March 8, 2025 • 43 mins
It is literally all around you (and even inside you) - electricity makes up the basis of modern life. But what exactly is electricity and how does it work? In this classic episode, Josh and Chuck chase away the darkness and explain electricity in their usual electrifying way.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, it's Joshum. For this week's Select, I've chosen
our twenty fourteen episode on electricity, and I chose it
as a kind of Casey Casum 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. Well,
rather than just send him a link and being boring,
(00:21):
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 2 (00:34):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
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, you know, if Chuck's not wearing
that hat, who knows what's going on?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Yeah, I thought a loss of sing yeah once. Yeah,
I think I.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Vaguely remember that dude freaked.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
I was on the with Delta and everything, and I
was like, oh, here it is.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
It's on my head your back pocket, like Bruce Springsteen.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Uh, how you doing great, Chuck, Yes, let's talk about electricity, electricity, electricity.
I've had the Talking Heads song in my head, which
one electricity? Okay, where all these sees are little dots.
I thought you're gonna say once in a lifetime. No,
that's what is that called once in a lifetime? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Uh yeah, I've been singing the Schoolhouse Rock electricity song
over and over in my head.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
What about the electric company theme song? Mmm, I haven't
been singing that, but do you remember it?
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Yeah? That was I was electric Company over Sesame Street even.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
No, it's uh and the correct answer there's the Who.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
By the way, what do you mean like that?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Who?
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Is that? Right?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
No?
Speaker 3 (02:07):
I mean yeah, I love the Who, But I'm with you.
I don't see the need to rank things like that.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Well, Plus, the electric Company came on after Sesame Street,
I think.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Yeah, it skewed slightly older.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
I think Sesame Street to me felt like, you know,
six seven eight year olds.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Electric companies were.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Like eight, nine to ten, twelve, and then even younger
than Sesame Street was Pinwheel if I remember correctly, and
that was after your time, Okay, Pinwell was pretty cute.
It was like little kids, and then Sesame Street was
like little kids, and then Electric Company was like cool.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yeah, and Romper Room was kind of pre Sesame Street.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Even so, was that the one with Reggedy Ann and Andy? Mmm?
Speaker 2 (02:47):
I don't remember. I just remember it was very immature. Yeah,
it's very childish.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
You think Raggedy Ann and Andy were in that. Well.
At any rate, we've angered enough people now, I know.
I have an intro for this one.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Great.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Okay, you ready, about thirteen point eight billion years ago,
a little something called the Big Bang happened and the
universe was created, so says you, So this is a
lot of people. Yeah, you know, we weren't around. Nobody
saw it, but it's been detected and it's strongly suspected
(03:20):
by scientists that the universe is thirteen point eight 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. Yeah, let's do it, okay, and
under the auspices of the Big Bang theory, not the
TV show, but the actual theory. At that moment, all
(03:41):
of the energy in the entire universe was created. Right then,
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 places. It can
be transferred from one place to another via some natural
(04:04):
ways like convection, conduction, radiation, and like I said, it
can be stored in stuff. It can be stored in
your body. Right. Fat is potential energy that can be
burned and used for energy to carry out work, which
is all we're looking to do is work. We use
energy to carry out work, whether it's digging a shovel
(04:25):
or lighting a light bulb. That's what energy does. It
produces work. Right, Okay, 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. We
wouldn't be in the computer age right now if it
(04:47):
weren't for something called electricity, which is basically how humans
have figured out how to harness converting energy from one
type of another and then transmitting it very long distance. Yeah,
because electricity isn't a primary energy source like the sun
or solar radiation, or nuclear energy or even the flow
(05:09):
of water kinetic energy. No, it's created, yeah, it's and
it's a secondary energy source. It's a carrier, that's right.
So electricity carries energy from one point to another. And
if you understand that, you understand the very basis of
what we're going to talk about today.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Like we've figured out how to generate electricity to carry
energy to produce work down the line.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
That's my intra which is usually mechanical energy is what's
produced right by a machine.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Yes, so think about this, like, if you capture mechanical
energy like water spinning a turbine, which we'll talk about, yeah,
and Niagara Falls, that's not going to do anything to
light your light bulb two hundred miles away.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
No, not by itself.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
Yeah, it's pretty simple. Actually, it seems complicated, but it's not. No,
just electrons moving around.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Yeah, let's talk about electrons. Man, let's talk about the atom.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
Well, should we talk about the history of this stuff? Yes,
let's 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.
That doesn't mean that they weren't playing around with.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
It, No, and getting zapped because they're messing with static electricity.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
That's right, which we'll explain all that later to But
there was one dude called Dallas of Melitas. He is
a philosopher in Greece and in six hundred BC he
is thought to have been the first dude to around
with electrostatics static electricity by rubbing amber with fur, and
he noticed that dust and feathers and things were attracted
(07:08):
to it. He didn't know what the heck was going on,
but he knew something.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Was up right, and the amber plays a pretty big role.
It's actually amber. The Latin er I'm sorry is it Greek?
Greek Greek word for amber is electron with a K.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
That was like.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
The way heavy metal.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Yeah, you know, but that's so like our Our word
electricity is derived from the Greek word for amber. From
that first experiment with static electricity.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Yeah, and it was actually coined by a dude named
William Gilbert. He was an Englishman, a physician, and he
was studying sort of the same things with static electricity
that Militis was. And he was the first person to
say it's electric when he saw these forces at work.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
With an exclamation point and his finger in the air. Yeah,
and we should probably we should probably differentiate, like there's
a couple of types of electricity. There's static electricity, and
then there's current electricity, right, 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
(08:16):
carried out. 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 saying it's electric for the
first time, yeah, the concept electricity was that it was fluid.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Well, it was fluid. He was on the right track.
Something is flowing.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
But they thought it was literally a fluid which they
called which.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
In those days was called a humor.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
And he said it leaves what he called then an
afflu vivvum effluvium, right, which is atmosphere around it. When
you create this rubbing action, it removes that fluid. But
it wasn't fluid. They were not dummies back then, but
they were just figuring it all out.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
No, they weren't dummies because even Ben Franklin thought it
was a fluid. It was the prevailing idea concept of electricity,
and Ben Franklin and a couple of his contemporaries, including
a guy named Thomas Francois Dalibard, were studying electricity big time,
and it was when they really investigated lightning that our
(09:23):
understanding of current electricity started to take shape.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
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 1 (09:37):
But if he didn't do it, other people did. There
were guys who died carrying out that experiment. Yeah, but
it was definitely carried out. I don't know if Ben
Franklin did or not.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
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 2 (09:56):
But it's a great story either way.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Yeah, and I think he at least proposed it the experiment.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Well.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
So he's a smart guy, very smart.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
He's a polymn.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Then there was another smart dude named Coulomb, Charles Augustin
de Coulomb, and he is the one that wrote Coulomb's law.
And he said, charges like charges repel, opposite charges attract,
and that's kind of like the basis for it all.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
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 canceled on another out
or push one another away.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
He basically said, you can now calculate this right because
of my handy dandy little law.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Yeah, and with a boom, he said boom, not bang. Okay,
that came earlier later on.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
A guy named J. J.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
Thompson in eighteen ninety seven said at a science conference, Hey,
I found something smaller than the atom. And everyone said, silly, man,
atoms are invisible. You can't it even means invisible.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
You liar, And he said no, I promise it's there's
something smaller, it's got a negative charge, and I'm going
to call it a corpuscle.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
No he didn't.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Yeah, it is Latin for small bodies. And then I think,
I don't know who later said let's change it to electron.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Yeah, that sounds way cooler.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
But the discovery of the electron was basically the birth
of what we know is electricity today. Yeah, the understanding
of the electron is what it's all about.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
And would you say, like eighteen ninety seven, yes, So
before that time, I guess he didn't understand the electron,
but he understood electricity. A guy named Michael Faraday was
working on the.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Case stud Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Basically everybody's like Ben frank on electricity hand in hand.
Really it's Michael Faraday, who is British, who really came
to the foundation for electrifying the world. He just he
created the first dynamo, which is a generator which we'll
talk about.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
He first electric motor.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Yeah, yeah, he just he got electricity and he explained
it to other people very well.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
Can you even fathom how smart these people were to
be that in the dark and figuring all this subatomic
stuff out.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Yeah. Back then, hats off, top, Hats off to these guys.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Last chance garageot off.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Yeah, I'm back on, Like I have trouble understanding it now,
right when it's explained through like Kids for Science website,
you know.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Like inventing this, figuring this stuff out with the first time.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Right exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
And it's a pretty dangerous field to try to figure
out blind too, you know.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Yeah, I mean more than one scientist got a shock
from a Leyden jar. Oh yeah, and you can make those, dud?
Did you make those in science class?
Speaker 1 (12:53):
No?
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Yeah, you can make those.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Well, it's we should say a leaden jar is a
very primitive capacitor to use a metal rod in a jar,
a nail that's sunk into like some water, and it
can store a charge. 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,
(13:16):
But again, he did make the proposal. It's whether or
not he carried it out as it's question.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
All right, I guess now we can get the atoms finally.
Atoms are very tiny and they make up molecules and
molecules make up everything you see.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Yeah, atoms are the building block of matter. That's right,
an atam. Remember we're always talking about nature loves homeostasis,
Oh man does it? You've got a balance that nature
always seeks tries to achieve it. Same with atoms or
atoms are no exception. I should say within an atom,
(13:52):
you have a nucleus which is made up of protons
and neutrons. 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. Right, And when you
have an equal number of protons to electrons, you have
(14:17):
a neutral atom.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
Yeah, there's no potential energy there. It's just in balance.
And a lot of stuff is like that. A lot
of stuff is in balance, some stuff is not well.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Some stuff falls out of balance easier than other stuff.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Well, yeah, the electrons sometimes they're super tightly bound to
the atom and they don't want to leave the house.
They want to stick around. Sometimes 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 1 (14:52):
We go on rum Springer. Yeah, yeah, and it depends
on the material. 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,
so they act as either electrical conductors or electrical insulators.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Like, if you pick up a stick off the ground,
it's 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 loose and they like to go
off and do those things that teenage electrons do, and
therefore it does conduct electricity.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Right very well.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Under normal circumstances. When you pick up that rod or
you pick up that stick, the electrons are staying put
no matter what. 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 core puscle idea. Yeah, JJ, what's his name, Yeah, JJ,
(15:57):
core Puzzle, I think Thompson. So thanks to the work
of all of these people, we figured out how to
knock electrons loose. And it's ingenious and simple, but it's
also very complex, and it involves the relationship between magnetism
and electricity. So Chuck, yes, we're talking about knocking electrons loose,
(16:33):
which is ultimately the basis of producing electricity.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
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.
All you're doing, you're rubbing that balloon on your sweater,
and electrons are jumping from that balloon onto your sweater.
And now there are two different charges going on. Because
you're overcharged, the balloon is now undercharged, and because opposite
(17:00):
it charges a tract it sticks to your sweater, right,
And that's static electricity.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
And static you know, you have static and dynamic, and
dynamic indicates motion. Static indicates staying still, 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.
Like when you touch something that's charged, like a door
knob after you've shuffled with your feet in socks over carpet.
(17:28):
When you touch that door knob, you're forming that connection,
and all of a sudden, the balance is achieved once more,
and the electrons flow.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Like you're literally a conductor of electricity in that moment.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
So with current electricity, those electrons move, they move along
a conductive material, say like copper wire or something like that.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
That's a hot one.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
Right. So let's talk about how you produce an electrical current, right, Okay,
let's talk about generators and turbines and all that awesome stuff.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
It sounds like you need to generate that electricity with
a generator, right.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
I think that's what generators are called. That's why they're
called there.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
Yeah, it's funny just how basic some of these things are.
Like you say, a compu tour.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Right, but but you just you've heard it so many
times you take it for granted and this is its meaning,
and it's like looking at a word too frequently.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Yeah, I think I think a lot of these words
are like that, like a generator or a core puzzle
or a what's it called when he stop down the electricity,
which we'll get to transformer? Yeah, it transforms something. But
you say them so much, you're like, what's a transformer do?
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Right?
Speaker 2 (18:37):
You know?
Speaker 3 (18:38):
Yeah, anyway, I've been reading too much science for dummies,
I think. All right, so generators, well, I guess it
all comes down to magnetism.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Yes, in the case of generators.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
And if you want to listen to two shows Lightning
and Magnetism before this one, it might help you understand
electricity a little.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Bit more, all right, So just go listen to those,
well to do that right now, wait two hours. So
what 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 say,
(19:19):
conductive material. You can knock the electrons loose basically using
a magnet.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Yeah, it's like what happens when you attract a paper
clip to a magnet. It's just the transfer of electrons
jumping around.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
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. And when you do this, you're reversing polarity
all of a sudden, Yeah, and you are knocking the
electrons loose in those coils. And the way that you
(19:54):
spin the coils very quickly is by hooking the coils
to say a shaft. Yeah, we kind of did this backwards.
Let's start at the beginning. You want to Okay, let's
go to Niagara Falls.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Okay, back in eighteen ninety five George.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Westinghouse, who is Nikola Tesla's boss, Which, by the way,
if you want to listen to another really good podcast,
go listen to that one, Nikola Tesla one.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
Remember it was all about the ac DC war between
Tesla and Addison. Yeah, good episode, killed shocking animals. Yeah, yeah,
it's pretty awful. But in eighteen ninety five, George Westinghouse
set up a hydro electric power plant along the Niagara Falls.
And what he did was he had a means of
(20:45):
taking the movement of water, which is kinetic energy. The
water at the top of the falls has potential energy,
and then once it falls over, that potential turns to
kinetic energy. Well, Westinghouse set up a turbine to catch
this movement of water, right, which is actual energy, and
have that movement spin a turbine, a propeller or a fan.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
Yeah, it's the same concept as an old gristmill, except
it's not creating energy. It's just moving the stones that
grind the wheat or corn.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Right, the gristmill is in this case it's capturing that
energy by or it's transferring it, we should say, by
converting that kinetic energy from the water into mechanical energy
spinning the turbine. The turbine is connected to that shaft
I was talking about where we suddenly change course. And
at the end of that shaft, which is now spinning
(21:37):
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. 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 2 (21:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
And 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. 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 2 (22:12):
Right.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
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 3 (22:29):
And these are all just different methods, whether it's solar
or steam or nuclear. I almost set it, which is
weird because I definitely don't say it that way.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Well, you were very excited.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
I think I said it enough as a joke that
it slips in. But anyway, all those are just means
to turn that turbine, right.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
And all it is is you're using that stored energy, yeah,
or that kinetic energy like over here to create electricity
so that you can transfer it into you work down
the line.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
It's so cool.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
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 1 (23:13):
Okay, if you don't get something.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
Yeah, it's a great place to go. Visit are these
kids websites because they break it down like super simply.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
But in our article, it.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
Describes a generator as if it was a water and
a pump, which made a lot of sense to me.
The generator is the pump, but instead of pushing water
through a pipe, it's pushing electrons down a line power line.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
And that whole like using water as an analogy for
electricity fits very well.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
Yeah, but you need something to push it. It's not
a self pusher, so you need that force, and that
force is voltage, right, Yeah, it's electromotive force.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
It's the same with water, like you have water pressure
that forces the water on the line, right, And with
electricity you have a force that moves electricity and it's voltage,
like you said, measured in volts. Yeah, and the electrical
current is measured in amps. And the amps represent the
total number of electrons flowing through any one point of
(24:18):
a circuit in any every second, and there's a lot
of them.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
And if you have voltage and you add that to current,
which is amps, you get power, which is watts.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Right, and I think it's multiplied by it. Oh really,
yeah it is.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Okay. I wasn't even thinking of it as a math formula.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
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 industrial power transmission that
which we'll get to later.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Yeah, and I know it sounds a little confusing with
the volts, amps, and watts, but there are different Like
if you said, you know that guy was shocked and
he had one hundred and twenty volts coursing through his body,
that's not true at all, because the vault is the
force he's got.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
He's got amps coursing through his body. Yeah, but you'd
be a huge geek to point that out to someone.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Someone said that, And a good rule of thumb is
the higher the vaults, the more dangerous the shock. Yeah,
which is why in America most outlets and homes are
two or one hundred and twenty volts, where if you
touch it, you're gonna feel it, but it's probably not
going to kill you.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
In the United States it's one twenty. But it's different
in other countries.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Right, which is why like European appliance can't be plugged
into an American appliance because.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
You got to get those adapters.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
Yeah. So you were talking about current, which is the
number of electrons flowing through a circuit. You have the volts,
which is the force or pressure that's pushing them down
the line, and then you have those two multiplied by
(26:06):
one another to create watts, which is power.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
You also there's one there's another factor to electrical currents,
and that is resistance.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
Oh yeah, we didn't talk about that, so we acted
like it was all either an insulator or conductor.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
But you can be a resistor, well, I mean everything,
Everything has a certain level of resistance.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
Yeah, but if you're an official resistor, that means current moves,
it just doesn't move like as fast as it might
end metal, right or not.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
At all as in wood.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Yeah, or glass is another good resistor insulator yeah, and
so is rubber. Yes, but even something is like conductive
as copper wire has a certain amount of resistance. And
again that water flowing analogy comes into place. Like if
you pump like some water really really hard, Yes, try
(26:57):
to get a lot of water through a very small pipe,
it's still not going to come out very high, very
fast because you're trying to force too much water through
that little pipe. 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
(27:19):
to resist. And when you have resistance in an electrical circuit,
you have 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, and that's the result of friction.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
And resistance is measured in ohms ohm. Should we talk
about circuits?
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Are we there?
Speaker 1 (27:46):
I think so.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
So all this is well and good.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
That's you know, you can supply power and we'll talk
about this more in detail to homes from a power plant,
but you can also have a little battery supplying that
electrical energy to a iPhone, let's say, right, And in
that case you need something called a circuit, which is
(28:08):
basically just a closed loop that allows the electrons to travel.
And in most electronics it's like like you said, like
copper wire maybe, and it travels from you know, there's
a switch that turns it on and off, which is
why a.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Circuit is called a circuit breaker.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
Like if you break that circuit by turning the switch off,
or if the wire like snaps or something, it's gonna
no more electrons are going to be flowing.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Right, because there's and the reason they're not going to
be flowing any longer is because the positive pole and
the negative pole from that circuit are no longer connected,
that's right. Another way to look at voltage is that
it is the difference between electrons on one side and
electrons on another side of a circuit. And remember we
(28:54):
talked about nature always wanting balance. Yeah, electrons flow from
negative to positive, right, that's right. 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. Yeah,
so they want to leave the negative side to go
(29:16):
achieve balance on the positive side and ultimately make whatever
circuit it's traveling neutral.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
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, yeah,
you can convert that movement into productive work. Yeah, mechanical energy, right,
And anything you attach onto a circuit to exploit that
flow of electrons for work is called the load.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
It could be a light bulb or you know whatever.
Whatever mechanical energy you're trying to create is your load.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Right, And there's all sorts of things you can do
by attaching a load to a circuit. Like a light bulb.
A light bulb basically uses that electricity flow to flow
into a resistant filament, very thin wire that purposely resists
that flow of electricity, generating heat and in turn heating
(30:14):
up to produce light. That's how light bulb works.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
You can also recharge batteries which go in and force
electrons back into the negative position so that the batteries
recharged and those electrons are ready to flow again once
you connect the circuit. There's also appliances that use resistors
to produce heat, like hair dryer or a toaster. There's
all sorts of stuff you can do to connect into
(30:39):
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, it's you're plugging
a load onto an electrical circuit and exploiting the flow
of electrons.
Speaker 3 (30:54):
Yeah, and I kind of misspoke a minute ago when
I said it's creating the mechanical energy.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
You need a motor to actually do that.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
So, yeah, 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, and electric motor
is basically just a cylinder stuffed with magnets around the edge.
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.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
It's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
It's very cool.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
It's like those little guns you used to get at
the circus when you're.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Yeah, god, I love those.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
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 it's wrapped around you know,
the coppers wrapped around the edges. So electricity flows to
that core, creates magnetism, and then that pushes against the
outer cylinder and makes that motor spin around, and then
(31:47):
that's where you get your mechanical energy.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
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. 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
(32:12):
to spin the drill 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. There's one
(32:35):
other thing 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.
If you look at a plug, sometimes you'll see three prongs,
and the third prong, the one on the bottom, seems
(32:55):
different from the other ones, that's round, and that is
actually a grounding wire.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Very important, very.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
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,
and so there's such a thing as leakage of electrons,
which is crazy. And there's also electrical build up that
(33:22):
can happen where if you're not using all of the
amps 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,
sometimes through you, which can make it very dangerous. To
(33:44):
prevent this, they have 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.
And that's where the word comes from ground actually transferring
that residual electric energy to the ground, which is basically
(34:07):
an infinite reservoir for a charge dispersal to earth. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:25):
Or if you look at every house, you're going to
see near the meter, the electrical meter, you're going to.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
See a probably a copper rod driven into the ground,
and that's your house is ground.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
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. 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 gonna be fine,
so we think, and it's a very good it's very
good at just dispersing those charges. So that's what grounding
(34:57):
comes from. Very important stuff.
Speaker 3 (34:59):
Yeah, we mentioned transformers earlier. 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 in your home immediately. But
they do need that kind of juice in order to
(35:20):
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. So the way they do that
is through transformers. They transmit the power with a lot
of voltage, so more force, less amperage.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Less resistance, less resistance, which means you lose less.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
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 one hundred and twenty volts.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
More elsewhere, nice and safe, right, And then you just
plug your appliance into it and all of a sudden
that electrical energy transmits to your toast strude old being warmed.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
In your hot pocket with tainted meats.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Wow, did you hear about that? Yeah? Remember that whole
horse meat thing with Ikea the last couple of years.
It wasn't just Ikea, but yeah, they were definitely called out,
maybe most strongly for.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
I think the hot pockets too.
Speaker 3 (36:15):
They called it unsound meat, which is just a word
that sounds weird.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
In front of meat.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
Yeah, unsound is not you don't want to go near it, unsound, unclean.
It's biblical, all right.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
So now I think we, even though we've covered it
in the Tesla podcast, we do need to go over
ac DC a little.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
Bit to go listen to that podcast. That's a great one,
best episode, best Australian band of all time. Are they
were good?
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Yeah? Yeah, are good?
Speaker 1 (36:38):
David? Are they still around? Yeah? Man, David Bowie played
pretty mean Tesla.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
No, I'm not talking about test him home at ac DC.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Oh okay, uh yeah, Tesla's all.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
Right, sure, and they're not around.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
That's why I was really confused. So I was more
confused about that than I was by any aspect of electricity.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
I'm like, yeah, man, of course they're around anyone Australian.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
Uh yeah, No, ac DC is great and they're still around.
Speaker 3 (37:05):
Huh yeah they're I think they're putting an album together
right now, give them form them.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
I'll bet it sounds exactly like all the rest. It's
still rocks blues based rock uh in valure or velvet.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
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,
and I'll prove this to you by electrocuting animals and
dogs and cats and even an elephant named Topsy.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
And he was alleged to have helped botch the first
electric cution by electric chair by a state. Oh yeah,
I don't remember the details of that, but it's definitely
in our episode.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
On Exploded the guy.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Yeah, he was a real jerk.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
Remember, Yeah, and I think we remember. I remember talking
about there should be a movie too about that that battle.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Yeah, I can't believe there's not.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
It sounds super nerdy, but it would actually be interesting.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
It go over well these days, agreed.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
So batteries these days use direct current power DC power,
and that means the positive and negative terminals are always
positive and negative, and it always electricity always flows in
the same.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
Direction from negative to positive.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
Yeah, it does not alternate.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Yeah, just think about it. This way negative and electrons negative. Yeah,
so in any terminal, that's where all the negative charges
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 poll good vibes, yeah,
or the very least so so vibes, yeah, true, but
(38:41):
not negative vibes.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
No.
Speaker 3 (38:43):
And then you have alternating current or AC, which means
the current reverses sixty times per second here in the US,
fifty times per second in Europe. So it's just reversing
back and forth, alternating that current. And I guess, so
who went out in the end Tesla on a large scale.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
Well, yeah, I mean that's what our generation does.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
Yeh. Edison has his batteries. I guess he could throw
it to.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
Which are pretty important too. But yeah, I think we
kind of came out in the same way on that episode. Yeah,
like this one, they both kind of won. Yeah, but
Tesla was the cooler dude. Although Tesla died penniless in
New York in the nineteen forties. Oh yeah, and Edison
died of rich fat guy.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
He died of consumption and gout.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
That has Ben Franklin I guess we can finish with.
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 US, we deliver electricity
into your home at one hundred and twenty volts, So
you got to remember that one too.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
It's important.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
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. You plug
in the space heater and it comes out to ten amps.
So you multiply that ten times one hundred and twenty
because that's your voltage, and you have got twelve hundred
(40:13):
watts of heat.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
Or one point two kill a watts.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
Yes, because that's how the power company is going to
measure it, right, because they deal in big chunks.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
And if you leave that heater on for an hour,
you've just used one point two kill a wat hours,
which is how you're build.
Speaker 3 (40:28):
Yeah, and if they charge you a dime per kill
a what hour? It's going to cost you twelve cents
an hour to run that space heater?
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Right?
Speaker 2 (40:34):
Pretty simple? Yeap and neat.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
And that's why when you go to buy an appliance
you should look at that little tag that says how
many KILLO what hours you're going to be burning?
Speaker 1 (40:42):
That's right, the lower the better, So electricity. Huh You
got anything else?
Speaker 2 (40:48):
No, don't play around with it?
Speaker 1 (40:49):
No, don't. Uh. Yes, I always wear rubber sold.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Huice because rubber is an insulator.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
It is why because it hangs on to its electron.
That's right, the atoms that make up rubber.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
It's just that simple.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
If you want to know more about electricity, you can
type that word in the search bart HowStuffWorks dot com.
You can also go on all sorts of kids science
sites and find out more about it too. And since
I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (41:17):
I'm gonna call this rare birthday shout out.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
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. We've been best friends for twelve years,
and many of our conversations begin by commenting on the podcast.
For example, we could not stop laughing at your nineteen
twenties voice toward the end of the Underground Tunnels episode,
(41:43):
we laughed over and over.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
That is a good voice.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
I think she's talking about this one. See that one. Yeah, Electricity,
Tesla Edison killing animals. All right, that was for you,
Molly and Pearl.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
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
twenty sixth birthday is April ninth. I think it would
be totally awesome birthday gift if you would send her
a shout out during listener mail, I would be forever
in your debt.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
Thanks for doing the podcast.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
I'm a middle school teacher who always listens during my
prep periods and so happy birthday Molly.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Happy twenty six This should be close.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Yeah, happy birthday to April ninth. That was very nice
of us, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
And thank you Pearl Web in Chicago, and your friendship
means a lot to us.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
You know, your friendship with one another.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
Yeah, and then conversely threw us all together in their car.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Nice. Yeah, 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 stuff Podcasts at
iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, it's Joshum. For this week's Select, I've chosen
our twenty fourteen episode on electricity, and I chose it
as a kind of Casey Casum 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. Well,
rather than just send him a link and being boring,
(00:21):
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 2 (00:34):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
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, you know, if Chuck's not wearing
that hat, who knows what's going on?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Yeah, I thought a loss of sing yeah once. Yeah,
I think I.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Vaguely remember that dude freaked.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
I was on the with Delta and everything, and I
was like, oh, here it is.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
It's on my head your back pocket, like Bruce Springsteen.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Uh, how you doing great, Chuck, Yes, let's talk about electricity, electricity, electricity.
I've had the Talking Heads song in my head, which
one electricity? Okay, where all these sees are little dots.
I thought you're gonna say once in a lifetime. No,
that's what is that called once in a lifetime? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Uh yeah, I've been singing the Schoolhouse Rock electricity song
over and over in my head.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
What about the electric company theme song? Mmm, I haven't
been singing that, but do you remember it?
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Yeah? That was I was electric Company over Sesame Street even.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
No, it's uh and the correct answer there's the Who.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
By the way, what do you mean like that?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Who?
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Is that? Right?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
No?
Speaker 3 (02:07):
I mean yeah, I love the Who, But I'm with you.
I don't see the need to rank things like that.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Well, Plus, the electric Company came on after Sesame Street,
I think.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Yeah, it skewed slightly older.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
I think Sesame Street to me felt like, you know,
six seven eight year olds.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Electric companies were.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Like eight, nine to ten, twelve, and then even younger
than Sesame Street was Pinwheel if I remember correctly, and
that was after your time, Okay, Pinwell was pretty cute.
It was like little kids, and then Sesame Street was
like little kids, and then Electric Company was like cool.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yeah, and Romper Room was kind of pre Sesame Street.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Even so, was that the one with Reggedy Ann and Andy? Mmm?
Speaker 2 (02:47):
I don't remember. I just remember it was very immature. Yeah,
it's very childish.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
You think Raggedy Ann and Andy were in that. Well.
At any rate, we've angered enough people now, I know.
I have an intro for this one.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Great.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Okay, you ready, about thirteen point eight billion years ago,
a little something called the Big Bang happened and the
universe was created, so says you, So this is a
lot of people. Yeah, you know, we weren't around. Nobody
saw it, but it's been detected and it's strongly suspected
(03:20):
by scientists that the universe is thirteen point eight 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. Yeah, let's do it, okay, and
under the auspices of the Big Bang theory, not the
TV show, but the actual theory. At that moment, all
(03:41):
of the energy in the entire universe was created. Right then,
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 places. It can
be transferred from one place to another via some natural
(04:04):
ways like convection, conduction, radiation, and like I said, it
can be stored in stuff. It can be stored in
your body. Right. Fat is potential energy that can be
burned and used for energy to carry out work, which
is all we're looking to do is work. We use
energy to carry out work, whether it's digging a shovel
(04:25):
or lighting a light bulb. That's what energy does. It
produces work. Right, Okay, 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. We
wouldn't be in the computer age right now if it
(04:47):
weren't for something called electricity, which is basically how humans
have figured out how to harness converting energy from one
type of another and then transmitting it very long distance. Yeah,
because electricity isn't a primary energy source like the sun
or solar radiation, or nuclear energy or even the flow
(05:09):
of water kinetic energy. No, it's created, yeah, it's and
it's a secondary energy source. It's a carrier, that's right.
So electricity carries energy from one point to another. And
if you understand that, you understand the very basis of
what we're going to talk about today.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Like we've figured out how to generate electricity to carry
energy to produce work down the line.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
That's my intra which is usually mechanical energy is what's
produced right by a machine.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Yes, so think about this, like, if you capture mechanical
energy like water spinning a turbine, which we'll talk about, yeah,
and Niagara Falls, that's not going to do anything to
light your light bulb two hundred miles away.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
No, not by itself.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
Yeah, it's pretty simple. Actually, it seems complicated, but it's not. No,
just electrons moving around.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Yeah, let's talk about electrons. Man, let's talk about the atom.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
Well, should we talk about the history of this stuff? Yes,
let's 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.
That doesn't mean that they weren't playing around with.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
It, No, and getting zapped because they're messing with static electricity.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
That's right, which we'll explain all that later to But
there was one dude called Dallas of Melitas. He is
a philosopher in Greece and in six hundred BC he
is thought to have been the first dude to around
with electrostatics static electricity by rubbing amber with fur, and
he noticed that dust and feathers and things were attracted
(07:08):
to it. He didn't know what the heck was going on,
but he knew something.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Was up right, and the amber plays a pretty big role.
It's actually amber. The Latin er I'm sorry is it Greek?
Greek Greek word for amber is electron with a K.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
That was like.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
The way heavy metal.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Yeah, you know, but that's so like our Our word
electricity is derived from the Greek word for amber. From
that first experiment with static electricity.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Yeah, and it was actually coined by a dude named
William Gilbert. He was an Englishman, a physician, and he
was studying sort of the same things with static electricity
that Militis was. And he was the first person to
say it's electric when he saw these forces at work.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
With an exclamation point and his finger in the air. Yeah,
and we should probably we should probably differentiate, like there's
a couple of types of electricity. There's static electricity, and
then there's current electricity, right, 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
(08:16):
carried out. 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 saying it's electric for the
first time, yeah, the concept electricity was that it was fluid.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Well, it was fluid. He was on the right track.
Something is flowing.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
But they thought it was literally a fluid which they
called which.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
In those days was called a humor.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
And he said it leaves what he called then an
afflu vivvum effluvium, right, which is atmosphere around it. When
you create this rubbing action, it removes that fluid. But
it wasn't fluid. They were not dummies back then, but
they were just figuring it all out.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
No, they weren't dummies because even Ben Franklin thought it
was a fluid. It was the prevailing idea concept of electricity,
and Ben Franklin and a couple of his contemporaries, including
a guy named Thomas Francois Dalibard, were studying electricity big time,
and it was when they really investigated lightning that our
(09:23):
understanding of current electricity started to take shape.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
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 1 (09:37):
But if he didn't do it, other people did. There
were guys who died carrying out that experiment. Yeah, but
it was definitely carried out. I don't know if Ben
Franklin did or not.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
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 2 (09:56):
But it's a great story either way.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Yeah, and I think he at least proposed it the experiment.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Well.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
So he's a smart guy, very smart.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
He's a polymn.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Then there was another smart dude named Coulomb, Charles Augustin
de Coulomb, and he is the one that wrote Coulomb's law.
And he said, charges like charges repel, opposite charges attract,
and that's kind of like the basis for it all.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
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 canceled on another out
or push one another away.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
He basically said, you can now calculate this right because
of my handy dandy little law.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Yeah, and with a boom, he said boom, not bang. Okay,
that came earlier later on.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
A guy named J. J.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
Thompson in eighteen ninety seven said at a science conference, Hey,
I found something smaller than the atom. And everyone said, silly, man,
atoms are invisible. You can't it even means invisible.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
You liar, And he said no, I promise it's there's
something smaller, it's got a negative charge, and I'm going
to call it a corpuscle.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
No he didn't.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Yeah, it is Latin for small bodies. And then I think,
I don't know who later said let's change it to electron.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Yeah, that sounds way cooler.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
But the discovery of the electron was basically the birth
of what we know is electricity today. Yeah, the understanding
of the electron is what it's all about.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
And would you say, like eighteen ninety seven, yes, So
before that time, I guess he didn't understand the electron,
but he understood electricity. A guy named Michael Faraday was
working on the.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Case stud Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Basically everybody's like Ben frank on electricity hand in hand.
Really it's Michael Faraday, who is British, who really came
to the foundation for electrifying the world. He just he
created the first dynamo, which is a generator which we'll
talk about.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
He first electric motor.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Yeah, yeah, he just he got electricity and he explained
it to other people very well.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
Can you even fathom how smart these people were to
be that in the dark and figuring all this subatomic
stuff out.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Yeah. Back then, hats off, top, Hats off to these guys.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Last chance garageot off.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Yeah, I'm back on, Like I have trouble understanding it now,
right when it's explained through like Kids for Science website,
you know.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
Like inventing this, figuring this stuff out with the first time.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Right exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
And it's a pretty dangerous field to try to figure
out blind too, you know.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Yeah, I mean more than one scientist got a shock
from a Leyden jar. Oh yeah, and you can make those, dud?
Did you make those in science class?
Speaker 1 (12:53):
No?
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Yeah, you can make those.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Well, it's we should say a leaden jar is a
very primitive capacitor to use a metal rod in a jar,
a nail that's sunk into like some water, and it
can store a charge. 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,
(13:16):
But again, he did make the proposal. It's whether or
not he carried it out as it's question.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
All right, I guess now we can get the atoms finally.
Atoms are very tiny and they make up molecules and
molecules make up everything you see.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Yeah, atoms are the building block of matter. That's right,
an atam. Remember we're always talking about nature loves homeostasis,
Oh man does it? You've got a balance that nature
always seeks tries to achieve it. Same with atoms or
atoms are no exception. I should say within an atom,
(13:52):
you have a nucleus which is made up of protons
and neutrons. 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. Right, And when you
have an equal number of protons to electrons, you have
(14:17):
a neutral atom.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
Yeah, there's no potential energy there. It's just in balance.
And a lot of stuff is like that. A lot
of stuff is in balance, some stuff is not well.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Some stuff falls out of balance easier than other stuff.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Well, yeah, the electrons sometimes they're super tightly bound to
the atom and they don't want to leave the house.
They want to stick around. Sometimes 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 1 (14:52):
We go on rum Springer. Yeah, yeah, and it depends
on the material. 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,
so they act as either electrical conductors or electrical insulators.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Like, if you pick up a stick off the ground,
it's 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 loose and they like to go
off and do those things that teenage electrons do, and
therefore it does conduct electricity.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Right very well.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Under normal circumstances. When you pick up that rod or
you pick up that stick, the electrons are staying put
no matter what. 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 core puscle idea. Yeah, JJ, what's his name, Yeah, JJ,
(15:57):
core Puzzle, I think Thompson. So thanks to the work
of all of these people, we figured out how to
knock electrons loose. And it's ingenious and simple, but it's
also very complex, and it involves the relationship between magnetism
and electricity. So Chuck, yes, we're talking about knocking electrons loose,
(16:33):
which is ultimately the basis of producing electricity.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
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.
All you're doing, you're rubbing that balloon on your sweater,
and electrons are jumping from that balloon onto your sweater.
And now there are two different charges going on. Because
you're overcharged, the balloon is now undercharged, and because opposite
(17:00):
it charges a tract it sticks to your sweater, right,
And that's static electricity.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
And static you know, you have static and dynamic, and
dynamic indicates motion. Static indicates staying still, 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.
Like when you touch something that's charged, like a door
knob after you've shuffled with your feet in socks over carpet.
(17:28):
When you touch that door knob, you're forming that connection,
and all of a sudden, the balance is achieved once more,
and the electrons flow.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Like you're literally a conductor of electricity in that moment.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
So with current electricity, those electrons move, they move along
a conductive material, say like copper wire or something like that.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
That's a hot one.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
Right. So let's talk about how you produce an electrical current, right, Okay,
let's talk about generators and turbines and all that awesome stuff.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
It sounds like you need to generate that electricity with
a generator, right.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
I think that's what generators are called. That's why they're
called there.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
Yeah, it's funny just how basic some of these things are.
Like you say, a compu tour.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Right, but but you just you've heard it so many
times you take it for granted and this is its meaning,
and it's like looking at a word too frequently.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Yeah, I think I think a lot of these words
are like that, like a generator or a core puzzle
or a what's it called when he stop down the electricity,
which we'll get to transformer? Yeah, it transforms something. But
you say them so much, you're like, what's a transformer do?
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Right?
Speaker 2 (18:37):
You know?
Speaker 3 (18:38):
Yeah, anyway, I've been reading too much science for dummies,
I think. All right, so generators, well, I guess it
all comes down to magnetism.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Yes, in the case of generators.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
And if you want to listen to two shows Lightning
and Magnetism before this one, it might help you understand
electricity a little.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Bit more, all right, So just go listen to those,
well to do that right now, wait two hours. So
what 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 say,
(19:19):
conductive material. You can knock the electrons loose basically using
a magnet.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Yeah, it's like what happens when you attract a paper
clip to a magnet. It's just the transfer of electrons
jumping around.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
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. And when you do this, you're reversing polarity
all of a sudden, Yeah, and you are knocking the
electrons loose in those coils. And the way that you
(19:54):
spin the coils very quickly is by hooking the coils
to say a shaft. Yeah, we kind of did this backwards.
Let's start at the beginning. You want to Okay, let's
go to Niagara Falls.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Okay, back in eighteen ninety five George.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Westinghouse, who is Nikola Tesla's boss, Which, by the way,
if you want to listen to another really good podcast,
go listen to that one, Nikola Tesla one.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
Remember it was all about the ac DC war between
Tesla and Addison. Yeah, good episode, killed shocking animals. Yeah, yeah,
it's pretty awful. But in eighteen ninety five, George Westinghouse
set up a hydro electric power plant along the Niagara Falls.
And what he did was he had a means of
(20:45):
taking the movement of water, which is kinetic energy. The
water at the top of the falls has potential energy,
and then once it falls over, that potential turns to
kinetic energy. Well, Westinghouse set up a turbine to catch
this movement of water, right, which is actual energy, and
have that movement spin a turbine, a propeller or a fan.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
Yeah, it's the same concept as an old gristmill, except
it's not creating energy. It's just moving the stones that
grind the wheat or corn.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Right, the gristmill is in this case it's capturing that
energy by or it's transferring it, we should say, by
converting that kinetic energy from the water into mechanical energy
spinning the turbine. The turbine is connected to that shaft
I was talking about where we suddenly change course. And
at the end of that shaft, which is now spinning
(21:37):
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. 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 2 (21:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
And 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. 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 2 (22:12):
Right.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
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 3 (22:29):
And these are all just different methods, whether it's solar
or steam or nuclear. I almost set it, which is
weird because I definitely don't say it that way.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Well, you were very excited.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
I think I said it enough as a joke that
it slips in. But anyway, all those are just means
to turn that turbine, right.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
And all it is is you're using that stored energy, yeah,
or that kinetic energy like over here to create electricity
so that you can transfer it into you work down
the line.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
It's so cool.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
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 1 (23:13):
Okay, if you don't get something.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
Yeah, it's a great place to go. Visit are these
kids websites because they break it down like super simply.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
But in our article, it.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
Describes a generator as if it was a water and
a pump, which made a lot of sense to me.
The generator is the pump, but instead of pushing water
through a pipe, it's pushing electrons down a line power line.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
And that whole like using water as an analogy for
electricity fits very well.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
Yeah, but you need something to push it. It's not
a self pusher, so you need that force, and that
force is voltage, right, Yeah, it's electromotive force.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
It's the same with water, like you have water pressure
that forces the water on the line, right, And with
electricity you have a force that moves electricity and it's voltage,
like you said, measured in volts. Yeah, and the electrical
current is measured in amps. And the amps represent the
total number of electrons flowing through any one point of
(24:18):
a circuit in any every second, and there's a lot
of them.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
And if you have voltage and you add that to current,
which is amps, you get power, which is watts.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Right, and I think it's multiplied by it. Oh really,
yeah it is.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Okay. I wasn't even thinking of it as a math formula.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
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 industrial power transmission that
which we'll get to later.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Yeah, and I know it sounds a little confusing with
the volts, amps, and watts, but there are different Like
if you said, you know that guy was shocked and
he had one hundred and twenty volts coursing through his body,
that's not true at all, because the vault is the
force he's got.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
He's got amps coursing through his body. Yeah, but you'd
be a huge geek to point that out to someone.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Someone said that, And a good rule of thumb is
the higher the vaults, the more dangerous the shock. Yeah,
which is why in America most outlets and homes are
two or one hundred and twenty volts, where if you
touch it, you're gonna feel it, but it's probably not
going to kill you.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
In the United States it's one twenty. But it's different
in other countries.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Right, which is why like European appliance can't be plugged
into an American appliance because.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
You got to get those adapters.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
Yeah. So you were talking about current, which is the
number of electrons flowing through a circuit. You have the volts,
which is the force or pressure that's pushing them down
the line, and then you have those two multiplied by
(26:06):
one another to create watts, which is power.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
You also there's one there's another factor to electrical currents,
and that is resistance.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
Oh yeah, we didn't talk about that, so we acted
like it was all either an insulator or conductor.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
But you can be a resistor, well, I mean everything,
Everything has a certain level of resistance.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
Yeah, but if you're an official resistor, that means current moves,
it just doesn't move like as fast as it might
end metal, right or not.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
At all as in wood.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Yeah, or glass is another good resistor insulator yeah, and
so is rubber. Yes, but even something is like conductive
as copper wire has a certain amount of resistance. And
again that water flowing analogy comes into place. Like if
you pump like some water really really hard, Yes, try
(26:57):
to get a lot of water through a very small pipe,
it's still not going to come out very high, very
fast because you're trying to force too much water through
that little pipe. 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
(27:19):
to resist. And when you have resistance in an electrical circuit,
you have 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, and that's the result of friction.
Speaker 3 (27:38):
And resistance is measured in ohms ohm. Should we talk
about circuits?
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Are we there?
Speaker 1 (27:46):
I think so.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
So all this is well and good.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
That's you know, you can supply power and we'll talk
about this more in detail to homes from a power plant,
but you can also have a little battery supplying that
electrical energy to a iPhone, let's say, right, And in
that case you need something called a circuit, which is
(28:08):
basically just a closed loop that allows the electrons to travel.
And in most electronics it's like like you said, like
copper wire maybe, and it travels from you know, there's
a switch that turns it on and off, which is
why a.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Circuit is called a circuit breaker.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
Like if you break that circuit by turning the switch off,
or if the wire like snaps or something, it's gonna
no more electrons are going to be flowing.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Right, because there's and the reason they're not going to
be flowing any longer is because the positive pole and
the negative pole from that circuit are no longer connected,
that's right. Another way to look at voltage is that
it is the difference between electrons on one side and
electrons on another side of a circuit. And remember we
(28:54):
talked about nature always wanting balance. Yeah, electrons flow from
negative to positive, right, that's right. 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. Yeah,
so they want to leave the negative side to go
(29:16):
achieve balance on the positive side and ultimately make whatever
circuit it's traveling neutral.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
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, yeah,
you can convert that movement into productive work. Yeah, mechanical energy, right,
And anything you attach onto a circuit to exploit that
flow of electrons for work is called the load.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
It could be a light bulb or you know whatever.
Whatever mechanical energy you're trying to create is your load.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Right, And there's all sorts of things you can do
by attaching a load to a circuit. Like a light bulb.
A light bulb basically uses that electricity flow to flow
into a resistant filament, very thin wire that purposely resists
that flow of electricity, generating heat and in turn heating
(30:14):
up to produce light. That's how light bulb works.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
You can also recharge batteries which go in and force
electrons back into the negative position so that the batteries
recharged and those electrons are ready to flow again once
you connect the circuit. There's also appliances that use resistors
to produce heat, like hair dryer or a toaster. There's
all sorts of stuff you can do to connect into
(30:39):
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, it's you're plugging
a load onto an electrical circuit and exploiting the flow
of electrons.
Speaker 3 (30:54):
Yeah, and I kind of misspoke a minute ago when
I said it's creating the mechanical energy.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
You need a motor to actually do that.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
So, yeah, 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, and electric motor
is basically just a cylinder stuffed with magnets around the edge.
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.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
It's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
It's very cool.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
It's like those little guns you used to get at
the circus when you're.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Yeah, god, I love those.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
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 it's wrapped around you know,
the coppers wrapped around the edges. So electricity flows to
that core, creates magnetism, and then that pushes against the
outer cylinder and makes that motor spin around, and then
(31:47):
that's where you get your mechanical energy.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
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. 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
(32:12):
to spin the drill 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. There's one
(32:35):
other thing 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.
If you look at a plug, sometimes you'll see three prongs,
and the third prong, the one on the bottom, seems
(32:55):
different from the other ones, that's round, and that is
actually a grounding wire.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Very important, very.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
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,
and so there's such a thing as leakage of electrons,
which is crazy. And there's also electrical build up that
(33:22):
can happen where if you're not using all of the
amps 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,
sometimes through you, which can make it very dangerous. To
(33:44):
prevent this, they have 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.
And that's where the word comes from ground actually transferring
that residual electric energy to the ground, which is basically
(34:07):
an infinite reservoir for a charge dispersal to earth. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:25):
Or if you look at every house, you're going to
see near the meter, the electrical meter, you're going to.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
See a probably a copper rod driven into the ground,
and that's your house is ground.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
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. 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 gonna be fine,
so we think, and it's a very good it's very
good at just dispersing those charges. So that's what grounding
(34:57):
comes from. Very important stuff.
Speaker 3 (34:59):
Yeah, we mentioned transformers earlier. 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 in your home immediately. But
they do need that kind of juice in order to
(35:20):
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. So the way they do that
is through transformers. They transmit the power with a lot
of voltage, so more force, less amperage.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Less resistance, less resistance, which means you lose less.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
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 one hundred and twenty volts.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
More elsewhere, nice and safe, right, And then you just
plug your appliance into it and all of a sudden
that electrical energy transmits to your toast strude old being warmed.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
In your hot pocket with tainted meats.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Wow, did you hear about that? Yeah? Remember that whole
horse meat thing with Ikea the last couple of years.
It wasn't just Ikea, but yeah, they were definitely called out,
maybe most strongly for.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
I think the hot pockets too.
Speaker 3 (36:15):
They called it unsound meat, which is just a word
that sounds weird.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
In front of meat.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
Yeah, unsound is not you don't want to go near it, unsound, unclean.
It's biblical, all right.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
So now I think we, even though we've covered it
in the Tesla podcast, we do need to go over
ac DC a little.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
Bit to go listen to that podcast. That's a great one,
best episode, best Australian band of all time. Are they
were good?
Speaker 2 (36:37):
Yeah? Yeah, are good?
Speaker 1 (36:38):
David? Are they still around? Yeah? Man, David Bowie played
pretty mean Tesla.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
No, I'm not talking about test him home at ac DC.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Oh okay, uh yeah, Tesla's all.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
Right, sure, and they're not around.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
That's why I was really confused. So I was more
confused about that than I was by any aspect of electricity.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
I'm like, yeah, man, of course they're around anyone Australian.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
Uh yeah, No, ac DC is great and they're still around.
Speaker 3 (37:05):
Huh yeah they're I think they're putting an album together
right now, give them form them.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
I'll bet it sounds exactly like all the rest. It's
still rocks blues based rock uh in valure or velvet.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
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,
and I'll prove this to you by electrocuting animals and
dogs and cats and even an elephant named Topsy.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
And he was alleged to have helped botch the first
electric cution by electric chair by a state. Oh yeah,
I don't remember the details of that, but it's definitely
in our episode.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
On Exploded the guy.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Yeah, he was a real jerk.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
Remember, Yeah, and I think we remember. I remember talking
about there should be a movie too about that that battle.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Yeah, I can't believe there's not.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
It sounds super nerdy, but it would actually be interesting.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
It go over well these days, agreed.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
So batteries these days use direct current power DC power,
and that means the positive and negative terminals are always
positive and negative, and it always electricity always flows in
the same.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
Direction from negative to positive.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
Yeah, it does not alternate.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Yeah, just think about it. This way negative and electrons negative. Yeah,
so in any terminal, that's where all the negative charges
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 poll good vibes, yeah,
or the very least so so vibes, yeah, true, but
(38:41):
not negative vibes.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
No.
Speaker 3 (38:43):
And then you have alternating current or AC, which means
the current reverses sixty times per second here in the US,
fifty times per second in Europe. So it's just reversing
back and forth, alternating that current. And I guess, so
who went out in the end Tesla on a large scale.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
Well, yeah, I mean that's what our generation does.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
Yeh. Edison has his batteries. I guess he could throw
it to.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
Which are pretty important too. But yeah, I think we
kind of came out in the same way on that episode. Yeah,
like this one, they both kind of won. Yeah, but
Tesla was the cooler dude. Although Tesla died penniless in
New York in the nineteen forties. Oh yeah, and Edison
died of rich fat guy.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
He died of consumption and gout.
Speaker 3 (39:31):
That has Ben Franklin I guess we can finish with.
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 US, we deliver electricity
into your home at one hundred and twenty volts, So
you got to remember that one too.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
It's important.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
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. You plug
in the space heater and it comes out to ten amps.
So you multiply that ten times one hundred and twenty
because that's your voltage, and you have got twelve hundred
(40:13):
watts of heat.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
Or one point two kill a watts.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
Yes, because that's how the power company is going to
measure it, right, because they deal in big chunks.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
And if you leave that heater on for an hour,
you've just used one point two kill a wat hours,
which is how you're build.
Speaker 3 (40:28):
Yeah, and if they charge you a dime per kill
a what hour? It's going to cost you twelve cents
an hour to run that space heater?
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Right?
Speaker 2 (40:34):
Pretty simple? Yeap and neat.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
And that's why when you go to buy an appliance
you should look at that little tag that says how
many KILLO what hours you're going to be burning?
Speaker 1 (40:42):
That's right, the lower the better, So electricity. Huh You
got anything else?
Speaker 2 (40:48):
No, don't play around with it?
Speaker 1 (40:49):
No, don't. Uh. Yes, I always wear rubber sold.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Huice because rubber is an insulator.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
It is why because it hangs on to its electron.
That's right, the atoms that make up rubber.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
It's just that simple.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
If you want to know more about electricity, you can
type that word in the search bart HowStuffWorks dot com.
You can also go on all sorts of kids science
sites and find out more about it too. And since
I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (41:17):
I'm gonna call this rare birthday shout out.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
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. We've been best friends for twelve years,
and many of our conversations begin by commenting on the podcast.
For example, we could not stop laughing at your nineteen
twenties voice toward the end of the Underground Tunnels episode,
(41:43):
we laughed over and over.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
That is a good voice.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
I think she's talking about this one. See that one. Yeah, Electricity,
Tesla Edison killing animals. All right, that was for you,
Molly and Pearl.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
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
twenty sixth birthday is April ninth. I think it would
be totally awesome birthday gift if you would send her
a shout out during listener mail, I would be forever
in your debt.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
Thanks for doing the podcast.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
I'm a middle school teacher who always listens during my
prep periods and so happy birthday Molly.
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Happy twenty six This should be close.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Yeah, happy birthday to April ninth. That was very nice
of us, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (42:24):
And thank you Pearl Web in Chicago, and your friendship
means a lot to us.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
You know, your friendship with one another.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
Yeah, and then conversely threw us all together in their car.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Nice. Yeah, 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 stuff Podcasts at
iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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