Introduction

Thousands of appliances and systems that allow us to do the most ordinary things are possible thanks to this phenomenon of nature, which has always existed, and that man only discovered by chance.

Electricity, indispensable in our lives today, has travelled a long distance since the beginning of time. The reflection and hard work of many men have modelled and adapted it to every necessity of life.

All historians agree on designating the Greek philosopher Tales de Mileto (624-543 BC) as the first person to intuit that this type of energy existed. He discovered that by rubbing a piece of amber (fossilised resin) with a cloth, small particles such as dry leaves, feathers and threads were attracted. Tales de Mileto thought that this happened due to a “spirit” found inside the amber, called electron, from which the word electricity was derived.

It would be a monumental task to try and describe all the advances, up to the present time, on the question of electricity or its ensuing technological applications.

But we would not be exaggerating if we said that the present civilisation would return to a primitive state if the knowledge of this form of energy did not exist. Imagine your own life without electricity. There would be no electric light, nor telephone nor any way of communicating at a distance other than by letter. There would be no computers, nor cinema. Medicine would retreat to its origins, without X-rays, magnetic resonance, or medical scans, etc. The world of food would suffer a serious setback without refrigeration. Without communication satellites, meteorologists would be unable to predict hurricanes or phenomena such as El Niño. There would be no automobiles if the “Pistola di Volta”, the precursor to spark plugs, had not been invented. If there were no automobiles, neither would there be construction machines. Would there be buildings, bridges, tunnels? Maybe a few. The advantage might be that we wouldn’t have to face the problems created by these advances, but at what price?