Informative Speech
TITLE: History of Electricity
Introduction:
Affordable and reliable, electricity is fundamental to modern life. Electricity is one
of nature’s most amazing phenomena. We have used electricity to light our cities, to
communicate across the seas and through the air, to create modern industry and to give
us the digital revolution. Although electricity is ceasing to be a novelty and becoming a
necessity of our everyday lives, most of us don’t give the history of electricity a second
thought. Where does it come from? And who are those scientists that have unlock the
mysteries of electricity? In this video I would like to enlighten you about the history of
electricity….
The beginning of electricity:
Electricity is a form of energy and it occurs in nature, so basically it was not
invented but was discovered. In about 600 BC, the Ancient Greeks discovered that
rubbing fur on amber caused an attraction between the two, which we call now as the
static electricity. Thales of Miletus made a series of observations on static electricity,
from which he believed that friction rendered amber magnetic.
In the year 1600, English scientist William Gilbert wrote “de magnete”, in which
he made a careful study of electricity and magnetism, distinguishing the lodestone effect
from static electricity produced by amber. He coined the new latin word “electricus”, the
greek word for amber, that refers to the property of attracting small objects after being
rubbed. This affiliation gave rise to the English words “electric” and “electricity”, which
made their first appearance in print in Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica.
Later in the 18th century, in June 1752, Benjamin Franklin is reputed to have
attached a metal key to the bottom of a dampened kite string and flown the kite in a
storm-threatened sky. A succession of sparks jumping from the key to the back of his
hand showed that lightning was indeed electrical in nature. Building upon Franklin’s
work, many other scientists studied electricity and began to understand more about how
it works.
Italian physicist Alessandro Volta discovered that particular chemical reactions
could produce electricity, and in 1800 he constructed the voltaic pile (an early electric
battery) that produced a steady electric current, and so he was the first person to create
a steady flow of electrical charge. Volta also created the first transmission of electricity
by linking positively-charged and negatively-charged connectors and driving an
electrical charge, or voltage, through them.
In 1831 electricity became viable for use in technology when Michael Faraday
created the electric dynamo (a crude power generator), which solved the problem of
generating electric current in an ongoing and practical way. Faraday’s rather crude
invention used a magnet that was moved inside a coil of copper wire, creating a tiny
electric current that flowed through the wire. This opened the door to American Thomas
Edison and British scientist Joseph Swan who each invented the incandescent filament
light bulb in their respective countries in about 1878. Previously, light bulbs had been
invented by others, but the incandescent bulb was the first practical bulb that would light
for hours on end.
Later in the 1800’s and early 1900’s Serbian American engineer, inventor, and all
around electrical wizard Nikola Tesla became an important contributor to the birth of
commercial electricity. He worked with Edison and later had many revolutionary
developments in electromagnetism, and had competing patents with Marconi for the
invention of radio. He is well known for his work with alternating current (AC), AC
motors, and the polyphase distribution system.
Others who worked to bring the use of electricity to where it is today include
Scottish inventor James Watt, Andre Ampere, a French mathematician, and German
mathematician and physicist George Ohm.
And so, electricity would remain little more than an intellectual curiosity for
millennia until these several great minds. These people throughout the ages have
made a huge impact on how we live our life today. Electricity is so crucial to modern life,
in fact, that the history of electricity is really the history of the modern world.
Demonstrative Speech
TITLE: Learning Super Hexagon for Trigonometric Identities
Introduction:
