Learn basic information about electricity on this page. Page explores the movement of charges with text and a video.

How are magnetism and electricity related? Students will explore the relationship between magnetism and electricity, learn how to construct an electromagnet, and discover everyday uses of electromagnets. Students will create a multimedia...

Alessandro Volta invents the first primitive battery, discovering that electricity can be generated through chemical processes; scientists quickly seize on the new tool to invent electric lighting. Meanwhile, a profound insight into the...

Scientists take important steps toward a fuller understanding of electricity, as well as some fruitful missteps, including an elaborate but incorrect theory on animal magnetism that sets the stage for a groundbreaking invention.

A discovery by Hans Christian Orsted forever changed the way scientists think about electricity and magnetism. While preparing to perform an experiment during a lecture at the University of Copenhagen, he found that the magnetized needle...

The first telegraphs are constructed and Michael Faraday produces much of his brilliant and enduring research into electricity and magnetism, inventing the first primitive transformer and generator.

Albert Einstein publishes his special theory of relativity and his theory on the quantum nature of light, which he identified as both a particle and a wave. With ever new appliances, electricity begins to transform everyday life.

The telephone and first practical incandescent light bulb are invented while the word "electron" enters the scientific lexicon.

The Industrial Revolution is in full force, Gramme invents his dynamo and James Clerk Maxwell formulates his series of equations on electrodynamics.

Computers evolve into PCs, researchers discover one new subatomic particle after another and the space age gives our psyches and science a new context.

Defense-related research leads to the computer, the world enters the atomic age and TV conquers America.

New tools such as special microscopes and the cyclotron take research to higher levels, while average citizens enjoy novel amenities such as the FM radio.

The legendary Faraday forges on with his prolific research and the telegraph reaches a milestone when a message is sent between Washington, DC, and Baltimore, MD.

Find out how humans discovered the magnetic lodestone as well as the attracting properties of amber. Advanced societies, in particular the Chinese and the Europeans, exploited the properties of magnets in compasses, a tool that makes...

Scientists' understanding of the structure of the atom and of its component particles grows, the phone and radio become common, and the modern television is born.

Scientists discover and probe x-rays and radioactivity, while inventors compete to build the first radio.

With his famous kite experiment and other forays into science, Benjamin Franklin advances knowledge of electricity, inspiring his English friend Joseph Priestley to do the same.

After discovering the nature of electrical resistance, scientists devised instruments like this one to measure and control it. (Java tutorial)

Because they could store significant amounts of charge, Leyden jars allowed scientists to experiment with electricity in a way never before possible.

Spurred by Hans Christian Orsted's discovery of a relationship between electricity and magnetism, German chemist Julian Schweigger immediately began tinkering and soon came up with a very early galvanometer known as the Schweigger...

Joseph John Thomson, better known as J. J. Thomson, was a British physicist who first theorized and offered experimental evidence that the atom was a divisible entity rather than the basic unit of matter, as was widely believed at the...

A self-educated man with a brilliant mind, Michael Faraday was born in a hardscrabble neighborhood in London. Through the combination of insatiable curiosity and a powerful will to succeed, he transcended his austere beginnings to...

This tutorial illustrates how a galvanometer, an instrument that detects and measures small amounts of current in an electrical circuit, works. (Java tutorial)

By the late 1800s, electricity had long been discovered and was no longer considered a novelty. The science of how to store, enhance, or transmit electrical current was just beginning to evolve, and eccentric scientist Nikola Tesla...