Electrostatics and Coulomb's Law

Even though they didn't fully understand it, ancient people knew about electricity. Thales of
Miletus, a Greek philosopher known as one of the legendary Seven Wise Men, may have been
the first human to study electricity, circa 600 B.C. By rubbing amber -- fossilized tree resin -with fur, he was able to attract dust, feathers and other lightweight objects. These were the
first experiments with electrostatics, the study of stationary electric charges or static
electricity. In fact, the word electricity comes from the Greek elektron, which means amber.
The experiments wouldn't continue until the 17th century. That's when William Gilbert, an
English physician and amateur scientist, began to study magnetism and static electricity. He
repeated the research of Thales of Miletus, rubbing objects together and charging them by
friction. When one object attracted or repelled the other, he coined the term "electric" to
describe the forces at work. He said these forces developed because the rubbing action
removed a fluid, or "humour," from one of the objects, leaving an "effluvium," or atmosphere,
around it.
This concept -- that electricity existed as a fluid -- persisted into the 1700s. In 1729, English
scientist Stephen Gray observed that certain materials, such as silk, didn't conduct electricity.
His explanation was that the mysterious fluid described by Gilbert could travel through
objects or be hampered from traveling. Scientists even built jars to hold this fluid and study its
effects. The Dutch instrument makers Ewald von Kleist and Pieter van Musschenbroek
created what is now known as a Leyden jar, a glass jar containing water and a nail that could
store an electrical charge. The first time Musschenbroek used the jar, he received a massive
shock.
By the later 1700s, the scientific community was beginning to get a clearer picture of how
electricity worked. Benjamin Franklin ran his famous kite experiment in 1752, proving that
lightning was electrical in nature. He also presented the idea that electricity had positive and
negative elements and that the flow was from positive to negative. Approximately 30 years
later, a French scientist by the name of Charles Augustin de Coulomb conducted several
experiments to determine the variables affecting an electrical force. His work resulted in
Coulomb's law, which states that like charges repel and opposite charges attract, with a force
proportional to the product of the charges and inversely proportional to the square of the
distance between them.
Coulomb's law made it possible to calculate the electrostatic force between any two charged
objects, but it didn't reveal the fundamental nature of those charges. What was the source of
the positive and negative charges? As we'll see in the next section, scientists were able to
answer that question in the 1800s.

Making Electricity

In Michael Faraday's generator, coils of copper wire rotating between the poles of a magnet
produce a steady current of electricity. One way to rotate the disk is to crank it by hand, but
this isn't a practical way to make electricity. Another option is to attach the shaft of the
generator to a turbine and then let some other energy source power the turbine. Falling water
is one such energy source, and, in fact, the first major plant ever built took advantage of the
enormous kinetic energy delivered by Niagara Falls.
George Westinghouse opened that plant in 1895, but the principles of its operation haven't
changed much since then. First, engineers build a dam across a river to create a reservoir of
stored water. They place a water intake near the bottom of the dam wall, which allows water
to flow from the reservoir and through a narrow channel called a penstock. The turbine -imagine a huge propeller -- sits at the end of the penstock. The shaft from the turbine goes up
into the generator. When the water moves across the turbine, it spins, rotating the shaft and, in
turn, rotating the copper coils of the generator. As the copper coils spin within the magnets,
electricity is produced. Power lines connected to the generator carry electricity from the
power plant to homes and businesses. Westinghouse's Niagara Falls plant was able to
transport electricity more than 200 miles (322 kilometers).
Not all power plants rely on falling water. Many take advantage of steam, which acts like a
fluid and can therefore transfer energy to a turbine and, ultimately, to a generator. The most
popular way to make steam is to heat water by burning coal. It's also possible to use
controlled nuclear reactions to turn water into steam. You can read about the various types of
power stations in How Hydropower Plants Work, How Wind Power Works and How Nuclear
Power Works. Just keep in mind that they all work on the same basic principle of converting
mechanical energy -- spinning turbine -- into electrical energy.
Of course, using a generator to make electricity is just the beginning. After you get your
electrons moving along, you'll need an electrical circuit to do anything with it. Find out why
next.

Electrical Ground

When the subject of electricity comes up, you will often hear about electrical grounding, or
just ground. For example, an electrical generator will say, "Be sure to attach to an earth
ground before using," or an appliance might warn, "Do not use without an appropriate
ground."
It turns out that the power company uses the Earth as one of the wires in the power system.
The planet is a good conductor, and it's huge, so it makes a handy return path for electrons.
"Ground" in the power-distribution grid is literally the ground that's all around you when you
are walking outside. It is the dirt, rocks, groundwater and so on.
If you look at a utility pole, you'll probably be able to spot a bare wire coming down the side
of the pole. This connects the aerial ground wire directly to ground. Every utility pole on the
planet has a bare wire like this. If you ever watch the power company install a new pole, you
will see that the end of that bare wire is stapled in a coil to the base of the pole. That coil is in
direct contact with the earth once the pole is installed, and is buried 6 to 10 feet (2 to 3
meters) underground. If you examine a pole carefully, you will see that the ground wire
running between poles are attached to this direct connection to ground.
Similarly, near the power meter in your house or apartment there is a 6-foot (2-meter) long
copper rod driven into the ground. The ground plugs and all the neutral plugs of every outlet
in your house connect to this rod. Our article How Power Grids Work also talks about this.
Explore the links on the next page to learn even more about electricity and its role in
technology and the natural world.