Electricity an Enigma

Electricity is an enigma. It can power motors, cook meals, produce moving pictureson a TV screen, wake us up in the morning or calculate the cube root of 1.8704 tothe eighth place of decimal. Using it, one can not only to talk to a person severalthousand kilometers away but also control rockets on a mission to a distant planet.It is produced not only from a electric power station using the energy from a water fall or coal or a nuclear reaction, but also by just rubbing a comb on your dry hairsor inserting two metallic wires into a lemon. It is responsible for all our musclemovements or sensory perceptions. Indeed its presence as well its absence can beshocking. Its study is also an important component of any physics curriculum. Everystudent of science knows that an electric current is a flow of electrons, but still manyquestions related to it remain perplexing. Let us begin with the following:

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Electric current is a flow of electrons, why is it not stopped when the wire is pinched as water can be stopped by pinching the pipe?

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Where does the electricity go after it is being used up by any device ?

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When a copper wire conducts electricity, what happens inside the wire ?

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A bulb is connected to the electric supply by a wire of length 50 km or more and current is switched on; after how much time will the bulb glow and why?

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Why is there a disturbance in a radio receiver when one switches on an electricappliance nearby?

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What is the basic difference between the two terminals of a power supply?

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Is it possible to convert electricity into electromagnetic waves for transmissionand reconvert it back into electricity for use?

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If an electric locomotive makes contact with only one overhead wire, then whydo other electric equipment use two wires for current supply?

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Why is electricity transmitted across cities and towns at very high voltage?

An electric signal is transmitted through a metallic wire at a speed almostequal to the speed of light, i.e. about 300,000 km per second. This means that thetime interval between switching on power and its action at a distance of 50 km. isabout 0.00016 sec. Does that mean that electrons inside an electric wire move at a

speed almost equal to (but less than) the speed of light? No electrons do not andcannot move at the speed of light. Than how does the electric current travel so fast?Let us analyze what happens when a copper wire conducts electricity. Acopper wire, as we all know, is made up of a regular array of copper atoms, which inturn are composed of protons, neutrons and electrons. In this regular array, alsocalled a “lattice” most of the electrons of copper atoms are limited to the vicinity of the respective atoms, except a few which are relatively free to move about in thelattice like the molecules in a gas. These electrons, (in case of copper, two electrons per atom in the lattice) move about in random directions, at speeds ranging from afew meters to few thousand meters per second. Over a period of time there is no perceptible motion of electrons in any particular direction. However when a metallicconductor e.g. a copper wire is connected (or brought close) to a source of electric power, say the negative terminal of a battery, the electric field, due to electronsaccumulated at the terminal of the battery on the electrons in the wire, changes. As aresult the force exerted on the electrons in the copper wire moves them awayfrom(or closer to) the terminal and their drift velocities change. The magnitude of this change is in the range of a few millimeters to a few micrometers per second. Aslong as there is an electric field and the wire is in contact with the terminal, electronsflow, provided the electrons can leave the wire. In this way an electric current isgenerated.It is important to distinguish between the speed at which electrons moveand the speed which electric signals move. Once electrons start moving at one endof the wire, their electric field influences the electrons farther down the wire at thespeed of light. The electric current is thus very similar to the case when we turn on atap for the water supply to a distant place. If the pipe is full of water (a wire isalways full of electrons), then water comes out of the far end almost instantaneouslyas you turn on the faucet, even though the water at the faucet does not have time totravel to the far end of the pipe. But although this analogy is often cited to explainor understand electric current through a metallic wire, like all analogies it has itslimitations. Water and pipe are distinct independent entities but electrons and ametallic wire are not, and electrons influence each other by a much stronger electricfield around them then water molecules, which have a much weaker gravitationalfield. This explains why unlike water in a pipe pinching a wire cannot stop anelectric current.In our above example the individual electrons at the switch do not have totravel all the way to the bulb before it lights up, and so is the case with most

electrical appliances. But this is not always so. For example if we switch on a TVset, the sound comes on immediately, but picture does not appear for a few seconds.This is because the sound is produced through a solid-state circuit where theelectron flow is by the above mechanism. In the TV picture tube on the other hand,electrons emitted from a hot filament have to move up to the screen. It takes sometime for the filament to heat up before it emits electrons, hence the delay.Electricity is thus a movement of electrons from one terminal of the power source to the other. The energy that flows through this close circuit depends on thetotal electrical resistance put into the circuit. In practice the electrical devicesconnected between the two terminal constitute the predominant resistance betweenthe two terminals, the resistance of the connecting wires is negligible in comparison.Thus the electrical devices dissipate almost all the electrical energy drawn from thesupply. The connecting wires in the form of heat dissipate the residual energy. Incase of transmission of electric power there are two options either to transmit highelectric current at low voltage or low electric current at high voltage. As the currentthrough a wire increases so does the heating caused by the electric flow. If we wereto transmit very high currents of electricity at normal potential difference the wiresof normal diameters would heat up to ver high temperatures and may melt. Hence totransmit very high currents one would need very thick wires ( the resistance of awire decreases with an increase in its diameter), which is obviously not economical.Electric power is therefore transmitted at high voltage requiring low currents.The electric potential difference (voltage) measures the ‘pressure’ that causesthe current to flow, while the electric current (amperage) measures the amount of current flow. Every time exactly 6,242,000,000,000,000,000 electrons go past agiven point of wire in one second, one ampere of current has passed. The twomeasurements, voltage and amperage, offer widely different clues to the behavior of electric currents. It is easily possible, for example, for a great number of electrons toflow through a wire at very low pressure, much as River Yamuna flows past Delhi asa voluminous but sluggish body of water. Such a current is said to be of highamperage and low voltage. On the other hand a current may be just the opposite--low amperage and high voltage, behaving much like a small Himalayan rivulet that plunges down at top speed down a precipice. A welding machine may use as low as15 volts potential difference and as high as 1,200 ampere current. A static electricitymachine generates sparks with discharges at high voltage and low amperage.Lightening combines both high current and voltage; a single stroke of lightening may be rated at 100 million volts and 160,000 amperes.