Electricity
- Year(s) Officially Discovered: Roughly 3000 to 2700 B.C.
- Discovery Put Into Action: Inventions Using Electricity Took Thousands Of Years To Form
- Team/Person Behind The Discovery: Ancient Egyptians, Thales of Miletus, Ben Franklin, Heinrich Hertz, Michael Faraday, Nikola Tesla
Sorry Grade School teachers, Benjamin Franklin was not the one to discover electricity. Ancient Egyptians knew of it, even referencing what we’d one day call “Electric Eels” as the “Thunderers of the Nile.” They realized how close this was to lightning even back then. In fact, the first man to actually do extensive studies on it was a man by the name of Thales of Miletus. He was the first to study and pioneer our most common knowledge of static electricity and how it operates.
This was done sometime around 600 B.C. and his studies laid the groundwork for those that studied electricity after him. Ben Franklin did not study it until the 18th Century but was a major asset to the field. Others like Heinrich Hertz, Michael Faraday, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla were all major students of electricity. Obviously, some of them invented things within this world that we still use today. Electricity is clearly one of the greatest discoveries in history and we keep learning more about it as time goes on.