5 Interesting Things About Electricity They Didn’t Teach You In School

When you stop and think about it, it’s mind-blowing how we’ve harnessed electricity to build and power our societies. It almost seems like magic, taking the same natural phenomenon that powers our brains and muscles and using it to do everything else. We all learned in school how the discovery and use of electricity changed human society forever, sure, but the technology has been around for so long (power lines were invented earlier than you may realize) that we take it for granted. Even so, electricity is a topic that continues to surprise you the deeper you dig into it. You’ll even hear electricians say they don’t fully understand it, and that no one truly does. In that spirit, we want to look at a few things you might not have known about electricity.

Now, obviously, everyone’s schooling experience is unique. It’s possible you learned some or all of the following. If that’s the case, congrats, we’re glad your school was funded and your teachers cared. Regardless, we hope that at least a couple of the following are surprises and deepen your appreciation for the thing you don’t think twice about when plugging in your phone charger.

Every American child knows the story that Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a storm with a key attached to the string and nearly electrocuted himself when lightning struck. Since this supposedly happened in the 1700s, before electricity became commonplace, the assumption is that Franklin discovered it. Not really. Humans had observed electricity for thousands of years, even if their understanding was more primitive than ours today.

BBC Science Focus provides an excellent précis on scientific discoveries related to electricity. Thales of Miletus was one of the first people in recorded history to observe static electricity, a Greek philosopher active around 585 BCE. We get the word electricity from the 15th century, and experiments in the following centuries expanded our knowledge of how to conduct it, insulate it, and store it, long before Franklin was born. It’s also important to note that Benjamin Franklin was a renaissance man, someone with many interests, not just electricity. Many scientists came after Franklin who dedicated their lives to studying the phenomenon in greater depth and shaped what we have today.

Perhaps more importantly, the historical record raises doubt about Franklin’s famous kite experiment. Though it’s written down as happening in June of 1752, no one knows for certain where Franklin did it — or whether he performed it himself. It doesn’t help that he neglected to tell people about it for months afterward and failed to clearly document that he was the one who conducted the experiment (via NPS). To be fair, there is some evidence for this account, rather than a whole-cloth fabrication like Washington’s cherry tree myth. Franklin was an incredible man who made many invaluable contributions, but his kite story may not be one of them.

That’s right, a bolt of lightning on Earth — a place famous for being in the Goldilocks zone of habitability — can somehow get hotter than our own resident star. Of course, there is a bit of nuance here. Lightning itself isn’t the one clocking in at 10 large. Electricity, technically speaking, can’t be measured in terms of temperature, but matter (like air) can. Electrical resistance can produce a ton of heat, which is partially why you want tools that are properly insulated before using them for electrical work. The other factor to consider is that air is one of the poorest conductor materials out there, so because of that, temperatures can climb to around 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit (27,760 degrees Celsius).

Also, the sun isn’t a single, uniform temperature throughout. According to Britannicathe surface of the Sun is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,537.78 degrees Celsius), but deeper inside, it gets up to 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (14,999,982.22 degrees Celsius). Temperatures above the sun, such as in the corona, can also reach about 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (999,982.22 degrees Celsius). So in this case, lightning gets hotter than the surface of the sun and its surrounding atmosphere.

These are scary numbers, but in practice, they tend to overstate the threat lightning poses. Lightning can strike your car and you could survive without a scratch. Lightning also hits planes all the time and pales in comparison to bad turbulence. Lightning strikes do kill people, of course, but check out the National Weather Service’s Lightning Strike Survivor Stories and be amazed at the long list of people who lived to tell the tale.

They say that the speed of light is the speed limit of the universe. As far as we know, traveling at light speed or faster will remain science fiction. However, some things can get close, and electricity is one of them. You can observe this effect for yourself right now; just turn on a light, and it comes on virtually instantly. Our human hardware isn’t sensitive enough to tell the difference between light speed and something slightly slower than light speed, but electricity gets about 90% of the way there. Light travels through the universe at an eye-watering 299,792 km/s, while electricity trails slightly behind at roughly 270,000 km/s. The more interesting question is why electricity moves so fast.

It’s complicated. Answering that question demonstrates just how brain-breaking electricity is. Physics professor Christopher S. Baird of Science Questions With Surprising Answers explains why. Electricity has to do with free-moving electrons, quantum particles, and their interacting electromagnetic fields as they travel down a wire. Strange things happen at this subatomic level, such as the fact that electrical current technically moves faster than electrons themselves. Electrons do not race through the wire; instead, changes in their electromagnetic fields let the current’s effects propagate far faster than any single electron. To make things more confusing, there are several distinct velocities to measure, from individual electron drift speeds to the speed at which electrical effects propagate through the system.

If you’re confused, don’t worry. Basically, electricity in a wire can approach light speed, at least if it’s in a vacuum. But velocities of its component parts (like an individual electron’s velocity) vary, sometimes going an order of magnitude slower. So, electricity can paradoxically travel near light speed even though its electrons are nowhere close.

It’s a sort of knee-jerk assumption that cars were gasoline-powered combustion engines from their very inception, and then electric cars — the cleaner, quieter, arguably better variety — came later once the tech was refined. Surprisingly, this is not true. The first electric car is older than you’d realize, coming on the scene in 1832, decades before the American Civil War. Crazy, right? Yet again, there’s more nuance once you dig into the history. Combustion engines did precede electric motors by hundreds of years, but they used gunpowder, hydrogen, gas (not gasoline), and other fuels before petroleum became dominant in 1858. So if we’re talking about modern internal combustion as we know it versus electric motors, electric motors actually won the race — pun intended.

Bear in mind, the first electric car had huge limitations. It was essentially a snail on wheels that probably couldn’t drive to the other side of town before dying, and its batteries needed replacement after each use. Rechargeable batteries weren’t a thing until about 30 years later in 1859.

We’d also be remiss not to mention that during this time, the electrical grid was not what it is today; for reference, Cleveland was the first American city to get public electric lighting, and that didn’t happen until 1879. Finding reliable electric car chargers in the modern-day US is still an issue, so imagine charging an electric vehicle at that time, let alone owning one. However, things changed, and for a time more Americans owned electric cars than they did in 2023. That prominence ended thanks to Ford’s Model T and cheap gasoline, and the rest is history.

Today, the difference between AC and DC power is a fun little science lesson, but early on it was a heated argument. Thomas Edison was strongly opposed to competitor George Westinghouse’s AC over his own DC. He had proponents in his ring, including electrician Harold Brown, who went on public record claiming AC was more dangerous. There was also dentist Alfred Southwick, who advocated for fast, painless, non-disfiguring death by AC current — specifically as a solution for the state of New York, which was then considering more “humane” execution methods. So Edison set out to taint Westinghouse’s name, making “AC” and “death by electrocution” synonymous.

Depending on which source you ask, Edison may have done this for cutthroat capitalist competition to push Westinghouse’s AC out of the running, or he may have truly believed AC was a bad idea. There was one disturbingly misleading press stunt where Edison supported demonstrations in which a primitive AC-powered electric chair killed various animals as “proof” of AC’s supposed dangers for consumer use. He later even facilitated the adoption of AC electric chairs in prisons. What matters here, though, is that Edison really didn’t know enough about electrocution to be the authority on the matter; we now know the electric chair is not a painless, humane option.

Regardless of his motives, Edison’s efforts were semi-successful; “Westinghoused” became a synonym for electrocution, at least for a time. But ultimately, AC was the better of the two for electrical transmission, while DC worked best for short-distance applications — and that remains true today. Oh, and Westinghouse Electric Corporation is still around at the time of writing, while GE, ironically, reels from the poor decisions of another former CEO, Jack Welch.