Eli5 : After seing the meme of a guy going back in time and unable to answer to the question “how is this so-called electricity made?”, I’m actually really asking myself the question.
In: Engineering
Here’s a major oversimplification of it
I’ve split the explanation into 4 parts:
– Atoms
– Electricity
– How the light bulb works
– TLDR
First off, atoms and what they’re made of:
Everything in the world is made of atoms, but what are atoms made of? Well we have 3 parts of an atom, neutrons (a particle without a charge), protons (a particle with a positive charge) and electrons (a particle with a negative charge). We call these subatomic particles, because they’re a step below atomic particles like atoms. (There’s a step below subatomic particles, but that’s a whole other can of worms).
Now protons and neutrons really like each other so they’re stuck together in the center of the atom while electrons are only loosely attracted to the other 2, so they orbit around the center like our satelites do around earth or the planets around the sun. Different elements are made of different amount of electrons, protons and neutrons. It takes a lot of energy for protons to be separated from the neutrons in the center, but a loooot less energy to move around the electrons, cos you know they only kinda like being near the center of the atom and not mooshed together like the proton.
Here’s where we actually get to electricity:
All energy in the world is transformed, not created. Everyday we see things like a light bulb taking electrical energy and turning into heat and light, or a car turning combustion (heat, light, expanding gas kinetic energy, sound vibrational energy even) into mechanical kinetic energy that makes it go vroom.
Now electricity is a big branching word we use to cover energy that’s created using the movement of electrons jumping from atom to atom. There are many ways for electrons to be influenced into moving, but we won’t go into that detail cos it’s quite literally a 1/4 year high school topic.
One of the most popular is to create a positively charged deficit so the negatively charged electrons will start moving towards it, cos we’re gonna tack on the fact that everything in the world also likes to be balanced and in equalibrium. We see this in batteries, that’s why we have a positive end and a negative end,the battery has chemicals and things in it that have a tonne of electrons on the negative side, but a lot less on the positive. When you attach the battery to a circuit,the electrons see a path for them to run through to the positive side so they scurry through the circuit to try to balance out the battery and become equally charged on both sides.
Another way to move it is glorious magnets. At some point in time in the past after many years of research and discoveries, we found out that magnets effect electrons. Now I’m not gonna dive into it,cos electromagnetism is a whole topic with a super interesting history involving people who’s names are still used in words today like, voltage, amps, Faraday cages, galvan etc. All you need to know of magnets effect electrons so we made things to push them around like electric motors and such, google may give you a much better explanation than I ever could haha.
Now finally an example of electricity at work:
The light bulb, I’ve already explained how electrons want to move through circuits because of something like a battery, but why does the traditional light bulb do what it does? The traditional light bulb is just a thin cable, enclosed in a glass bulb, filled with non flammable gas. That’s it, why it took Edison so many attempts to come up with it is baffling, but anyway. When you have a electrons running through it,several things start to happen.
The first is the thin cable,being so thin the electrons coming in through the thick cable outside of the bulb have to squeeze through, but because of another scientific principal, it has to go faster in a tight space to make sure the same number of electrons come out the other side. This means they’ve a lot faster in the cable. When this happens, it causes a lot of friction. (Did he say friction?!?!?) YES, friction can be created from electrons,but at the speed they’re moving at it very quickly transforms the it into heat energy and light energy.
That’s how it works, something to note is that non flammable gas we mentioned earlier is there to make sure the thin cable doesn’t start a fire from the heat and melt itself. Combustion requires oxygen,so the bulb is filled with a gas that is not oxygen or otherwise flammable, in case someone breaks the bulb.
TLDR: Electricity is what we call the generation and usage of energy when we manipulate subatomic particals called electrons.
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