History of Electricity Uses

The first practical application of electricity was the telegraph, invented by Samuel F.B. Morse in 1837. The need for electrical engineers was not felt until some 40 years later, upon the invention of the telephone (1876) by Alexander Graham Bell and of the incandescent lamp (1878) by Thomas A. Edison. These devices and Edison’s first central generating plant, in New York City (1882), created a large demand for people trained to work with electricity.

Electrical phenomena attracted the attention of European thinkers as early as the 17th century. The most noteworthy pioneers include Ludwig Wilhelm Gilbert and Georg Simon Ohm of Germany, Hans Christian Ørsted of Denmark, André-Marie Ampère of France, Alessandro Volta of Italy, Joseph Henry of the United States, and Michael Faraday of England. Electrical engineering may be said to have emerged as a discipline in 1864 when the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell summarized the basic laws of electricity in mathematical form and showed that radiation of electromagnetic energy travels through space at the speed of light. Thus, light itself was shown to be an electromagnetic wave, and Maxwell predicted that such waves could be artificially produced. In 1887 the German physicist Heinrich Hertz fulfilled Maxwell’s prediction by experimentally producing radio waves.