I could not find much information about how electricity was made but I did find this.

        Back in about 1752 people used to use lightning rods which were made by Benjamin Franklin. This worked by putting a container of some sort near the lightning rod before the storm starts and the electricity in the air would go down the rod and into the storage container.

        In Italy, in the late 1700’s Luigi Galvani discovered that a dead frog’s muscles twitched when it was placed near an electrical machine. He did experiments to try to explain why a dead frog appeared to jump. Luigi thought the frog’s nerves contained the electricity. Alessandro Volta was interested in Galvani’s experiments but thought the electricity came from the metals, such as the steel knife or the metal table. Volta is best known for inventing the voltaic pile, now called a battery. He had made a stack of disks of zinc, acid or salt-soaked paper, and copper. This was the first way to store and control the release of dynamic electricity. Volta did not know why his electric cell worked. The volt is named after Volta.