PHYSICS IS FUN: The Story of Electricity

THE STORY OF ELECTRICITY

Imagine a world without any electricity. Imagine your home now… no televisions, no air conditioners, no light, no refrigerator, no machines, no mobile phones, no electronic gadgets to assist you, no apps, no facebook, no twitter… The only form of electricity available to us would be that of lightning.

Ohh.. what a boring life…

But life would be very close to nature. Sun and fire will be the only source of light. Watching birds, animals would be your favorite pass time. Crude handmade gadgets like magnetic compass, hammer, knife would be your apps. Pigeon would serve as twitter, FB…

So my dear friend, electricity is an integral part of our modern life. The study of electricity is necessary so that such a vast knowledge is not lost overtime. It must be passed to the next generation.

I am doing my duty as I am passing the story to electricity to you..

Take a piece of copper metal. If you view the copper at the microscopic level you would find a lot of empty space with copper atoms suspended in space in the cloud of electrons. Most of the electrons in the cloud are orbiting to some copper atoms or the other. Some electrons in the cloud are wandering from one atom to the other, colliding with other atoms and electrons. At this microscopic level, everything happens very fast. Electrons are moving at 10⁶m/s, atoms are vibrating very rapidly with a frequency of ……..

Suddenly, in the macroscopic, outer world, a human connected the metal plate to a battery.

In the inner atomic world, there is a change in the scene now. The cloud of wandering electrons start moving towards positive terminal of the battery with a very slow speed of 1mm/s. The number of wandering electrons are however enormous. About 10²² in few grams of copper.

We call this flow of electrons as electric current.

When such moving electrons are made of pass through a filament of electric bulb, it heats up to approx 2700°C and starts glowing.