A General History

Though he did not name it, the first person to discuss electricity as modern man knows it was the Italian physician, Girolamo Cardano. he wrote of it in his 1550 work, De Subtilitate, and pointed out the difference between what would now be called electrical and magnetic forces. His work was supplemented by William Gilbert's 1600 paper De Magnete, in which he coined the word electricus, from the greek word electron, meaning amber.

The word 'electricity' is fist ascribed to sir Thomas Browne in his 1846 book, Pseudodoxica Epidemica. In it, he attributes various strange happenstances and myths to the phenomenon and attempts to define it through empirical testing. The book has gone through no less than six separate editions, and is still sold today, as well as having been published online:
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/pseudodoxia/pseudodoxia.shtml

Other pioneers of electricity include: Pieter van Musschenbroek, who invented the Leiden Jar (one of the first capacitors, named after the Leiden Unviersity, where he worked) in 1745, and William Watson, who discovered in 1747 that a static discharge is equivalent to an electric current,

Benjamin Franklin, in addition to his 1752 'Kite Experiment', also is credited with the invention of electrical attractors, or lightning rods. He and Philadelphia colleague Ebenezer Kinnersley are credited with the discovery of the positive and negative natures of electrical charges.

These observations and experiments allowed another gamut of development: the works of Michael Faraday (the inventor of electrolysis), Luigi Galvani (who discovered that muscles in the body produce electricity and laid down the foundations for the first electrochemical cell), Andre-Marie Ampere (the discoverer of electromagnetism) , Alessandro Volta (creator of the voltaic cell and thus the first modern chemical battery), and Georg Simon Ohm (the discoverer of electrical resistance). The accomplishments of these great intellectuals is evident in modern electrical technology: all have had units and concepts named after them (the Faraday constant, galvanic current and corrosion, and the Amp, Volt and Ohm).

SOURCE: 'The E behind Everything: How Electricity Came To Be' IEEE Virtual Museum.
http://www.ieee-virtual-museum.org/exhibit/exhibit.php?id=159249&lid=1