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Electricity

physical phenomena associated with the presence and flow of electric charge

Electricity is a general term encompassing a variety of phenomena resulting from the presence and flow of electric charge. These include many easily recognizable phenomena, such as lightning, static electricity, and the flow of electrical current in an electrical wire. In addition, electricity encompasses less familiar concepts such as the electromagnetic field and electromagnetic induction.

One can prophesy with a Daniel's confidence that skilled electricians will settle the battles of the near future. But this is the least. In its effect upon war and peace, electricity offers still much greater and more wonderful possibilities. ~ Nikola Tesla
In 1881, Edison built electricity generating stations at Pearl Street in Manhattan and Holborn in London.
Within a year, he was selling electricity as a commodity. A year later, the first electric motors were driving manufacturing machinery.
Yet by 1900, less than 5% of mechanical drive power in American factories was coming from electric motors. The age of steam lingered. ~ Tim Harford
At the beginning of the Great Depression, the vast majority of rural communities across the United States had little or no access to electricity. The cost of connecting to private electric lines was so prohibitive that many rural communities turned to organizing amongst themselves to find creative solutions to electrification. In 1935, the federal government established the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) to support the formation of rural electric cooperatives. Over the following decades, this initiative thoroughly transformed rural life, extending electricity to rural businesses, farms, schools, and households and establishing a large network of utilities cooperatives that continue to provide services to rural areas today. ~ Southern Oral History Program

Quotes

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  • And fire a mine in China, here
    With sympathetic gunpowder.
  • We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.
    • Thomas Edison, in a statement to a reporter during the first public demonstration of his incandescent (31 December 1879), as quoted in Chronology of Americans and the Environment (2011) by Chris J. Magoc, p. 46.
  • Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence: or shall we say it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we dreamed it.
  • Speed the soft intercourse from soul to soul,
    And waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole.
  • At the beginning of the Great Depression, the vast majority of rural communities across the United States had little or no access to electricity. The cost of connecting to private electric lines was so prohibitive that many rural communities turned to organizing amongst themselves to find creative solutions to electrification. In 1935, the federal government established the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) to support the formation of rural electric cooperatives. Over the following decades, this initiative thoroughly transformed rural life, extending electricity to rural businesses, farms, schools, and households and establishing a large network of utilities cooperatives that continue to provide services to rural areas today.
  • Electric current, after passing into the earth travels to the diametrically opposite region of the same and rebounding from there, returns to its point of departure with virtually undiminished force. The outgoing and returning currents clash and form nodes and loops similar to those observable on a vibrating cord. To traverse the entire distance of about twenty-five thousand miles, equal to the circumference of the globe, the current requires a certain time interval, which I have approximately ascertained. In yielding this knowledge, nature has revealed one of its most precious secrets, of inestimable consequence to man. So astounding are the facts in this connection, that it would seem as though the Creator, himself, had electrically designed this planet just for the purpose of enabling us to achieve wonders which, before my discovery, could not have been conceived by the wildest imagination.
    • Nikola Tesla, in "The Transmission of Electrical Energy without wires as a means for furthering Peace" in Electrical World and Engineer (7 January 1905).

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

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Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 218-19.
  • Stretches, for leagues and leagues, the Wire,
    A hidden path for a Child of Fire—
    Over its silent spaces sent,
    Swifter than Ariel ever went,
    From continent to continent.
  • While Franklin's quiet memory climbs to heaven,
    Calming the lightning which he thence hath riven.
  • And stoic Franklin's energetic shade
    Robed in the lightnings which his hand allay'd.
  • To put a girdle round about the world.
  • A vast engine of wonderful delicacy and intricacy, a machine that is like the tools of the Titans put in your hands. This machinery, in its external fabric so massive and so exquisitely adjusted, and in its internal fabric making new categories of thought, new ways of thinking about life.
    • Charles Ferguson, address reported in Stevens' Indicator, Volume XXXIV. No. 1 (1917).
  • Notwithstanding my experiments with electricity the thunderbolt continues to fall under our noses and beards; and as for the tyrant, there are a million of us still engaged at snatching away his sceptre.
    • Benjamin Franklin, comment on Tubgot's inscription in a letter to Felix Nogaret, who translated the lines into French.
  • But matchless Franklin! What a few
    Can hope to rival such as you.
    Who seized from kings their sceptred pride
    And turned the lightning's darts aside.
  • A million hearts here wait our call,
    All naked to our distant speech—
    I wish that I could ring them all
    And have some welcome news for each.
  • An ideal's love-fraught, imperious call
    That bids the spheres become articulate.
  • This is a marvel of the universe:
    To fling a thought across a stretch of sky—
    Some weighty message, or a yearning cry,
    It matters not; the elements rehearse
    Man's urgent utterance, and his words traverse
    The spacious heav'ns like homing birds that fly
    Unswervingly, until, upreached on high,
    A quickened hand plucks off the message terse.
  • Eripuit cælo fulmen, mox sceptra tyrannis.
    • He snatched the thunderbolt from heaven, the sceptre from tyrants.
    • Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune, inscription for the Houdon bust of Benjamin Franklin. See Condorcet, Life of Turgot, p. 200. Ed. 1786. Eripuit fulmenque Jovi, Phœboque sagittas. Modified from Anti-Lucretius. I. 5. 96, by Cardinal ee Polignac. Eripuit Jovi fulmen viresque tonandi. Marcus Manlius, Astronomica, I, 104. Line claimed by Frederick von der Trenck asserted at his trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris (July 9, 1794). See Gartenlaube, Last Hours of Baron Trenck.

The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy (1888), by H.P. Blavatsky

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  • Col. Olcott, was taken to task for asserting in one of his lectures that Electricity is matter. Such, nevertheless, is the teaching of the Occult Doctrine. "Force," "Energy," may be better names for it, so long as European Science knows so little about its true nature; yet matter it is, as much as Ether is matter, since it is as atomic, though indeed several removes from Ether. p. 136
  • It seems ridiculous to argue that because a thing is imponderable to Science, therefore it cannot be called matter. Electricity is "immaterial," in the sense that its molecules are not subject to perception and experiment; yet it may be — and Occultism says it is — atomic; therefore it is matter. But even supposing it were unscientific to speak of it in such terms, once Electricity is called in Science a source of Energy, Energy simply, and a Force — where is that Force or that Energy which can be thought of without thinking of matter? p. 137
  • Electricity is not only Substance, but that it is an emanation from an Entity, which is neither God nor Devil, but one of the numberless Entities that rule and guide our world, according to the eternal Iaw of Karma. p. 137
  • The Aurora Borealis and Australis (Aurora)... take place at the very centres of terrestrial electric and magnetic forces. The two Poles are said to be the store-houses, the receptacles and liberators, at the same time, of cosmic and terrestrial Vitality (Electricity), from the surplus of which the Earth, had it not been for these two natural safety-valves, would have been rent to pieces long ago. p. 226
  • If, as Sir William Grove says, the electricity we handle is but the result of ordinary matter affected by something invisible, the intimate generating power" of every Force, the "one omnipresent influence," then it only becomes natural that one should believe as the Ancients did; namely, that every Element is dual in its nature. p.508
  • Sir William Grove... in a lecture at the London Institution, in 1842, was the first to show that "heat, light, may be considered as affections of matter itself, and not of a distinct ethereal, 'imponderable,' fluid [a state of matter now] permeating it." Yet, perhaps, for some Physicists... Force and Forces were tacitly "Spirit [and hence Spirits] in Nature." What several rather mystical Scientists taught was that light, heat, magnetism, electricity and gravity, etc., were not the final Causes of the visible phenomena, including planetary motion, but were themselves the secondary effects of other Causes, for which Science in our day cares very little, but in which Occultism believes; for the Occultists have exhibited proofs of the validity of their claims in every age. And in what age were there no Occultists and no Adepts? p. 525
  • The science of electricity, which was not yet in existence when he [Boehme] wrote, is there anticipated [in his writings]; and not only does Boehme describe all the now known phenomena of that force, but he even gives us the origin, generation, and birth of electricity, itself. p. 535
  • We have an important scientific corroboration for one of our fundamental dogmas — namely, that (a) the Sun is the store-house of Vital Force, which is the Noumenon of Electricity; and {b) that it is from its mysterious, never-to-be-fathomed depths, that issue those lifecurrents which thrill through Space, as through the organisms of every living thing on Earth. p. 579
  • The Nasmyth willow leaves, mistaken by Sir John Herschell for "solar inhabitants," are the reservoirs of solar vital energy; "the vital electricity that feeds the whole system; the sun in abscondito ;being thus the storehouse of our little Cosmos, self-generating its vital fluid, and ever receiving as much as it gives out," and the visible Sun only a window cut into the real solar palace and presence, which, however, shews without distortion the interior work. p. 592
  • We are told that Mr. Keely defines electricity "as a certain form of atomic vibration." In this he is quite right; but this is Electricity on the terrestrial plane, and through terrestrial correlations. p. 613
  • Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life, says the Evangelist [and the Kabalist]. Both are electricity — the life principle, the Anima Mundi — pervading the Universe, the electric vivifier of all things. p. 633

See also

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