The Basics of Electricity

to understand the basics behind electricity itself. A lot of this is going to be a refresher course from science classes, primarily in physics, but it's to cover stuff that often confuses people, and I'm including myself in that category. I often get confused to the point where I frequently have to do a quick refresher. So I'm not a scientist, I'm not an electrical engineer. I have to remind myself

on the basics whenever I talk about electricity. Complicating matters is that many text books for younger students in particular, frame electricity in ways that can be misleading. They oversimplify ideas to the point where they're kind of, you know, wrong, and I know I've been guilty of doing the same thing on this show. After all, I am a product of the educational system that relies on such textbooks, and

I didn't have a background and electrical engineering. I know I have on many occasions described electricity as the flow of electrons, and that's not really the case. Now. Electrons are charged sub atomic particles. They carry an electric charge. But electricity, a vague term at best, isn't about these carrier particles. It's more about the electric charge itself. So I have to actually unlearn what I had learned to

talk about this more accurately. So if you're like me, then this episode is going to be great for you. And if you already know electricity inside and out, you'll probably find this episode a little too basic for your liking. Or in a worst case scenario, you might hear me get something totally wrong. I'm working hard to prevent that, but I am human. So if I say something totally wrong, feel free to call me out on it, but please

just be nice about it. I am well intentioned, and if I make a mistake, I want to correct it. Just don't drag me under the bus for it, all right, So Let's assume some of you out there are like me and you don't have a background in working with electricity. Let's figure out why this is so confusing. I mean, we do have different units of measurement all to describe various components of electricity and the behavior of electrical phenomena.

You know, we have whats, we have what hours or more frequently, actually, really we have kill a lot hours. We have volts, we have amps, we have ohms. It can get a little overwhelming, so I'm gonna do my best to try and clear stuff up a bit now.

In that medical history episode, I talked about Greek philosophers who observed the effects of static electricity, what we call static electricity, where you build up an electric charge and it can be discharged when you come into contact with something else, and about how Benjamin Franklin proved that this was the same stuff as was found in lightning. But I mostly stayed away from the history of detecting and measuring electrical phenomena and the terminology that we associate with it.

So that's really what this episode will end up being about. And in that previous episode, I mentioned that Benjamin Franklin thought of electricity as a sort of fluid. He was not alone in this. It was a prevalent thought at the time, and that's probably why he described the movement of electricity as current. But the way Franklin described current and the way we tiply talk about electricity has caused

confusion for some folks like me. So I'll explain. Imagine you have two pools of water and they're connected by a hose. Now imagine that the ground is perfectly level between these two pools of water. You would expect the water in the hose to be pretty much in a state of equilibrium. It would be still. But imagine one pool is at a slightly higher elevation than the other. Well, then you would expect water to follow the force of gravity and flow down through the hose into the other pool.

You would have a current, and you could think of the pool at the higher elevation as being positive, at least in terms of elevation. So in that context, you'd say that a current of water is flowing from positive to negative through the hose. Now I'm oversimplifying a bit, but that's kind of what Franklin was thinking. When it

comes to the fluid. He observed with electricity. He described current as moving from positive to negative, and this has more to do with the electrostatic experiments he was doing and whether or not the surface that he was rubbing with, for for example, was the positive or whether it was the negative. You also have to remember that Franklin made his observations more than a century before we had discovered

that electrons are even a thing that exists. I have often joked that Franklin really messed us all up with his description of current going from positive to negative, but turns out that's not really true. Now explain why that is in just a moment. Now, Later on after Benjamin Franklin's time, we would learn more about electricity and we

began to learn about electric charges and electric potential. We began to understand that you can have different magnitudes of electric charge and it could be negative, it could be positive, and that you can create a connection between different things with different electric charges and observe of a flow of electric charge or an electric current. This was all stuff that we learned over time. And let's think back on

our two pools connected by a hose analogy. If we had two pools that were on level ground and we equated that with a conductive pathway in an electrical circuit. Let's just say it's a it's a copper wire connecting two terminals. Then we would describe that wires having equal amounts of potential on either side. There's not a positive and a negative terminal, they're both neutral, and in other words,

there's no difference in electrical potential. There's no difference in potential energy, there's no flow of electrical charge, and thus

no electrical current. In the analogy in which we think of one pool being at a higher elevation than the other, we would describe the corresponding electrical system as the end of the wire representing the elevator pool, elevator pool having a higher potential energy or just higher potential, and the lower end having a lower potential energy or lower potential, And we call this difference an electric potential between the

high and the low pools as the voltage. So the greater the difference between those two points in the analogy, the greater difference in an elevation would mean the greater the voltage. So if you have one that is one terminal that's extremely positively charged and one that's extremely negatively charged, you have an extreme voltage. The difference between those two. Sticking with the analogy of water, voltage is like water pressure. It's kind of how hard the electricity is being pushed

through the conductive connection between the different terminals. So if the electric potential is of great magnitude, you get more pressure. It's like a water hose shooting out water at high force, like a fire hose connected to a fire hydrant. If the electric potential isn't that great, if if the difference isn't that great, then the voltage is lower, and in our analogy, the water pressure is lower, so water would come out and kind of a lazy arc as opposed

to blasting out at full force. And it helps if we remember that opposite charges attract each other and like charges repel each other. So if there's a big difference in electrical potential between two connected points, the like charges are going to want to rush over to the opposite charges and get the heck away from the other like charges.

If you listen to my previous episode, then you heard me talk about Alessandro Volta, the man who invented the voltaic pile, which was a precursor to the modern battery. He did that back in eighteen hundred. It's from his name that we get volts and voltage, and a volt is a unit of measurement to describe the difference in

electric potential between two points. I'll get back to describing exactly how we define volts in a second, because unfortunately that definition depends upon us knowing what some of this other stuff is. First. It doesn't do you much good to give a definition if you realize that all the

other terms in that definition are undefined. Okay, So if we assume voltage is pressure water amps, Now, amps are a measure of current, or how much electrical charge is flowing through a specific point in a circuit per unit of time. So let's go back to the water analogy and change things up a bit. Imagine that we have those sets of pools we've been talking about. We have one pool at a higher elevation and one pool at a lower elevation. Now let's say that we copy that.

So now we've got to we've got two pools at high elevation, two pools at low elevation. With one of the high low sets, we connect the two pools with an ordinary garden hose, and with the other set, we connect the two with a concrete tube with a much greater diameter than the garden hose, more water will be able to flow through a given point, Let's say it's the midpoint of the concrete tube per unit of time than through the midpoint of the garden hose in that

same unit of time. The concrete tube has a greater capacity, The tube can hold more volume, and thus we get more water coming out per unit of time than we would observe with the hose. Well, with electrical circuits, we described the same idea with amps. Amps tell us how much electrical charge passes a given point in a circuit per unit of time. So voltage is the pressure and amps or current is the amount of charge. Multiply those two together and you get what's now. Moving back to Franklin,

we'll get back to Watson a second. He thought of electricity as a positive flow, that the direction of current was in the direction of an electrical field, and unfortunately we would later learn that it's the negatively charged electrons, not the positively charged protons, that really move around in a typical electric circuit. So if we follow the conventional explanation of current. The flow of current is in the

opposite direction of the flow of electrons. In a circuit with a battery, we would see movement described as the electrons going from the negative terminal of the battery through a circuit doing whatever work was part of that circuit, like lighting a lamp or something before journeying to the positive terminal of the battery. But we would describe the current in that circuit as traveling from the positive end of the battery through the circuit until it got to

the negative end. But what's more important here is not the carrier of the electric charge. It's the concept of electrical charge itself, not the movement of electrons, which again are just the carriers. Electricity ultimately is about the flow

of electric charge, positive or negative. So in our day to day use of electricity, we're talking about of the type where electrons flow through circuits, so we typically are looking at negatively charged particles moving in a conductive pathway, pushing that negative charge in the opposite direction of what we would typically call the current. But electricity isn't the movement of electrons, even though that's often how it is simplified. It's really the movement of the charge itself we need

to be concerned with. And if you have a flow of protons, you would still have a flow of charge, and thus you would still have electricity. So a particle accelerator, for example, the accelerates a beam of protons is creating a flow of electricity. Electrons are not even involved in that. It's the movement of positively charged particles. You're getting a movement of a positive charge that is technically electricity. So again we need to kind of divorce ourselves from the

idea of electrons and think more about electrical charge. The electrons happen to be the carriers of that, but that's as far as their importance is concerned from this perspective. They get important again once we start talking about quantum effects, but that's a discussion for a different time. So I say all this in order to exonerate Benjamin Franklin a

little bit. I give him a hard time, but it's largely because the way we harness electricity for most of the stuff we do means that we have an apparent contradiction in the sense of the flow of electrons and the flow of current. But to be fair, our lay understanding of electricity is based on a lot of misconceptions. In general, we focus a bit too much on those carrier particles and not the larger concept of electric charge. Another misconception has to do with the wires in a circuit.

I'll explain more after we take a short break. Okay, so let's get another misconception out of the way. Many people take that analogy of water pipes or hoses or tubes as being a literal one to one with electricity, and thus the wires in a circuit they think of as empty conduits through which electrons can travel like. They're imagining the wires as being these hollow tubes, and electrons

are just shooting down the tubes. They're coming out of the battery or out of the wall if you have something plugged in, shooting down the tube and getting to the other end. But if we think about that for even a moment, we realize that cannot possibly be true, because the wires themselves are made up of atoms, and atoms have electrons. So it's more like a tube or a hose or whatever that is already packed with water before you connected to the two pools. And even that

is not a perfect analogy. So let's talk about conductivity. Some types of atoms have electrons in their outer energy levels that are more lucy goosey. If you have a single copper atom, then you've got a nucleus that contains twenty nine protons and thirty five neutrons. Now we're talking about a basic neutral copper atom, meaning the positive and negative charges cancel each other out. So we have twenty nine electrons paired up with that nucleus that has twenty

nine protons. Electrons orbit the nucleus, but not in the same way that planets orbit stars or moons orbit planets. The electrons inhabit various orbitals, which in turn are in what we would call subshells, which are in shells around the nucleus. Now I'm not going to dive into all of that, because I'm sure most of you have a general handle on it. But the twenty nine electrons and copper add up to a point where one electron is

left orbiting the outermost shell. There's no room for that last electron in any of the lower shells closer to the nucleus, so this electron is pushed out to the next lowest energy shell, and it's they're all by its lonesome. That means that electron is easier to push around than the ones that are locked in packed closer to the nucleus.

So when you lump a bunch of copper atoms together, like that was just one copper atom, right, If we put a bunch of copper atoms together and we've got something like a copper wire that's made up of trillions of these atoms, you end up with a mass of copper atoms that all have these single free electrons, and you can almost think of those electrons as moving around the mass of copper atoms as opposed to being tied

down to a single copper nucleus. If you then connect the wire into a circuit in which you have a battery or some sort of generator or something, that battery or generator acts as a pump that can push those free electrons around. The negative terminal has a charge that pushes against those electrons because remember like charge repels like, so each of those electrons has its own negative charge

and pushes further down the path of the circuit. And since since the other end of the battery has a positive terminal, the negative charges get attracted to the positive side. It's not that electrons are shooting out of a battery down a pipe, doing some work, and then going into the other end of the battery. Is that the charge of the battery is pushing through this pathway and the electrons carry that charge. Likewise, the electrons are not moving at the speed of light. I know I've been guilty

of saying that before too, but that's not correct. The electrons move much more slowly than the speed of light. You could even say the charge moves more slowly than that. But within the circuit, the charge is moving throughout all parts of the circuit at the same time. It's not like one electron moves and then the next one and then the next one. It's like they're all moving together in in lock step. And so you have this entire circuit that all goes into motion at the same time.

And to us that means that we see practically instantaneous results. So if you flip on a light switch to an incandescent lamp, the light comes on immediately, it doesn't delay. That's why. It's because all of those electrons in the circuit are moving at the same time, so the effect is that it's moving at the speed of light. But in reality, what's actually happening is the electrons as a whole in this circuit are all moving together. So a battery connected to a circuit is not really a source

of electrons. It's a source of energy. It's providing the energy or the pressure to move that charge through the circuit. It's the source of voltage. An electrochemical reaction in the battery acts as an internal circuit to create this voltage, which manifests as a difference in electrical potential shold between

the positive and the negative terminals on the battery. Connecting that battery to a circuit is what gives the energy necessary to move this charge through the circuit and to do whatever work it is you need to do along the way, such as lighting up that light bulb. Within a battery, you've got an exothermic reaction that is working against the electric field. So it's kind of like pushing a boulder uphill. The force of gravity in that case would be working against you and you have to overcome it.

You have to exert effort to work against the force of gravity to push the boulder up the hill. A battery likewise is exerting effort in the form of this exothermic reaction. The external circuit, that is, the larger circuit that you connect to the battery, is following the natural

energy field. It isn't working uphill. It's got a high potential terminal and a low potential terminal, and the current flows according to the direct and of high to low as Franklin described, The actual electrons are going in the opposite direction. As the charge moves through the circuit, it encounters energy transforming devices. These would be things like light bulbs, heating elements, pretty much, you know, anything that you would

connect to a circuit. At those points, some of the electrical potential energy of the charge gets transformed into some other form of energy, light, heat, whatever. The loss of electrical potential in a circuit after passing through one of these elements is often called a voltage drop. Now going to the water analogy again, imagine that you have a pool of water. You have a ramp set up above that pool of water, like maybe it's like a water slide, and the water slide is not turned on, uh, and

it's smacked aub in the middle of the pool. You're also in the middle of the pool, and you grab a bucket and you fill it up with water from the pool. You lift the bucket up over your head to the top of the slide, and you tip the bucket out so that the water hits the slide, goes down the slide off the other end back into the pool. Well, you've just taken water from an area of low potential energy in this case, kinetic energy, and you moved it

using work to an area of high potential energy. The water then flows down the ramp till it gets the end. And maybe you even put a water wheel at the base of this slide, so when the water hits the water wheel, it actually provides the work necessary to turn the wheel and you get the wheel turning. You have this display of mechanical energy from the water. So that's kind of what you would see with a battery in a circuit. In this example, you are fulfilling the same

purpose of a battery. You are lifting some water using work from an area of low potential to an area of high potential. The battery is doing this but with electrical potential, not with you know, physical stuff. Okay, now it's time to define an actual vault. I alluded to this in the first segment of this podcast. We've got voltage, which is this difference in electrical potential between two points.

And we understand that creating a conductive path between an area of high electrical potential and one of low electrical potential allows for the flow of current. So how do we define a vault. Well, there's actually a couple of ways. One is to say that one volt is equivalent to the energy consumption of one jewel per electric charge of one coolomb. But that just raises more questions, doesn't it.

The dictionary definition of a jewel is a unit of work or energy equal to the work done by a force of one Newton acting through a distance of one meter, and a Newton is a unit of force. One Newton is the force required to impart an acceleration of one meter per second per second to a mass of one kim okay, So a jewel is the energy required to produce a Newton's worth of force through a distance of

one meter. What's a coulomb. A coulomb is a unit of electrical charge equal to the quantity of a current of one ampier in one second. It's named after Charles Augustine de Coulomb, who in the late seventeen hundreds developed a description of the force that interacts between electrical charges.

He had determined that like charges repel each other and that opposite charges attract each other, and his work led to further discoveries that the force of this repulsion or attraction is proportional to the products of the electrical charges and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between those two charges. And this is what we now call Coulomb's law and another way to define volt That was

one way, but here's the other one. It's equivalent to one amp of current times the resistance of one ohm. And oh my goodness, looks like we're gonna have yet another thing to talk about here. And while you might hear that resistance is useless, I'm here to tell you it's pretty important in the case of circuitry. So I talked about how copper is a good conductor because of those free electrons, right well, the single electrons in the outermost energy shell around a copper nucleus make copper a

great conductor of electricity. We describe this quality of copper as conductance, or the ease with which electrical current may pass through that substance. The opposite quality is called electrical resistance, the opposition of a material to the flow of current through it, And typically we talk about that with materials that have fewer or no free electrons, making it more difficult for electricity to pass through. Even copper has some

electrical resistance. It's not a perfect conductor, at least not under conditions you and I would typically experience. Resistance is kind of like the concept of friction, right. We know that an object in motion tends to stay in motion. So if you were to roll a ball across a perfectly level surface, and both the ball and that surface were made of some magical material that ignored friction, there's no friction in this system, then that ball would roll

forever unless it ran into something. But friction means that some of the energy of that rolling ball in a normal setting where we're using you know, a real ball and a real level surface, friction means that some of that energy gets converted into heat, and that means that there's less energy for that ball to continue to roll, and eventually the ball will slow down and stop rolling.

Electrical resistance is kind of similar to that typically we see energy and electrical circuits convert into other forms like heat, which dissipate into the environment at large. Now I mentioned that one volt is equal to one amp of current running through one ohm of resistance. Resistance then is the ratio of voltage across whatever material we're talking about, divided

by the current going through that material. So resistance is voltage divided by current, and conductance is the current running through an object divided by the voltage across it, So it's the reciprocal of resistance. Now we measure resistance in oms and ohm is the amount of electrical resistance between two points on a conductor when there's a constant potential difference of one volt applied to those points, producing one current or one amp here of current. I should say

electrical resistance depends on a lot of stuff. Depends upon the atoms of the material itself, So the resistance of a copper wire will be different than the resistance of say a gold wire that's of the same thickness or gauge. It also depends upon the thickness or gauge of a wire, so a thicker copper cable will have less resistance than a thin copper wire. And it depends upon stuff like temperature.

If you were to super cool some conductors, like get it near absolute zero, they would then have them perform as super conductors, which is material that can conduct current with no conversion into other types of energy like heat. You get no loss. In other words, likewise, there are some materials that have tightly packed electrons that resist this flow of current. I mentioned those earlier. We would call these insulators. So materials that insulate don't allow for the

conduct conductivity of electricity or they severely restricted. Alright, so quick rundown voltage is akin to pressure. It's the difference in electrical potential between two points. Amperage is a measurement of current and explains how much charge passes a given point in a circuit within a unit of time. Ohms are a measure of resistance, or how much material resists

the flow of charge through it. Now to define a what, so a what is the amount of electrical work performed when one ampere of current flows across one volt of electrical potential difference? So what is a unit of power? And this is where I find another stumbling block for myself, because in language we often swap out words that have similar meanings in other contexts, but very specific meanings in physics,

and it causes confusion for people like me. So words like work, energy, power, and force they get thrown around a lot, and it's easy to forget what they all mean within the context of physics, and they mean different things. A force is something that causes an object to change its velocity in some way. Velocity is a vector quantity that means it has both a magnitude and a direction.

So in our example of rolling a ball on a flat surface, that ball would tend to stay in motion at a constant speed and remain on a straight path on its own unless some other force were to act upon that ball and either speed it up or slow it down, or make it change its direction, or some combination of these things. That would be an external force acting upon this system. You can think of energy as the capacity for doing work, and it comes in lots

of different forms. A moving object has kinetic energy. For example, work is a type of energy, specifically the amount of energy used to apply some force on some object over some distance. Now, as I mentioned earlier, the jewel is a unit of energy defined as being equal to the work done by a force of one newton across one meter in the direction of action of that force. We would describe the energy needed to lift a kilogram and move it a meter in a specific direction as work.

Power is a description of the amount of energy used per unit of time. So if you expend twelve jewels of energy to do some sort of work, Let's say it's to to move a wheelbarrow a few feet. Uh, let's say that's that's how much energy you spent total moving that wheelbarrow. This is a totally hypothetical example. So you spent twelve jewels moving it. If you expended that energy those twelve jewels over the course of three seconds,

your average output of power would be for watts. As you take the twelve jewels that you took to actually do this thing and the three seconds the amount of time it took you to do it, and you divide the twelve by the three, that's where you get the four watts. When we come back, I'll talk a little bit more about volts, amps, watts and how to read your power bill. But first let's take another quick break. I mentioned that one what is the same as one

jewel of energy expended in one second. So what does it mean if your power bill is broken down by kill a watt hours. Well, it's kind of simple, and that a kill a watt hour is what it sounds like. It's the equivalent to one kill a watt of power sustained over the course of an hour of time. Since and this is a unit of energy, right, Since since one what is equivalent to a jewel per second? A kill a lot hour is equal to three point six mega jewels. Wait, how did I get that number? Well,

jewel per two. Right, there are sixty seconds in a minute and sixty minutes in an hour, so we multiply sixty by sixty to get us three thousand, six hundred that's how many seconds there are in an hour. Then we multiply that by one thousand because we have one thousand watts because it's at kill a lot, So one thousand watts times three thousand, six hundred seconds we get three point six million. And remember a what is equivalent

to one jewel per second? That means a jewel is equal to what's times seconds, So one thousand watts per hour three pint six mega jewels are equal. We use kill a wat hours to describe the amount of energy used to do work. So let's say you've got an appliance at home that requires a kill a lot in order for it to do its work. So it's gonna have a kill a lot of work in order to do whatever it's doing. Let's say it's an air conditioner.

You gotta kill a what air conditioner. If you run that appliance for one hour, it consumes one kilowatt hour worth of energy to do that work. If you have a ten what device plugged in, it would take that device one hundred hours for it to use one kilowatt hour of energy. Power companies usually sell electrical energy in kilowatt hours, and it gets more confusing than that. Some

regions have varying prices on kilowatt hours. Sometimes that price depends upon the time of day or the rate of consumption. So we're just going to leave it at that. But that's why we're talking about kilowatt hours as units, and you're really thinking about this is the amount of energy that is representative of doing a killer what worth of work within an hour. I haven't talked about direct current and alternating current yet, so I guess I should do that.

A bit direct current is what you would find in a circuit connected to a battery. The direction of current is always going to stay the same because the positive and negative terminals on the battery are fixed. They can't swamp. The positive terminal is always positive. The negative terminal is always a drag guy. He's just always saying bad things about everybody. Alternating current switches the terminals in a circuit, and thus the direction of current switches back and forth,

and it does this in cycles per second. So in Europe the standard is fifty times per second fifty cycles. In the United States it's sixty cycles per second. The reason we use alternating current is largely because of how it's pretty easy to adjust voltages for the purposes of power distribution. This is where things like resistance and voltage and ambridge really become important. So let's say you've got a power plant and that power plant produces one million

watts of power. But then you have to distribute that power to the people who need it and the places that need it. So how do you do that. Well, you could send one million amps at an electrical potential difference of one volt, because remember the watts are it's really volts times amps. So if you have a million amps, then your voltage has to be one or you could send one amp very low current across an electrical potential difference of a million volts. One amp would only need

a very thin wire. It doesn't need much wire at all and would have very little energy loss due to heat. A million amps would need an incredibly thick cable to avoid losing too much energy to resistance or burning through the wire entirely. And it would be very tricky to come up with a method that works for both distributing electricity across vast distances and also making use of that electricity once it gets to the home. Like once you get to the home, you don't probably want a super

high current in your home. It would burn out all of your electrical appliances and probably kill you. Uh. You also don't want super low current for like super super low current, and you don't you know your voltage. You don't need super high voltage for the home. So how do you solve that problem? Well, direct current has issues with that. Alternating current, however, allows for the use of transformers, which lets you step up or step down the voltage.

Now I've talked about transformers in other episodes, so I'm not going to go through all of that right now, but they are how a power company can increase or decrease the voltage. They can increase the voltage for the purposes of transmission, where transmitting power at high voltage is more efficient less power loss. You can push it further distances and then step it down when it comes time to distribute that power to read and so you step

it up for the purposes of transmission. It gets to say a neighborhood, it goes to a different transformer that steps the voltage back down a bit, and then that transformers sends the power over to the households, where there's another step down to get it down to the standard in that house. So in the United States, that standard is one volts, all right, So really it's to make it more confusing, a pair of wires that combined offer two hundred forty volts of power, but that's because of

alternating current. Most homes have an electrical service that provides between a hundred to two hundred amps, though there are exceptions both on the low end and the high end. There's more I could go into with direct current versus alternating current, including obviously the current wars between Westinghouse and Edison. A lot of people say between Tesla and Edison, although I think that's not entirely fair, uh, And I can also talk about the equations used to describe direct current

versus alternating current. They are a bit different. But I'm going to hold off on all of that for a future episode because otherwise this episode would run way too long for me to get into that. Something else I did want to cover, however, was the difference between voltage and amperage when it comes to safety risks. Now we've established that these two factors are different. Voltage and ambridge

described different things. Voltage again, is that pressure and ambridge is the amount of charge passing through a given point in a given amount of time. But which is more dangerous? Which one do you need to be more aware of? Well, you've probably seen signs that say things like danger high voltage when there's a fire at the disco or a fire at the taco bell. Make sure you let me know if you actually get that reference. It might just be making a joke for my own sake at that point.

But is voltage the really dangerous factor here. Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. Let's say you encounter a current running at high voltage but very low ambridge, so there's a lot of pressure in the line, but

not much electrical charge being moved through per second. That would be less dangerous than a current a high current with a relatively low voltage, So a high ambridge low voltage would be more dangerous than a high voltage low ambridge, And it doesn't take much amperage to do some damage to us. When you get a zapp from an electrostatic charge, chances are the brief current would have measured in the one to ten milla amp range, So a mill hamp

is one of an amp. Less than that you probably would even feel it, and one to ten you would feel the little snap of an electric spark, but you wouldn't have any muscular convulsion at that strength of ambridge. Electro Static charges are are very high voltage but very low ambridge. At about ten milli amps of current, you would experience muscular contractions. If you grabbed hold of a wire that had ten or more milla amps of current running through that wire, you'd probably find yourself unable to

let go. As you got shocked, your muscles would clamp down. At about twenty milla amps of current, you'd find it difficult to breathe. If the current were around one hundred miller amps, it would probably be fatal as it would interfere with the operation of your heart. And it might seem counterintuitive, but above two hundred milli amps you could actually survive the experience. So between one and two hundred

is the real danger spot. Your heart would go into uncoordinated contractions and you would experience was called ventricular fibrillation, and that in fact can be fatal. Above two hundred mill amps, your heart would actually seize up. It would affect to really act as if it had been clamped down, so it wouldn't go into ventricular fibrillation, it wouldn't have those uncontrolled contractions. It would just stop. And if someone were able to shut down the current going through you

fast enough, you could probably be revived. After that, you could be given resuscitation and recover. You would probably have some nasty burn injuries to deal with, and you would probably also have some injuries and and damaged to your internal organs. I have more to say about that in an episode about the electric chair, where we did it to people on purpose and continue to in some cases. So that's the key there is that you really want to be aware of the amperage and voltage is still important.

It's not like it's pleasant to get zapped by a low amperage high voltage electric current, but it's not as dangerous as the the amperage would be. And it's those tiny little changes an amperage that will get you. So be aware. Now I'll have to do more episodes to talk about stuff like diodes, triodes, capacitors, and other components in circuitry. I've covered them in previous episodes, but I feel like taking this approach and really breaking it down.

Getting to the basics builds upon an understanding that we can then rest more complicated subjects upon. Right, you can start once you start understanding how these circuit pathways work and what they do, and the behavior of electrical charge and why that's important. Then you can build on that and include things like quantum effects and why it gets difficult when you start getting into concepts like logic gates and quantum tunneling. You can you can touch on those subjects.

You can also understand what a logic gate is, and you can understand how to build circuits to do actual, you know, tasks like how you can create a circuit to do calculations. But it all depends upon this basic understanding of what is going on with these electrical charges. And I find that if we start there we can build a better understanding of everything else as we go along. But that's gonna be for a later episode. Our next one is going to be about using electricity to kill you.

I didn't. I did one on how people try to use electricity to help you, and that continues to this day to varying degrees of success in scientific rigor. And then we're gonna talk about the other extreme in our next episode, a pleasant topic to say the least, and

then after that we'll cover all sorts of stuff. I haven't decided what goes on after that one, but if you guys have suggestions for things I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, you can reach out via email The addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can reach out via social media. It's tech Stuff hs W both on Facebook and on Twitter, and go on over to our website. That's tech stuff podcast dot com. You'll find a link to the archive of

all of our past episodes. You also find a link to our online store, where every purchase you make goes to help the show and we greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.