Go Fly A Kite

Everyone knows about Benjamin Franklin's experiment with the kite. In June 1752, he allegedly tied a key to a wet kite string, went out in a storm, and flew his kite.

Sparks jumped from the key, down the wet string, and to his hand. That proved to our founding father, who had studied electricity in depth, that lightning was electrical in nature.

Later in 1791, Luigi Galvani published his discovery in Bioelectricity. He showed that electricity was the medium nerve cells used to "pass" signals to muscles.

A few years later, Alessandro Volta made a battery by alternating layers of zinc and copper. This voltaic pile gave scientists a more reliable source of electrical energy than the electrostatic machines that had been used in the past.

You can thank Hans Christian Orsted and Andre-Marie Ampere for recognizing the unity of electric and magnetic phenomena called electromagnetism. That was in 1819-1820. Then a year later Michael Faraday invented the electric motor, and Georg Ohm figured out the electrical a few years later.

Bringing Meaning To Madness

From all of these, we get the words most people recognize as having to do with electricity: galvanized, volt, amp, and ohm.