We push a button and the light goes on. Electricity flows through the wires. But it took hundreds of years to find out about this form of energy. Isaac Asimov tells the history of electricity from the early Greek philosophers to Volta’s battery and Faraday’s electro-magnetism in a concise, simply written, authoritative text. Bold black-and-white illustrations dramatically emphasize each step.

This second volume in the “How did we find out” series is the first to add the “about” to the title—a precedent followed by all the subsequent volumes. (How Did We Find Out the Earth is Round? is the only one whose title doesn’t include that “about.”) It takes the story of electricity—as also told, for example, in Understanding Physics, volume 2 or Asimov’s New Guide to Science—up through the end of the nineteenth century. This might be a slightly too early cut-off, but it doesn’t matter—the book still remains a good source for the young reader to find out some of the basic facts about electricity and how it was discovered.