When you transmit electricity through a cable or other conductor, some portion of that energy is lost during transmission.

This is the result of what's called electrical resistance, which is caused by the electrons,

of which the electricity consists, colliding with other electrons and atoms and or with impurities

in the material through which they're passing. This is largely what determines the conductivity of a material.

So metals like copper and non-metal substances like graphite

have high conductivity and low resistance,

while materials like rubber have high resistance and thus low conductivity. Both types of material can be useful, as, for instance,

you can make gloves and boots using rubber that will help you avoid electrocution, while copper

is great if you want to produce wires that rapidly carry electricity from place to place,

with relatively little loss of energy along the way.

Most conductive materials, though, the ones we know about anyway, still suffer from at least

some level of resistance, which means no matter how high quality the copper we use in our electrical cables,

we will still lose some of the energy we send along those cables, which is waste.

And in a lot of cases, that waste takes the form of heat, those electrons that are blocked or

knocked off course being emitted as waste heat, which can cause its own problems in some cases,

including the straining of electrical cables, which expand and

contract due to a change in temperature caused by that heat. Superconductivity was originally discovered

in Mercury back in 1911 by a Dutch physicist who was working on a theory that had been

posited and forwarded by several other

researchers in preceding years.

The idea being that metals might demonstrate decreased resistance, perhaps even to the point

of zero resistance, if dramatically cooled down, with one prominent theory stating that

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