It has always been a question of mine that ive never gotten answered in a way that I understand. Like, how do you go from motion in my generator to electricity for my toaster? how does the energy go from spinny-magnet in the box outside to lightning in my walls? I don’t understand.
In: 87
In many metals there are some electrons that can freely move around inside the material, these electrons are free to be manipulated. All electrons are like very tiny magnets that always repel each other, so if they are bunched up inside a piece of metal, let’s say on one side of the wire, they will try to evenly space out.
|■■■■■■■■■■■■■————|
↓
|■-■-■-■-■-■-■-■-■-■-■-■-■|
now for the generator, imagine a single wire connected from your toaster to a generator:
🍞 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ⚡
To generate the heat in the toaster, you need to make the electrons move inside the toaster since the electrons generate “friction” inside the toaster which heats it up. So moving the electrons back and forth inside the toaster is your goal.
You can do that by moving some electrons at one end of the cable back and forth (the generator), because all the electrons repel each other evenly they all start to move to get back to being evenly spaced.
🍞 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ → ■ ⚡
🍞 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ → ■ ■ ⚡
…
🍞 → ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ⚡
and finally the electrons in the toaster move as well, this entire chain of movement happens at the speed of light.
So all that you need to do to create electricity is moving the electrons back and forth at one end of the cable and the rest will wiggle along to that generator. That wiggling motion generates the power needed in appliances.
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