🔌 What

In this section, you will learn:

💡 How to draw parallels between water (which you can see) and electricity (which you cannot see)

💡 The vocabulary used when measuring amounts of electricity

💡 What different “amounts” of electricity could feel like

How can we visualize electricity when we can’t see it happening in action?  Think about how we cannot see the wind itself but we’re able to see its effects (leaves rustling, dirt clouds, wind chimes etc…)

A great way to think of electricity is to compare it to how water flows.  We’ll use some animations that show how water behaves in situations you have seen in daily life and compare those behaviors to electricity.

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The first question with water is usually, “How much do you have?”  We measure the amount of water in units of volume such as: 

• Cups
• Pints
• Liters
• Gallons

Gallons are probably the standard baseline measurement for liquids in America, so let’s use that. And to get a gallon, we use a bucket to pour exactly the right amount of water in to get a measured amount.

🌟 Did you know that there are about 120 septillion molecules of water in a gallon?  Sure you did! 

We can measure the amount of electricity as well, but instead of gallons, we measure electricity in coulombs.  The singular is pronounced “KOO-laam.”  If you have a one-coulomb “bucket” of electricity, it holds about 6.24 quintillion electrons.  Which is a lot!  (And if you’re burning with curiosity, a quintillion has 18 zeros following it; a septillion has 24 zeros following it.  Now you’re ready for Jeopardy!)  And to help with your next Jeopardy question, the symbol for coulombs is the capital letter “C.”

That’s a good beginning!  We can now measure the most basic aspect of electricity:  “volume”.  (Of course, electrons don’t take up actual space the way water does, but conceptually, it’s the same thing.)  We have a “bucket” to hold electricity, and if we pour 6.24 quintillion electrons into it, we’ll have one coulomb.

But how much is that in real-life terms?

• The smallest static spark you can see or feel is about 50 billionths of a coulomb. [1]
• A really bad shock on a dry winter day (that you can actually hear and makes you snap your hand back) is about 10 times worse, or about 500 billionths of a coulomb.
• A taser delivers about 2% of a coulomb every second, and that hurts a LOT. [2]
• So if you built up a full coulomb of static electricity and discharged it in one second, that would be about 50 times worse than getting tasered.  Which would hurt VERY badly.  Fortunately, this never happens, so you can relax about petting the cat in winter.

Final answer:  if you release it quickly enough (that is, if you “dump it out of the bucket” very fast), one coulomb of electricity is a LOT to a human being.

🌟 KEY CONCEPTS

• Electric charge is a measure of the accumulation of negatively-charged subatomic particles called electrons.
• Coulombs are the units of measurement for electric charge.
• C is the abbreviation for coulombs.