Electric Circuit Experiments: Materials

Series Summary

Ever charged a potato? Sparked up a lemon? Energized a serving of Jell-O? All of these common foods make excellent conductors for electricity experiments. Electricity is the science of studying the flow of electrical currents. A popular subject for high school science fairs and demonstrations, the basic of principles of electric circuits are easy to demonstrate. Follow the steps in these videos to create fun and fascinating experiments using willing subjects from the grocery store. In this free series, a professional audio engineer demonstrates how to set up a simple oscillator and connect it to a speaker so that viewers will be able to hear the sound fruits and vegetables make in their efforts to conduct electricity. Does fire conduct electricity? Indeed it does, as demonstrated in this riveting demonstration for an electronics expert. Lorin Parker has built entire synthesizers out of turnips. Watch his mastery of fruits and vegetables in this excellent series on musical food.

Video Transcript

"All right, so first I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the equipment that I have here, and some of the equipment that you might want to have available if you're doing experimentation with chemistry, physics, and specifically electronic projects like this. First off on the electrical side of things, I have these guys right here, which are my all-purpose tools, alligator clips. You can buy them at any electronic store for about a dollar, for ten of them. They're really cheap and they allow me to make all the connections I need to, here I'm connecting them up to a battery. And I can connect them up to pennies, and I can connect them up to my circuitry. Here right now I have a circuit laid out on a breadboard. A breadboard allows me to put different elements like this resistor and a chip and capacitor all down without soldering anything. Minimal work involved and maximum output. Then I have my multimeter, this one's a bit fancier than most, but you can find these for about ten dollars, they measure basic properties of electricity such as voltage and resistance, capacitance, all kinds of things. So, that's telling me I've got two point five one volts on my battery right now. Also we've got our chemicals which today are going to be kind of mundane. We've got a potato, we've got a lemon, we've got Jell-o we've got a glass of water, and then we've got some acid. And what I'm using right now is a dilute solution of hydrochloric acid, but you could also use lemon juice, you could use vinegar. If you, if you so please, it would probably be a little bit safer for this experiment too, but I'm going to show it off with the hydrogen, hydrogen-chloride here this HCl acid, go for the strong stuff so we can see what it looks like. You'll also just need basic kitchen utensils like matches and here I have a knife. And then finally I brought a pair of battery powered speakers, because we're going to make some sound today and I want to hook these up because I want to show you what Jell-o and lemons and potatoes might sound like as circuits."