amasci.com/viselect/viselect.html is the website for this device. Complete info, more tricks, DIY build your own 1988 version if desired. Needed: a version with green LEDs (neg charge carriers) which move backwards. Or perhaps an "electrolytic" version with red and green LEDS moving opposite past each other. The originals were part of my set of physics exhibit-devices designed for Museum of Science, Boston.
Depends on the capacitor. Some are cylindrical while others are rectangular bricks. A capacitor for a commercial neon light system resembles be a heavy rectangular brick-like capacitor, whereas a capacitor for a mobile audio system would resemble the cylindrical shape, similar to the size of a small fire extinguisher. Not 100% on this, but perhaps A/C capacitors are rectangular whereas D/C capacitors are cylindrical in shape?
First need to build a 1Hz, 3-phase signal generator. But even a simple square-wave version would be instructional. (Heh, or train three students to move three genecons back and forth, in choreographed sequence one-two-three-one-two-three.)
Nobody ever gives reference to the origin. It's right here: amasci.com/viselect/viselect.html , including my original 1992 schematic and PCBs. I invented the device at Boston's Museum of Science in 1989, while working on our new Electricity exhibit. (Actually the original insight came to me in 1988 while on a trip to SF, while messing with the electricity exhibits at Frank Oppenheimer's old Exploratorium museum. Yes, The Exploratorium does sometimes spur one's physics-creativity!) When I first built ten of these as prototypes, and I got them all working at the same time, I hooked them up with four rectifiers to form a full wave bridge, with a light bulb as the load, and a Genecon to power the circuit. Eight Visible Electricity units formed a complete schematic. Then, wiggle the crank on the Genecon back and forth, and see the DC pulses appear in the light bulb circuit, AC to DC conversion. Then, add a 1-farad supercapacitor across the bulb, and the pulsed DC is filtered to become a smooth constant flow. Very cool, eh? (But first you have to be the owner of an entire bucket filled with Visible Electricity devices! Here's my original list of suggested demonstrations: amasci.com/viselect/vedemos.html If you decide to build your own devices, make sure to make some Electron Conductors as well as the usual Proton Conductors. (Electrons are green LEDs, of course.) Then, wire it so the green LEDs flow in the opposite direction. Then, whenever you hook a red segment in series with several green segments, you've formed a lead-acid battery electrolysis diagram (with battery acid full of mobile protons, as is the actual case in the real world.) When you force a current in the chain of VE devices, at one point the reds and greens are flowing together and vanishing, with positives and negatives canceling out. This represents the creation of hydrogen gas at the negative battery plate (where electrons from the metal join with protons from the acid, to produce H atoms at the electrode surface.) And at another place, the reds and greens are flowing apart, as pair-production. This represents the splitting of neutral H2O into -OH ions and protons (called +H ions.) In a lead-acid battery, the protons then flow out into the proton-filled acid, while the -OH donates electrons to the metal conductor (and releases neutral atoms of "O," forming oxygen gas bubbles.) See, when your physics-model is based on the real world, it can be changed around to create other new models, which turn out to actually exist in the real world.
Thank you. I am excited to learn this history! Do you have other inventions you would like to write about? I am always looking for articles for my column in THE PHYSICS TEACHER.
@@jameslincoln8476 BTW, see my permanent online history-article amasci.com/viselect/vistxt.html Also see another version of Visible Electricity invented independently by others, published in Physics Edu. 40(2) in 2005 (with added color-change LEDs, to indicate voltage) iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0031-9120/40/2/005/meta I never patented or published my own 1989 version, I just posted it for free on internet (and, sold them through Arbor Scientific.) Other inventions? Most of my inventions are physics-concepts and lecture-demos. I've been secretly distributing "physics memes" since the late 1980s, letting them spread without attribution. They spread all over the place, and then after about ten years I typically see them end up as articles in TPT (e.g. my thick copper tube with falling supermagnet, and green magnetic film on the outside surface.) Compiled list is at amasci.com/news.html#memes (A good example is my mechanical maglev device, high speed copper rollers which lift a supermagnet, amasci.com/maglev/magroll.html and ruclips.net/video/glCNP6qH_Dc/видео.html Another is: giant lightning in pure argon at one atmosphere pressure. We can make a "plasma globe," but with your own hand acting as the central electrode, and ten-inch plasma streamers spewing from your bare skin. At 760 Torr, pure argon or helium (or mixtures) will produce enormously long lightning, using just a small handheld Tesla coil or other similar HV power supply. Also see this mystery: 3D stabilization of levitated magnet-sphere, a sort of Paul Trap effect...ruclips.net/video/67RU241Az1Q/видео.html invented by a hobbyist on my private forum, definitely NOT been in TPT, AJP, etc.) Meme-spreading. For example, the Bernoulli/Newton Airfoil Misconception, that was started by Klaus Weltner in AJP journal in 1990, but I made it my personal goal to spread it all over the entire education community (via PHYS-L and TAP-L email lists,) and all over USENET, commercial pilot forums, RC aircraft forums, etc. After years of this, and with the unexpected arrival of www, the controversy finally caught fire, ended up "in the big time:" NY Times and various science magazines, TPT etc. (Finally it appeared in Scientific American just this year.) But there's another aspect to Airfoil Misconception which *nobody* has yet explored: all airplane wings are propulsion devices; examples of reaction-motors, and reaction motors completely violate Bernoulli's Law/equations, because they perform real work on gas parcels. Bernoulli cannot tolerate reaction motors or fluid propulsion devices. Therefore, airfoils can only be analyzed by making the wingspan infinitely wide, or putting wings into "ground effect" flight. In that case, an instant-force appears between the wing and Earth, no energy is pumped into the gas-parcels, and wingtip vortices can be ignored. (In that case the wing has become a kind of venturi, as with any ground-effect vehicle.) Therefore, every single airfoil diagram you've ever seen ...is wrong. It's wrong because it cannot explain how airplanes actually work. It can only be used to explain exotic ground-effect coasting flight, or used to compare various airfoil designs (when various airfoil designs are employed in ground-effect coasting flight!) Similarly, airfoils and Bernoulli cannot be used to explain helicopters, or sailboats, or ship-propellers or swimming fish or hovering bumblebees. (Put simply, all airplanes are basically the same as helicopters and hovering bumblebees. Their lifting-force is based on reaction against local gas, NOT reaction against a distant ground surface. They work by vortex-shedding, and are not based on forces involving Bernoulli's constant-energy parcels.) But confusingly, a typical aircraft is translating sideways fast, so its vertical plume of constrained downwash becomes smeared out diagonally, unlike with helicopters and hummingbirds. Yet this sideways smearing has no effect upon momentum-conservation or vertical mass-flow. Nor can the sideways motion somehow be used to eliminate the complicated vorticity-flow which performs real work upon the gases (thus violating Bernoulli. A true explanation of airplane flight is required to avoid any mention of Bernoulli!) I suspect that THIS is why "nobody really understands wings," no matter how accurate we can make our math models. The gut-level, intuitive explanation is removed, as soon as we remove the downwards-moving shed-vortex, or as we make the wingspan be infinitely wide, and we exclusively analyze 2D flows around 2D airfoils. Airplane flight is a consequence of 3D physics, and removing one physical dimension will remove any possibility of explaining how airplanes stay up there. (Heh, airplane flight is actually based on Feynman's Reversed Lawn Sprinkler! No joke. Every wing is surrounded by a contracting sphere of onion-layers of inflowing gas, and this in-flow produces exactly zero net-force upon the wing. This little-mentioned process is part of all fluid-propulsion devices.) -- One of my very successful memes was the "Buckyballs" supermagnet-balls puzzle. I came up with that one in 2001, took it around to local toy manufacturers, but nobody was interested. The mark-up ratio for materials cost was way too small. (Also, rare earth magnets cannot be sold as toys to kids; lethal swallowing hazard.) I finally put my discovery on my high-traffic physics site in 2004 (also posting it in Usenet Newsgroup sci.physics, and on the now-ancient PHYL-L and TAP-L physics email lists.) Nobody noticed! Rats! Years later I posted multiple youtube video demonstrations of the spheres, see amasci.com/amateur/beads.html. That did it! Within months of the youtube exposure, several people had "stolen" the idea and started selling them. (That was my true goal, since I didn't want to start a company myself!) One might wonder who patented the "Buckyballs" magnets? Nobody. I forced the concept into the public domain by putting it in public in 2004, so by 2005 nobody can own the concept, and everyone can sell them. (That's why there are Neocube and Cybercube and Buckyball and Zen Magnets ...and also about twenty other separate companies selling little neodymium sphere magnets.) One secret I never developed at the time: if the little spheres are magnetized with quadrupole pattern, then they become models for carbon atoms, and will naturally assemble into diamond lattice, carbon-chain molecules (even decorated with hydrogens!), and they actually form a proper Buckminster Fullerene sphere. The dipole magnets sold at present DON'T form a proper buckyball. They do have sixty magnet-atoms, but they form squares and pentagons, not hexagons and pentagons as with carbon-60 Fullerene. The magnet-atoms need to have tetrahedral outer orbitals, for four-bond structure, like carbon. Otherwise we instead get "polymers" with sulfur's dipole-bonding structures, not the zig-zag backbones seen with all carbon chains. So, there's a new meme-product, "buckyball" sets of supermagnet spheres, but each magnetized in quadrupole pattern. That's if the Consumer Products Safety Commission doesn't continue on its quest to ban all sales of sphere-shaped rare-earth magnets. They've tried this twice, and were fought to a standstill by a famous supermagnets activist! That's an entire story in itself (including the one where the government agency forced the company to oven-toast about $20,000 supermagnet beads, sent above Curie temperature and demagnetized. It's not impossible to re-magnetize these. The "dead" ones are being sold by the kilo on eBay, for anyone wanting to experiment. ( The trick to re-magnetizing a small supermagnet is, use a soldering iron tip to heat it above Curie, then cool it down again while held next to a large, powerful neodymium magnet. Next, try to impose a quadrupole magnetization, rather than the typical dipole pattern!)
@@jameslincoln8476 Waking up after shutdown! I have loads of stuff, leftovers from my 1980s physics-exhibits career at Museum of Science, Boston. Need to figure out what actually fits TPT though. Some is listed at amasci.com/scied.html. All this was internet-only, and many oldschool physics educators from the 1990s have seen much of it via TAP-L and PHYS-L discussion groups ...but my devices never appeared in TPT, and teachers from the last ten or fifteen years may not have encountered any of it. A cool one from a few years back is the Mechanical Maglev machine, my two rotary copper pipes with a neo supermagnet floating in the cleft, see ruclips.net/video/glCNP6qH_Dc/видео.html and amasci.com/maglev/magroll.html I almost entered it in the TPT lecture-demos contest in ?1998,? but ran out of time. I think someone here at UW physics finally built a copy of the device, but that may be the only other version around. I don't know if it ever ended up in TPT. Possibility: measure repulsion force and drag, calculate the induced surface-currents, even explore skin-effect phenomena re. the variable-RPM motor. Did TPT ever have anything about my invention "Hand-Drawn Holograms" amasci.com/amateur/holo1.html, or about Human Infrared Vision amasci.com/amateur/irgoggl.html ? The first ended up on a Star Wars vinyl soundtrack record, a real-image of a 3D "TIE fighter" floating in space above the disk, rotating as it plays the music. It all came from my needing to explain hologram-physics to little kids and grandmothers (while working at MOS museum in Boston.) To really understand a topic, become a teacher. But as a result, I found that holograms are nothing like anyone thinks, and we can create Benton Rainbow holograms by scratching a plastic surface with a blunt needle! Projects I never got around to: a version of Arbor Scientific VED as a "thicker wire," with two or three LEDs abreast, but it flows at 1/2 or 1/3 the normal speed. Then, use thin-VED to depict a light bulb filament, with thick-VED as the connecting wires. Tungsten filaments heat up because the charge-carriers are flowing much faster in the thinner wire. Or, VED version with green LEDs, which runs backwards! It depicts a metal wire ...where the red-color VED instead is like a hose full of acid, full of +H ions (+H ions have another name: protons. Acids are proton-conductors, although students and even some teachers seem unaware.) THEN: to describe a simple battery, use green VED devices for the main circuit, with a short segment of red VED as the electrolyte layer. Then we can see the water molecules splitting at one joint, green electrons and red protons flowing away from that junction, then flowing back together at the other junction to form neutral hydrogen again. The main insight is that all batteries are short circuits, and the path for current is THROUGH. This combats the common misconception that batteries are a source of electricity, when in fact a battery is much like a Genecon, and is just an "electricity pump." Ah, how about VandeGraaff generator sparks, the three different kinds? We have the usual bright needle-sparks. But we can make foot-long violet fractal tree-structure sparks, by triggering a discharge with a 1cm steel ball. Also, the Winsco Corp. tabletop VDG exhibits a weird discharge that resembles a long purple sausage 2cm thick (it leaps between the sphere and the sharp corners of the square base.) Using a Morris and Lee VDG machine I was creating this third type of spark, roughly a meter long, and with branches!
I love these things. I need to get some!
amasci.com/viselect/viselect.html is the website for this device. Complete info, more tricks, DIY build your own 1988 version if desired. Needed: a version with green LEDs (neg charge carriers) which move backwards. Or perhaps an "electrolytic" version with red and green LEDS moving opposite past each other.
The originals were part of my set of physics exhibit-devices designed for Museum of Science, Boston.
Is that what a capacitor looks like?
Depends on the capacitor. Some are cylindrical while others are rectangular bricks. A capacitor for a commercial neon light system resembles be a heavy rectangular brick-like capacitor, whereas a capacitor for a mobile audio system would resemble the cylindrical shape, similar to the size of a small fire extinguisher.
Not 100% on this, but perhaps A/C capacitors are rectangular whereas D/C capacitors are cylindrical in shape?
It would be interesting to show 3 phase AC circuit using this device.
First need to build a 1Hz, 3-phase signal generator. But even a simple square-wave version would be instructional. (Heh, or train three students to move three genecons back and forth, in choreographed sequence one-two-three-one-two-three.)
Nobody ever gives reference to the origin. It's right here: amasci.com/viselect/viselect.html , including my original 1992 schematic and PCBs. I invented the device at Boston's Museum of Science in 1989, while working on our new Electricity exhibit. (Actually the original insight came to me in 1988 while on a trip to SF, while messing with the electricity exhibits at Frank Oppenheimer's old Exploratorium museum. Yes, The Exploratorium does sometimes spur one's physics-creativity!)
When I first built ten of these as prototypes, and I got them all working at the same time, I hooked them up with four rectifiers to form a full wave bridge, with a light bulb as the load, and a Genecon to power the circuit. Eight Visible Electricity units formed a complete schematic. Then, wiggle the crank on the Genecon back and forth, and see the DC pulses appear in the light bulb circuit, AC to DC conversion. Then, add a 1-farad supercapacitor across the bulb, and the pulsed DC is filtered to become a smooth constant flow. Very cool, eh? (But first you have to be the owner of an entire bucket filled with Visible Electricity devices!
Here's my original list of suggested demonstrations: amasci.com/viselect/vedemos.html
If you decide to build your own devices, make sure to make some Electron Conductors as well as the usual Proton Conductors. (Electrons are green LEDs, of course.) Then, wire it so the green LEDs flow in the opposite direction. Then, whenever you hook a red segment in series with several green segments, you've formed a lead-acid battery electrolysis diagram (with battery acid full of mobile protons, as is the actual case in the real world.) When you force a current in the chain of VE devices, at one point the reds and greens are flowing together and vanishing, with positives and negatives canceling out. This represents the creation of hydrogen gas at the negative battery plate (where electrons from the metal join with protons from the acid, to produce H atoms at the electrode surface.) And at another place, the reds and greens are flowing apart, as pair-production. This represents the splitting of neutral H2O into -OH ions and protons (called +H ions.) In a lead-acid battery, the protons then flow out into the proton-filled acid, while the -OH donates electrons to the metal conductor (and releases neutral atoms of "O," forming oxygen gas bubbles.) See, when your physics-model is based on the real world, it can be changed around to create other new models, which turn out to actually exist in the real world.
Thank you. I am excited to learn this history! Do you have other inventions you would like to write about? I am always looking for articles for my column in THE PHYSICS TEACHER.
@@jameslincoln8476 BTW, see my permanent online history-article amasci.com/viselect/vistxt.html
Also see another version of Visible Electricity invented independently by others, published in Physics Edu. 40(2) in 2005 (with added color-change LEDs, to indicate voltage) iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0031-9120/40/2/005/meta I never patented or published my own 1989 version, I just posted it for free on internet (and, sold them through Arbor Scientific.)
Other inventions? Most of my inventions are physics-concepts and lecture-demos. I've been secretly distributing "physics memes" since the late 1980s, letting them spread without attribution. They spread all over the place, and then after about ten years I typically see them end up as articles in TPT (e.g. my thick copper tube with falling supermagnet, and green magnetic film on the outside surface.) Compiled list is at amasci.com/news.html#memes (A good example is my mechanical maglev device, high speed copper rollers which lift a supermagnet, amasci.com/maglev/magroll.html and ruclips.net/video/glCNP6qH_Dc/видео.html Another is: giant lightning in pure argon at one atmosphere pressure. We can make a "plasma globe," but with your own hand acting as the central electrode, and ten-inch plasma streamers spewing from your bare skin. At 760 Torr, pure argon or helium (or mixtures) will produce enormously long lightning, using just a small handheld Tesla coil or other similar HV power supply. Also see this mystery: 3D stabilization of levitated magnet-sphere, a sort of Paul Trap effect...ruclips.net/video/67RU241Az1Q/видео.html invented by a hobbyist on my private forum, definitely NOT been in TPT, AJP, etc.)
Meme-spreading. For example, the Bernoulli/Newton Airfoil Misconception, that was started by Klaus Weltner in AJP journal in 1990, but I made it my personal goal to spread it all over the entire education community (via PHYS-L and TAP-L email lists,) and all over USENET, commercial pilot forums, RC aircraft forums, etc. After years of this, and with the unexpected arrival of www, the controversy finally caught fire, ended up "in the big time:" NY Times and various science magazines, TPT etc. (Finally it appeared in Scientific American just this year.) But there's another aspect to Airfoil Misconception which *nobody* has yet explored: all airplane wings are propulsion devices; examples of reaction-motors, and reaction motors completely violate Bernoulli's Law/equations, because they perform real work on gas parcels. Bernoulli cannot tolerate reaction motors or fluid propulsion devices. Therefore, airfoils can only be analyzed by making the wingspan infinitely wide, or putting wings into "ground effect" flight. In that case, an instant-force appears between the wing and Earth, no energy is pumped into the gas-parcels, and wingtip vortices can be ignored. (In that case the wing has become a kind of venturi, as with any ground-effect vehicle.) Therefore, every single airfoil diagram you've ever seen ...is wrong. It's wrong because it cannot explain how airplanes actually work. It can only be used to explain exotic ground-effect coasting flight, or used to compare various airfoil designs (when various airfoil designs are employed in ground-effect coasting flight!) Similarly, airfoils and Bernoulli cannot be used to explain helicopters, or sailboats, or ship-propellers or swimming fish or hovering bumblebees. (Put simply, all airplanes are basically the same as helicopters and hovering bumblebees. Their lifting-force is based on reaction against local gas, NOT reaction against a distant ground surface. They work by vortex-shedding, and are not based on forces involving Bernoulli's constant-energy parcels.) But confusingly, a typical aircraft is translating sideways fast, so its vertical plume of constrained downwash becomes smeared out diagonally, unlike with helicopters and hummingbirds. Yet this sideways smearing has no effect upon momentum-conservation or vertical mass-flow. Nor can the sideways motion somehow be used to eliminate the complicated vorticity-flow which performs real work upon the gases (thus violating Bernoulli. A true explanation of airplane flight is required to avoid any mention of Bernoulli!) I suspect that THIS is why "nobody really understands wings," no matter how accurate we can make our math models. The gut-level, intuitive explanation is removed, as soon as we remove the downwards-moving shed-vortex, or as we make the wingspan be infinitely wide, and we exclusively analyze 2D flows around 2D airfoils. Airplane flight is a consequence of 3D physics, and removing one physical dimension will remove any possibility of explaining how airplanes stay up there. (Heh, airplane flight is actually based on Feynman's Reversed Lawn Sprinkler! No joke. Every wing is surrounded by a contracting sphere of onion-layers of inflowing gas, and this in-flow produces exactly zero net-force upon the wing. This little-mentioned process is part of all fluid-propulsion devices.)
--
One of my very successful memes was the "Buckyballs" supermagnet-balls puzzle. I came up with that one in 2001, took it around to local toy manufacturers, but nobody was interested. The mark-up ratio for materials cost was way too small. (Also, rare earth magnets cannot be sold as toys to kids; lethal swallowing hazard.) I finally put my discovery on my high-traffic physics site in 2004 (also posting it in Usenet Newsgroup sci.physics, and on the now-ancient PHYL-L and TAP-L physics email lists.) Nobody noticed! Rats! Years later I posted multiple youtube video demonstrations of the spheres, see amasci.com/amateur/beads.html. That did it! Within months of the youtube exposure, several people had "stolen" the idea and started selling them. (That was my true goal, since I didn't want to start a company myself!) One might wonder who patented the "Buckyballs" magnets? Nobody. I forced the concept into the public domain by putting it in public in 2004, so by 2005 nobody can own the concept, and everyone can sell them. (That's why there are Neocube and Cybercube and Buckyball and Zen Magnets ...and also about twenty other separate companies selling little neodymium sphere magnets.) One secret I never developed at the time: if the little spheres are magnetized with quadrupole pattern, then they become models for carbon atoms, and will naturally assemble into diamond lattice, carbon-chain molecules (even decorated with hydrogens!), and they actually form a proper Buckminster Fullerene sphere. The dipole magnets sold at present DON'T form a proper buckyball. They do have sixty magnet-atoms, but they form squares and pentagons, not hexagons and pentagons as with carbon-60 Fullerene. The magnet-atoms need to have tetrahedral outer orbitals, for four-bond structure, like carbon. Otherwise we instead get "polymers" with sulfur's dipole-bonding structures, not the zig-zag backbones seen with all carbon chains. So, there's a new meme-product, "buckyball" sets of supermagnet spheres, but each magnetized in quadrupole pattern. That's if the Consumer Products Safety Commission doesn't continue on its quest to ban all sales of sphere-shaped rare-earth magnets. They've tried this twice, and were fought to a standstill by a famous supermagnets activist! That's an entire story in itself (including the one where the government agency forced the company to oven-toast about $20,000 supermagnet beads, sent above Curie temperature and demagnetized. It's not impossible to re-magnetize these. The "dead" ones are being sold by the kilo on eBay, for anyone wanting to experiment. ( The trick to re-magnetizing a small supermagnet is, use a soldering iron tip to heat it above Curie, then cool it down again while held next to a large, powerful neodymium magnet. Next, try to impose a quadrupole magnetization, rather than the typical dipole pattern!)
@@jameslincoln8476 Waking up after shutdown! I have loads of stuff, leftovers from my 1980s physics-exhibits career at Museum of Science, Boston. Need to figure out what actually fits TPT though. Some is listed at amasci.com/scied.html. All this was internet-only, and many oldschool physics educators from the 1990s have seen much of it via TAP-L and PHYS-L discussion groups ...but my devices never appeared in TPT, and teachers from the last ten or fifteen years may not have encountered any of it.
A cool one from a few years back is the Mechanical Maglev machine, my two rotary copper pipes with a neo supermagnet floating in the cleft, see ruclips.net/video/glCNP6qH_Dc/видео.html and amasci.com/maglev/magroll.html I almost entered it in the TPT lecture-demos contest in ?1998,? but ran out of time. I think someone here at UW physics finally built a copy of the device, but that may be the only other version around. I don't know if it ever ended up in TPT. Possibility: measure repulsion force and drag, calculate the induced surface-currents, even explore skin-effect phenomena re. the variable-RPM motor.
Did TPT ever have anything about my invention "Hand-Drawn Holograms" amasci.com/amateur/holo1.html, or about Human Infrared Vision amasci.com/amateur/irgoggl.html ? The first ended up on a Star Wars vinyl soundtrack record, a real-image of a 3D "TIE fighter" floating in space above the disk, rotating as it plays the music. It all came from my needing to explain hologram-physics to little kids and grandmothers (while working at MOS museum in Boston.) To really understand a topic, become a teacher. But as a result, I found that holograms are nothing like anyone thinks, and we can create Benton Rainbow holograms by scratching a plastic surface with a blunt needle!
Projects I never got around to: a version of Arbor Scientific VED as a "thicker wire," with two or three LEDs abreast, but it flows at 1/2 or 1/3 the normal speed. Then, use thin-VED to depict a light bulb filament, with thick-VED as the connecting wires. Tungsten filaments heat up because the charge-carriers are flowing much faster in the thinner wire.
Or, VED version with green LEDs, which runs backwards! It depicts a metal wire ...where the red-color VED instead is like a hose full of acid, full of +H ions (+H ions have another name: protons. Acids are proton-conductors, although students and even some teachers seem unaware.) THEN: to describe a simple battery, use green VED devices for the main circuit, with a short segment of red VED as the electrolyte layer. Then we can see the water molecules splitting at one joint, green electrons and red protons flowing away from that junction, then flowing back together at the other junction to form neutral hydrogen again. The main insight is that all batteries are short circuits, and the path for current is THROUGH. This combats the common misconception that batteries are a source of electricity, when in fact a battery is much like a Genecon, and is just an "electricity pump."
Ah, how about VandeGraaff generator sparks, the three different kinds? We have the usual bright needle-sparks. But we can make foot-long violet fractal tree-structure sparks, by triggering a discharge with a 1cm steel ball. Also, the Winsco Corp. tabletop VDG exhibits a weird discharge that resembles a long purple sausage 2cm thick (it leaps between the sphere and the sharp corners of the square base.) Using a Morris and Lee VDG machine I was creating this third type of spark, roughly a meter long, and with branches!
It's Been too long since the last video