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
Take a big coil of wire – a metal, full of electrons. Electricity is just the movement of electrons.
Because electrons are electrically charged, they create and respond to electric fields – think of when you rub a balloon against your hair, statically charging it. The hairs push away from each other. That’s the negative charges creating negative fields. Negative charges don’t want to be in other electrons’ negative fields, so they start pushing away from each other.
A magnetic field is the same thing as an electric field, really – that’s why we call it “electromagnetism”. The only difference is how you look at it.
Put some magnets in the centre of the big coil of wire. The magnetic field from those magnets will start to push on the electrons in the wire.
If you start turning those magnets, the field will turn too – and as it moves, it’ll push the electrons with it. Because it’s a coil, or a spiral, as you spin around the middle, you also move to one of the ends.
The electrons moving out of the end of the coil is electricity.
Edits:
Literally a hundred comments later asking the same few questions:
1.0) You can’t deplete a wire of its electrons. Electricity works in circuits, closed loops of wire – as you push the electrons out of the wire, the pushing force affects the whole circuit and more electrons are pushed back into the other side of the coil, and they then get pushed around again by the magnets.
2.0) The electrons start in the wire. Everything is made of atoms and atoms have electrons. In metals, those electrons are free to move around, but they’re more bound up in non-metals.
3.0) You can find naturally occurring magnets in the form of minerals like magnetite, or lodestones, but you can also make them by rubbing two pieces of iron together in the same direction a few thousand times.
3.1) “In the same direction” means the strokes are always the same, you don’t go back and forth. Think of it like combing your hair: you always brush in the same direction.
4.0) I know this is an oversimplification, that’s the point. It’s an ELI5. Stop telling me “Well actually it’s a lot more complicated-“. I know you can carry charge through other means, not just electrons; I know positive charges are conveyed as holes in the electron sea; I know. Whatever your correction is, I know, and I deliberately left it out to make it simple enough for a 5 year old. As is the sub’s reason to exist. If your 5 year old can crunch the numbers on Lenz’ Law, good for you, go breed an army of your fucking superkids and stop bothering me.
5.0) Really late in the game here, but: “In OP’s comment he says-” – no he doesn’t, _she_ does.
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