When electricity was first installed in the White House in 1891, President Benjamin Harrison and his wife were afraid of electrocution because of the new concept. They refused to touch light switches, so the staff had to turn the lights on and off for them.
100 Mind-Blowing Electricity Facts
In the UK in 2019, renewable energy generated more electricity than fossil fuels for the first time. Also, did you know Norway gets 0% electricity from coal? And Germany has installed 1 kW of renewable capacity per person in the last decade? a) (Climate change is the biggest global issue of our time, but there are some things to feel positive about!)
Nikola Tesla hated pearls. The electrical engineer paved the way for current system generators and motors; the way electricity gets transmitted and converted to mechanical power is thanks to his inventions. But despite his patience with scientific experimentation, he had no tolerance for pearls. When his secretary wore pearl jewellery one day, he made her go home.
Researchers once turned a live cat into a telephone. Princeton researchers Ernest Wever and Charles Bray took out a cat’s skull and most of its brain to connect the animal to electricity. When they spoke into the cat’s ear, the sound could be heard through a phone receiver in another room. The twisted experiment paved the way for cochlear implant developments.
The electric chair was invented by a dentist. In more shocking fun facts (perhaps literally): Alfred Southwick was a dentist who conceptualized electrical execution when he heard of an intoxicated man who died from touching a live electric generator. Realizing the man’s quick death, Southwick concluded that electricity could be an alternative to hanging for executions. However, he first intended for electrocution to euthanize stray dogs.
Nikola Tesla did not like pearls. One of the fathers of mechanical electricity, Nikola Tesla’s love for groundbreaking discoveries let us harness electricity the way we do now. However, he did not love pearls. He once sent an assistant home for showing up wearing pearls.
Lightning strikes the Earth 100 times each second. Each bolt contains up to one billion volts of electricity. This calculates to about 8 million lightning strikes per day.
A dentist invented the electric chair. In 1881 a dentist witnessed a man quickly die in a chair after touching an electric generator. After this experience, he soon realized that using electricity could be a more humane way of execution.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai claimed that artificial intelligence (AI) would be more transformative to humanity as a species than electricity and fire.