Electricity has become something we rely on to live our lives, but it was by no means an overnight discovery. Over the last two hundred years it has developed from a scientific phenomenon to part of everyday life. One of the first applications of electricity was the first incandescent light bulb in around 1870.

The introduction of electricity to society has introduced some new household hazards; however it did eradicate some of the old ones like the naked flames of the gas lighting that was widely used up until that point.

The Joule heating effect that can be found in light bulbs is also present in electric heating. Electric heating has been thought of as wasteful in the past because in order to create that heat energy, heat has already been used in the power stations

A few countries, including Denmark have introduced new laws restricting the use of electric heating in new buildings as it is having an adverse affect on climate change. However as the global temperature rises the demand for Air conditioning goes up, and so climate change is getting worse with a snowball effect.

Electricity is of course used in telecommunication. The electrical telegraph was one of the earliest applications that electricity was used for, commercially demonstrated by Crooke and Wheatstone in 1837.

In the 1860s, electricity had made global communication possible with the first intercontinental telegraph systems (this was of course before the telephone) and then the first transatlantic ones. Since then, satellite communication and optical fibre have taken a share of the communications market, but electricity is sure to remain a vital part of the process.

Electromagnetism is most visibly apparent in the electric motor which of course provides an efficient and clean power motive. A motor that stays in one place, like a winch can easily be powered by a stationary power supply, but a moving motor like an electric car or scooter must carry its power supply along with it in the form of a battery, or it can gain electrical charge from sliding contact like with a pantograph.

Perhaps the most important invention of the 1900s is the transistor. It is a vital part of all modern electrical circuits and a modern integrated circuit may contain several billion miniaturised transistors in a region of only a few centimetres squared.