Since a hundred years ago the electricity was the most important invention ever discovered and if you look around yourself you will know that most of your life is working with electricity but we were wondering how the electricity works. Here we go; in this article you will find how the electricity is generated.
In 1827 there were many men who started to experiment in electromagnetic fields. However in 1832 Michael Faraday discovered the operating principle of electromagnetic generators. Michael Faraday built the first electrical generator with DC output voltage. It was very simple but in his time the electricity was the most attractive subject that people talked about so at that time there were many scientists working on the electromagnetic fields. In the same year Hippolyte Pixii made the dynamo. The dynamo was the first electrical generator that generated an AC voltage. Hippolyte Pixii inscribes his name in the history because of his invention; however Michael Faraday also did.
Because in any generators we have to use Faraday's law which says:
'Where e is the instantaneous induced voltage, N the number of turns in the coil, φ the flux in webers, and t the time in seconds'.
The generator's principle is that a machine converts the mechanical energy to electrical energy. It is basically a coil connected with a shaft located between two magnetic fields. When the shaft rotates it produces electricity. This shaft can be driven by steam or gas or wind or flowing water etc. There are many ways to drive the shaft to rotate. There are many different types of generators. They are classified by their output. The output of generators can be measured by three units which are Amps, Volts and Watts . To imagine how the electricity works imagine that the electricity is the water and the generator is the pump; also the wires are the pipes. Then imagine that the amount of the water flowing in the pipe is the amount of electrons flowing in the wire; that’s what we call a current and it's measured in amps. Also the voltage of the electricity can be compared with the pressure of the water and it's measured in volts.
howstuffworks.com
This is general information about the generators and how they work.
wikipedia.org