Hey Guys! Sorry I haven’t posted lately! Happy 2017! If you’re asking for some content, here is some stuff I learned on batteries!
Have you ever seen someone stick a nail and a penny in a lemon and attach a little light. If you have you know that the little light begins to glow, as if it was attached to a battery. WHY?! To simplify things we will start off with a real battery. It is connected to a wire connected to a light bulb, connected back to the battery. To give a simple answer: The electrons from the atoms (usually lithium ions) go from the negative end of the battery to the positive end. You want to dive deeper you say? Ok here we go!
Ok, now I’m going to tell you, there’s simple physics involved. Wait! Don’t leave yet! Take a deep breath and let’s dive in!
It all started with a frog. Really! I’m not kidding! There was this guy named Luigi Galvani who stuck different metals in a dead frog’s legs and found that it produced electricity. Galvani thought the legs were releasing their “animal energy”, but Alessandro Volta, who had commented on the experiment, discovered that it was the difference in the metals that produced the current (electricity), and is quoted as saying
"It is the difference in metals that does it."
Alessandro Volta
But what about the batteries you use in your flashlight? You don’t put lemons in those, right? Correct, you use little round tubes and if you put them in right the flashlight flickers on. Are there little men putting little pennies and little nails into tiny lemons? No, but they use the same concept. Let’s start with the magic tubes you buy at the store. You have two ends of the battery: The cathode and the anode. But what does that even mean? Ok, starting from the beginning, the cathode is the positive end, the end that generally has a bump. The anode is the negative end without the bump. When you attach the two ends of a battery with a conductor, an object that lets electrons flow through it, and the electrons from the anode (negative) to the cathode (positive), giving you a circuit. But what if you hook up a light bulb? We will call our light bulb our resistor, but are generally called a load. When the electrons from the anode travel to the cathode, but meet a resistor, they drop off some electrons, causing our resistor, the light bulb, to light up. Then they continue to the cathode. When the both ends of the battery have the same number of protons and electrons, the anode and cathode neutralize, and the battery dies causing the light bulb to go out.
Thank you for reading my article! I hope you enjoyed it, and learned as much as I did. I work hard to get these articles out, and I appreciate your patience! Bye guys!
Here is the website I used for my research if you want to learn more about batteries!
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