Electricity

Recently I read "Each year, about 77 million lightning bolts strike the United states, and world wide, occur about 60 times per second." Lightning can affect nitrogen oxides, and ozone in the atmosphere. Lightning strikes are known to magnetize materials in the earth, and probably created some of what we call Lodestones. Lightning has been shown to actually create gamma rays. Lightning is awesome, beautiful, frightening, and dangerous... and it is Nature's grandest exhibition of electricity. Electricity is real.

Basic Electricity is a three fold phenomena. Electricity is generally thought of as the flow of electrons in wiring large and small, called amperage. Most all people know it is associated with less understood voltage that can sometimes zap you if touched. Rounding this out is resistance.

The relationship of the three basics of electricity... is when there is one coulomb of electrons passing a point in one second with a voltage differential of potential of one volt, and there is one ohm of resistance... this is one ampere of electron current. A coulomb is about 6.24150962915265 x 10¹⁸ electrons.

Voltage is officially called Electro-Motive Force, or EMF... and shortens to E for formulae. This electromotive force is the differential of charge between a body having an excess of electrons as compared to another body with a deficiency of electrons. If there is a low resistance the electrons will move to the atoms shy on electrons, called positive ions. If a high resistance, the flow is slowed or stopped. This electron flow relationship with resistance is a pressure phenomena. The electron has mass and exerts pressure when in motion. The medium that the electron goes through to get to the positive atoms is the resistance against the flow of electrons exerting a reverse pressure. In some of the older electrical books they defined EMF as a pressure force.

What people don't usually know is that there can be positive current flow also. Atoms that are positively charged ions due to the loss of an electrons in a run of copper wire are molecularly still held in place in the solid copper so they don't move very much. However, if positive ions are created in a liquid solution by a difference of potential, the electrons will push off from the atoms making them ions, and the positive ions will push off from the electrons and move in the opposite direction. This what happens in the electrolyte of a battery. This phenomena is also used for metal plating of other metals. This process is called electrolysis, which separates electrons from atoms, also, this process is how oxygen and hydrogen are separated from water.

You might be wondering what actually is the resistance that pushes against the flow of electrons? As electrons flow through a copper wire, for example, all the atoms of copper are generally not turned into positive ion atoms. You might have only a micro-amp of current flow in a number 10 AWG, whereas that size wire is usually run for code situations allowing up to 30 amperes. And since the electricity comes out the other end at the same speed in each scenario it would appear that it isn't required that all the atoms become ions. The electrons move along bumping into atoms and get grabbed by some ions to fill in the upper most energy level, while some electrons are being kicked out of other atoms. The flow is not like water flowing in an empty hose, it is more like some water flowing into a lake and some flowing out the other side equally, but, way over on the other side. There is a lot of atomic activity to pass through to get through to the end. This actually requires work. In the electrical world work is volts times amps, and for general terms this is called watts, as the units that measure electrical Power. Power as watts will convert to all other units of work as ergs, joules, horsepower, foot pounds, and etc. If too many amperes are conducting through a wire, the wire will get hot. This is heat being dissipated into the atmosphere, and is work being done... in this case a waste of work, and will end up as problems.

A special note here for people that might have wondered... If your household resistance portable heater is 1500 watts__ it does not matter if it runs on 120 volts or 240 volts... the electric company will charge you the same amount. Volts and amps work inversely proportional. This means when the voltage goes up twice as much, the current will go down twice as much. 1500 watts divided by 120 volts is 12.5 amps. 1500 watts divided by 240 volts is 6.25 amps. There is no magic! You only have 1500 watts of primarily infrared wave length heat. 1500 watts is about 2 horsepower. (1hp = 746w) And, when a salesman tries to blow smoke... and tell you his heater is so great because it will do 5118 BTUs (British Thermal Units), don't get excited... divide that by 3.41214 to get you what it is equal in watts... yeah, you guessed it__ 1500watts. You can blow it (convection), you can focus it (radiation) it, or you can physically contact it, (conduction)__ but it is still 1500 watts of heat. The only gain for higher voltage equipment, is the wires can be smaller.

Electricity as amperes going through electrical circuitry also works better when things are cool. Since there is always motion, as molecular and atomic activity going on in matter, when it is cooled down, it loses heat, and this equates to less activity in general... thus electrons going through a wire conductor have less pedestrian traffic to bump into... i.e. less resistance. It is also known, that when electricity is alternating at a higher frequency, it will do what is called a Skin Effect, which means it will run along the outer surface of a wire more than inside the wire. In Radar equipment, it is common that the conductor to the antenna is a wave guide where the electricity runs down the inner silver plated surface of a rectangle tubing.

I have covered, and went into some basic electrical items, in my own way, above to fit with the theme agenda of these, my writings herein. Basic electricity is as I said, three fold...and, as I like to put it:

Electronics is part of electromagnetic. Electronics has electricity throughout its systems, but has been sort of segregated from electrical, much like modern physics from classical physics. The subject of Electronics is an enjoyment for me since I was born in the early stages of this field and have lived while major changes happened in electronics. Early on, anything called electronic consisted of equipment that had one or more vacuum tubes in it. Then along came transistors, integrated circuits, large scale integration, miniaturization, film circuitry, and etc... Also electronics at first could pretty well all be analyzed down to circuits of rectification, oscillation, and amplification. Sometimes with modulation and radiation. All electrical was generally thought of as analog. (And, in the purest and strictest sense... I believe everything is still analog) Analog for electrical and electronics means there is a smooth flow or transition of any change of state. Such as current flow increasing or decreasing, even when it is alternating. Sometimes there may be quick changes, but as long as there is any duration required to have an action happen, there are no perfectly instantaneous 90 degree turns.

Then along came digital technology. I like to tell people, "I got into digital before it was fashionable." I was schooled in vacuum tube digital electronic cryptology in 1962. I even worked on equipment that was comprised of hand wound memory core technology. Digital made it possible to do things that were, if not impossible... would have been damn difficult early on. Now, it is possible to sample one half cycle of a electromagnetic wave, with thousands of samples of amplitude. This information or data can very quickly be converted to digital data of a string of zeros and ones, ups and downs, or on and offs. And, almost instantaneously it can be re-created at a different location. Music is stored digitally, and is a quality very close to the live performance. I can personally tell you music from a CD disk is one whole heck of a lot better that an old 45 record disk, or cassette tape.

Digital solid state technology... made computers a reality for modern civilization. A person cannot keep up and know everything electronic... but I have kept up in several areas, and keep tuned in so I can pretty well understand much of the new technology. I have been there from machine language, assembly language, basic language, higher level languages, ladder logic, state language, and a bit of HTML. I have to tell you it has been fun!

Sorry, I can really get wound up in a world of electrical... My Great Grandfather was an electrician on the first and second World's Fairs (Expositions), at Chicago and then St. Louis. My Grandfather built one of the first tuned radio frequency radio receivers. Anyway, without electricity the modern world would pretty much be as the Amish live... or as a horse and buggy civilization. There would be no radio, television, telephones, amplifiers, electric motors, combustion engines with electrical ignitions, electric lighting, refrigerators, air conditioners, electric heating, satellites, powered air planes, computers and etc...

But, even more important__ it is scientifically accepted that Light in all its frequencies is electromagnetic. And, science is leaning real strongly to the thought that all matter is electromagnetic.