TABLE OF CONTENTS Scientists first began to understand fully and make use of electricity generation in the late nineteenth century. Experimenters had been investigating the phenomena of static electricity and magnetism for more than 200 years up to that point and had reported on a variety of interesting results. Their names are commemorated in some of the units used to measure the effects they discovered the ohm, tesla and ampere. The IET commemorates one of the most important scientists, Michael Faraday, who explored electromagnetic induction during a series of experiments begun in 1831. He found that, if he moved a magnet through a loop of wire, an electric current flowed in the wire. The current also flowed if the loop was moved over a stationary magnet.
This is the basic principle of electricity generation: the three ingredients are a magnetic field, an electric current and movement. Any two of these components together will produce the third, so that moving a conductor in a magnetic field will produce a current, and, equally, passing an electric current through a conductor in a magnetic field will make the conductor move the principle by which an electric motor works.
With these three components electricity can be generated or an electric motor set up using very simple apparatus and at small or large scale. As a result, once it was clear that electric current was a useful tool and could be employed in an electric circuit to produce...
