Saturday, February 5, 2011

Electricity Vs. Magnetism

In the late 1880's there was a war. Not a war fought on the battle ground, but a war of the mind. This war was between two inventors: Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla. They were fighting over which type of current was superior; Alternating (AC) or Direct (DC). To make a long story short, Nicola Tesla won the war with his Alternating Current system. It totally changed the world! Today, almost every person the world over has electricity in their lives, and in most cases come in contact with it on a daily basis. People over the course of time have studied just what electricity is, and they seem to know everything about it. From what I've read and understand, electricity is the movement of the electrons on one atom's valance ring to the next in a rapid succession (the speed of light). This movement of electrons creates energy which we use in our everyday lives. I don't need to get into the differences of AC vs. DC, but suffice it to say that its just a different way of how the electrons move. Magnetism also plays a big part in how electricity is created. Wrap a wire around a soft iron core, move a magnet across it and you've just created voltage. They are closely related. However, the one thing that people have not discovered is just what magnetism is. We know that the positively and negatively charged particles align themselves perfectly to create opposing poles, but we don't know what the power of the magnet is. We call it lines of flux, but have no idea just what those flux lines are. There are ways of measuring the magnetic charge, but no way of observing what the power is. I just think its interesting. We don't know everything, even though we act like we do. See ya!

3 comments:

  1. edison ripped him off and basically made it impossible for him to seem legit...

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  2. Thats true Jerry! I'm really a big fan of Tesla. Its not until just recently that they took the credit from Marconi and gave it to him as the inventor of the radio. I read his autobiography. He wrote that every invention he ever came up with was presented to him in a vision. It appeared before his eyes as a complete unit, came apart piece by piece, and then reassembled itself. Just amazing stuff!

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