who was the first person who discovered electricity
William Gilbert
title: Electricity text: in Thomas Browne's "Pseudodoxia Epidemica" of 1646. Further work was conducted in the 17th and early 18th centuries by Otto von Guericke, Robert Boyle, Stephen Gray and C. F. du Fay. Later in the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin conducted extensive research in electricity, selling his possessions to fund his work. In June 1752 he 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. title: Hans Christian Ørsted text: Hans Christian Ørsted Hans Christian Ørsted (; ; often rendered Oersted in English; 14 August 17779 March 1851) was a Danish physicist and chemist who discovered that electric currents create magnetic fields, which was the first connection found between electricity and magnetism. Oersted's law and the oersted (Oe) are named after him. A leader of the Danish Golden Age, Ørsted was a close friend of Hans Christian Andersen and the brother of politician and jurist Anders Sandøe Ørsted, who served as Prime Minister of Denmark from 1853 to 1854. Ørsted was born in Rudkøbing in 1777. As a young boy title: Alessandro Volta text: Alessandro Volta Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (; 18 February 1745 – 5 March 1827) was an Italian physicist, chemist, and a pioneer of electricity and power, who is credited as the inventor of the electric battery and the discoverer of methane. He invented the Voltaic pile in 1799, and reported the results of his experiments in 1800 in a two-part letter to the President of the Royal Society. With this invention Volta proved that electricity could be generated chemically and debunked the prevalent theory that electricity was generated solely by living beings. Volta's invention sparked a great amount of title: Electricity text: to Hans Christian Ørsted and André-Marie Ampère in 1819–1820. Michael Faraday invented the electric motor in 1821, and Georg Ohm mathematically analysed the electrical circuit in 1827. Electricity and magnetism (and light) were definitively linked by James Clerk Maxwell, in particular in his "On Physical Lines of Force" in 1861 and 1862. While the early 19th century had seen rapid progress in electrical science, the late 19th century would see the greatest progress in electrical engineering. Through such people as Alexander Graham Bell, Ottó Bláthy, Thomas Edison, Galileo Ferraris, Oliver Heaviside, Ányos Jedlik, William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, Charles Algernon title: Experiments and Observations on Electricity text: the concept that electricity is attracted to points. Franklin then carried the idea a step forward and surmised that a pointed iron rod high above a rooftop would attract a lightning bolt, if the bolt was of electricity. Frenchman Thomas-Francois d'Alibald did the actual experiment May 10, 1752, as Franklin had suggested and lightning struck the iron rod. In London it was repeated in Spital Square on July 20, 1752, and again in Chelmsford, Essex, on August 12, 1752. The electricity attraction from a lightning storm was also done by Franklin himself in the kite experiment that he talked about