History of Electricity

An excellent book that describes electricity and its functions. In many ways the author bridges chemistry with electrical operation . The book has a chapter on the brain and the way it can identify and detect items. Read this chapter as it opens and solves many of the questions we all want to know pertaining to the neural connections in our brain. This book should be a must read for students for students interested in the field of electricity.

This book certainly helped me understand the physics of electricity while providing a good historical account on the topic. Nevertheless, I believe the author should have mentioned some content on Nikola Tesla, and more on Mr. Franklin, Mr. Ohm, Mr. Amp, and Mr. Watt. Just one simple observation: In boolean algebra, the "+" (plus sign) is used to represent an "OR" operation. Therefore, T + F = T (or 1 + 0 = 1) as opposed to F (as described in the book).

The engineering geek within was thrilled. Despite having spent a large portion of my professional carrier on the subject, this book helped me understand a few new things about electricity. More specifically, how our bodies work. The rest, was just pure physics fun. This is not a book for everyone. Physics students or those who love the quantitative side of nature must read it.

Bodanis begins with Volta's discovery of electricity and the development of many inventions dependent on it. It's incomplete, which a reader would expect for a book of this length pertaining to events and personalities spanning over three and a half centuries.

A reader unfamiliar with the topic must start at the shallow end, and Electric Universe was just right for its technical explanations. I've read the reviews of other readers who challenge Bodanis's explanations as errant. I'm not expert enough to affirm or refute these readers' reviews.

I felt that the explanation of the explosion of rock and roll music was unnecessarily hasty, and here was an instance where I disagreed. Bodanis claims that the transistor, as used in the transistor radio, was responsible for the rapid diffusion of the music of the mid-twentieth century. This is partly true, but it ignores something huge. The truth is that rock and roll actually kept vacuum tube amplification alive longer than it would have survived otherwise. Many musicians of other genres were interested in transistors because the transistor amplifiers removed the perceived problem of distortion. Rock and roll harnessed distortion because its kind of harmonics are not normally heard with acoustic instruments. Transistor amplifiers merely increase the volume of the instrument or the vocals, but tube amplifiers most audibly change the quality of the tone. (Tubes are not purer than transistors in sound at all.)

The book made the nearly unpardonable crime of leaving out Tesla, but this can be forgiven in a book that is so readable.

I'm a dummy when it comes to science, but even this felt lightweight to me. After reading a biography of Tesla, I wanted to know all about the development of electricity. Those beginning days of electricity feel more like magic than science. The idea of being able to harness weird sparky hot lightning stuff that comes out of the sky but also lives in pretty much everything... that's pretty cool. But this book makes it feel commonplace.

Rather than go into the science, this book wants to tell a story: the narrative of how electricity became integral to our world. And that's a good goal for a book to have, but it was just so blah. The narrative arc was cut up piecemeal so there wasn't a sense of this led to this which led to this. Instead, the feeling is that there was a scientist who did this thing and then there was another scientist who did this other, unrelated thing.

Anyway, skip this book. It's just nothing special.

The discussion about electricity in our brains was a pleasant surprise. The author went into anatomical detail about methods that the body converts molecules into electricity used by neurons. You can tell that the author is inspired by the billions of years of evolution that has perfected this method, and the author emphasizes how it trumphs any electric generation created by man. It was a great way to end a book on such fascinating subject.

It should have been better than it was. Bodanis is not able to weave a narrative like Bryson, Dawkins or Feynman; instead the bits are broken into different parts of the book. This resulted in frequent disappointment only to learn later that I do indeed get my questions answered, well after I thought to ask them.

Also, there i not enough. Also, I didn't particularly click with his metaphors. They were not especially illuminating.

The information itself is fascinating. I think it would be a hit with young adult readers, if any of them were interested in the history of electrical discoveries.

Lättsmält och håller uppmärksamheten utan att offra de vetenskapliga förklaringarna och faktan.

I don't think I read every chapter of this book as I was using it for research. That said, it was an amazing resource and I loved it and wanted to read more.

Look I have to say that this book was way off the mark.The author lost all
his credibility as soon as I checked the index and saw that there was not a
single reference to Tesla. Not ONE. That's like writing the history of Christianity
and forgetting to mention Jesus Christ.Had it not been for Nicola Tesla the whole world would still be running off a battery. Tesla was brilliant and this guy neglects to mention
him????? No. As soon as I saw that- I knew he was going to glorify
Edison.That's the way it works. You dismiss Tesla- you lie about Edison
You make him into a great man when in fact Edison stole most of his ideas from Tesla.
I should've stopped reading the book right then and there.To me it was all
worthless propaganda.Edison was a crook. Period. All he did was discover the use of tungsten
so that light bulbs could last longer. That's it.
If you have any knowledge of electricity- don't read this book.
It'll make you sick with disgust.
JM

Good overview

Very interesting, covers electricity from early times to the present. The book has an especially good listing of material for further reading, listed by topics with observations about the book

Just the right balance of facts, anecdotes and reflection. I learned a lot, even things I didn't know about the human body. These amazing electrons!