Stuff You Should Know - How Electricity Works

Episode Date: March 20, 2014

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? Josh and Chuck chase away the darkness and explain electricity in their usual electrifying way. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerry's over there. What Chuck's wearing is 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? Yeah.

I thought I lost this thing once, yeah. I think I vaguely remember that, dude, I freaked. I was like coming in the morning. You were crying. I was on the phone with Delta and everything. I was like, oh here it is. It's on my head. Your back pocket with Bruce Springsteen.

That's right. How you doing? Great. Chuck? I don't think you knew this, but I'm not sure everybody listening does. If you like, not you Chuck, but people out there, I'm speaking to you now. If you like hanging out with us on the podcast, you can hang out with us outside of the podcast too.

You know, some people are like, can you release a podcast every day? No we can't, but we do hang out on Twitter, Facebook, that kind of thing every day. Yes we do. Every day. Yeah. Our Twitter handle is S-Y-S-K podcast, facebook.com slash stuff you should know. Yeah, we're trying to get up over 100,000 likes on Facebook. So close.

So if you could like us and then just hide us if you don't like us. I don't even think you need to hide us. I think 18% of people get any given posts. It varies. Something like that though, right? Yeah. So I mean, I think you will seek us out though rather than hiding us because it's an entertaining page.

Yeah, we like to deliver the goods. Yeah, and then of course you can hang out with us on our website, stuffyoushouldknow.com, where we have blogs, slideshows, we post our podcasts there, videos. It's like the Josh and Chuck video network. Agreed. Okay, so there. All right. Now, let's talk about electricity.

Electricity. Electricity. I've had the Talking Heads song in my head. Which one? Electricity. Oh, okay. Where all he sees are little dots. I thought you were going to say once in a lifetime.

No, that's... What is that called? Electricity in a lifetime? Yeah. Yeah. I've been singing the Schoolhouse Rock electricity song over and over in my head. What about the Electric Company theme song? I haven't been singing that.

But do you remember it? Yeah, that was... I was Electric Company over Sesame Street even. 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? No, it's... In the correct answer, there's the who, by the way. What do you mean?

Stones or Beatles? Stones or Beatles? The who. Is that right? No, I mean... Yeah, I love the who. But I'm with you. I don't see the need to rank things like that.

Well, plus the Electric Company came on after Sesame Street, I think. Yeah, it skewed slightly older, I think. Sesame Street, to me, felt like, you know, six, seven, eight-year-olds. Electric companies were like eight, nine, ten, twelve. And then even younger than Sesame Street was Pinwheel, if I remember correctly. That was after your time. Okay. That was pretty cute.

But it was like Little Kids, and then Sesame Street was like Little Kids. And then Electric Company was like, cool. Yeah. And Romper Room was kind of pre-Sesame Street, even. So was that the one with Reggie Dianne and Andy? I don't remember. I just remember it was... It was very immature.

Yeah. It was very childish. I think Reggie Dianne and Andy were in that. Well at any rate, we've angered enough people now. I know. I have an intro for this one. Great. Okay, you ready?

Mm-hmm. So, 13.8 billion years ago, a little something called the Big Bang happened, and the universe was created. So says you. So says a lot of people. Yeah. You know, we weren't around, nobody saw it, but it's been detected, and it's strongly suspected by scientists that the universe is 13.8 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. Um, and under the auspices of the Big Bang theory, not the TV show, but the actual theory. Yeah. Um, at that moment, all 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 ways, like convection, conduction, radiation. Yeah. Um, and like I said, it can be stored in stuff, like 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 or lighting a light bulb, that's what energy does. It produces work, right? Yeah. Okay. Um, we 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. Yes. We wouldn't be in the computer age right now if it weren't for something called electricity. Yes. Which is basically how humans have figured out how to harness converting energy from one type of another and then transmitting it a 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 of water, kinetic energy. No, it's created. Yeah. 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. Yeah. Like we've figured out how to generate electricity to carry energy to produce work down the line. That's right. That's my answer. Which is usually mechanical energy is what's produced. Right. By machine.

Yes. So think about this. Like if you capture mechanical energy like water spinning a turbine, which we'll talk about in Niagara Falls, that's not going to do anything to light your light bulb 200 miles away. No. Not by itself. 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. That's right. Yeah. It's pretty simple. Actually, it seems complicated, but it's not. No.

It's just electrons moving around. Yeah. Let's talk about electrons, man. Let's talk about the atom. 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. Right. But it doesn't mean that they weren't playing around with it. No. And getting zapped because they're messing with static electricity. That's right, which we'll explain all that later, too. But there was one dude called Thales of Miletus.

He is a philosopher in Greece. And in 600 BC, he is thought to have been the first dude to mess around with electrostatics, static electricity, by rubbing amber with fur, and he noticed that dust and feathers and things were attracted to it. He didn't know what the heck was going on, but he knew something was up. Right. And the amber plays a pretty big role. It's actually amber, the Latin or, I'm sorry, is it Greek?

Greek word for amber is electron. Yeah, with a K. Yeah. That was like their little... Makes the book way heavy metal. Yeah. But that's... So like our word electricity is derived from the Greek word for amber from that first experiment

with static electricity. 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 Miletus was, and he was the first person to say it's electric when he saw these forces at work. With an exclamation point and his finger in the air. I'm pleased to see it.

Yeah. And we should probably differentiate, like static... 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, and that was the first experiments carried out. Then there's other types of current electricity, like lightning.

But at this time, when these people are messing with static electricity or saying it's electric for the first time, the concept of electricity was that it was fluid. Well, it was fluid. He was on the right track, so something is flowing, but they thought it was literally a fluid, which in those days was called a humor, and he said it leaves what he called then an effluvium, 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. No, they weren't dummies because even Ben Franklin thought it was a fluid. It was the prevailing idea or concept of electricity, and Ben Franklin and a couple of his contemporaries, including a guy named Thomas Francois de la Bard, were studying electricity big time, and it was when they really investigated lightning that our understanding of current electricity started to take shape. Yeah, the old story of Ben Franklin flying his kite may or may not have happened. There were some people that didn't happen now.

If he didn't do it, other people did. There were guys who died carrying out that experiment, but it was definitely carried out. I don't know if Ben Franklin did or not. 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, but it's a great story either way. Yeah, and I think he at least proposed it, the experiment.

Well, 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, so he's a smart guy. Very smart. He's a polymath. 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. 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 cancel one another out or push one another away. Yeah, he basically said you can now calculate this because of my handy-dandy little law. Yeah, and with a boom. He said boom. Not bang. Okay. That came earlier. Later on, a guy named J.J. Thompson in 1897 said at a science conference, hey, I found

something smaller than the atom, and everyone said, silly man, atoms are invisible. It even means invisible. You liar. And he said no, I promise, there's something smaller, it's got a negative charge, and I'm going to call it a corpuscle. No, he didn't. Yeah, it's Latin for small bodies, and then I think, I don't know who later said, let's change it to electron.

Yeah, that sounds way cooler. But the discovery of the electron was basically the birth of what we know as electricity today. The understanding of the electron is what it's all about. And would you say like 1897? 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 case. Stud.

Basically, everybody's like Ben Franklin, electricity, hand in hand. Really it's Michael Faraday, who's British, who really came to lay the foundation for electrifying the world. He created the first dynamo, which is a generator, which we'll talk about. First electric motor? Yeah. He got electricity, and he explained it to other people very well. Can you even fathom how smart these people were to be that in the dark and figuring all

this subatomic stuff out back then? Hats off. Top hats off to these guys. Last chance to brush that off. I'm back on. I have trouble understanding it now, when it's explained through kids for science websites. I know. We're not inventing this, figuring this stuff out for the first time.

Right, exactly. And it's a pretty dangerous field to try to figure out blind, too, you know? Yeah, I mean, more than one scientist got a shock from a laden jar. Oh yeah. And you can make those. Did you make those in science class? No. Yeah, you can make those.

Well, we should say a laden jar is a very primitive capacitor. You use a metal rod in a jar that's sunk into some water, and it can store a charge. Yeah. And 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. But again, he did make the proposal. It's whether or not he carried it out is a true question.

All right, I guess now we can get to Adams. Finally. Adams are very tiny, and they make up molecules, and molecules make up everything you see. Yeah, Adams are the building block of matter. That's right. And Adam, remember when I was talking about nature loves homeostasis? Oh man, does it. You've got a balance that nature always seeks.

Tries to achieve it. Same with Adams, or Adams are no exception, I should say. Within an atom, you have 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. That's right.

You have an equal number of protons to electrons. You have a neutral atom. 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, some stuff falls out of balance easier than other stuff.

Well, yeah. The electrons, sometimes they're super tightly bound to the atom, and they don't want to leave the house. That's right. 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. They go on Rumspringer.

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. Yeah. 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 very well. 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 corpuscle idea, J.J. was his name. Yeah, J.J.

J.J. Corpuscle. I think it was 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. And we'll talk about that right after this message. Attention Bachelor Nation. He's back.

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Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Is that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia

starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck. Yes. You're making electrons loose, which is ultimately the basis of producing electricity.

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 balloons 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 charges attract, it sticks to your sweater. Right. And that's static electricity.

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 doorknob after you've shuffled with your feet in socks over carpet, when you touch that doorknob, you're forming that connection and all of a sudden the balance is achieved once more and the electrons flow. Like you're literally a conductor of electricity in that moment.

Right. So with current electricity, those electrons move. They move along a conductive material, say like copper wire or something like that. That's a hot one. Right. And that's how you produce an electrical current, right? Okay. But let's talk about generators and turbines and all that awesome stuff.

It sounds like you need to generate that electricity with a generator. Right. I think that's what generators are called, why they're called that. Yeah. It's funny just how basic some of these things are, like you say, a computer. Right. But you just, you've heard it so many times, you take it for granted, it loses its meaning. Exactly.

It's like looking at a word too frequently. Yeah. I think a lot of these words are like that. Like a generator or a... Corpuscle. Or a, what's it called, when you stop down the electricity, which we'll get to. Transformer. Yeah.

It transforms something. Right. But you say them so much, you're like, what's a transformer do? Right. You know? 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. Yes. In the case of generators. And if you want to listen to two shows, lightning and magnetism, before this one, it might help you understand electricity a little bit more. All right. So just go listen to those. We'll wait.

We'll do that right now. We'll 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, conductive material. You can knock the electrons loose, basically, using a magnet. Yeah. It's like what happens when you attract a paperclip to a magnet, it's just the transfer

of electrons. Right. Jumping around. And you create a flow by flipping the polarity. And you can do this by rotating metal, right? Yeah. 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.

And you are knocking the electrons loose in those coils. And the way that you spin the coils very quickly is by hooking the coils to, say, a shaft. We kind of did this backwards. Let's start at the beginning. You want to? Okay. Okay. Good Niagara Falls.

Okay. Attention, Bachelor Nation. He's back. The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand-new Tell All podcast. The most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny.

We'll push the envelope. But I promise you this, we have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all. And now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward and letting everybody hear from me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out.

I have not spoken publicly for two years about this and I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day. Truly, every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Back in 1895. George 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. Yeah. Nikola Tesla one. Yeah. The DC War between Tesla and Addison. Yeah.

Good episode. Kill shocking animals to death. Yeah. It's pretty awful. What a jerk. But in 1895, George Westinghouse set up a hydroelectric power plant along the Niagara Falls. And what he did was he had a means of 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, which is actual energy, and have that movement spin a turbine, a propeller or a fan. 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. Right. The gristmill is.

Yeah. In this case, it's capturing that energy 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 changed course. And at the end of that shaft, which is now spinning 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. Yeah. 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. Right. 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. And these are all just different methods, whether it's solar or steam or nuclear.

I almost said it, which is weird, because I definitely don't say it that way. Well, you were very excited. 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. And all it is is you're using that stored energy or that kinetic energy, like over here, to create electricity so that you can transfer it into work down the line. That's right.

It's so cool. Yeah. 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. Yeah. If you don't get something. It's a great place to go visit, or these kids' websites, because they break it down like super simply.

Right, because kids are dumb. But in our article, it 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, a power line. And that whole, like using water as an analogy for electricity fits very well. 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 an electromotive force. It's the same with water. Like you have water pressure that forces the water down the line, right? And with electricity, you have a force that moves electricity in its voltage. Like you said, measured in volts.

And the electrical current is measured in amps. And the amps represent the total number of electrons flowing through any one point of a circuit in every second. And there's a lot of them. And if you have voltage and you add that to current, which is amps, you get power, which is watts. Right. And so...

I think it's multiplied by it. Oh, really? Yeah. It is. Okay. I wasn't even thinking of it as a math formula. 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, which we'll get to later. Yeah. And I know it sounds a little confusing with volts, amps, and watts, but they are all different. Like if you said, you know, that guy was shocked and you had 120 volts coursing through his body, that's not true at all, because the volt is the force that amps.

Right. He's got amps coursing through his body, but you'd be a huge geek to point that out to someone. Someone said that. And a good rule of thumb is the higher the volts, the more dangerous the shock, which is why in America, most outlets and homes are 120 volts. Where if you touch it, you're going to feel it, but it's probably not going to kill you. Yeah, and the United States is 120, but it's different in other countries.

Right. Which is why like a European appliance can't be plugged into an American appliance because you've got to get those adapters. 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 one another to create watts, which is power. You also, there's another factor to electrical currents. And that is resistance.

Oh yeah, we didn't talk about that. We acted like it was all either an insulator or a conductor, but you can be a resistor. Well, I mean, everything has a certain level of resistance. Yeah, but if you're an official resistor, that means current moves, it just doesn't move like as fast as it might in metal or not at all as in wood. Yeah. Or glass is another good resistor insulator and so is rubber. 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, try to get a lot of water through a very small pipe, it's still not going to come out very high or 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 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. Yeah. And resistance is measured in ohms. Right. OHM. Should we talk about circuits? Yeah.

Are we there? I think so. So all this is well and good. 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 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 circuit is called a circuit breaker. Like if you break that circuit by turning the switch off, or if the wire like snaps or something, it's going to, no more electrons are going to be flowing. Right. Because there's the, 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. The 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 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. They want to leave the negative side to go achieve balance on the positive side and ultimately make whatever circuit it's traveling neutral. Yeah. 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 a load. Yeah.

It could be a light bulb or whatever. Whatever mechanical energy you're trying to create is your load. 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 up to produce light.

That's how a light bulb works. Yeah. You can also recharge batteries, which go in and force electrons back into the negative position so that the batteries recharge and those electrons are ready to flow again once you connect the circuit. Yeah. There's also appliances that use resistors to produce heat like a hairdryer or a toaster. There's all sorts of stuff you can do to connect into 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. You're plugging a load onto an electrical circuit and exploiting the flow of electrons. Yeah. And I kind of misspoke a minute ago when I said it's creating the mechanical energy. You need a motor to actually do that. So 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. It's pretty cool. It's very cool. It's like those little guns you used to get at the circus when you were a kid. Yeah. I love those. So it's packed with those magnets around the edge and in the middle, you've got your

core, which is like an iron wire and it's wrapped around 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 that's where you get your mechanical energy. Right. And an electric motor is probably the best example of how you're converting energy from one form to another 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 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. Core puzzles. There's one 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?

Yeah. If you look at a plug, sometimes you'll see three prongs and the third prong, the one on the bottom, seems different from the other ones, it's round and that is actually a grounding wire. Yeah. Very important. It does. 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 buildup that 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 prevent this, they connect the appliance through either that third prong in 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. You're actually transferring that residual electric energy to the ground, which is basically an infinite reservoir for a charged dispersal. To earth. Yeah. 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 10 feet.

Or if you look at every house you're going to see near the meter, the electrical meter, you're going to see probably a copper rod driven into the ground and that's your house's ground. 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 going to 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 comes from. Very important stuff. Yeah.

And 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 home immediately. But they do need that kind of juice in order to transfer like hundreds of miles away from the power plant. 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.

Less resistance. Less resistance. Which means you lose less. And then once 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, 120 volts. Yeah. Making it. 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 toaster strudel being worn. Your hot pocket with tainted meats. Wow. Did you hear about that? Yeah.

This meat thing with Ikea the last couple of years, it wasn't just Ikea, but they were definitely called out maybe most strongly for it. I think the hot pockets too, they called it unsound meat, which is just a word that sounds weird in front of meat. Yeah. Unsound is not. You don't want to go near it. Unsound, unclean.

It's biblical. All right. So now I think we even though we've covered it in the Tesla podcast, we do need to go over ACDC a little bit. Seriously, go listen to that podcast. That's a great one. Bring it up a second. Best Australian band of all time.

They were good. Yeah. Far good. David. Are they still around? Yeah, man. David Bowie played a pretty mean Tesla. No.

I'm not talking about Tesla. I'm talking about ACDC. Oh, okay. Yeah. Tesla's all right. Sure. And they're not around. That's why I was really confused for a second.

I was more confused about that than I was by any aspect of electricity. I'm like, yeah, man. Of course they're around. Yeah. They're all Australian. Yeah. No. ACDC is great.

And they're still around, huh? Yeah. I think they're putting an album together right now. Good for them. I'll bet it sounds exactly like all the rest. It's still rocks. Blues-based rock. In velour or velvet.

Yes. 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. Yeah. And- And he was alleged to have helped botch the first electrocution by electric chair

by a state. Oh, yeah. I don't remember the details of that, but it's definitely in our episode on- Exploded the guy. Yeah. He was a real jerk, remember? Yeah. And I think we remembered, I remember talking about there should be a movie, too, about

that battle. Yeah. I can't believe there's not. It sounds super nerdy, but it would actually be interesting. It go over well these days. Agreed. 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 direction. From negative to positive. Yeah. It does not alternate. 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 neutrals so that there's no pole. Good vibes. Yeah. Or the very least, so-so vibes. Yeah.

True. But not negative vibes. No. And then you have alternating current or AC, which means the current reverses 60 times per second here in the US, 50 times per second in Europe. So it's just reversing back and forth, alternating that current, and I guess, so who won out in the end, Tesla? On a large scale.

Well, yeah. I mean, that's what power generation does. Yeah, but Edison has his batteries, I guess, that he could throw at Tesla. Which are pretty important, too. But yeah, I think we kind of came out in the same way on that episode. Yeah. Tesla won. They both kind of won.

Yeah. But Tesla was the cooler dude. Tesla died penniless in New York in the 1940s, and Edison died of rich fat guy. He died of consumption and gout. No, it's been 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 120 volts.

You got to remember that one, two, it's important. 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 10 amps. So you multiply that 10 times 120, because that's your voltage, and you have got 1200 watts of heat. Or 1.2 kilowatts.

Yes. Because that's how the power company is going to measure it. Right. Because they're dealing big chunks. And if you leave that heater on for an hour, you just use 1.2 kilowatt hours, which is how you're billed. Yes. And if they charge you a dime per kilowatt hour, it's going to cost you 12 cents an

hour to run that space heater. Right. Pretty simple. Yes. And neat. And that's why when you go to buy an appliance, you should look at that little tag that says how many kilowatt hours you're going to be burning. That's right.

The lower, the better. So electricity, huh? You got anything else? No. Don't play around with it. No. Don't. Yes.

Always wear rubber sold shoes. Because rubber is an insulator. It is. Why? Because it hangs on to its electrons, the atoms that make up rubber. It's just that simple. If you want to know more about electricity, you can type that word in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.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. I'm going to call this a rare birthday shout out. Hey, guys. My name is Pearl, and I just wanted 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 12 years. And many of our conversations begin by commenting on the podcast.

For example, we could not stop laughing at your 1920s voice toward the end of the Underground Tunnels episode. We laughed over and over. That is a good voice. I think she's talking about this one. See? That one. Electricity.

Tesla. Edison. Killing animals. All right. That was for you, Molly. And Pearl. 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 26th birthday is April 9th, and I think it would be a totally awesome birthday gift if you would send her a shout out. During listener mail, I would be forever in your debt. Thanks for doing the podcast. I'm a middle school teacher who always listens during my prep periods. And so happy birthday, Molly. Happy 26th.

That should be close. Yeah. Happy birthday. To April 9th. That was very nice of us, Chuck. And thank you, Pearl Webb, in Chicago, and your friendship means a lot to us. Your friendship with one another. Yeah.

And then conversely through us all together in their car. Nice. Yeah. You can get some sort of shout out, sometimes Chuck, Danes too, he's very nice. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastatdiscovery.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

I'm Munga Shatikular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. We find in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes, because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

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