The discovery of electricity dates to the earliest days of the Uzdumalian Empire; although generally credited to an imperial meteorologist (or astronomer, for in the days before Uzdumalian airships ruled the skies, the chief occupations of the imperial meteorologist was reading the stars for portents of hurricanes and impending assassination attempts) named "Jaaklot Breathes-Fire". (Those surviving records recording Inighar's royal entourage do not mention the existence of any such person, however. Given the other feats attributed to Jaaklat, including artificing an automaton capable of playing Alchemy and using earthquakes to destroy a village that had insulted the honor of one of the lesser royal mistresses, he may be only a folk hero or perhaps a genuine historical figure to whom numerous factual deeds from the Early Empire were attributed.)

Nonetheless, it is attested from several sources that electricity was known as a scientific curiosity by at least c. 145, when a primitive static generator was demonstrated to the Barons' Roundtable, a gathering of gentlemen that was the distant ancestor of the Imperial University. In the year 172, the entourage of the Princess Umre, herself an intellectual and patroness of the scientific arts, demonstrated the first practical electric motor, and in the year 178, a Glenridean national named Zabatrik demonstrated (and was granted an imperial patent on) the arc light, which, as the poet Straj wrote, "cast the world into shadow and unwavering light". The Uzdumalian state's use of electricity, as much as its belligerent foreign policy or its military successes, helped make it the dominant regional power. While other states on the Uzdumalian borders (notably Orin, Ulm, and Sarpkza) used electricity to power airships and colossi and for religious rituals, the Uzdumalian adaption of electricity for industrial purposes was possibly unique.

It is unquestionably Uzdumalians who created electric refrigeration, urban lighting, the electric streetcar, and the electric riverboat. By the end of the fourth century, hardly a freehold (save for the sugar plantations) in all of Greater Uzda lacked at least an undershot waterwheel or windmill to help charge the electric harvesters that made Uzdumalian agriculture so much more productive than that found elsewhere on the continent. The naptha-fueled hydrogen crackers in the Fifth Army's home city of Jyorn were described by Pellet in his Visitations as so vast that they "threw up a smoke that blotted out the noonday sun" every day; he describes Jyornians as pallid and unaccustomed to bright light, although this may be a rare example of Pellet exaggerating for comic effect; manmade hydrogen preserved Uzdumalian air superiority during the fifth-century decline in known helium reserves.

Even through the Empire's slow decline, the pace of Uzdumalian innovation in novel uses of electricity barely slackened. Much of this was due to the continued power bases held by the Air Corps, the scientific services, and the Fifth Army, each of which had independent sources of funding and supporters within chit clubs who could divert promising nubbins into the path of applied electrical research. However, the purges that followed the Scientists' Revolt finished the Uzdumalian dominance of scientific inquiry on the continent, and the use of radio as a tool of communication in 598 was first demonstrated in the Sarpkzanian capital. This may have been the greatest blow delivered to Uzdumalia by Sarpkza since the death of Inighar V; it eliminated in a single blow the communications advantage that the Uzdumalians had held since Devon-Lars I first reorganized the air corps. (The discovery of radio would prove profoundly disquieting to several breakaway Uzdumalian sects. At least one of these sects, the "Body of the Traversing Wave", held that the "background radio hiss" identified by Sarpkzanian astronomers was audible evidence of the Great God's presence.) Further, during Targhand's years of exile, he was able to use radio to communicate to his adherents within the Uzdumalian Empire; this ability to evade both censors and the long reach of the Midnight Guard proved invaluable to early Targhandite missionaries.

See also:

Alchemy

Devon-Lars I

Fifth Army

Midnight Guard

Heretical sects of Uzda

Scientists' Revolt