Gustav Kirchhoff, Albert Einstein, Reddy Kilowatt, George Ohm, Robert Millikan, and the light bulb patent.
Steve Mitnick is Editor-in-Chief of Public Utilities Fortnightly and author of the book “Lines Down: How We Pay, Use, Value Grid Electricity Amid the Storm.”
Gustav Kirchhoff, who you can blame for the miserable complexity of electrical transmission and distribution systems, was born on March 12, 1824, in Konigsberg, Germany.
As a seminar exercise in 1845 (essentially, a homework assignment), he set forth Kirchhoff's Laws governing electrical flows in circuits. He later co-discovered two elements on the periodic table, rubidium and cesium, atomic numbers 37 and 55.
Kirchoff's collaborator in finding two of the 118 elements was Robert Bunsen. That's right, he's the one that invented the mainstay of chem labs since, the Bunsen burner.
Albert Einstein, whose theories were both special and general, suggested that atomic chain reactions would produce energy in enormous quantities, as in today's nuclear power plants. He was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Germany.
Einstein's famous formula, E=mc2, says a change in mass, m, causes a gigantic change in energy, E. That constant, c2, ruling the relationship of m and E, is really quite large. But why is this important for our electric grid?
The combustion at coal and natural gas power plants deals with the valence electrons of atoms. Yes, this brings back bad memories for most of you about high school science.