English chemist and physicist Michael Faraday at work in his bottle-lined laboratory in the basement of the Royal Institution in London.
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Humans have known about the existence of electricity for thousands of years. After all, it's abundant in the natural world. But it wasn't until early scientists such as Benjamin Franklin in the 1700s and Michael Faraday in the 1800s began investigating electricity that we came to truly understand it [source: Mr. Nussbaum]. And we wasted no time figuring out how to harness it in order to power human life.
Trying to imagine what life was like before electricity is pretty difficult. Electricity is used to manufacture our homes and cars and it powers everything from appliances to streetlights. Before the discovery and development of electricity, not only did we do nearly every task and household chore by hand, we pretty much had to do them before nightfall.
Electricity is also responsible for making our modern high-tech world possible. It charges our phones, computers, and virtually every other tool of communication used in modern life. Even people who do not have electricity in their homes may use it in their worklives in factories or offices or in commercial activities.
Electricity is produced from a variety of sources such as solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear and fossil fuel energy, and new twists on its production provide innovative solutions to the world problems. These days, scientists and entrepreneurs are coming up with all sorts of new ways to produce electricity, including biofuels sources. There are even teams working on artificial leaves as photosynthesis-derived electricity source [source: Science Daily]. Considering these innovations, the most important contribution of electricity as a scientific breakthrough may be its potential to fuel future breakthroughs.
