Kathy Loves Physics

Author: Kathy Joseph

  • History Of 3-Phase Electricity And It’s Distribution

    History Of 3-Phase Electricity And It’s Distribution

    Almost all of our electrical systems use 3 phase AC electricity, but how does it work, why was it invented, and who invented it? Ready for the surprising but complex and story as well as the answer to why some countries use 50 Hz and some use 60 Hz and one country uses both? In…

  • The Origin of The Polyphase Current

    The Origin of The Polyphase Current

    As I said in my video on the history of 3-phase electricity, both Nikola Tesla and Galileo Ferraris simultaneously discovered 2-phase electricity and the 2-phase motor that were, according to Tesla, “identical almost to the smallest detail.”[1] So, how did these two men come up with this amazing discovery? That is what this supplemental video…

  • James Joules: The Beer Brewer Who Changed The World

    James Joules: The Beer Brewer Who Changed The World

    Most of us who know of James Joule know of him because we have heard of Joule’s law, his paddle experiment and/or we know that energy is measured in Joules in his honor. But who was Joule and how and why did he make his discoveries and what does it have to do with his…

  • Magnetic Fields, Electric Fields, and Elector Magnetic Waves: Physics And History

    Magnetic Fields, Electric Fields, and Elector Magnetic Waves: Physics And History

    I was working on a video on the physics of the Faraday cage and it became clear that not only do you need to talk about magnetic fields to explain the cage but that Faraday had actually created the idea of electric fields for that very purpose in 1837. Now I had known that Faraday…

  • The Not So Honorable History of The Wheatstone Bridge

    The Not So Honorable History of The Wheatstone Bridge

    In my last video, on the history of Ohm’s law, I talked about part of how it was made famous was when a man named Charles Wheatstone attributed Ohm’s law to help him create what is now called the “Wheatstone Bridge” in 1843. However, I quickly learned that this “bridge” was actually created 10 years…

  • Ohm’s Law: History and Biography of George Ohm

    Ohm’s Law: History and Biography of George Ohm

    Everyone who studies basic electricity or physics learns Ohm’s law. But did you know that when Georg Ohm published his work in 1827, it was widely hated so much that he basically lost his job? Georg Simon Ohm was born in 1787 in Bavaria the oldest of three children who survived to adulthood (out of…

  • Why Doesn’t The US Use 220V Like Everyone Else In The World?

    Why Doesn’t The US Use 220V Like Everyone Else In The World?

    As I studied the history of electricity I wondered more and more, why do 1/3rd of the countries in the world, including the United States, use around 110/120 volts in their homes, and the other 2/3rd use around 220/230 volts? I think I have found the answers: it all has to do with how Edison…

  • How The Light Bulb Was Invented And Who Invented It?

    How The Light Bulb Was Invented And Who Invented It?

    Imagine, you happened to fall back in time to November, 1705 and imagine you happened to be admitted to the lecture hall of the Royal Academy in London, then you could have seen an incredible sight. Isaac Newton’s 45-year-old assistant named Francis Hauksbee (who was an expert in vacuum pumps) demonstrating a strange device, with…

  • Who invented the light bulb?

    Imagine, you happened to fall back in time to November, 1705 and imagine you happened to be admitted to the lecture hall of the Royal Academy in London, then you could have seen an incredible sight: Isaac Newton’s 45-year-old assistant named Francis Hauksbee (who was an expert in vacuum pumps)demonstrating a strange device, with a…

  • How Norman Lockyer Discovered Helium, Chromosphere And Nature Magazine

    How Norman Lockyer Discovered Helium, Chromosphere And Nature Magazine

    How did Norman Lockyer go from being a poor civil servant with no scientific background, to a famous astronomer who co-discovered and named the Chromosphere of the sun, determine that lines in the chromosphere were from a new element, named that new element Helium (after the Greek God of the sun Helios), and create and…