particles through electromagnetic fields. But in terms of electricity, it's all about the electron where it was a subatomic particle first theorized by French physicist André-Marie Ampère in the early 19th century, later described as an "electrodynamic molecule". Each atom is made of a nucleus of protons and neutrons surrounded by a series of "shells" containing electrons.

While electrons close to the nucleus have a strong pull, electrons farther away in what is known as the “valence shell” have a much weaker pull . Sometimes these weak electrons can be pushed out of their orbits and travel from one atom to another. These moving electrons are known as electricity.

Since conductors like copper and silver have only one electron in their valence shell, these elements easily accept more electrons, which makes them conductive. Insulators, on the other hand, have shells full or nearly full of electrons, which makes them resistant to electrical charges. Semiconductors, however, are somewhere in the middle, meaning their gaps Bandwidths are not zero like metals, but can be made conductive using heating, doping, or most importantly, electric fields.

The most famous of these materials is silicon, which is what makes the portable devices we use today possible. These silicon wafers house transistors that switch between insulators and conductors thanks to electric fields. In many ways, the transistor is what turned the page from the electrical to the digital revolution.

Electricity may seem like a complex field, because it involves the knowledge of several scientists and inventors, who have been improving their knowledge over time. So you can see that this knowledge drags on through time from 624 BC with Thales of Miletus until today with the super conductors. So, did you know the history of electricity?

Did you have any idea of ​​the number of scientists and inventors who participated in this story? Leave it here in the comments that I want to know I'm going to leave two videos here on the side that you might like too and that's cool, it's worth checking out. If you liked the video, leave your like, subscribe to the channel and share this video with others .

That's it engineering lovers, a big hug and see you in the next video.