- The word electricity comes from the Greek ‘elektron’ meaning ‘amber’. Why amber? Because the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus rubbed pieces of it together to produce electricity in 600BC.
- In ancient Egypt, people's experience of electricity came from electric fish. Egyptian texts from 2750BC mention people getting shocks from them, and calling such fish the "Thunderer of the Nile". The Egyptians believed the electric fish protected all the others. An electric eel can deliver shocks of up to 600 volts. In ancient Rome they believed touching an electric fish could cure headaches or gout.
- Electricity which builds up in one place is called static electricity. That's the kind you get from rubbing things together, like balloons and your hair or clothes. When you walk across a carpet and then get a shock from touching something metal, that's static electricity. Rain clouds rubbing against the air around them is what causes Lightning, by far the most impressive example of static electricity.
- Electricity travels at the speed of light - more than 186,000 miles per second or 6,696,000 miles an hour.
- Electricity is usually produced using fossil fuels, nuclear power, wind or water turbines or solar panels, but there have been some more unusual means of generating power in South America. In Brazil, there is a prison where the inmates can pedal stationary Bicycles to power a nearby city, and get their sentences reduced for doing so. The first city in South America to get electricity was La Paz, Bolivia, and it was powered by llama dung.
- In the early days, there was a fierce competition between Thomas Edison, who promoted his direct current (DC) electricity supply, and Tesla and Westinghouse who promoted alternating current (AC). The DC system was safer, but could only be used within a small area as it couldn't travel far without losing power. Edison set out to show how dangerous AC was by publicly electrocuting Cats and Dogs and even an Elephant in public and trying to persuade people to refer to electrocution as being ‘Westinghoused’. Despite all his efforts, DC went the way of Betamax and AC became the standard.
- Human beings being what they are – vindictive and cruel, electricity was quickly adopted as a means of torture and execution. There's a myth that the electric chair was invented by a dentist. The electric chair was actually invented by Harold Brown, a colleague of Edison, who wanted to demonstrate that AC current was dangerous. However, it was a dentist, Alfred P. Southwick, who came up with the idea that it could be used to kill people quickly and (he reckoned) painlessly, and promoted it. The first person to die in the electric chair was a murderer named William Kemmler. You may have heard the story of Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia, who bought two electric chairs before realising they were useless as Ethiopia had no electricity supply at the time – but waste not want not – he used one as a throne.
- How come birds can sit on power lines without getting electrocuted? They don't come to any harm unless there's a circuit. If any part of a bird touches another line they would get fried.
- The first street in the world to be lit by electric light bulbs was Mosley Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, in 1879. The first four common domestic items to be powered by electricity were the Sewing machine, fan, kettle and toaster.
- All the batteries on Earth store just ten minutes of the world’s electricity needs.
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