Give Me the Power!

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) His kite experiment demonstrated that lightning is electricity. He was the first to use the terms positive and negative charge. Franklin was one of seventeen children. He quit school at age ten to become a printer. His life is the classic story of a self-made man achieving wealth and fame through determination and intelligence.

Michael Faraday (1791-1867) an Englishman, made one of the most significant discoveries in the history of electricity: Electromagnetic induction. His pioneering work dealt with how electric currents work. Many inventions would come from his experiments, but they would come fifty to one hundred years later.

Failures never discouraged Faraday. He would say; “the failures are just as important as the successes.” He felt failures also teach. The farad, the unit of capacitance is named in the honor of Michael Faraday.

Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) was one of the most well known inventors of all time with 1093 patents. Self-educated, Edison was interested in chemistry and electronics.During the whole of his life, Edison received only three months of formal schooling, and was dismissed from school as being retarded, though in fact a childhood attack of scarlet fever had left him partially deaf.

Nikola Tesla was born of Serbian parents July 10, 1856 and died a broke and lonely man in New York City January 7, 1943. He envisioned a world without poles and power lines. Referred to as the greatest inventive genius of all time. Tesla’s system triumphed to make possible the first large-scale harnessing of Niagara Falls with the first hydroelectric plant in the United States in 1886.