Another attempt to visualize time and space
While reading today’s weekend newspaper, I stumbled upon a travel article about the city of Como.
There, the author mentioned that Alessandro Volta was born there.
Suddenly, I was inspired to do something.
I opened ChatGPT and asked, “List me 10 people (sorted by the sum of their biggest contributions) who were responsible for the invention of modern electricity.”
It replied :
If we’re talking about “modern electricity” as a practical, scientific, and industrial system rather than a single invention, then the list has to be a reasoned ranking, not an objective one. With that caveat, here is a commonly accepted top ten, ordered from the most foundational overall contribution downward.
Michael Faraday usually sits at the top because he discovered electromagnetic induction, which is the principle behind electric generators, transformers, and electric motors. Without Faraday, large-scale electricity generation simply does not exist.
James Clerk Maxwell comes next because he unified electricity, magnetism, and light into a single theoretical framework through Maxwell’s equations. His work turned electricity from a collection of experiments into a predictive science and made all later electrical engineering possible.
Nikola Tesla ranks very high due to his development of alternating current (AC) systems, including polyphase motors and long-distance power transmission. Modern power grids are essentially Tesla’s architecture.
Thomas Edison follows, not because he invented electricity, but because he industrialized it. His work on power distribution systems, practical lighting, and electrical infrastructure made electricity a mass consumer technology.
André-Marie Ampère deserves placement here for founding electrodynamics and formalizing the relationship between electric currents and magnetic fields. His work underpins circuit theory and current measurement.
Georg Ohm is next because Ohm’s law provided the basic quantitative relationship between voltage, current, and resistance. This law is fundamental to all electrical design, from household wiring to microelectronics.
Alessandro Volta belongs on the list for inventing the first true electric battery, the voltaic pile. This made continuous electric current available for experimentation and practical use.
Heinrich Hertz contributed by experimentally proving the existence of electromagnetic waves predicted by Maxwell. This directly led to radio, wireless communication, and much of modern electronics.
Gustav Kirchhoff is included for formulating Kirchhoff’s circuit laws, which are essential for analyzing complex electrical networks and remain central in electrical engineering education and practice.
Benjamin Franklin rounds out the list because his experiments established the electrical nature of lightning and introduced key concepts such as positive and negative charge, shaping early electrical theory even if his work was more exploratory than industrial.
First, I put those answers into wdlist, a web app that I recently made.
I added each person and short comments listing their contributions.
But, here, I noticed several bugs in my recently made app.
First, when the sidebar is hidden, the main content overflows.
I could fix it (quite fast) by changing the margin-left value of the “sidebar-closed” CSS class.
Second, the comment field doesn’t grow to multiline.
Fixing this bug is quite tricky, because I would have to replace the current <input> with a <textarea>, and I’m feeling lazy right now. So I simply treat it as a feature instead of a bug.
Yeah. You can only add short comments, limited to one line, now. Multiline comments are banned.
Now, after every person is listed, we can access their respective Wikidata entry quickly.
From Wikidata, I extracted three things for each of them: birth date, death date, and place of birth.
I’m going to use ganttchart-webviz to visualize the birth date and death date data. Then I’m going to use locationpad to visualize the place of birth data.
Both are also my recently made apps.
So yes, in short, I just want to use this Como → Volta spark of inspiration to test my recently made app.
And here’s the result.
Epilogue
Currently, wdlist stores your data offline, inside your own browser. This can be seen as either a feature or a bug, depending on your point of view. It’s a feature because your privacy is guaranteed. But it’s also a bug (or more accurately, a limitation) because you can’t share your list publicly, nor can you see other people’s lists.
For the latter, I think it’s actually possible to solve. Maybe I could host it on Toolforge (for free?), but for now I still don’t know how to set it up properly there, especially when it comes to handling a database and related infrastructure. Ideally, users could also log in using their Wikimedia account.
But again, I’m feeling lazy right now. So for the moment, I’m just building my own lists offline while continuing to test the concept.
The real question I keep asking myself is: do people actually need to build their own private Wikidata lists?
Personally, I do enjoy building private Wikidata lists, especially when I can add extra comments and context behind each entry. I’ve made several such “private Wikidata lists” in the past [1] [2] [3]. While working on them, it was always quite a hassle to reorder items or add comments, since I had to rely on cryptic wiki templates like {{Q|2313131}} without immediately knowing the actual item’s label. Wdlist was created to solve that specific problem. It makes it much easier to add items, rearrange them, and attach comments.