FACTORALY - E78 ELECTRICITY

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

These days, we can't imagine a world without electricity, but it hasn't been that long since we tamed this mighty beast. It's always been around in the form of lightning and static, but what are its origins, and where have we taken it? As always, click on the pics for extra amp-le facts (see what we did there?) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello Bruce. Hi Simon. How are you today? I'm feeling very good. Glad to hear that. How are you? Not too shabby. Very good, very good. And hello to everyone who may or may not happen to be listening to us at this current moment. If you're not listening to us, no, no, no, no, no. Yes, you're lost. So this is Factorily. What is Factorily, Simon? Factorily is a wondrous repository of fun facts and useful information. You say useful. Well well it's interesting at least well today's a bit more interesting than some of them have been oh today's gonna be great yeah

because we normally try and take a like a dull subject or a little subject and make it interesting and bigger yes this is rather the opposite this this has had to be whittled down somewhat. Yes, I don't envy whoever's editing this, and I think it's probably you. That's me. Thanks. It's not going to have fun because we're going to have a lot to say about electricity. Indeed, that is what we are talking about today, electricity. I can't remember if I've ever told you this, Bruce, in all of our long years together um i i studied electronics at university in a totally previous life before doing what i do now and and any of my previous blow me down

with a feather i had no idea did you not oh there you go um i have a higher national diploma in micro electronic engineering wow so there is a huge risk of me getting incredibly geeky on this one oh don't worry i will i will rein you in thank you very much act as a capacitor oh wonderful how good of you um yes i i sort of started doing the research and uh i i was writing stuff from memory around what i was actually researching i thought no no no one needs to hear all of that. Get out your old notes from college. Yeah, exactly. So in a nutshell, what is electricity? It's, there are pluses and minuses. Yes, there are positives and negatives. There are. So electricity is a charge. Yes.

Essentially. It's the difference between a positively charged atom and a negatively charged atom. Yes. That's kind of the potential for energy between those two things, is what electricity is. Very well put. Yes. The electrons that float around the nucleus of an atom positive ones have a tendency to want to flow into the space of the negative ones so if you rub a bit of material metal whatever it might be and you pull some of the positive electrons off um then they will automatically try to zip across to the next nearest space where they can fit. So these particles zip along from one atom of whatever the material is to another, to another, to another,

and create this energetic flow. This is getting far too technical. So clearly no one invented electricity. it's a natural phenomenon that exists yes you know look at lightning that's that's a thing yes that exists yeah it it was discovered well it's always been known about you know the very first caveman who saw a lightning strike across the sky knew that it was there just didn't necessarily know what it was yes but um lots of people have have sort of made different discoveries over the years you know no one single person discovered it but i found um

i found a fact that i didn't know which was that static electricity was first discovered and and sort of explained and quantified in 600 bc oh way earlier than than i thought it would have been and it was drum roll please the greeks yay the greeks uh a greek chap called thales or talus um he was rubbing a piece of amber uh with a silk cloth and he noticed this static charge another thing i didn't know amber is naturally quite static if you rub a piece of amber much like rubbing a balloon on your hair you get a dinosaur no you don't unless it's got a mosquito inside it in which case okay things unfold um but yeah you rub a piece of amber with a bit of cloth and it becomes ever so slightly static and it can attract really light objects to it like bits of straw or feathers or things like that.

And that was first discovered in 600 BC. I know what you're going to tell me next. What's the Greek for amber? So, the Greek word for amber is electron. Yay! And the word electricity sort of first came into being in this context. So the Latin word electricus was first written down in 1600 to describe Amber's attractive properties. Not that it's pretty, but, you know, the attractiveness of it. Then in the 1600s, Francis Bacon was the first person to write down the word electric, which was a noun.

It was an object that had this static attractive property and electric yes and that led to electricity yada yada yada that was francis hawksby was it indeed i didn't come across his name yeah first used the word electricity all right okay but yeah it's all very much based around these little static charges not really knowing what they did and what they had the potential to do so going back to the origin you mentioned lightning i did i mean that's kind of like the the proto electricity i guess yes what do you know about lightning? It's bright. Yes. It's often accompanied by a roll of thunder. Yes.

And it blooming hurts if it hits you. So the way lightning works is it's about, you were talking about sort of positive electrons sort of like rubbing off things. Yes. And when clouds sort of go past each other, sometimes some of the electrons rub off. Yes, that's right. And so those positives want to get back with some negatives, and they'll jump any distance to do that.

And sometimes the negatives are in the air in another cloud, and sometimes they're on the ground. Yeah, exactly. So those positive electrons want to join up yeah so they they jump it's exactly that same principle of rubbing a balloon on your hair or if you're walking around on a carpet in your socks it builds up that charge then you go and touch something that's negatively charged and a little tiny spark of electricity shoots and hits your finger and you go ouch so balloons are negatively charged when they're sticking to a wall so it's it's it's the rubber

so different different materials react differently when you rub them so some of them will become positively some will become negatively charged so it depends on the material all right okay yeah but but i mean lightning is um it is a lot more powerful than a balloon. Yes, I don't think a balloon would stand a chance against a lightning bolt. No, I mean, a lightning bolt is five times hotter than the sun. No way. Yeah, it's about 30,000 degrees Celsius.

Goodness me, that's quite warm, isn't it? No wonder it sets fire to stuff. Yeah, well, it has the power of one lightning strike has the power of about 250 tons of tnt really yeah wow and as we all know a lightning strike contains roughly 1.21 gigawatts or in voltage terms 300 million volts. So a bolt of lightning is roughly the equivalent of 200 million AA batteries. I mean, it's no wonder people got fascinated. I mean, as time went on, people were really fascinated with lightning. Absolutely, yeah.

You get the $100 bill guy. Franklin. Ben Franklin, yes. I'm very proud of myself for remembering that it's $100, actually. Oh, yeah, I the $100 bill guy. Franklin. Ben Franklin. Yes. Yeah. I'm very proud of myself remembering that it's $100, actually. Oh, yeah. I didn't even know that. So great.

Well done. Ben Franklin. Yeah. I mean, you know, sending a key up on a kite. Yes. But I mean, other people did that too. Before we leave Franklin, do you know why he did that? For a bet?

No. know why he did that for a bet no so he he was actually trying to find a way of preventing lightning strikes burning down buildings okay um and he was doing all sorts of different experiments he was sort of trying to work out if there was a way to channel the lightning away from the buildings um so he shot this key up on a kite and found that the lightning hit the the key thus leading him to realize that electricity is attracted to metal metal is a good conductor yeah and he invented the lightning rod so every every large building public building church has a metal rod attached to the roof which then goes down the side of the building down to the ground so that if lightning strikes it it gets channeled

away from the structure of the building and down the road down into the earth so that's lightning strikes it, it gets channeled away from the structure of the building and down the road. And down into the earth. So that's all he was doing. It was a fire prevention scheme. It wasn't that he was looking to go out and discover electricity. That was just sort of a byproduct.

I mean, you know, he was using metal. Yes. You can use other things. You can use cats. Can you? You can, especially if you're Percy Shelley. Oh, that's going to need some explanation, I think. Come on.

So he did the same thing. He found this local tomcat. Right. And he tied it to a kite in a thunderstorm and sent it up into the thunderstorm. Oh, little cat. To see what would happen when it was struck by lightning. Basically, it's the effect of electricity on a living body yeah I would imagine

it went pop it didn't strike it but it got very close and basically the electricity really I mean A the height

and B the electricity probably screwed up the cat no end but I think he tried it a couple of times I think one of the cats did die

but all in the name of science I read somewhere that as well as metal water is a really good conductor um and that's why bodies be it human or animal um get electric shocks so easily so if you touch an electric plug or or the whole static thing you've already discussed it's only because we're so full of water that draws the electricity to us rather than to anything else electric baths sorry so there were people in the 18th and 19th centuries who did some very weird

things with electricity right one of which was an electric bath, which was a very gentle DC charge into a bath of water, which was supposed to be invigorating. I've never heard the like. I mean, these 1700s, basically electricity was used to cure all sorts of stuff. It's called vital electricity.

It's basically static or captured electricity. So it would be put into Leiden jars. Okay. Which is basically like a battery. In fact, Benjamin Franklin put a number of Leiden jars together, a battery of Leiden jars, if you will. Yes. And hence came up with the name battery.

Electricity has been used to cure all sorts of stuff for years and years and years. Has it? Let's talk about the Romans. Yeah, go go on then they haven't made an appearance yet what they came up with this idea of electrotherapy no way that was them that was them really um for sort of headaches and gout and things like that yeah um they they there's a type of electric eel called a torpedo fish right so they would make sure that you've got an electric shock called a torpedo fish. Right. So they would make sure that you got an electric shock from a torpedo fish, which would cure your headache or your gout. It's a bit like, you know, like a TENS machine?

Well, yes, that's valid, actually, yeah. I use a TENS machine for my dodgy back, and it is actually quite soothing. Yes. Yeah, they are quite good. And then sort of, obviously, that was the Romans, but much later on in the 1700s, when electricity was this amazing new, a bit like the internet.

It's like, oh, we can do everything. Yeah. Electricity can do everything. Yeah. So doctors, and mostly quacks, used it for all sorts of stuff. Yeah. fever deafness blindness headaches we've mentioned sore throat epilepsy tapeworms kidney stones hemorrhoids it could cure everything wow as well as curing ailments um i suppose electricity can cure the biggest ailment of all, i.e. death, by bringing monsters to life.

You mentioned Percy Shelley. Yes. Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein. Yes. Other than being a great big moral story of the age, it sort of portrayed electricity as being this big frightening scary thing you you sort of mentioned it it being called vigor and and and giving life and and so on and so on um dr frankenstein brought his monster to life with electricity because it was seen as this this life-giving energizing thing but hadn't you seen somebody doing that electric thing with frog's

legs where you sort of put a small electric charge into a frog's leg and it moves and it moves yeah i think that's what she'd seen and she kind of extrapolated that into humans yes that's right yeah yeah but you know by and large people were scared of it you know when electricity first came into the home see our previous episode on plugs um when we started getting electric lights and electric appliances and you know people were really scared about the idea of this dangerous stuff flowing through the walls of their house they they thought it might give them all kinds of you know illnesses even today you have people who live in areas where there are huge electric pylons overhead yeah saying that it gives them migraines and illnesses and all sorts of things.

So it used to be a very, very scary thing to the common person. I mentioned Francis Hawksby before. Yes, you did. And he was one of these people who discovered that if you got a glass ball and you applied static electricity, so like rub it with a lamb's fleece or something like that, you get a glow, like a purple glow

from inside it. And so he would demonstrate this at the Royal Society and people go, oh that's amazing. And they would imagine that it's all sorts of spirits living within the glass. But actually, this idea, in 1700, this glass ball that that um

francis hawksby used is the predecessor of neon oh really yeah so that's how neon works okay so the electricity charges the gas inside the the glass tube or whatever glass tube and lights it up yeah oh brilliant oh so neon lighting had its origins in 1700. 1700. That's preposterously long ago. I can't quite accept that. Shall we talk about the current wars? Current wars.

You know, the ones that go... ACDC. Yes.D.C. Yes. That was beautiful. Well done. So, Tesla versus Edison. Yes. Tesla went from Eastern Europe to go and work for Edison.

Did he? I didn't know that. He did. And Edison was working with DC. Yes. Direct current. Yes. But the trouble with direct current is it fades. It doesn't go very far.

So you have to have booster stations, which basically are just making more DC electricity. Right, OK. And he said to Tesla, I'll give you $50,000 if you can make my DC electricity go further. Right. You can make my DC electricity go further. So Nikola Tesla went, that's a challenge, but I'll work day and night and work for nearly a year and dedicate my life to making this work. And then he did. He made DC go a bit further. Right. And he went to Edison and said, done it.

Can I have my 50 grand, please? And Edison said, can't you take a joke? Oh, really? He said, you obviously don't understand the American sense of humor. It was just a joke. I didn't really mean it. Oh, great.

I mean, Edison was not a nice person. So Edison got backing from quite big people like J.P. Morgan. Tesla got backing from Westinghouse. And I think Westinghouse said that they would pay him two and a half cents for every volt that they generated. And it got to a point where Tesla was basically making so much money from Westinghouse that they were going bust. And Westinghouse said, look, Nicola, we've got this real problem with the contract that we made. We're very happy to keep the contract, but can we just give it a break?

Can we dial it down a bit? Tesla tore the contract up. I mean, it was worth billions in today's money. And he just said, it's more important to me that AC electricity is promoted. And I want you to continue. So I'm going to just stop taking money. I mean, he died broke. No way.

Yeah. But isn't that amazing? Yeah, Nikola Tesla did all of that. And yet the only thing that the everyday folk really know about him, isn't that the name of the electric car? Yes. And that's all he's got to show for it. Yeah.

Wow. Edison comes along, screws a light bulb into the ceiling, and he's the most famous the electric car? Yes. And that's all he's got to show for it? Yeah. Wow. Edison comes along, screws a light bulb into the ceiling, and he's the most famous electrician of all time. Except he didn't invent the light bulb. No, he didn't. Somebody else did. He didn't even invent the thing. He just popularized it.

The one thing that Tesla did invent is the internet. Hang on a minute. So he foresaw messages, business messages being given in one country and being received simultaneously in another country. No. And he put patterns together basically for radio at the same time as marconi oh really was putting patents together for for radio and edison saw this and decided to talk to somebody very high up at the patent office who them already having granted um tesla the the license for radio declined it revoked and revoked it and basically said oh no it's marconi oh edison boo yes not a nice man

so james watt after whom the watt the unit of electrical power is named um had pretty much nothing to do with electricity at all okay um so james watt invented the steam engine and his steam engine was eventually used in conjunction with edison's electrical generator to produce sort of large-scale electricity that could be pumped into homes and offices and so on and because he used his his steam engine to to run the uh they decided to use the name watt as the the unit of power what um so yeah i'd always sort of assumed oh yeah james watt it's named after him he must have invented electricity but no but what's it to do with resistance and voltage aren't they okay so go on go back to your textbook very briefly i i love this analogy the flow of electricity is very similar in in a way to the

flow of water in a pipe so you've got a certain amount of water going into the pipe so that the larger the the amount of pressure the build-up of water that can be equated to voltage in electricity the rate of flow how fast the water flows through the pipe, can be related to current, amps. And the size of the pipe, how big the diameter of the pipe and therefore how much it restricts the flow of water, can be equated to resistance, which is measured in ohms. And there are all sorts of fun calculations where you can derive the one from the other from the other. And then you get watts, which I still don't fully understand, even after all my years of training. You then get kilowatt hours and all sorts of other stuff. Oh, I know kilowatt hours because I used to have a two-bar electric fire.

So I know what that is. Okay, go on then. What's that? So that's if you've got one bar of your electric fire on for an hour. Yes. And it's a kilowatt bar. Yes. That's one kilowatt hour that it uses of electricity. Right. One kilowatt per hour is a kilowatt hour.

Yes. Right, okay. And if you've got the two bars on, then it's twice as expensive. And that's kind of about the quantity, how much electricity you're using. Yes. the quantity how much electricity you're using yes but i've always found that quite complicated because you can't you can't sort of like hold a a volume of electricity you can't look at it and say oh yes i've used a liter of electricity or i've used a kilo of well you used to be able to you know i talked about the leiden jars you used to be able to see exactly you used to be able to

keep electricity in a jar yeah that's a good point good point, yeah. Or batteries, in fact. If you look at your phone and you see how many bars it's got, that's a measure of how much electricity is in your phone, even down to percentages. Yes, that's true. Batteries are interesting. I did a little look about how exactly batteries work. They're kind of these magical little things, you know, the sort of the typical AA Duracell or Energizer or whatever. Yeah.

It's just this little blob of whateverness and it powers stuff. Yes. Without ever really knowing how it works. And essentially it contains two different types of metal and some acid. And when the acid sort of starts to dissolve and corrode the metal, that makes these electrons fall off and go to the other piece of metal. So one of them becomes negative, the other becomes positive. You might have zinc and copper, which end up with opposite charges.

And then the electricity just flows from one to the other. But just one of those is called a cell, as opposed to a battery. As you said earlier, a battery means a group of. So technically we're using the word batteries in the wrong way. A AA battery is actually a cell. When you put them together in a device. Is it a Duracell? Oh, that's nice. Oh, that's good.

It's a durable cell. Yeah. Makes sense. There you go. Now you know why it's called Duracell? Oh, that's nice. Oh, that's good. It's a durable cell. Yeah. Makes sense. There you go. Now you know why it's called Duracell. Very good. So that's battery acid in a battery. You can also do that.

This is a sort of a classic old school experiment. You can also do that with the acid from a lemon. Yes. If you take those two pieces of metal, stick them into either side of a lemon, then the acid has the same effect. It starts rubbing the electrons off those bits of metal, you connect the two by a wire, and you get a teeny tiny piddly little amount of charge. You can light a bulb. Apparently so. I think you have to have several lemons, don't you?

I've never squeezed that many lemons. Have you not? No. You haven't lived, Bruce. I do know that we're electric. Our brains are basically firing electricity around your brain all the time. That's how you think. That's how you're listening to this, is electric charges going from bits of your brain. Yeah. And in fact, your brain produces enough electricity in a day to power a 25-watt light bulb. No way. Yeah.

Really? Yeah. That's brilliant. There are stunningly interesting things about electricity. And generating it is something that we do quite a lot now. We do, don't we? In all sorts of ways. Yeah. But we've been doing it for a long time.

I was amazed to discover that solar power, solar electricity, has been around since 1839. No, it hasn't. It has. No way. Photovoltaic panels were invented in 1839. Good grief. And then you've got hydroelectricity, 1878. In Scotland.

I've been there. It's in a mountain. It's fantastic. Okay. It's really good. And then you've got windmills. You know those modern sort of windmills that you see that generate electricity? Wind turbines, yeah.

1888? No. The first one? It's ridiculous. Just after coal-powered power stations in 1882. Yeah. And they were powering things like street lighting. Okay.

Have you ever rocked down to... Electric Avenue. In Brixton? I've rocked past it. Have you? Yeah. So that was the very first uh market street in the world to have electric light yes i seem to remember reading that um when do you reckon and where do you reckon the first place in the world was that had electric street lights

uh i really want to say victorian london but that's because I'm a Londoner. You're not far off. Oh, go on. It was 1881. Yes. Godalming. Godalming? Yes. In Surrey? In Surrey. It was the first place to have...

It was the first place to have electric streetlights. Why? Why Godalming? I've been there. What's so special about that? I tried to look it up, why they chose Godalming, but I don't know. However, if you know, then you can write to us at hello at factorily.com.

Yes, you can. You can go onto our Facebook page at Factorily. You can shout at us really loudly. Yes. If you bump into us in the street, you can say, Oi, I'm from Godalming, I know. Yes. It's over to you, Factoralites. Which country do you reckon uses the most electricity?

I would imagine it would be the one that has the most people in it. Yes. So probably China? Maybe. Or America? Because they're quite big. They've got quite a few people there, haven't they? There's a country that uses 23% more electricity than the whole of america really it's a very small country no go on then iceland

what iceland uses 23 percent more electricity than the usa on what probably staying warm well i suppose so yeah except they have geothermal. So basically they also sell electricity to other countries. Yeah, yeah. So because of their geothermal power stations, they not only have masses of hot water and steam, they can power electric generators. So there are people in Iceland in the middle of winter with their windows open because they've got the heating on.

Oh, my goodness. Because it doesn't cost them anything. It's just spare. Yeah. Wow. So, Simon, I don't really ask this, but are there any records about electricity? I've never heard you ask me that before. There are.

There are many and they are various. Some are interesting. Some are boring. Let's just stick to the interesting ones shall we yeah yeah i'll skip over the the biggest power station and the longest electrical cable and all that kind of stuff because it's just boring the most techie one i'll do is this the most powerful electric current was generated in 1996 at a laboratory in the United States. I don't know how, but they created an electrical current of 2 million amps per square meter. Given that the current that flows through your house is roughly 100 to 200 amps, this was 2 million amps. That sounds ouchy. It does sound ouchy.

I mentioned lemon batteries earlier on. There's a Guinness World Record for the largest fruit-based battery, which used 2,923 lemons by a gentleman called Saif al-Islam in the UK at the Royal Society of Chemistry in Manchester. This was in 2021. He put all of these lemons together in the method previously described

and managed to generate a whopping 0.84 milliamps and a power of 1.94 watts it was a bit better than a double a battery but not by a lot um the largest number of people generating electricity on a bike okay uh for one bike or several they shared i took it in turns uh there was a bike one of these bikes that you ride and it generates electricity 4739 people took it in turns to ride this bike over the course of a week uh this was achieved by um chevrolet in canada uh and they generated just over 13 kilowatt hours which was was just about enough to power the games park at the Chevrolet booth at Pan Am in Canada. OK.

Fun. Yeah, it doesn't seem like it's worth all the effort. Not really. That, I think, is all we have to say on electricity. Yes, I think so. I think all of my electric facts have been discharged. Yes, I've run out of current. Well, thank you ever so much for listening.

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