Mission Planet - Interplanetary Space Travel to Mars

Two Centuries of Electricity and Counting

There are some things in life we simply take for granted and rarely give a second's thought to. The air that we breathe, the water that flows from our taps and the food in the supermarket, we never stop to think how much we rely on these to survive ' yet, if any of them were taken away it wouldn't take us long to notice.

Furthermore, our ability to harness energy and use it to fuel countless machines, devices, contraptions and gadgets also demonstrates our ability to control our environment and use the planet's resources to achieve all sorts of amazing feats, from building skyscrapers to interplanetary travel.

In the modern digital age, we rely on the ability to harness energy more than ever, but nobody ever stops to consider how we got to the stage we're at today. So how exactly was electricity discovered?

Well, Benjamin Franklin, the American writer, publisher, scientist and diplomat, is often credited as 'discovering' electricity in the mid eighteenth century. However, it had been discovered a long time before that, it's just that nobody had really mastered the art of harnessing it for any practical use.

Franklin carried out a number of kite-flying experiments in 1752, which essentially involved him fastening an iron spike to a silken kite during thunderstorms and from this, he was able to shed some light on how electricity worked.

However, relying on thunderstorms for a source of electricity wasn't exactly conducive to effective experiments and it wasn't until 1800 that Italian scientist Alessandro Volta made a crucial breakthrough. By drenching paper in salt water and placing zinc and copper on either side of the paper, the electrical current that followed was, in effect, the birth of the electric cell. Creating and harnessing electricity was crucial to any future experiments.

Through connecting a series of these cells, this essentially created the first battery and Volta's name was thus used for the unit of power we now measure batteries in ' volts.

Other notable inventors that lent their names to units of energy include Scottish inventor James Watt, whose name is still alive today in the electric unit of power ' the 'Watt', whilst French mathematician Andre Ampere's dedication to the field of electricity and magnetism saw his name used as the unit of measurement for electric currents. Similarly, German mathematician George Ohm's research was recognised in Britain which ultimately led to his surname being adopted as the unit of measurement for electrical resistance.

Today, electricity is all around us, and we're now at the stage of being able to harness energy directly from the sun, with solar power becoming an increasingly used energy source to generate electricity and heat homes. We've sure come a long way in the past two hundred years!