Curated category
Energy conversion
- Electric motorIn the basement of the Royal Institution, a free-hanging wire dipped into a pool of mercury rotated around a permanent magnet on the 3rd of September 1821.
- Solar powerCharles Fritts installed the world's first rooftop photovoltaic solar array on a New York City roof in 1884. This early device used selenium cells that…
- RecyclingIn the fourth century BC, Plato wrote about reusing materials when resources were scarce. Archaeological studies of ancient waste dumps show less household…
- Solar cellIn 1839, a nineteen-year-old French physicist named Edmond Becquerel stood in his father's laboratory and observed something strange.
- Steam engineIn the first century AD, Hero of Alexandria described a device called the aeolipile. This Hellenistic mathematician and engineer in Roman Egypt created a…
- Solar energyEarth receives 174 petawatts of incoming solar radiation at the upper atmosphere. This massive flow of energy strikes our planet every single day.
- HydropowerA single cubic meter of water falling ten meters releases enough energy to power a standard lightbulb for several hours.
- Nuclear powerOn the 20th of December 1951, four light bulbs flickered to life at the Experimental Breeder Reactor One near Arco, Idaho.
- Nuclear fusionAmerican chemist William Draper Harkins proposed the concept of nuclear fusion in 1915. Francis William Aston invented the mass spectrometer in 1919 to…
- Energy developmentIn 2024, fossil fuels met 86% of the world's energy needs. This figure rose from 81% in 2005, according to data from the International Energy Agency.
- Photoelectric effectIn 1887, Heinrich Hertz observed a strange behavior inside his spark-gap apparatus. He placed the device in a darkened box to see the sparks more clearly.