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No one invented electricity. It is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Benjamin Franklin is credited with discovering electricity through his famous experiment where he flew a kite during a thunderstorm.

Contrary to what schools have taught for years, Thomas Edison neither invented the light bulb nor held the first patent to the modern design of the light bulb. Joseph Swan from England, invented and obtained the first patent for the same light bulb in Britain one year earlier, in 1878.
http://www.unbelievablefacts.info/

Thomas Edison made many inventions, one, the phonograph which he used to experiment with the telephone to create a recording.

The inventions of Thomas Edison
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bledison.htm

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HISTORY OF ELECTRICITY.

600 B.C. Thales of Miletus wrote about amber becoming charged by rubbing, what is called static electricity today.

1600 English scientist, William Gilbert first used the word "electricity" translating the Greek word for amber in to English

1660 Machine invented by Otto von Guericke that produced static electricity.

1675 Robert Boyle discovered electric forces transmitted through a vacuum, observed attraction and repulsion.

1729 Stephen Gray's conduction of electricity discovery.

1733 Charles Francois du Fay discovered electricity comes in two forms, he called these, resinous(-)and vitreous(+). Benjamin Franklin and Ebenezer Kinnersley renamed the discovery as positive and negative.

1752 Benjamin Franklin invents the lightening rod. Demonstrations proved lightning was electricity.

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read this for information on the people credited with invention and a time line :
Depite what you have learned, Benjamin Franklin did not "invent" electricity. In fact, electricity did not begin when Benjamin Franklin at when he flew his kite during a thunderstorm or when light bulbs were installed in houses all around the world.

The truth is that electricity has always been around because it naturally exists in the world. Lightning, for instance, is simply a flow of electrons between the ground and the clouds. When you touch something and get a shock, that is really static electricity moving toward you.

Hence, electrical equipment like motors, light bulbs, and batteries aren't needed for electricity to exist. They are just creative inventions designed to harness and use electricity.

The first discoveries of electricity were made back in ancient Greece. Greek philosophers discovered that when amber is rubbed against cloth, lightweight objects will stick to it. This is the basis of static electricity.

Over the centuries, there have been many discoveries made about electricity. We've all heard of famous people like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison, but there have been many other inventors throughout history that were each a part in the development of electricity.

Electricity Personalities



Benjamin Franklin

Franklin was an American writer, publisher, scientist and diplomat, who helped to draw up the famous Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. In 1752 Franklin proved that lightning and the spark from amber were one and the same thing. The story of this famous milestone is a familiar one, in which Franklin fastened an iron spike to a silken kite, which he flew during a thunderstorm, while holding the end of the kite string by an iron key. When lightening flashed, a tiny spark jumped from the key to his wrist. The experiment proved Franklin's theory, but was extremely dangerous - He could easily have been killed.



Galvani and Volta

In 1786, Luigi Galvani, an Italian professor of medicine, found that when the leg of a dead frog was touched by a metal knife, the leg twitched violently. Galvani thought that the muscles of the frog must contain electricity. By 1792 another Italian scientist, Alessandro Volta, disagreed: he realised that the main factors in Galvani's discovery were the two different metals - the steel knife and the tin plate - apon which the frog was lying. Volta showed that when moisture comes between two different metals, electricity is created. This led him to invent the first electric battery, the voltaic pile, which he made from thin sheets of copper and zinc separated by moist pasteboard.

In this way, a new kind of electricity was discovered, electricity that flowed steadily like a current of water instead of discharging itself in a single spark or shock. Volta showed that electricity could be made to travel from one place to another by wire, thereby making an important contribution to the science of electricity. The unit of electrical potential, the Volt, is named after Volta.



Michael Faraday

The credit for generating electric current on a practical scale goes to the famous English scientist, Michael Faraday. Faraday was greatly interested in the invention of the electromagnet, but his brilliant mind took earlier experiments still further. If electricity could produce magnetism, why couldn't magnetism produce electricity.

In 1831, Faraday found the solution. Electricity could be produced through magnetism by motion. He discovered that when a magnet was moved inside a coil of copper wire, a tiny electric current flows through the wire. Of course, by today's standards, Faraday's electric dynamo or electric generator was crude, and provided only a small electric current be he discovered the first method of generating electricity by means of motion in a magnetic field.



Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan

Nearly 40 years went by before a really practical DC (Direct Current) generator was built by Thomas Edison in America. Edison's many inventions included the phonograph and an improved printing telegraph. In 1878 Joseph Swan, a British scientist, invented the incandescent filament lamp and within twelve months Edison made a similar discovery in America.

Swan and Edison later set up a joint company to produce the first practical filament lamp. Prior to this, electric lighting had been my crude arc lamps.

Edison used his DC generator to provide electricity to light his laboratory and later to illuminate the first New York street to be lit by electric lamps, in September 1882. Edison's successes were not without controversy, however - although he was convinced of the merits of DC for generating electricity, other scientists in Europe and America recognised that DC brought major disadvantages.


George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla

Westinghouse was a famous American inventor and industrialist who purchased and developed Nikola Tesla's patented motor for generating alternating current. The work of Westinghouse, Tesla and others gradually persuaded American society that the future lay with AC rather than DC (Adoption of AC generation enabled the transmission of large blocks of electrical, power using higher voltages via transformers, which would have been impossible otherwise). Today the unit of measurement for magnetic fields commemorates Tesla's name.



James Watt

When Edison's generator was coupled with Watt's steam engine, large scale electricity generation became a practical proposition. James Watt, the Scottish inventor of the steam condensing engine, was born in 1736. His improvements to steam engines were patented over a period of 15 years, starting in 1769 and his name was given to the electric unit of power, the Watt.

Watt's engines used the reciprocating piston, however, today's thermal power stations use steam turbines, following the Rankine cycle, worked out by another famous Scottish engineer, William J.M Rankine, in 1859.



Andre Ampere and George Ohm

Andre Marie Ampere, a French mathematician who devoted himself to the study of electricity and magnetism, was the first to explain the electro-dynamic theory. A permanent memorial to Ampere is the use of his name for the unit of electric current.

George Simon Ohm, a German mathematician and physicist, was a college teacher in Cologne when in 1827 he published, "The galvanic Circuit Investigated Mathematically". His theories were coldly received by German scientists but his research was recognised in Britain and he was awarded the Copley Medal in 1841. His name has been given to the unit of electrical resistance.
Electricity Dateline

900 BC - Magnus, a Greek shepherd, walks across a field of black stones which pull the iron nails out of his sandals and the iron tip from his shepherd's staff (authenticity not guaranteed). This region becomes known as Magnesia.

600 BC - Thales of Miletos rubs amber (elektron in Greek) with cat fur and picks up bits of feathers.

1269 - Petrus Peregrinus of Picardy, Italy, discovers that natural spherical magnets (lodestones) align needles with lines of longitude pointing between two pole positions on the stone.

1600 - William Gilbert, court physician to Queen Elizabeth, discovers that the earth is a giant magnet just like one of the stones of Peregrinus, explaining how compasses work. He also discusses static electricity and invents an electric fluid which is liberated by rubbing.

ca. 1620 - Niccolo Cabeo discovers that electricity can be repulsive as well as attractive.

1630 - Vincenzo Cascariolo, a Bolognese shoemaker, discovers fluorescence.

1638 - Rene Descartes theorizes that light is a pressure wave through the second of his three types of matter of which the universe is made. He invents properties of this fluid that make it possible to calculate the reflection and refraction of light. The ``modern'' notion of the aether is born.

1638 - Galileo attempts to measure the speed of light by a lantern relay between distant hilltops. He gets a very large answer.

1644 - Rene Descartes theorizes that the magnetic poles are on the central axis of a spinning vortex of one of his fluids. This vortex theory remains popular for a long time, enabling Leonhard Euler and two of the Bernoullis to share a prize of the French Academy as late as 1743.

1657 - Pierre de Fermat shows that the principle of least time is capable of explaining refraction and reflection of light. Fighting with the Cartesians begins. (This principle for reflected light had been anticipated anciently by Hero of Alexandria.)

1665 - Francesco Maria Grimaldi, in a posthumous report, discovers and gives the name of diffraction to the bending of light around opaque bodies.

1667 - Robert Hooke reports in his Micrographia the discovery of the rings of light formed by a layer of air between two glass plates. These were actually first observed by Robert Boyle, which explains why they are now called Newton's rings. In the same work he gives the matching-wave-front derivation of reflection and refraction that is still found in most introductory physics texts. These waves travel through the aether. He also develops a theory of color in which white light is a simple disturbance and colors are complex distortions of the basic simple white form.

1671 - Isaac Newton destroys Hooke's theory of color by experimenting with prisms to show that white light is a mixture of all the colors and that once a pure color is obtained it can never be changed into another color. Newton argues against light being a vibration of the ether, preferring that it be something else that is capable of traveling through the aether. He doesn't insist that this something else consist of particles, but allows that it may be some other kind of emanation or impulse. In Newton's own words, ``...let every man here take his fancy.''

1675 - Olaf Roemer repeats Galileo's experiment using the moons of Jupiter as the distant hilltop. He measures m/s.

1678 - Christiaan Huygens introduces his famous construction and principle, thinks about translating his manuscript into Latin, then publishes it in the original French in 1690. He uses his theory to discuss the double refraction of Iceland Spar. His is a theory of pulses, however, not of periodic waves.

1717 - Newton shows that the ``two-ness'' of double refraction clearly rules out light being aether waves. (All aether wave theories were sound-like, so Newton was right; longitudinal waves can't be polarized.)

1728 - James Bradley shows that the orbital motion of the earth changes the apparent motions of the stars in a way that is consistent with light having a finite speed of travel.

1729 - Stephen Gray shows that electricity doesn't have to be made in place by rubbing but can also be transferred from place to place with conducting wires. He also shows that the charge on electrified objects resides on their surfaces.

1733 - Charles Francois du Fay discovers that electricity comes in two kinds which he called resinous(-) and vitreous(+).

1742 - Thomas Le Seur and Francis Jacquier, in a note to the edition of Newton's Principia that they publish, show that the force law between two magnets is inverse cube.

1749 - Abbe Jean-Antoine Nollet invents the two-fluid theory electricity.

1745 - Pieter van Musschenbroek invents the Leyden jar, or capacitor, and nearly kills his friend Cunaeus.

1747 - Benjamin Franklin invents the theory of one-fluid electricity in which one of Nollet's fluids exists and the other is just the absence of the first. He proposes the principle of conservation of charge and calls the fluid that exists and flows ``positive''. This educated guess ensures that undergraduates will always be confused about the direction of current flow. He also discovers that electricity can act at a distance in situations where fluid flow makes no sense.

1748 - Sir William Watson uses an electrostatic machine and a vacuum pump to make the first glow discharge. His glass vessel is three feet long and three inches in diameter: the first fluorescent light bulb.

1750 - John Michell discovers that the two poles of a magnet are equal in strength and that the force law for individual poles is inverse square.

1752 - Johann Sulzer puts lead and silver together in his mouth, performing the first recorded ``tongue test'' of a battery.

1759 - Francis Ulrich Theodore Aepinus shows that electrical effects are a combination of fluid flow confined to matter and action at a distance. He also discovers charging by induction.

1762 - Canton reports that a red hot poker placed close to a small electrified body destroys its electrification.

1764 - Joseph Louis Lagrange discovers the divergence theorem in connection with the study of gravitation. It later becomes known as Gauss's law. (See 1813).

1766 - Joseph Priestly, acting on a suggestion in a letter from Benjamin Franklin, shows that hollow charged vessels contain no charge on the inside and based on his knowledge that hollow shells of mass have no gravity inside correctly deduces that the electric force law is inverse square.

ca 1775 - Henry Cavendish invents the idea of capacitance and resistance (the latter without any way of measuring current other than the level of personal discomfort). But being indifferent to fame he is content to wait for his work to be published by Lord Kelvin in 1879.

1777 - Joseph Louis Lagrange invents the concept of the scalar potential for gravitational fields.

1780 - Luigi Galvani causes dead frog legs to twitch with static electricity, then also discovers that the same twitching can be caused by contact with dissimilar metals. His followers invent another invisible fluid, that of ``animal electricity'', to describe this effect.

1782 - Pierre Simon Laplace shows that Lagrange's potential satisfies.

1785 - Charles Augustin Coulomb uses a torsion balance to verify that the electric force law is inverse square. He also proposes a combined fluid/action-at-a-distance theory like that of Aepinus but with two conducting fluids instead of one. Fighting breaks out between single and double fluid partisans. He also discovers that the electric force near a conductor is proportional to its surface charge density and makes contributions to the two-fluid theory of magnetism.

1793 - Alessandro Volta makes the first batteries and argues that animal electricity is just ordinary electricity flowing through the frog legs under the impetus of the force produced by the contact of dissimilar metals. He discovers the importance of ``completing the circuit.'' In 1800 he discovers the Voltaic pile (dissimilar metals separated by wet cardboard) which greatly increases the magnitude of the effect.

1800 - William Nicholson and Anthony Car

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Yes he did i know because i've been studying him for 3 years i'm only in elementary school.

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yes and...no

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no one invented electricety.