Selects: How Electricity Works

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Speaker 11 Hey everybody, it's Josh, and for this week's Select, I've chosen our 2014 episode on electricity.

Speaker 11 And I chose it as a kind of Casey Kasim-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.

Speaker 11 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!

Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 You know, if Chuck's not wearing that hat, who knows what's going on? Yeah.

Speaker 15 I thought I lost this thing up here.

Speaker 12 Once, yeah.

Speaker 15 I think I vaguely remember that.

Speaker 12 Oh, dude, I freaked out. I was like,

Speaker 12 I was crying. I was on the phone with Delta and everything.
I was like, oh, here it is.

Speaker 12 It's on my head. In your back pocket.
Like Bruce Springsteen. That's right.

Speaker 12 How are you doing?

Speaker 15 Great.

Speaker 12 Chuck? Yes. Let's talk about electricity.
Electricity, electricity. I've had the Talking Heads song in my head.

Speaker 15 Which one?

Speaker 12 Electricity. Oh, okay.
Where all he sees are little dots.

Speaker 15 I thought you were going to say Once in a Lifetime.

Speaker 12 No, that's.

Speaker 12 What is that called? Once in a Lifetime? Yeah.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I've been singing the Schoolhouse Rock electricity song over and over in my head.

Speaker 12 What about the Electric Company theme song?

Speaker 15 I haven't been singing that.

Speaker 12 But do you remember it?

Speaker 15 Yeah, that was, I was Electric Company over Sesame Street even.

Speaker 12 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,

Speaker 15 and the correct answer there is the Who, by the way.

Speaker 12 What do you mean? Like that's the Stones or Beatles? The Who. Is that right?

Speaker 15 No, I mean, yeah, I love the Who.

Speaker 12 But I'm with you.

Speaker 15 I don't see the need to rank things like that.

Speaker 12 Well, plus, the Electric Company came on after Sesame Street, I think.

Speaker 15 Yeah, it skewed slightly older, I think. Sesame Street, to me, felt like, you know, six, seven, eight-year-olds.
Electric companies weren't like eight, nine, ten, twelve.

Speaker 12 And then even younger than Sesame Street was Pinwheel, if I remember correctly.

Speaker 12 That was after your time. Okay.
Pinwheel was pretty cute. And it was like little kids, and then Sesame Street was like, little kids.
And then Electric Company was like, Cool.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and Romper Room was kind of pre-Sesame Street even.

Speaker 12 So was that the one with Reggie Ann and Andy?

Speaker 15 I don't remember. I just remember it was very immature.
Yeah. It was very childish.

Speaker 12 I think Reggie Ann and Andy were in that. Well, at any rate, we've angered enough people now.
I know.

Speaker 12 I have an intro for this one. Great.
Okay, you ready? Mm-hmm.

Speaker 12 About 13.8 billion years ago, a little something called the Big Bang happened, and the universe was created.

Speaker 15 So says you.

Speaker 12 So says a lot of people. Yeah.
You know, we weren't around. Nobody saw it.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Yeah, let's do it. Okay.

Speaker 12 And under the auspices of the Big Bang theory, not the TV show, but the actual theory. Yeah.

Speaker 12 At that moment, All of the energy in the entire universe was created right then.

Speaker 12 Boom. Bam.
Ever since that point, the energy has 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

Speaker 12 places. It can be transferred from one place to another via some natural ways, like convection, conduction, radiation.

Speaker 12 And like I said, it can be stored in stuff, like it can be stored in your body, right? Fat is potential energy that can be burned burned and used for energy to carry out work. Yeah.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Okay.

Speaker 12 We've 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.

Speaker 12 We wouldn't be in the computer age right now if it weren't for something called electricity. Yes.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 No, it's created.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it's an and it's a secondary energy source. It's a carrier.

Speaker 10 That's right.

Speaker 12 So

Speaker 12 electricity carries energy from one point to another. And

Speaker 12 if you understand that, you understand the very basis of what we're going to talk about today. Yeah.

Speaker 12 Like, we've figured out how to generate electricity to carry energy to produce work down the line. That's right.

Speaker 15 That's my answer. Which is usually mechanical energy is what's produced.

Speaker 12 Right. By a machine.
Yeah. So think about this.
Like, if you capture mechanical energy, like water spinning a turbine, which we'll talk about,

Speaker 12 in Niagara Falls, that's not going to do anything to light your light bulb

Speaker 12 200 miles away.

Speaker 15 No, not by itself.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 Yeah, it's pretty simple. Actually, it seems complicated, but it's not.

Speaker 12 No.

Speaker 15 Just electrons moving around.

Speaker 12 Yeah, let's talk about electrons, man. Let's talk about the atom.

Speaker 15 Well, should we talk about the history of this stuff?

Speaker 12 Yes, let's.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 But that doesn't mean that they weren't playing around with it.

Speaker 12 No, and getting zapped because they were messing with static electricity.

Speaker 15 That's right, which we'll explain all that later too.

Speaker 15 But there was one dude called Thallus of Miletus. He was a philosopher in Greece.

Speaker 15 And in 600 BC, he is thought to have been the first dude to mess around with electrostatics, static electricity, by rubbing amber with fur, and he noticed that dust and feathers and things were attracted to it.

Speaker 15 He didn't know what the heck was going on, but he knew something was up.

Speaker 12 Right, and the amber plays a pretty big role. It's actually

Speaker 12 amber,

Speaker 12 the Latin or I'm sorry, is it Greek? The Greek word for amber is electron.

Speaker 15 Yeah, with a K.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 15 That was like their little way heavy metal.

Speaker 12 Yeah. You know.
But that's so like our word electricity is derived from the Greek word for amber from that first experiment with static electricity.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and it was actually coined by a dude named William Gilbert.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 With an exclamation point and his finger in the air. Probably to see it.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 we should probably differentiate, like static, there's a couple of types of electricity. There's static electricity and then there's current electricity, right?

Speaker 12 And current electricity is what we are able to generate. artificially.
Static electricity exists in nature, just naturally. Yes.
And that was the first experiments carried out.

Speaker 12 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

Speaker 12 saying it's electric for the first time,

Speaker 12 the concept of electricity was that it was fluid.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And he said it leaves what he called then an effluvium. Effluvium.

Speaker 12 Right.

Speaker 15 Which is atmosphere around it. When you create this rubbing action, it removes that fluid.

Speaker 12 Right.

Speaker 15 But it wasn't fluid. They were

Speaker 15 not dummies back then, but they were just figuring it all out.

Speaker 12 No, they weren't dummies because even Ben Franklin thought it was a fluid. It was the prevailing idea or concept of electricity.

Speaker 12 And Ben Franklin and a couple of his contemporaries, including a guy named Thomas François Dalabard,

Speaker 12 were studying electricity big time. And it was when they really investigated lightning that our

Speaker 12 understanding of current electricity started to take shape.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 If he didn't do it, other people did. There were guys who died carrying out that experiment.
Yeah.

Speaker 12 It was definitely carried out. I don't know if Ben Franklin did or not.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 Right.

Speaker 15 But it's a great story either way.

Speaker 12 Yeah, and I think he at least proposed it,

Speaker 12 the experiment.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 Very smart. He's a polymath.

Speaker 15 Then there was another smart dude named Coulomb, Charles Augustin de Coulomb, and he is the one that wrote Coulomb's law.

Speaker 15 And he said charges, like charges repel, opposite charges attract, and that's kind of like the basis for it all.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 Yeah, he basically said you can now calculate this

Speaker 15 because of my handy-dandy little law.

Speaker 12 Yeah, and with a boom. He said, boom.

Speaker 12 Not bang.

Speaker 12 Okay. That came earlier.

Speaker 15 Later on, a guy named J.J. Thompson in 1897 said at a science conference, hey, I found something smaller than the atom.

Speaker 15 And everyone said, silly man, atoms are invisible. You can't, it even means invisible.

Speaker 12 You liar.

Speaker 15 And he said, no, I promise. There's something smaller.
It's got a negative charge. And I'm going to to call it a corpuscle.

Speaker 12 No, he didn't. Yeah.

Speaker 15 It's Latin for small bodies. And then I think, I don't know who later said, let's change it to electron.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it sounds way cooler.

Speaker 15 But the discovery of the electron was basically the birth of what we know as electricity today.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 15 The understanding of the electron is what it's all about.

Speaker 12 And would you say, like 1897? Yes.

Speaker 12 So

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Yeah, basically, everybody's like, Ben Franklin, electricity, hand in hand. Really, it's Michael Faraday, who's British,

Speaker 12 who really came to lay the foundation for electrifying the world. He just created the first dynamo, which is a generator, which we'll talk about.

Speaker 15 First electric motor?

Speaker 12 Yeah. He just got electricity and he

Speaker 12 explained it to other people very well.

Speaker 15 Can you even fathom how smart these people were to be that in the dark and figuring all this subatomic stuff out

Speaker 12 back then?

Speaker 12 Hats off. Top hats off to these guys.

Speaker 15 Last chance garage hat off. Yeah.

Speaker 12 And back on. Like, I have trouble understanding it now

Speaker 12 when it's explained through like kids for science websites, you know?

Speaker 15 Like inventing this, figuring this stuff out for the first time either. Right, exactly.

Speaker 12 And it's a pretty dangerous field to try to figure out blind, too, you know?

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, more than one scientist got a shock from a Leyden jar.

Speaker 12 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 15 And you can make those. Do you make those in science class? No.

Speaker 12 Yeah. You can make those.
Well, it's, we should say, a laden jar is a very primitive capacitor. You use a metal rod in a jar

Speaker 12 that's sunk into like some water, and it can store a charge. Yeah.

Speaker 12 I think Ben Franklin's kite experiment attached the kite to, 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.

Speaker 12 It's whether or not he carried it out is a question.

Speaker 15 All right, I guess now we can get to atoms.

Speaker 12 Finally.

Speaker 15 Atoms are very tiny, and they make up molecules, and molecules make up everything you see.

Speaker 12 Yeah, atoms are the building block of matter. That's right.

Speaker 12 And atom,

Speaker 12 remember, we're always talking about nature loves homeostasis.

Speaker 15 Oh, man. Does it?

Speaker 12 You've got a balance that nature always seeks. Tries to achieve it.
Same with atoms, or atoms are no exception, I should say.

Speaker 12 Within an atom, you have a nucleus which is made up of protons and neutrons.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And when you have an equal number of protons

Speaker 12 to electrons, You have a neutral atom.

Speaker 15 Yeah, there's no potential energy there. It's just in balance.

Speaker 15 And a lot of stuff is like that. A lot of stuff is in balance.
Some stuff is not.

Speaker 12 Well, some stuff falls out of balance easier than other stuff.

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 They go on rum springa. Yeah.

Speaker 12 Yeah, and it depends on the material.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 So they act as either electrical conductors or electrical insulators.

Speaker 15 Yeah, like if you pick up a stick off the ground,

Speaker 15 its electrons like staying close to home, so it's not going to conduct electricity. If you pick up a metal rod, those electrons are crazy

Speaker 15 and they like to go off and do those things that teenage electrons do, and therefore it does

Speaker 15 conduct electricity. Right.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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,

Speaker 12 JJ was his name, yeah, JJ. JJ Corpuscle.

Speaker 12 I think it was Thompson. So, thanks to the work of all these people, we figured out how to knock electrons loose.

Speaker 12 And it's ingenious and simple,

Speaker 12 but it's also very complex. And it involves the relationship between magnetism and electricity.

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Speaker 12 So Chuck, yes. We're talking about knocking electrons loose, which is ultimately the basis of producing electricity.

Speaker 15 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. Right.

Speaker 15 All you're doing, you're rubbing that balloon on your sweater and electrons are jumping from that balloon onto your sweater.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And that's static electricity.

Speaker 12 And static, you know, you have static and dynamic, and dynamic indicates motion, static indicates indicates staying still.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 Like you're literally a conductor of electricity in that moment.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 So let's talk about how you produce an electrical current, right?

Speaker 12 Okay. Let's talk about generators and turbines and all that awesome stuff.

Speaker 15 It sounds like you need to generate that electricity with a generator.

Speaker 12 Right. I think that's what generators are called.

Speaker 12 Why they're called that.

Speaker 15 Yeah, it's funny just how basic some of these things are. Like you say, a computer.

Speaker 12 Right.

Speaker 12 But you just, 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.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I think a lot of these words are like that.

Speaker 12 Like a generator or a corp puzzle

Speaker 15 or a

Speaker 15 what's it called when they stop down the electricity, which will get to transformer. Yeah, it transforms something.
But you say them so much, you're like, what's a transformer do?

Speaker 12 Right. You know? Yeah.

Speaker 15 Anyway, I've been reading too much science for dummies. I think.

Speaker 15 All right. So generators.

Speaker 15 Well, I guess it all comes down to magnetism.

Speaker 12 Yes.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 All right. So just go listen to those.
We'll wait. We could do that right now.

Speaker 15 We'll wait two hours.

Speaker 12 So

Speaker 12 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,

Speaker 12 say, a conductive material. You can knock the electrons loose, basically, using a magnet.

Speaker 15 Yeah, it's like what happens when you attract a paperclip to a magnet. It's just the transfer of electrons.
Right.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And when you do this, you're reversing polarity all of a sudden. Yeah.

Speaker 12 And you are knocking the electrons loose in those coils.

Speaker 12 And the way that you spin the coils very quickly is by

Speaker 12 hooking the coils to, say, a shaft. Yeah.

Speaker 12 We kind of did this backwards. Let's start at the beginning.
You want to? Okay. Let's go to Niagara Falls.
Okay.

Speaker 12 Back in 1895. George Westinghouse, who is Nikola Tesla's boss, which, by the way, if you want to listen to another really good podcast,

Speaker 12 go listen to that one. The Nikola Tesla one.
Yeah. Remember, it was all about the ACDC war between Tesla and Edison? Yeah.

Speaker 15 It's a good episode. Kill shocking animals to death.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it's pretty awful. What a jerk.

Speaker 12 But in 1895, George Westinghouse set up a hydroelectric power plant along the Niagara Falls.

Speaker 12 And what he did was he had a means of taking the movement of water, which is kinetic energy.

Speaker 12 The water at the top of the falls has potential energy, and then once it falls over, that potential turns to kinetic energy.

Speaker 12 Well, Westinghouse set up a turbine to catch this movement of water, right, which is actual energy,

Speaker 12 and have that movement spin a turbine, a propeller or a fan.

Speaker 15 Yeah, it's the same concept as an old grist mill,

Speaker 15 except it's not creating energy, it's just moving the stones that grind the wheat or corn.

Speaker 12 Right, the grist mill is. In this case, it's capturing that energy

Speaker 12 by, or it's transferring it, we should say, by converting that kinetic energy from the water into mechanical energy spinning the turbine.

Speaker 12 The turbine is connected to that shaft I was talking about where we suddenly changed course.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 Right.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 And these are all just different methods, whether it's solar or steam or nuclear. I almost said it.

Speaker 15 Which is weird because I definitely don't say it that way.

Speaker 12 Well, you were very excited.

Speaker 15 I think I said it enough as a joke.

Speaker 12 Right. That it slips in.

Speaker 15 But anyway, all those are just means to turn that turbine.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 If you don't get something?

Speaker 15 Yeah, it's a great place to go visit or these kids' websites because they break it down like super simply. But in our article,

Speaker 15 it

Speaker 15 describes a generator as if it was a water and a pump, which made a lot of sense to me.

Speaker 15 The generator is the pump. But instead of pushing water through a pipe, it's pushing electrons down

Speaker 15 a line, a power line.

Speaker 12 And that whole, like using water as an analogy

Speaker 12 for electricity, fits very well.

Speaker 15 Yeah, but you need something to push it.

Speaker 15 It's not a self-pusher.

Speaker 15 So you need that force, and that force is voltage. Right, yeah, it's electromotive force.

Speaker 12 It's the same with water. Like you have water pressure that forces the water down the line, right?

Speaker 12 And with electricity, you have a force that moves electricity, and it's voltage.

Speaker 12 Like you said, measured in volts. 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 any every second.

Speaker 12 And there's a lot of them.

Speaker 15 And if you have voltage and you add that to

Speaker 15 current, which is amps, you get power, which is watts.

Speaker 12 Right. And I think it's multiplied by it.
Oh, really? Yeah.

Speaker 12 It is. Okay.

Speaker 15 I wasn't even thinking of it as a math formula.

Speaker 12 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

Speaker 12 industrial power transmission, which we'll get to later.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 15 And I know it sounds a little confusing with volts, amps, and watts, but they are all different.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Because the volt is the force.

Speaker 15 He's got amps coursing through his body.

Speaker 15 But you'd be a huge geek to point that out to someone.

Speaker 12 Someone said that. And a good rule of thumb is the higher the volts, the more dangerous the shock.
Yeah. Which is why in America,

Speaker 12 most outlets and homes are 120 volts, where if you touch it, you're going to feel it, but it's probably not going to kill you.

Speaker 15 Yeah, in the United States, it's 120, but it's different in other countries.

Speaker 12 Right, which is why a European appliance can't be plugged into an American appliance because

Speaker 15 you got to get those adapters. Yep.

Speaker 12 So um

Speaker 12 you were talking about uh current which is the number of electrons flowing through a circuit. You have um the uh volts which is the force or pressure that's pushing them down the line.

Speaker 12 And then you have um those two multiplied by one another to create watts, which is power.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 12 You also there's one, there's another

Speaker 12 factor to electrical currents. Yeah.

Speaker 12 And that is resistance. Oh, yeah, we didn't talk about that.

Speaker 15 So we acted like it was all either an insulator or a conductor, but you can be a resistor.

Speaker 12 Well, I mean,

Speaker 12 everything has a certain level of resistance.

Speaker 15 Yeah, but if you're an official resistor, that means current moves. It just doesn't move like as fast as it might in metal.
Right. Or not at all, as in wood.

Speaker 12 Yeah. Or glass is another good resistor insulator.
Yeah.

Speaker 12 And so is rubber. Yes.
But even something as

Speaker 12 conductive as copper wire has a certain amount of resistance. And again, that water flowing analogy comes into place.
Like if you pump some water really, really hard,

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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

Speaker 12 when you have resistance in an electrical circuit, you have

Speaker 12 what 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.

Speaker 12 And that's the result of friction.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and resistance is measured in ohms

Speaker 15 OHM.

Speaker 10 Should we talk about circuits?

Speaker 12 Yeah. Are we there? I think so.

Speaker 15 So all this is well and good. That's, you know, you can supply power, and we'll talk about this more in detail to homes from a power plant.

Speaker 15 But you can also have a little battery supplying that electrical energy to a iPhone, let's say. Right.

Speaker 15 And in that case, you need something called a circuit, which is basically just a closed loop that allows the electrons to travel.

Speaker 15 And in most electronics, it's like, like you said, like copper wire, maybe.

Speaker 15 And it travels from,

Speaker 15 you know, there's a switch that turns it on and off, which is why a circuit is called a circuit breaker.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 Right, because there's

Speaker 12 the, and the reason they're not going to be flowing any longer is because the positive positive pole and the negative pole from that circuit are no longer connected. That's right.

Speaker 12 Another way to look at voltage is that it is the difference between

Speaker 12 electrons on one side and electrons on another side of a circuit. And remember, we talked about nature always wanting balance.

Speaker 12 Electrons flow from negative to positive,

Speaker 12 right? That's right.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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,

Speaker 12 you can convert that movement into productive work.

Speaker 15 Yeah, mechanical energy.

Speaker 12 Right, and anything you attach onto a circuit to exploit that flow of electrons for work is called a load.

Speaker 15 Yeah, it could be a light bulb or, you know, whatever. Whatever mechanical energy you're trying to create is your load.

Speaker 12 Right. And there's all sorts of things you can do by attaching a load to a circuit, like a light bulb.

Speaker 12 A light bulb basically uses that electricity flow to

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 12 There's also appliances that use resistors to produce heat, like a hairdryer or a toaster.

Speaker 12 There's all sorts of stuff you can do to connect into 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, you're plugging a load onto an electrical circuit and exploiting the flow of electrons.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And electric motor is basically just a cylinder stuffed with magnets around the edge.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 it's wrapped around, you know, the copper is wrapped around the edges.

Speaker 12 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 yeah 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 17 This podcast is sponsored by PayPal.

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Speaker 22 Let's talk about something you probably haven't thought about. Your couch.

Speaker 12 Yeah, that thing you nap on, eat on, cry on.

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Speaker 12 There's one other thing.

Speaker 12 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?

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And that is actually a grounding wire. Yeah.

Speaker 15 Very important.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 Right.

Speaker 12 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

Speaker 12 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.
Yeah.

Speaker 12 Sometimes through you, which can make it very dangerous.

Speaker 12 To prevent this,

Speaker 12 they connect the appliance through either that third prong and a plug or through an actual grounding wire to a copper wire that's driven into the ground.

Speaker 12 And that's where the word comes from: ground.

Speaker 12 You're actually transferring that residual

Speaker 12 electric energy to the ground, which is basically an infinite reservoir for charge dispersal.

Speaker 15 To earth. Yeah.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Or if you look at every house, you're going to see near the

Speaker 15 meter, the electrical meter, you're going to see probably a copper rod driven into the ground, and that's your house's ground.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 So we think.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and we mentioned transformers earlier.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So, the way they do that is through transformers. They transmit the power with a lot of voltage, so more force, less amperage.

Speaker 15 Less resistance. Less resistance.

Speaker 12 Which means you lose less.

Speaker 15 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. Yeah.

Speaker 15 More elsewhere.

Speaker 15 Nice and safe. Right.

Speaker 12 And then you just plug your appliance into it, and all of a sudden that electrical energy transmits to

Speaker 12 your toaster strudel being warmed.

Speaker 15 Your hot pocket with with tainted meats.

Speaker 12 Wow. Did you hear about that? Yeah.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 I think the hot pockets, too, they called it unsound meat, which is just a word that sounds weird in front of meat.

Speaker 12 Yeah, unsound is not.

Speaker 15 You don't want to go near it.

Speaker 12 Unsound, unclean. It's biblical.

Speaker 15 All right, so now I think we've, even though we've covered it in the Tesla podcast, we do need to go over ACDC a little bit.

Speaker 12 Seriously, go listen to that podcast. That's a great one.
Great episode.

Speaker 15 Best Australian band of all time.

Speaker 12 They were good. Yeah.
Yep. Are good.

Speaker 3 David, are they still around? Yeah, man.

Speaker 12 David Bowie played a pretty mean Tesla.

Speaker 15 No, I'm not talking about Tesla. I'm talking about AC DC.

Speaker 12 Oh, okay.

Speaker 12 Yeah, Tesla was all right. Sure.

Speaker 15 And they're not around.

Speaker 12 That's why I was really confused for a second. I was more confused about that than I was by any aspect of electricity.

Speaker 15 I'm like, yeah, man, of course they're around.

Speaker 12 Everyone's like, and they're Australian.

Speaker 12 Yeah, no, ACDC is 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.

Speaker 15 Blues-based rock.

Speaker 12 In Valour or Velvet.

Speaker 15 Yes. So there was a battle being waged between Tesla and Edison, and Tesla was all about the AC current, alternating current.
Edison, as we know, said, no, no, no, that's far too dangerous.

Speaker 15 And I'll prove this to you by electrocuting animals and dogs and cats and even an elephant named Topsy.

Speaker 12 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 was definitely in our episode on.

Speaker 15 Exploded the guy.

Speaker 12 Yeah, he was a real jerk, remember? Yeah.

Speaker 15 And I think we remember, I remember talking about there should be a movie, too, about that, that battle.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I can't believe there's not.

Speaker 15 It sounds super nerdy, but it would actually be interesting.

Speaker 12 They go over well these days. Agreed.

Speaker 15 So batteries these days use direct current power dc power and that's means the positive and negative terminals are always positive and negative and it always electricity always flows in the same direction from negative to positive yeah it does not alternate yeah just think about it this way uh negative

Speaker 12 an electron's negative yeah so in any terminal that's where all the negative charge is bad vibes 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.

Speaker 10 Good vibes. Yeah.

Speaker 12 Or at the very least, so-so vibes.

Speaker 15 Yeah, true. But not negative vibes.

Speaker 12 No.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So it's just reversing back and forth, alternating that current. And

Speaker 15 I guess, so who won out in the end?

Speaker 12 Tesla?

Speaker 15 On a large scale.

Speaker 12 Well, yeah, I mean, that's what his power generation does.

Speaker 15 Yeah, but Edison has his batteries, I guess, that he could throw at Tesla.

Speaker 12 Which are pretty important, too. But, yeah, I think we kind of came out in the same way on that episode.

Speaker 12 Tesla won. They both kind of won.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 15 He died of consumption and gout.

Speaker 12 That was Ben Franklin.

Speaker 15 I guess we can finish with

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So you've got to remember that one, too. It's important.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 You plug in the space heater, and it comes out

Speaker 15 to 10 amps. So you multiply that 10 times 120 because that's your voltage and you have got 1200 watts of heat.

Speaker 12 Or 1.2 kilowatts.

Speaker 15 Yes, because that's how the power company is going to measure it. Right.
Because they deal in big chunks.

Speaker 12 And if you leave that heater on for an hour, you've just used 1.2 kilowatt hours, which is how you're build.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 The lower, the better. So electricity, huh? You got anything else?

Speaker 15 No, don't play around with it.

Speaker 12 No, don't.

Speaker 12 Yes, always wear rubber-soled shoes.

Speaker 15 Because rubber is an insulator.

Speaker 12 It is. Why? Because it hangs on to its electrons.
That's right. The atoms that make up rubber.

Speaker 15 It's just that simple.

Speaker 12 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 kids' science sites and find out more about it too.

Speaker 12 And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 15 I'm going to call this

Speaker 15 a Rare Birthday Shoutout.

Speaker 15 Hey guys, my name is 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.

Speaker 15 We've been best friends for 12 years and many of our conversations begin by commenting on the podcast.

Speaker 15 For example, we could not stop laughing at your 1920s voice toward the end of the Underground Tunnels episode. We laughed over and over.

Speaker 12 That is a good voice.

Speaker 15 I think she's talking about this one. See? That one, yeah.
Electricity, Tesla, Edison, killing animals. All right, that was for you, Molly.

Speaker 10 And Pearl.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 12 That was very nice of us, Chuck.

Speaker 15 And thank you, Pearl Webb, in Chicago. And your friendship means a lot to us.

Speaker 12 You know?

Speaker 12 Your friendship with one another.

Speaker 15 Yeah, and then conversely through us all together in their car. Nice.
Yeah.

Speaker 12 Well, if you want to get some sort of shout out, sometimes Chuck Danes too, he's very nice. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

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