<Li> electronics which deals with electrical circuits that involve active electrical components such as vacuum tubes, transistors, diodes and integrated circuits, and associated passive interconnection technologies . </Li> <P> Electrical phenomena have been studied since antiquity, though progress in theoretical understanding remained slow until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries . Even then, practical applications for electricity were few, and it would not be until the late nineteenth century that electrical engineers were able to put it to industrial and residential use . The rapid expansion in electrical technology at this time transformed industry and society, becoming a driving force for the Second Industrial Revolution . Electricity's extraordinary versatility means it can be put to an almost limitless set of applications which include transport, heating, lighting, communications, and computation . Electrical power is now the backbone of modern industrial society . </P> <P> Long before any knowledge of electricity existed, people were aware of shocks from electric fish . Ancient Egyptian texts dating from 2750 BCE referred to these fish as the "Thunderer of the Nile", and described them as the "protectors" of all other fish . Electric fish were again reported millennia later by ancient Greek, Roman and Arabic naturalists and physicians . Several ancient writers, such as Pliny the Elder and Scribonius Largus, attested to the numbing effect of electric shocks delivered by catfish and electric rays, and knew that such shocks could travel along conducting objects . Patients suffering from ailments such as gout or headache were directed to touch electric fish in the hope that the powerful jolt might cure them . Possibly the earliest and nearest approach to the discovery of the identity of lightning, and electricity from any other source, is to be attributed to the Arabs, who before the 15th century had the Arabic word for lightning ra'ad (رعد) applied to the electric ray . </P> <P> Ancient cultures around the Mediterranean knew that certain objects, such as rods of amber, could be rubbed with cat's fur to attract light objects like feathers . Thales of Miletus made a series of observations on static electricity around 600 BCE, from which he believed that friction rendered amber magnetic, in contrast to minerals such as magnetite, which needed no rubbing . Thales was incorrect in believing the attraction was due to a magnetic effect, but later science would prove a link between magnetism and electricity . According to a controversial theory, the Parthians may have had knowledge of electroplating, based on the 1936 discovery of the Baghdad Battery, which resembles a galvanic cell, though it is uncertain whether the artifact was electrical in nature . </P>

Who discovered that lightning is a form of electricity
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