San Antonio College Library

"An Entertainment for Angels tells the story of how electricity charged the eighteenth-century imagination. With contemporary illustrations and engaging prose, Patricia Fara portrays the struggles to understand the unusual and exciting effects that electrical experiments were producing." "One of the heroes of the story is Benjamin Franklin, renowned on both sides of the Atlantic as an expert on electricity, who introduced lightning rods to protect...

When They Hid the Fire examines the American social perceptions of electricity as an energy technology that were adopted between the mid-nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries. Arguing that both technical and cultural factors played a role, Daniel French shows how electricity became an invisible and abstract form of energy in American society. As technological advancements allowed for an increasing physical distance between power...

This book is about how electricity has profoundly changed the way we live, work, and play. Some twenty topics are covered, with an abundance of graphs and images to build a comprehensive picture. Each looks at the developments, and the people who initiated them, together with how one led to the next and their subsequent impact on society. Topics include electric supply, lighting through X-rays, and all those appliances that make our homes so comfortable....

Written to educate new engineers about the business environment, this book explains how new methods of power systems operations and energy marketing relate to public policy, regulation, economics, and engineering science. It examines technologies and techniques currently in use and provides a foundation for understanding the coming era of unbundling, open access, power marketing, self-generation, and regional transmission operations. The book can...

Introduction to the essentials of electricity and electronics, includes information on circuits, transformers, semiconductors, transistors, wireless technology, computers, and the Internet, and features quizzes at the end of each chapter and a final exam.

The California energy crisis is not simply about a lack of electricity. It is about who owns the production and distribution of that electricity. As state after state agrees to deregulation, the utility industry is approaching a concentration not seen since the Power Trust of the 1930s. Seeing the Light urges us to change the rules now and create a future that includes affordable, locally owned electricity. The book chonicles hopeful new developments...

"A fresh look at electricity and its powerful role in life on Earth. When we think of electricity, we likely imagine the energy humming inside our home appliances or lighting up our electronic devices--or perhaps we envision the lightning-streaked clouds of a stormy sky. But electricity is more than an external source of power, heat, or illumination. Life at its essence is nothing if not electrical. The story of how we came to understand electricity's...