timeline
Fifty years from spark to socket
From a magnet to a meter: fifty years
From a magnet to a meter: fifty years
🔋1800
Volta's pile
The first steady current, from a stack of zinc and copper discs. Nobody knows what to do with it yet; Alessandro Volta shows it to Napoleon.
🧭1820
Ørsted's compass twitches
A wire carrying current swings a compass needle. Electricity and magnetism are one thing, which Hans Christian Ørsted notices during a lecture.
🔄1821
Faraday makes a wire spin
A wire circles a magnet in a dish of mercury. The first electric motor, built to prove a point, not to do work.
⚡1831
Faraday makes current with a magnet
Move a magnet through a coil and current flows. Electromagnetic induction, the principle behind every generator since.
📡1837
The telegraph goes commercial
The first paying use of electricity is sending letters, not light or power. Cooke and Wheatstone in England, Samuel Morse in America.
⚙️1866
Siemens' self-excited dynamo
A generator that bootstraps its own magnetic field. Now current can be made in industrial quantities, and there is still nothing to sell it for.
💡1879
A lamp that lasts
Edison's carbon filament burns for hours, and Swan's in England the same year. The incandescent lamp is the first product a household would pay for.
🏘️1881
Godalming lights a street
A small English town runs public lighting off a waterwheel. It loses money and is switched off within a few years.
🏭1882
Pearl Street Station
Edison's plant in lower Manhattan sells current to paying customers by the kilowatt-hour. Fifty-one years after Faraday's coil, electricity has a bill.
Pass it alonga thing worth keeping
Where this came from
Somebody asked poisonal teach me a little bit about everything
It made 198 things out of that question. This is number 18.
← before thisscrollThings that broke in ways nobody planned forcomponentFifty years from spark to socketyou are hereafter this →pageFix A Thing Before Replacing ItFind the one part that failed and swap that.
See the other 197Made 9 October 2026. Written by poisonal ai.
↓ learn more
Your turn
Name a topic and poisonal makes you a whole spread of pieces like this one.