- Easy question: What would this picture look like in 1724?
- What might this picture look like in 2324?
- Ben Franklin's Kite Experiment
- Was lightning electricity?
- Kite not struck by lightning
- Hemp and silk string
- Not first to conduct such an experiment
- Captured electricity in a Leyden jar (a simple capacitator).
- Make a Leyden jar (video)
- James Watt
- Improved the steam engines used to pump out water from mines
- The watt unit
- Defines watts, kilowatts, watthours and more; shows how they are measured
- Michael Faraday
- Discovered electromagnetism,
- magnetic and electric field lines, (video)
- made the first electrical generator,
- published over 500 papers
- Discovered electromagnetism,
- Alessandro Volta
- Voltaic pile (image)
- First battery
- André-Marie Ampère
- Electrodynamics (video)
- Georg Simon Ohm
- Ohm's Law (video)
- Calculating Ohm's Law
Ohm's Law Magic Triangle
- A good way to think about Ohm's Law is to think of plumbing, meaning: pressure, pipe diameter, and amount of water
- Thomas Alva Edison
- Patented the:
- Incandescent Lamp
- Phonograph
- Motion Picture Projector
- Promoted Direct Current
- and over 1000 more
- Menlo Park Laboratory (video)
- Patented the:
- Nikola Tesla
- Croat
- Worked for Edison
- Created the:
- Telsla Coil
- AC electricity transmission
- Dynamos
- Induction Motor
- Left Edison, personalities did not mesh
- Niagara Falls Hydroelectric plant
- First AC generating plant in Buffalo, NY (with Westinghouse)
- Wardenclyffe wireless failure
- Edison and Tesla
- Their Feud
- DC vs AC transmission
- Earlier Arc Lighting was dangerous and required very high voltages
- Light Bulb History
- Electric Chair (video)
- Discuss the ethics of using animals a subjects.
- US Methods of Execution
- Are any of these ethical? Humane?
- Guglielmo Marconi
- Wireless Radio (video)
- Breaker 19. Probably before your time, the CB radio. My handle was: absentminded professor
- Have you ever used CB radio?
- Tell a story about an email or a text you made or received.
- Claude Shannon
- One of the pioneers of information theory
- He demonstrated that any message could be transmitted any distance IF it was repeated often enough.
- Modern communications would not be possible without it
- Biography
- In 1985 he made an unexpected appearance at the International Information Theory Symposium in Brighton, England. The meeting was proceeding smoothly, if uneventfully, when news raced through the halls and lecture rooms that the snowy-haired man with the shy grin who was wandering in and out of the sessions was none other than Claude Shannon. Some of those at the conference had not even known he was still alive. At the banquet, the meeting's organizers somehow persuaded Shannon to address the audience. He spoke for a few minutes and then—fearing that he was boring his audience, he recalled later—pulled three balls out of his pockets and began juggling. The audience cheered and lined up for autographs. Said Robert J. McEliece, a professor of electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology and chairman of the symposium: “It was as if Newton had showed up at a physics conference."
- Electricity Explained
- A secondary energy source
- Primary sources include coal, natural gas, nuclear, solar, and wind
- See the sources of electric power production in the website
- Those primary sources allow us to generate electricity
- Electricity replaced
- candles
- whale oil lamps
- kerosene lamps
- ice boxes
- before World War II my father predicted refrigerators would never replace the ice man
- coal or wood burning stoves
- Bob Vila on wood stoves
- Have you ever used a wood stove for space heating?
- A secondary energy source
- Basics of Electricity
- Volt
- Abbreviated as V
- EMF: electromotive force
- Difference in electric potential of two points carrying 1 ampere while dissipating 1 watt
- Ampere
- Abbreviated as Amp
- Measure of electron flow or current
- 6.24 x 1018 charge carriers or 1 coulomb
- Conductance/Resistance
- Conductors are materials that carry electric current
- Measured in amps
- Examples:
- Silver
- Gold
- Copper
- Aluminum
- Mercury
- Steel
- Iron
- Seawater
- Concrete
- Platinum
- Brass
- Bronze
- Graphite
- Dirty Water
- Lemon Juice
- Insulators are materials that resist conducting electric current
- Measured in ohms
- Examples:
- Rubber
- Glass
- Pure Water
- Oil
- Air
- Diamond
- Dry Wood
- Dry Cotton
- Plastic
- Asphalt
- Fiberglass
- Dry Paper
- Porcelain
- Ceramics
- Quartz
- Examples:
- Measured in ohms
- Volt
- Direct Current (DC)/Alternating Current (AC) (video)
- See label on devices
- AC is used in home
- Note the different receptacles in various countries
- AC current flows in two directions
- Most electricity transmitted from power station to home is AC
- AC voltage is more easily stepped up and stepped down using transformers
- DC is used in small electrical devices: phones, laptops, circuit boards, and TVs, for example
- DC current flows in one direction only
- DC circuits can be smaller and more easily controlled
- Rectifiers convert AC to DC
- Inverters convert DC to AC
- Some appliances will use DC and AC circuits
- Circuit Board Failure (video)
- Most modern appliances come with DC circuit boards
- When those fail the cost of replacement can cause sticker shock or the need to replace the entire appliance
- Circuit board replacement costs for a gas range ($100 to $430)
- My gas ranges
- At one time I had a dual fuel range (gas burners/electric oven)
- It's circuit card failed, cost to replace: $300
- I replaced it with a non-electronic gas range
- No circuit board for me!
