Electric Utility Glossary
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Michael Faraday (1791-1867)
Many people standout in the story of electricity but Michael Faraday’s work became the basis for modern power generation, electric motors and transformers. Many of the major products needed to operate an electric utility are derived from Faraday’s discoveries.
Faraday’s story is very unique. He was born in England in 1791 but he grew up destitute with no formal education in physics, medicine, chemistry or science. This was unlike the majority of everyone else in these fields. But Faraday was very smart with a keen imagination and scientific mind. He learned as much as he could about the science of electricity. It eventually led to him getting noticed by British scientific society members by accident. This accident paved the way for Faraday to eventually work as an assistant to Humphrey Davy, the inventor of the first arc light.
Faraday’s contribution to electricity cannot be overstated because up until this point in history, electricity could only be created through chemical processes or mechanical friction. With the work of Andre Marie Ampere and others, magnetism was understood to have an effect, but magnetism wasn’t fully understood in practice or in theory.
Faraday bridged the gap between the invisible forces of magnetism and their effect on creating steady electricity when magnets were moved back and forth within conductive fields to light and un-light a bulb. This is the first example of creating electricity by inducing a magnetic field to create invisible electromagnetic rotation.
As these experiments and technology leaps came together, so too were the math and physics frameworks, including German physicist, Greg Ohm, who defined the relationship between power, voltage, current and resistance in 1826. This later became the famous Ohm’s Law, and it helped solidify mathematical understanding of electrical properties used to this day.
In only 30 years we went from creating sparks using friction or chemical mixtures to creating electricity from previously unknown invisible magnetic fields. It was a remarkable leap in human understanding. Faraday’s work went on to inspire the world of physics and people such as Albert Einstein. Faraday’s work also influenced people like Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla and the evolution of AC and DC power.
During the 1830s Faraday’s work inspired the first electric motors and dynamos to more consistently create and transfer electricity over wires. Faraday’s work ultimately set the stage for understanding how to harness electricity and direct its flow and this opened the door to what would eventually become electric utility systems.
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