Electrical Engineering is one of the most popular field of engineering which concerned with the study, design and application of equipment, devices and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism.
Here are some of the best, amazing and most interesting electrical engineering facts that will surprise you and you need to know are as follows,
- Electrical Engineering is one of the largest of the specialized branch of Engineering.
- Michael Faraday is the father of Electrical Engineering.
- In September 1882, Thomas Edison opened the first commercial power plant in the United States.
- The word electricity was first used by Thomas Browne in 1646. He derived this word from the word electrum, which means amber in Greek and Latin.
- Nikola Tesla is considered as the father of current.
- Benjamin Franklin is the first person to discover electricity.
- James Clerk Maxwell’s set of equations, formulated in the 19th century, unified the theories of electricity and magnetism, laying the groundwork for modern electromagnetic theory.
- The unit of electrical resistance is named after a German physicist named Georg Ohm.
- Francis Ronalds is the first electrical engineer.
- The number of Electrical Engineers is expected to grow at an average rate compared with the total for all occupations.
- The relationship between electricity and magnetism was discovered by Hans Christian Oersted in 1820, leading to the foundation of electromagnetic theory.
- Michael Faraday is known as the father of electricity.
- American polymath Benjamin Franklin is most credited for discovering electricity in 1752.
- Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi first developed the idea of a radio, or wireless telegraph, in the 1890s.
- In 1802, Humphry Davy invented the first electric light. Thomas Edison patented the first commercially successful bulb in 1879.
- A Tesla coil is an electrical resonant transformer circuit designed by inventor Nikola Tesla in 1891.
- The biggest power plant in the world is the Three Gorges Dam, China. In 2021, it generated 103.649 billion kWh. It also has the largest installed capacity of any power plant, 22500 MW.
- Japan’s Kashiwazaki Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant is the largest nuclear power plant in the world, boasting a net capacity of 7,965MW.
- Humphry Davy demonstrated the first incandescent light to the Royal Institute in Great Britain, using a bank of batteries and two charcoal rods.
- The Vindhyachal Thermal Power Station is the largest Thermal Power Plant in India with the capacity of 4,760 MW.
- China is by far the largest electricity-generating country in the world, with over 8.5 petawatt-hours generated in 2021.
- Albania, Iceland, and Paraguay obtain essentially all of their electricity from renewable sources.
- Datang Tuoketuo power station in China is the largest operational coal power plant in the world.
- Hydroelectric power is the most widely-used renewable power source with the capacity exceeding 1,295GW.
- The Bhadla Solar Park is the largest solar power plant located in the Thar Desert of Rajasthan in India.
- India has one of the largest manufacturing ecosystems for wind energy and is experiencing rapid growth in solar capacity.
- Alessandro Volta, Italian physicist whose invention of the electric battery in 1800 provided the first source of continuous current.
- Alternating current (AC) changes direction periodically, while direct current (DC) flows in one direction. AC is commonly used for power distribution, while DC is used in batteries and electronic devices.
- The first alternating current (AC) power station was built by George Westinghouse in 1887.
- The integrated circuit, or microchip, was developed in the 1950s. It revolutionized electronics by allowing multiple electronic components to be miniaturized and combined on a single chip.
- The electromagnetic spectrum encompasses a range of electromagnetic waves, including radio waves, visible light, microwaves, infrared, X-rays, ultraviolet, and gamma rays.
- The first solar panel was invented by Charles Fritts in 1883 where he coated a thin layer of selenium with an extremely thin layer of gold.
- The earliest recorded use of windmills dates back to ancient Persia around 700-900 AD.
- The Dutch are famous for their use of windmills to reclaim land from the sea.
- The development of modern wind turbines capable of generating electricity began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The first wind turbine to produce electricity was built in 1888 by Charles F. Brush in the United States.
- The first electronic computers were built in the 1940s and 1950s, and they used vacuum tubes to process and store data.