Selects: How Electricity Works

This is a message from sponsor Intuit TurboTax. You know, doing taxes was getting frustrated by your forms.
Now taxes is uploading your forms with a snap. And a TurboTax expert will do your taxes for you.
One who's backed by the latest tech, which cross-checks millions of data points for absolute accuracy. All of which makes it easy for you to get the most money back guaranteed.
Get an expert now on TurboTax.com. Only available with TurboTax live full service.
See guarantee details at TurboTax.com slash guarantees. This is the soundtrack of the millions undiagnosed with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, or OSA, in adults with obesity.
It's a chronic condition where the airway partially or fully collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation without your knowing. Don't sleep on the symptoms.
Talk to your doctor about OSA and learn more at don'tsleeponosa.com. This information is provided by Lily USA LLC.
Hey everybody, it's Josh. And for this week's Select, I've chosen our 2014 episode on electricity.
And I chose it as a kind of Casey Kasem-esque special dedication to one of our younger listeners, Charlie Pendergrast, who wrote in with a bunch of good ideas, one of which was electricity. Well, rather than just send him a link and being boring, I thought I'd share it as a select for everybody to enjoy.
So, if you enjoy this select, you can thank Charlie. Thanks, Charlie! Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh clark there's charles w chuck bryant jerry's over there chuck's wearing his last chance garage hat which means that all is right with the world yeah you know if chuck's not wearing that hat who knows what's going on yeah there's i thought i lost this thing yeah once yeah i think i vaguely remember that dude i.
Dude, I freaked. You were crying.
I was on the phone with Delta and everything. I was like, oh, here it is.
It's on my head. In your back pocket.
Like Bruce Springsteen. That's right.
How you doing? Great. Chuck.
Yes. Let's talk about electricity.
Electricity, electricity.

I've had the Talking Heads song in my head.

Which one?

Electricity.

Oh, okay.

Where all he sees are little dots.

I thought you were going to say once in a lifetime.

No, that's... What is that called?

Once in a lifetime?

Yeah.

Yeah, I've been singing the Schoolhouse Rock electricity song over and over in my head.

What about the Electric Company theme song? I haven't been singing that. But do you remember it? Yeah, that was, I was Electric Company over Sesame Street even.
Oh yeah, I didn't think there had to be like a, you know, I didn't know it was like the Stones or the Beatles, you know? No, it's, uh, and the correct answer there is the Who, by the way. What do you mean? Like that's the way you go for? Stones or Beatles, the who.
Is that right? No, I mean, yeah, I love the who. Do you? But I'm with you.
I don't see the need to rank things like that. Well, plus the electric company came on after Sesame Street, I think.
Yeah, it skewed slightly older, I think. Sesame Street, to me, felt like, you know,.
Electric Company was more like 8, 9, 10, 12. And then even younger than Sesame Street was Pinwheel if I remember correctly.
That was after your time. Okay.
Pinwheel was pretty cute. But it was like little kids and then Sesame Street was like little kids.
And then Electric Company was like cool. Yeah.
And Romper Room was kind of pre-Sesame Street even.

So was that the one with Raggedy Ann and Andy?

I don't remember.

I just remember it was very immature.

Yeah.

It was very childish.

I think Raggedy Ann and Andy were in that.

Well, at any rate, we've angered enough people now.

I know.

I have an intro for this one.

Great.

Okay, you ready?

Mm-hmm.

About 13.8 billion years ago, a little something called the Big Bang happened, and the universe was created. So says you.
So says a lot of people. Yeah.
You know, we weren't around. Nobody saw it, but it's been detected, and it's strongly suspected by scientists that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and that it came from something called the Big Bang, which, by the way, I would love to do an episode on.
Yeah, let's do it. Okay.
And under the auspices of the Big Bang theory, not the TV show but the actual theory, at that moment, all of the energy in the entire universe was created right then. Boom.
Bam. Ever since that point, no more energy has been created, and none of that energy has been destroyed.
But it changes states. It changes shapes.
It can be locked up in different places. It can be transferred from one place to another via some natural ways like convection, conduction, radiation.
And like I said, it can be stored in stuff. It can be stored in your body, right? Fat is potential energy that can be burned and used for energy to carry out work, which is all we're looking to do is work.
That's right. We use energy to carry out work, whether it's digging a shovel or lighting a light bulb.

That's what energy does.

It produces work, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

We figured out along the way that we don't have to wait around for radiation or convection

or conduction to do its thing to provide energy because we'd have a lot of waiting to do.

We wouldn't be in the computer age right now if it weren't for something called

Thank you. to do its thing to provide energy because we'd have a lot of waiting to do.

We wouldn't be in the computer age right now if it weren't for something called electricity,

which is basically how humans have figured out how to harness converting energy from one type of another and then transmitting it a very long distance.

Yeah.

Because electricity isn't a primary energy source like the sun or solar radiation or

nuclear energy or even the flow of water, kinetic energy.

No, it's created.

Yeah.

It's a secondary energy source.

It's a carrier.

That's right.

So electricity carries energy from one point to another.

And if you understand that, you understand the very basis of what we're going to talk about today. We've figured out how to generate electricity to carry energy to produce work down the line.
That's right. That's my intro.
Which is usually mechanical energy is what's produced by a machine. Yeah, so think about this.
If you capture mechanical energy like water spinning a turbine, which we'll talk about, in Niagara Falls, that's not going to do anything to light your light bulb 200 miles away. No, not by itself.
No, unless you connect the two. You send the work produced, the energy captured in Niagara Falls down to your light bulb.
And that's what we do, using electricity. That's right.
Yeah, it's pretty simple. Actually, it seems complicated, but it's not.
No. Just electrons moving around.
Yeah, let's talk about electrons, man. Let's talk about the atom.
Well, should we talk about the history of this stuff? Yes, let's. Back in the olden days, in ancient times, there were dudes messing around with energy and static electricity without even knowing what they were doing.
Right. They didn't understand it.
Right. But that doesn't mean that they weren't playing around with it.
No, and getting zapped because they're messing with static electricity. That's right, which we'll explain all that later too.
But there was one dude called Thalus of Miletus. He was a philosopher in Greece.
And in 600 BC, he is thought to have been the first dude to mess around with electrostatic, static electricity, by rubbing amber with fur, and he noticed that dust and feathers and things were attracted to it. He didn't know what the heck was going on, but he knew something was up.
Right, and the amber plays a pretty big role. It's actually amber, the Latin or, I'm sorry, is it Greek? Greek.
The Greek word for amber is electron. Yeah, with a K.
Yeah. Which makes it look way heavy metal.
Yeah. But that's, so like our word electricity is derived from the Greek word for amber from that first experiment with static electricity.
Yeah, and it was actually coined by a dude named William Gilbert. He was an Englishman, a physician, and he was studying sort of the same things with static electricity that Miletus was, and he was the first person to say it's electric when he saw these forces at work.
With an exclamation point and his finger in the air. Can you see it? We should probably differentiate.
There's a couple of types of electricity. There's static electricity, and then there's current electricity, right? And current electricity is what we are able to generate artificially.
Static electricity exists in nature, just naturally. And that was the first experiments carried out.
Then there's other types of current electricity like lightning. But at this time, when these people are messing with electric or static electricity or saying it's electric for the first time, the concept of electricity was that it was fluid.
Well, it was fluid. He was on the right track.
Something is flowing, but they thought it was literally a fluid, which they called, which in those days was called a humor. And he said it leaves what he called then an effluvium, which is atmosphere around it.
When you create this rubbing action, it removes that fluid. But it wasn't fluid.
They were not dummies back then, but they were just figuring it all out. No, they weren't dummies because even Ben Franklin thought it was a fluid.

It was the prevailing idea or concept of electricity.

And Ben Franklin and a couple of his contemporaries,

including a guy named Thomas Francois Dallabarde,

were studying electricity big time.

And it was when they really investigated lightning

that our understanding of current electricity started to take shape. Yeah.
The old story of Ben Franklin flying his kite may or may not have happened. There are some people that think that didn't happen now.
But if he didn't do it, other people did. There were guys who died carrying out that experiment.
Yeah. But it was definitely carried out.
I don't know if Ben Franklin did or not. Yeah, that's sort of the story that he flew the kite with the key.
And some people think it either didn't go down like that or didn't go down with him at all. But it's a great story either way.
Yeah, and I think he at least proposed it, the experiment. Well, yeah, and he was the first guy to say that electricity has a positive and negative charge and that it flows from positive to negative.
So he's a smart guy. Very smart.
He's a polymath. Then there was another smart dude named Coulomb, Charles Augustine de Coulomb, and he is the one that wrote Coulomb's Law.
And he said, charges, like charges repel, opposite charges attract.

And that's kind of like the basis for it all.

Yeah, and the force of these charges is proportional to their product.

So if you multiply the charges, they are going to be very strong or cancel one another out or push one another away.

Yeah, he basically said, you can now calculate this.

Right.

Because of my handy-dandy little law.

Yeah, and with a boom.

He said boom.

Not bang.

Okay.

That came earlier.

Later on, a guy named J.J. Thompson in 1897 said at a science conference,

hey, I found something smaller than the atom.

And everyone said, silly man, atoms are invisible. It even means invisible.
You liar. And he said, no, I promise.
There's something smaller. It's got a negative charge, and I'm going to call it a corpuscle.
No, he didn't. Yeah.
It's Latin for small bodies. And then I think, I don't know who later said, let's change it to electron.

Yeah, it sounds way cooler.

But the discovery of the electron was basically the birth of what we know as electricity today.

Yeah.

The understanding of the electron is what it's all about.

And would you say like 1897?

Yes.

So before that time, I guess he didn't understand the electron,

but he understood electricity.

A guy named Michael Faraday was working on the case.

Stud.

Yeah.

Basically, everybody's like, Ben Franklin, electricity, hand in hand.

Really, it's Michael Faraday, who's British,

who really came to lay the foundation for electrifying the world.

He just created the first dynamo, which is a generator,

which will talk about. First electric motor? Yeah.
He got electricity, and he explained it to other people very well. Can you even fathom how smart these people were? No.
To be that in the dark and figuring all this subatomic stuff out back then? Hats off. Top hats off to these guys.
Last Chance Garage hat off. Yeah.
And back on. Like, I have trouble understanding it now.
Right. When it's explained through, like, Kids for Science websites.
I know. We're not inventing this, figuring this stuff out for the first time.
Right, exactly. And it's a pretty dangerous field to try to figure out blind, too, you know? Yeah, I mean, more than one scientist got a shock from a Leyden jar.
Oh, yeah. And you can make those.
Do you make those in science class? No. Yeah, you can make those.
Well, we should say a Leyden jar is a very primitive capacitor. You use a metal rod in a jar.
Like a nail. That's sunk into, like, some water, and it can store a charge.
I think Ben Franklin's kite experiment attached the kite or a rod or something to a laden jar to store the charge, too. If that happened.
Right. But again, he did make the proposal.
It's whether or not he carried it out is a good question. All right.
I guess now we can get to atoms. Finally.
Atoms are very tiny and they make up molecules and molecules make up everything you see. Yeah.
Atoms are the building block of matter. That's right.
And, and Adam, remember, we're always talking about nature loves homeostasis. Oh man, does it? You've got a balance that nature always seeks.
Tries to achieve it. Same with atoms, or atoms are no exception, I should say.
Within an atom, you have a nucleus, which is made up of protons and neutrons. Protons are positively charged particles.
Neutrons are neutral. And then orbiting that nucleus, making the cool atom symbol, are electrons, and they're negatively charged.
That's right. And when you have an equal number of protons to electrons, you have a neutral atom.
Yeah. There's no potential energy there.
It's just in balance. Yeah.
And a lot of stuff is like that. A lot of stuff is in balance.
Some stuff is not. Well, some stuff falls out of balance easier than other stuff.
Well, yeah, the electrons, sometimes they're super tightly bound to the atom, and they don't want to leave the house. Right.
They want to stick around. Sometimes they're crazy teenagers and the slightest energy and movement makes them jump off from the atom and just say, I want to go attach myself to something else.
They go on rumspringa. Yeah.
Yeah, and it depends on the material and those types of material that have either tightly connected or loosely connected atoms either end up conducting electricity very well or don't conduct electricity very well. So they act as either electrical conductors or electrical insulators.
Yeah, like if you pick up a stick off the ground, its electrons like stand close to home, so it's not going to conduct electricity. If you pick up a metal rod, those electrons are crazy.
Loose. And they like to go off and do those things that teenage electrons do, and therefore it does conduct electricity.
Right. Very well.
Under normal circumstances, when you pick up that rod or you pick up that stick, the electrons are staying put no matter what. But we figured out along the way, thanks to the work of all of the people from the Greeks to Faraday to Ben Franklin to your guy with the corpuscle idea.
Yeah. JJ was his name? Yeah, JJ.
JJ Corpuscle. I think it was Thompson.
So thanks to the work of all of these people, we figured out how to knock electrons loose.

And it's ingenious and simple, but it's also very complex.

And it involves the relationship you look at and feel about EVs, specifically Hyundai EVs. Hyundai EV lineup has everything you've been yearning for in your next or first EV, boldly captivating your senses.
They have ultra-fast charging in the Ioniq 5 and Ioniq 6 from 10% to 80% in as little as 18 minutes using a 350-kilowatt, 800-volt DC ultra-fast charger. With such a fun-to-drive lineup drive lineup and tech infused with standard safety features like highway driving assist and blind spot collision warning.
How could you go wrong? Plus you get America's best warranty with a 10 year, 100,000 mile limited electric battery warranty. Learn more about Hyundai EVs at HyundaiUSA.com.
Call 562-314-4603 for complete details. America's best warranty claim based on total package of warranty programs.
See dealer for limited warranty details. See your Hyundai dealer for further details and limitations.
We were getting where we couldn't pay the bill. PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns so we could address them one by one.
That's terrifying. That's fair.
Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E. We have to run the business in a

way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down. I would love to see that.
We're on

our way. I hope so.
PG&E electricity rates are now lower than they were last year. Hear what

other customers have to say and what PG&E is doing about it at pge.com can do online courses. You can do blogs, videos, memberships.
You can even earn recurring revenue by gating your content behind a paywall. Simply set the price and choose whether to charge a one-time fee or a subscription for access.
That's right. And you can get your content discovered fast with integrated SEO tools.
Every Squarespace website is optimized to be indexed with meta descriptions and auto-generated sitemap and more, so you show up more often to more people in global search engine results. Just go to squarespace.
Yes. We're talking about knocking electrons loose, which is ultimately the basis of producing electricity.
Yeah, like when you were a kid in elementary school, you probably did the little balloon trick where you make static electricity and make the balloon stick to your sweater. All you're doing, you're rubbing that balloon on your sweater and electrons are jumping from that balloon onto your sweater.
And now there are two different charges going on because you're overcharged. The balloon is now undercharged.
And because opposite charges attract, it sticks to your sweater. Right.
And that's static electricity. And static, you know, you have static and dynamic, and dynamic indicates motion.
Static indicates staying still. And they use that to describe this type of electricity because the electrons don't flow.
They just sit there and wait for a connection. Like when you touch something that's charged, like a doorknob, after you've shuffled with your feet in socks over carpet,

when you touch that doorknob, you're forming that connection.

And all of a sudden, the balance is achieved once more and the electrons flow.

Like you're literally a conductor of electricity in that moment.

Right.

So with current electricity, those electrons move.

They move along a conductive material.

Yeah.

Say like copper wire or something like that.

That's a hot one. Right.
So let's talk about how you produce an electrical current, right? Okay. Let's talk about generators and turbines and all that awesome stuff.
It sounds like you need to generate that electricity with a generator. Right.
I think that's what generators are called. That's why they're called that.
Yeah, it's funny just how basic some of these things are.

Like you say, a computer.

Right. But you've heard it so many times, you take it for granted and it loses its meaning.

It's like looking at a word too frequently.

Yeah, I think a lot of these words are like that.

Like a generator or a...

Corpuzzle.

Or a... What's it called? When they stop down the electricity, which we'll get to? Transformer.
Yeah, it transforms something. But you say them so much, you're like, what's a transformer do? Right.
You know? Yeah. Anyway, I've been reading too much science for dummies, I think.
All right, so generators. Well, I guess it all comes down to magnetism.

Yes.

In the case of generators.

And if you want to listen to two shows, lightning and magnetism, before this one, it might help you understand electricity a little bit more. All right, so just go listen to those.
We'll wait. We'll do that right now.
We'll wait two hours. So what I think Faraday figured out was that because of this relationship between a magnet and electricity, you can take a magnet and you can move electrons in a, say, a conductive material.
You can knock the electrons loose, basically, using a magnet. Yeah, it's like what happens when you attract a paperclip to a magnet.
It's just the transfer of electrons. Right.
Jumping around. And you create a flow by flipping the polarity.
And you can do this by rotating metal, right? Yeah. Say like a coiled copper within the two poles of a large magnet.
And when you do this, you're reversing polarity all of a sudden. Yeah.
And you are knocking the electrons loose in those coils. And the way that you spin the coils very quickly is by hooking the coils to, say, a shaft.
Yeah. We kind of did this backwards.
Let's start at the beginning. You want to? Sure.
Let's go to Niagara Falls. Okay.
Back in 18... 95.
George Westinghouse, who is Nikola Tesla's boss, which, by the way, if you want to listen to another really good podcast, go listen to that one, the Nikola Tesla one. Yeah.
Remember it was all about the ACDC war between Tesla and Edison? Yeah. Good episode.
Killed shocking animals to death. Yeah, it's pretty awful.
What a jerk. But in 1895, George Westinghouse set up a hydroelectric power plant along the Niagara Falls.
Yeah. And what he did was he had a means of taking the movement of water, which is kinetic energy.
The water at the top of the falls has potential energy, and then once it falls over, that potential turns to kinetic energy. Well, Westinghouse set up a turbine to catch this movement of water, right, which is actual energy, and have that movement spin a turbine, a propeller, a fan.
Yeah, it's the same concept as an old gristmill, except it's not creating energy. It's just moving the stones that grind the wheat or corn.
Right, the gristmill is. In this case, it's capturing that energy.
Yeah. Or it's transferring it, we should say, by converting that kinetic energy from the water into mechanical energy spinning the turbine.
The turbine is connected to that shaft I was talking about where we suddenly changed course. And at the end of that shaft, which is now spinning thanks to the turbine, thanks to the movement of the water, is some coiled copper.
And that coiled copper is spinning within those two magnets. Yeah, that's the key.
Right. And because of that, the electrons are being knocked loose.
You have a power line leading from the coiled copper out, and all of a sudden, you have an electric current. Yeah, and if you've ever been to the Hoover Dam or something, you don't have to have a waterfall or a river to make this thing work.
That's why they build dams. You stop up the water, and then at the base of the dam, you have the means to release that water, and then it becomes that flowing water.
Right. And then also for thermal power plants, they use nuclear power to create a nuclear reaction to produce heat, or they burn coal to produce heat, and then they use that heat to heat water, and then they use that water to create steam, and then that steam turns a turbine.
And these are all just different methods, whether it's solar or steam or nuclear. I almost said it, which is weird because I definitely don't say it that way.
Well, you were very excited. I think I said it enough as a joke that it slips in.
But anyway, all those are just means to turn that turbine. Right.
And all it is, is you're using that stored energy or that kinetic energy, like over here, to create electricity so that you can transfer it into work down the line. That's right.
It's so cool. Yeah.
And this article, we used a few different articles for this one, like we said, including some science for kids websites, which, by the way, I highly recommend. If you don't get something? Yeah, it's a great place to go visit are these kids' websites because they break it down like super simply.
But in our article, it describes a generator as if it was a water in a pump, which made a lot of sense to me.

The generator is the pump,

but instead of pushing water through a pipe,

it's pushing electrons down a line, a power line.

And that whole, like using water as an analogy

for electricity fits very well.

Yeah, but you need something to push it. It's not a self-pusher.
So you need that force, and that force is voltage. Right, yeah.
Electromotive force. It's the same with water.
You have water pressure that forces the water down the line, right? And with electricity, you have a force that moves electricity, and it's voltage. Like you said, measured in volts.
Yeah. And the electrical current is measured in amps.
And the amps represent the total number of electrons flowing through any one point of a circuit at every second. That's right.
And there's a lot of them. And if you have voltage and you add that to current, which is amps,

you get power, which is watts. Right.
I think it's multiplied by it. Oh, really? Yeah, it is.
Okay. I wasn't even thinking of it as a math formula.
But it is. It is a math formula, and the reason why it's a math formula is because they're related.
Like you can flip-flop them, you can adjust them, and that's the whole basis of

industrial power transmission,

which we'll get to later.

Yeah, and I

know it sounds a little confusing with

volts, amps, and watts, but they are all different.

Like, if you said, you know,

that guy was shocked and he had 120

volts coursing

through his body, that's not true at all.

Because the volt is

the force, the amps. He's got

Thank you. That guy was shocked and he had 120 volts coursing through his body.
That's not true at all because the volt is the force. He's got amps coursing through his body.
But you'd be a huge geek to point that out to someone if someone said that. And a good rule of thumb is the higher the volts, the more dangerous the shock, which is why in outlets and homes are two or 120 volts, where if you touch it, you're going to feel it, but it's probably not going to kill you.
Yeah. In the United States, it's 120, but it's different in other countries.
Right. Which is why like a European appliance can't be plugged into an American appliance because you got to get those adapters.
Yep. So talking about current, which is the number of electrons flowing through a circuit.
You have the volts, which is the force or pressure that's pushing them down the line. And then you have those two multiplied by one another to create watts, which is power.
Yeah. Also, there's another factor to electrical currents.
Yeah. And that is resistance.
Oh, yeah, we didn't talk about that. We acted like it was all either an insulator or a conductor, but you can be a resistor.
Well, I mean, everything has a certain level of resistance. Yeah, but if you're an official resistor, that means current moves.
It just doesn't move as fast as it might in metal. Right.
Or not at all, as in wood. Yeah.
Or glass is another good resistor or insulator. Yeah.
And so is rubber. Yes.
But even something as conductive as copper wire has a certain amount of resistance. And again, that water flowing analogy comes into place.
Like if you pump like some water really, really hard, try to get a lot of water through a very small pipe, it's still not going to come out very high or very fast because you're trying to force too much water through that little pipe. Right.
So in the exact same way, a thin wire where you're trying to push a lot of amps through and a lot of volts through, it's going to resist. And when you have resistance in an electrical circuit, you lose some of those electrons that are flowing in the form of heat, which is produced by electrons bumping up against other atoms that aren't sharing their electrons.
And that's the result of friction. Yeah.
And resistance is measured in ohms. Right.
OHM. Should we talk about circuits? Yeah.
Are we there? I think so. So all this is well and good.

That's, you know, you can supply power, and we'll talk about this more in detail, too, to homes from a power plant. But you can also have a little battery supplying that electrical energy to an iPhone, let's say.
Right. And in that case, you need something called a circuit, which is basically just a closed loop that allows the electrons to travel.
And in most electronics, it's like, like you said, like copper wire maybe. And it travels from, you know, there's a switch that turns it on and off, which is why a circuit is called a circuit breaker.
Like if you break that circuit by turning the switch off or if the wire like snaps or something, it's going to, no more electrons are going to be flowing. Right.
Because there's, and the reason they're not going to be flowing any longer is because the positive pole and the negative pole from that circuit are no longer connected. That's right.
Another way to look at voltage is that it is the difference between electrons on one side and electrons on another side of a circuit. And remember we talked about nature always wanting balance.
Yeah. Electrons flow from negative to positive.
Right? That's right. And as they flow, the reason they're flowing, the whole reason they're moving at all is because there are not as many electrons on the positive side as there are on the negative side.
Yeah. So they want to leave the negative side to go achieve balance on the positive side and ultimately make whatever circuit it's traveling neutral.
Yeah. You stick something in that circuit and as those electrons are moving from the negative side to the positive side, because, again, electricity is just the flow of electrons, you can convert that movement into productive work.
Yeah, mechanical energy. Right, and anything you attach onto a circuit to exploit that flow of electrons for work is called a load.
Yeah, it could be a light bulb or, you know, whatever.

Whatever mechanical energy you're trying to create is your load.

Right.

And there's all sorts of things you can do by attaching a load to a circuit,

like a light bulb.

A light bulb basically uses that electricity flow to flow into a resistant filament, very thin wire,

that purposely resists that flow of electricity,

Generating the to flow into a resistant filament, very thin wire, that purposely resists that flow of electricity, generating heat and in turn heating up to produce light. That's how a light bulb works.
Yeah. You can also recharge batteries, which go in and force electrons back into the negative position so that the battery is recharged and those electrons are ready to flow again once you connect the circuit.
Yeah. There's also appliances that use resistors to produce heat like a hairdryer or a toaster.
There's all sorts of stuff you can do to connect into the circuit, but it's all the same, whether it's a battery or a toaster or a whole house if you want to look at it that way.

It's you're plugging a load onto an electrical circuit and exploiting the flow of electrons. Yeah, and I kind of misspoke a minute ago when I said it's creating the mechanical energy.
You need a motor to actually do that. So if you have an electric drill, that's great that you have electrons flowing, but it's not going to turn anything unless you have that motor.
And an electric motor is basically just a cylinder stuffed with magnets around the edge. And if you've ever used an electric drill and you fire it up, when you look and see in the vents, you can actually see sparks.
It's pretty cool. It's very cool.
It's like those little guns you used to get at the circus when you were a kid. Yeah.
God, I love those. So it's packed with those magnets around the edge, and in the middle, you've got your core, which is, you know, like an iron wire, and it's wrapped around, you know, the copper is wrapped around the edges.
So electricity flows to that core, creates magnetism, and then that pushes against the outer cylinder and makes that motor spin around, and then that's where you get your mechanical energy. Right, and an electric motor is probably the best example of how you're converting energy from one form to another and then reconverting it because an electric motor is basically a generator in reverse.
Yeah. And so you use that mechanical energy, the spinning of the turbine down the line, and convert it in your electric drill back into mechanical energy to spin the

drill. And in between is that flow of electrons that's causing the whole thing, or that's carrying that energy from point A to point B.
hey this is adam divine bl, Blake Anderson, and Anders Holm from This Is Important. Hyundai's most electric EV lineup changes the way you look at and feel about EVs, specifically Hyundai EVs.
Hyundai EV lineup has everything you've been yearning for in your next or first EV, boldly captivating your senses. They have ultra-fast charging in the Ioniq 5 and Ioniq 6 from 10% to 80% in as little as 18 minutes using a 350-kilowatt, 800-volt DC ultra-fast charger.
With such a fun-to-drive lineup and lineup and tech infused with standard safety features like highway driving assist and blind spot collision warning. How could you go wrong? Plus you get America's best warranty with a 10 year, 100,000 mile limited electric battery warranty.
Learn more about Hyundai EVs at HyundaiUSA.com. Call 562-314-4603 for complete details.
America's best warranty claim based on total package of warranty programs. See dealer for limited warranty details.
See your Hyundai dealer for further details and limitations. We were getting where we couldn't pay the bill.
PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns so we could address them one by one. That's terrifying.

That's fair.

Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E.

We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but starts driving costs down.

I would love to see that.

We're on our way.

I hope so.

PG&E electricity rates are now lower than they were last year.

Hear what other customers have to say and what PG&E is doing about it at pge.com slash open dash lines. What if I told you the most important part of your spring cleaning routine is your sock drawer? Yeah, you heard that right.
It's time to ditch any mismatched tired pairs and refresh your collection with some fresh Bombas. Yeah.
Are you ready to unlock your new running hobby? Well, Bombas engineers blister-fighting, sweat-wicking athletic socks that will help you go from that first mile to a whole marathon. That's right.
Or these are the ones I like. They're nice socks.
If you're looking for a nice pair to wear to a wedding, Bombas dress socks are made for loafers, heels, and all your other fancy shoes because you got to stay comfy on that dance floor. Yeah.
And the best part of all this, for every comfy pair you purchase,

Bombas donates another comfy pair

to someone facing homelessness.

And Bombas is going international.

You can enjoy worldwide shipping to over 200 countries.

Head over to bombas.com slash S-Y-S-K

and use code S-Y-S-K for 20% off your first purchase.

That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash S-Y-S-K,

code S-Y-S-K for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash S-Y-S-K, code S-Y-S-K for 20% off your first purchase.
There's one other thing. If you look at a plug that you're plugging an appliance into, because again, you're just attaching a load to that flow of electrons and diverting it through your appliance, and then it goes back on its merry way, right? Yeah.
If you look at a plug, sometimes you'll see three prongs, and the third prong, the one on the bottom, seems different from the other ones. It's round.
And that is actually a grounding wire. Yeah.
Very important. Very, very important because as awesome as we've gotten with producing and directing electricity, we can't control the amount of electrons that flow through an outlet to down to a single electron.
Right. And so there's such a thing as leakage of electrons, which is crazy.
And there's also electrical buildup that can happen, where if you're not using all of the amps through an appliance, the residual amps can build up, and they charge the appliance. And again, as with static electricity, a charge is just sitting there waiting to be neutralized, sometimes through you, which can make it very dangerous.
To prevent this, they connect the appliance through either that third prong in a plug or through an actual grounding wire to a copper wire that's driven into the ground. And that's where the word comes from, ground.
You're actually transferring that residual electric energy to the ground, which is basically an infinite reservoir for charge dispersal. To earth.
Yeah. So like when you look at a power line and you see that bare wire coming down from the power line and driven into the ground by a stake, that is the ground, and it goes down like six or ten feet.
Yeah. Or if you look at every house you're going to see near the meter, the electrical meter, you're going to see probably a copper rod driven into the ground, and that's your house's ground.
Exactly. Same thing with a lightning rod.
It's a ground for your entire house so that the lightning doesn't go through your house. It goes through the lightning rod.
And the point of all of those is that the earth is, it can take it. Go ahead.
Give it as many electrical shocks as you want. It's going to be fine.
So we think. And it's a very good, it's very good at just dispersing those charges.
So that's what grounding comes from. Very important stuff.
Yeah. And we mentioned transformers earlier.
Power plants create massive amounts of electricity, and you can't just shoot that down a power line and straight into a house because it will blow up everything in your home immediately. But they do need that kind of juice in order to transfer like hundreds of miles away from the power plant.
You know, if you don't live close, it's still got to get to you. Yeah.
But they do need that kind of juice in order to transfer, like, hundreds of miles away from the power plant.

You know, if you don't live close, it's still got to get to you.

Yeah.

So the way they do that is through transformers.

They transmit the power with a lot of voltage, so more force, less amperage.

Less resistance.

Less resistance.

Which means you lose less.

And then once it, you know, they stop it down along the way, and by the time it gets to your home, it's transformed down to, here in the United States, 120 volts.

Thank you. resistance.
Which means you lose less. And then once they stop it down along the way and by the time it gets to your home it's transformed down to here in the United States 120 volts.
Yeah. More elsewhere.
Nice and safe. Right.
And then you just plug your appliance into it and all of a sudden that electrical energy transmits to your toaster strudel being warmed. Your hot pocket with tainted meats.
Wow. Did you hear about that? Yeah.
Remember that whole horse meat thing with Ikea the last couple years? It wasn't just Ikea, but they were definitely called out maybe most strongly for it. I think the Hot Pockets, too, they called it unsound meat, which is just a word that sounds weird in front of meat.
Yeah, unsound is not. You don't want to go near it.

Unsound, unclean.

It's biblical.

All right, so now I think even though we've covered it in the Tesla podcast, we do need to go over ACDC a little bit.

Seriously, go listen to that podcast.

That's a great one.

Great episode.

Best Australian band of all time.

They were good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Are good.

David, are they still around?

Yeah, man.

David Bowie played a pretty mean Tesla. No, I'm not talking about Tesla.
I'm talking about ACDC. Oh, okay.
Tesla's all right. Sure.
And they're not around. That's why I was really confused for a second.
I was more confused about that than I was by any aspect of electricity. I'm like, yeah, man, of course they're around.
I was like, and they're Australian? Yeah, no, ACDC's no ACDC's great and they're still around huh yeah I think they're putting an album together right now good for them I'll bet it sounds exactly like all the rest it still rocks blues based rock in velour or velvet yes so there was a battle being waged between Tesla and Edison and Tesla was all about the the AC current, alternating current. Edison, as we know, said, no, no, no, that's far too dangerous, and I'll prove this to you by electrocuting animals and dogs and cats and even an elephant named Topsy.
Yeah. And he was alleged to have helped botch the first electrocution by electric chair, by a state.
Oh, yeah. I don't remember the details of that, but it's definitely in our episode.
He exploded the guy. Yeah, he was a real jerk, remember? Yeah.
And I think we remember talking about there should be a movie, too, about that battle. Yeah, I can't believe there's not.
It sounds super nerdy, but it would actually be interesting. It'd go over well these days.
Agreed. So batteries these days use direct current power, DC power, and that means the positive and negative terminals are always positive and negative, and electricity always flows in the same direction.
From negative to positive. Yeah, it does not alternate.
Yeah, just think about it this way. Negative, an electron's negative.
So in any terminal, that's where all the negative charge is. And then positive is where the electrons want to be because they're seeking to balance it out and create neutral so that there's no pole.
Good vibes. Yeah.
Or at the very least so-so vibes. Yeah, true.
But not negative vibes. No.
And then you have alternating current, or AC, which means the current reverses 60 times per second here in the U.S., 50 times per second in Europe. So it's just reversing back and forth, alternating that current.
And I guess, so who won out in the end? Tesla? On a large scale. Well, yeah, I mean, that's what power generation does.
Yeah, but Edison has his batteries, I guess, that he could throw at Tesla. Which are pretty important, too.
But, yeah, I think we kind of came out in the same way on that episode. Yeah, Tesla won.
They both kind of won. Yeah.
But Tesla was the cooler dude. Although Tesla died penniless in New York in the 1940s.
Oh, yeah? And Edison died of rich fat guy. He died of consumption and gout.
That was Ben Franklin. I guess we can finish with if you get your power bill and you're amazed and you wonder how they calculate this stuff, it's pretty easy.

Like we said, here in the U.S., we deliver electricity into your home at 120 volts.

So you've got to remember that one, too.

It's important.

Our article uses a space heater as an example, which I think is pretty good.

You plug in that space heater.

Let's say it's the only thing going in your house, which is not realistic, but go with me.

You plug in the space heater, and it comes out to 10 amps. So you multiply that 10 times 120, because that's your voltage, and you have got 1,200 watts of heat.
Or 1.2 kilowatts. Yes, because that's how the power company is going to measure it.
Right. Because they deal in big chunks.
And if you leave that heater on for an hour, you've just used 1.2 kilowatt hours, which is how you're billed. Yeah, and if they charge you a dime per kilowatt hour, it's going to cost you 12 cents an hour to run that space heater.
Right. Pretty simple.
Yep. And neat, and that's why when you go to buy an appliance, you should look at that little tag that says how many kilowatt hours you're going to be burning.
That's right. The lower, the better.
So electricity, huh? You got anything else? No. Don't play around with it.
No, don't. Yes, always wear rubber sold shoes.
Because rubber is an insulator. It is.
Why? Because it hangs on to its electrons. That's right.
The atoms that make up rubber. It's just that simple.
If you want to know more about electricity, you can type that word in the search bar at howstuffworks.com. You can also go on all sorts of kid science sites and find out more about it, too.
And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this a rare birthday shout-out.
Hey guys, my name Pearl, and I just want to tell you how much a fan I am of your show. I was introduced to the podcast by my best friend Molly.
We've been best friends for 12 years, and many of our conversations begin by commenting on the podcast. For example, we could not stop laughing at your 1920s voice toward the end of the Underground Tunnels episode.
We laughed over and over. That is a good voice.
I think she's talking about this one. See? That one, yeah.
Electricity, Tesla, Edison, killing animals. All right.
That was for you, Molly and Pearl. Whenever we're in the car together, we find a podcast of yours to listen to so we can enjoy it together.
I was wondering if you could help her out. Molly's 26th birthday is April 9th.
I think it would be a totally awesome birthday gift if you would send her a shout out. During listener mail, I would be forever in your debt.
Thanks for doing the podcast. I'm a middle school teacher who always listens during my prep periods.
And so happy birthday, Molly. Happy 26th.
This should be close. Yeah, happy birthday.
To April 9th. That was very nice of us, Chuck.
And thank you, Pearl Webb in Chicago. And your friendship means a lot to us.
Yeah. You know? Your friendship with one another.
Yeah, and then conversely through us all together in their car. Nice.
Yeah. Well, if you want to get some sort of shout-out, sometimes Chuck Daines, too.

He's very nice.

You can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, this is Adam Devine, Blake Anderson, and Anders Holm from This Is Important.
Hyundai's most electric EV lineup changes the way you look at and feel about EVs, especially Hyundai EVs. They have ultra-fast charging in the Ioniq 5 and the Ioniq 6 from 10 to 80% in as little as 18 minutes using a 350-kilowatt, 800-volt DC ultra-fast charger.
Plus, you get America's best warranty with a 10-year, 100,000-mile limited electric battery warranty. Learn more about Hyundai EVs at HyundaiUSA.com.
Call 562-314-4603 for complete details. America's best warranty claim based on total package of warranty programs.
See dealer for limited warranty details. See your Hyundai dealer for further details and limitations.
We were getting where we couldn't pay the bill. PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns so we could address them one by one.
That's terrifying. That's fair.
Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E. We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but starts driving costs down.
I would love to see

that. We're on our way.
I hope so. PG&E electricity rates are now lower than they were last year.
Hear what other customers have to say and what PG&E is doing about it at pge.com slash open dash lines. Your savings could be missing out on some of the best interest rates in the nation.
Raisin brings top rates directly to you with no fees.

Sign up in minutes to find, fund, and... out on some of the best interest rates in the nation.
Raisin brings top rates directly to you

with no fees. Sign up in minutes to find, fund, and manage savings options from over 70 banks

and credit unions, all in one secure account. Don't wait.
Visit Raisin.com and start saving smarter today.