Electricity has been studied since antiquity, though
scientific advances were not forthcoming until the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It would remain
however until the late nineteenth century that engineers
were able to put electricity to industrial and residential
use, a time which witnessed a rapid expansion in the
development of electrical technology. Electricity's
extraordinary versatility as a source of energy means it can
be put to an almost limitless set of applications which
include transport, heating, lighting, communications, and
computation. The backbone of modern industrial society is,
and for the foreseeable future can be expected to remain,
the use of electrical power |