How is electricity taken from batteries to be used? And does it have exhaust?
In: Technology
First- what is electricity? In simple terms, it is a flow of these tiny thingies called electrons, much like the flow of water. Like we can use the flow of water to do stuff (row a boat), we can harvest this flow to do stuff like spin a motor.
Now, this flow has to be caused by something, which we call a potential difference or voltage. Think of it like this- a difference in height of two surfaces will make water flow.
To generate electricity, we have to create a potential difference (at least a room temperatures). The battery has chemicals that do exactly that. One wants electrons and the second wants to lose electrons.
But, the thing is, they are isolated and can’t share. So, when we add a wire (which is like a pipe in this case) which allows the flow of electrons, the charges move from the part that wants to lose electrons to that part that wants electrons. This make the terminals of the battery.
Of course, as with the flow of water, things will eventually level out and the battery will die. Rechargeable batteries fix that by redistributing the electrons so that we can use it again.
EDIT: also, no major gain or loss of electrons takes place during this process, so that’s why our wire don’t experience a change in weight.
[Here’s a video](https://youtu.be/XcFOOfqfx3s) by electroBOOM if you want to understand it better (contains swearing)
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