We often mark our technology-dominated present as beginning with the development of the telephone, the gramophone, radio, the automobile and the airplane around a hundred years ago. But the consumer electronics era really begins with the discovery and development of electricity.

It is said that around 600 BC, Thales of Miletus, one of the legendary Seven Wise Men of ancient Greece, found that rubbing pieces of amber together produced an effect much like magnetism, but not quite.

In 1570, English scientist William Gilbert continued Thales' amber-rubbing experiments and called the result "electric", a modification of the Greek and Latin words for amber. In 1650, the term "electricity" was coined to refer to the resulting force.

Benjamin Franklin performed his shocking experiments with a kite and made his subsequent discovery and definition of positive and negative electrical charges in 1752. By 1800, Italian Alessandro Volta, for whom the "volt" is named, figured out how to produce electricity in steady current. English physicist Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic rotation in 1821.

In 1827, German George Ohm published his eponymous law concerning voltage, current and resistance that makes possible all manner of electrical and speaker wiring. Faraday, simultaneously with American scientist Joseph Henry, discovered electromagnetic induction in 1831, making possible all future electric motors and electrical generators.

But there were still no electrical gadgets, until Henry, working with an obscure painter named Samuel F.B. Morse, used the principal of magnetic induction to invent the first electronic communications device, the telegraph, in 1837.

In 1836, British John Frederic Daniell combined copper and zinc and created the Daniell cell, the forerunner of today's batteries. In 1839, young Frenchman Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel discovered the photovoltaic effect–power from light–without which most solar calculators would be useless. Between 1856 and 1873, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell defined electromagnetism, leading the development of every electrical product that followed. The first such breakthrough using Faraday's and Maxwell's theories was the development of the AC induction motor by Nikola Tesla in the mid-1880s.