The Importance Of Electricity In Modern Times
Over the last 200 years, electricity has become an essential part of most aspects of modern life. One of the first successful, publicly available applications of electricity was the early incandescent light bulb.
The electric overhaul of society obviously brought many fresh new dangers with it, but it eliminated some of the old ones, like the naked flames of gas lighting that was commonly used in homes and factories then.
The Joule heating effect that can be found in light bulbs is also present in electric heating. Electric heating has been thought of as wasteful in the past because in order to create that heat energy, heat has already been used in the power stations
A few countries, including Denmark have introduced new laws restricting the use of electric heating in new buildings as it is having an adverse affect on climate change. However as the global temperature rises the demand for Air conditioning goes up, and so climate change is getting worse with a snowball effect.
Another area that depends on electricity to function is telecommunication. The electric telegraph was in fact one of the first ways in which electricity was used successfully.
In the 1860s, global communication was made a possibility with telegraph systems going intercontinental, then transatlantic. Fibre optic technology and satellites have now taken a large chunk of the communications market but electricity still powers every communications application we have available to us.
Electromagnetism is most visibly apparent in the electric motor which of course provides an efficient and clean power motive. A motor that stays in one place, like a winch can easily be powered by a stationary power supply, but a moving motor like an electric car or scooter must carry its power supply along with it in the form of a battery, or it can gain electrical charge from sliding contact like with a pantograph.
Arguably the most important invention of the 1900s, the transistor is an essential part of every modern electrical circuit. It is used to amplify or split electronic currents and a modern circuit could contain billions of very small transistors in only a few square centimetres.
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