Batteries are "pumps" for electric charge. A battery takes an electric current (moving charge) entering its negative terminal and pumps that current to its positive terminal. In the process, the battery adds energy to the current and raises its voltage (voltage is the measure of energy per unit of electric charge). A typical battery adds 1.5 volts to the current passing through it. As it pumps current, the battery consumes its store of chemical potential energy so that it eventually runs out and "dies."

If you send a current backward through a battery, the battery extracts energy from the current and lowers its voltage. As it takes energy from the current, the battery adds to its store of chemical potential energy so that it recharges. Battery charges do exactly that: they push current backward through the batteries to recharge them. This recharging only works well on batteries that are designed to be recharged since many common batteries undergo structural damage as their energy is consumed and this damage can't be undone during recharging.

When you use a chain of batteries to power an electric device, you must arrange them so that each one pumps charge the same direction. Otherwise, one will pump and add energy to the current while the other extracts energy from the current. If all the batteries are aligned positive terminal to negative terminal, then they all pump the same direction and the current experiences a 1.5 volt (typically) voltage rise in passing through each battery. After passing through 2 batteries, its voltage is up by 3 volts, after passing through 3 batteries, its voltage is up by 4.5 volts, and so on.

Iron and most steels are intrinsically magnetic. By that, I mean that they contain intensely magnetic microscopic domains that are randomly oriented in the unmagnetized metal but that can be aligned by exposure to an external magnetic field. In pure iron, this alignment vanishes quickly after the external field is removed, but in the medium carbon steel of a typical screwdriver, the alignment persists days, weeks, years, or even centuries after the external field is gone.

To magnetize a screwdriver permanently, you should expose it briefly to a very strong magnetic field. Touching the screwdriver's tip to one pole of a strong magnet will cause some permanent magnetization. Rubbing or tapping the screwdriver also helps to free up its domains so that they can align with this external field. But the better approach is to put the screwdriver in a coil of wire that carries a very large DC electric current.

The current only needs to flow for a fraction of a second—just long enough for the domains to align. A car battery is a possibility, but it has safety problems: it can deliver an incredible current (400 amperes or more) for a long time (minutes) and can overheat or even explode your coil of wire. Moreover, it may leak hydrogen gas, which can be ignited by the sparks that will inevitably occur while you are magnetizing your screwdriver.

A safer choice for the current source is a charged electrolytic capacitor—a device that stores large quantities of separated electric charge. A charged capacitor can deliver an even larger current than a battery can, but only for a fraction of a second—only until the capacitor's store of separated charge is exhausted. Looking at one of my hobbyist electronics catalogs, Marlin P. Jones, 800-652-6733, I'd pick a filter capacitor with a capacity of 10,000 microfarads and a maximum voltage of 35 volts (Item 12104-CR, cost: $1.50). Charging this device with three little 9V batteries clipped together in a series (27 volts overall) will leave it with about 0.25 coulombs of separated charge and just over 3.5 joules (3.5 watt-seconds or 3.5 newton-meters) of energy.

Make sure that you get the polarity right—electrolytic filter capacitors store separated electric charge nicely but you have to put the positive charges and negative charges on the proper sides. [To be safe, work with rubber gloves and, as a general rule, never touch anything electrical with more than one hand at a time. Remember that a shock across your heart is much more dangerous than a shock across you hand. And while 27 volts is not a lot and is unlikely to give you a shock under any reasonable circumstances, I can't accept responsibility for any injuries. If you're not willing to accept responsibility yourself, don't try any of this.]

If you wrap about 100 turns of reasonably thick insulated wire (at least 18 gauge, but 12 gauge solid-copper home wiring would be better) around the screwdriver and then connect one end of the coil to the positively charged side of the capacitor and the other end of the coil to the negatively charged side, you'll get a small spark (wear gloves and safety glasses) and a huge current will flow through the coil. The screwdriver should become magnetized. If the magnetization isn't enough, repeat the charging-discharging procedure a couple of times, always with the same connections so that the magnetization is in the same direction.

As a number of readers have informed me, the watches you're referring to generate electricity that then powers a conventional electronic watch. These electromechanical watches use mechanical work done by wrist motions on small weights inside the watches to generate electricity. Seiko's watch spins a tiny generator—a coil of wire moves relative to a magnetic field and electric charges are pushed through the coil as a result. I have been told that other watches exist that use piezoelectricity—the electricity that flows when certain mechanical objects are deformed or strained—to generate their electricity. In any case, your wrist motion is providing the energy that becomes electric power.

These electromechanical watches are the modern descendants of the automatic mechanical watches. An automatic watch had a main spring that was wound by the motion of the wearer's hand. A small mass inside the watch swung back and forth on the end of a lever. Because of its inertia, this mass resisted changes in velocity and it moved relative to the watch body whenever the watch accelerated. If you like, you can picture the mass as a ball that rolls about inside a wagon as you roll the wagon around an obstacle course. When the lever turned back and forth relative to the watch body, the watch was able to extract energy from it. Gears attached to the lever allowed the watch to use the mass's energy to wind its mainspring. The energy extracted from the mass with each swing was very small, but it was enough to keep the mainspring fully wound. Ultimately, this energy came from your hand—you did work on the watch in shaking it about and some of this energy eventually wound up in the mainspring.

These same sorts of motions are what power the electromechanical watches of today. Instead of winding a spring, your wrist motions swing weights about inside the watches and these moving weights spin generators to produce electric power.

The bulb in a battery doesn't care which way current flows through it. The metal has no asymmetry that would treat left-moving charges differently from right-moving charges. That's not true of the transistors in a walkman or gameboy. They contain specialized pieces of semiconductor that will only allow positive charges to move in one direction, not the other. When you put the batteries in backward and try to propel current backward through its parts, the current won't flow and nothing happens.

The battery stops separating charges once enough have accumulated on its terminals. If the flashlight is off, so that charges build up, then the battery soon stops separating charge and the light bulb doesn't light.

You can recharge any battery by pushing charge through it backward (pushing positive charge from its positive terminal to its negative terminal). However, some batteries don't take this charge well or heat up. The ones that recharge most effectively are those that can rebuild their chemical structures most effectively as they operate backward.

A battery uses electrochemical processes to provide power to a current passing it. This statement means that if you send an electric charge through the battery in the normal direction, that charge will emerge from the battery with more energy than it had when it entered the battery. But while it might seem that the number of electric charges passing through the battery each second doesn't matter—that each charge will pick up the usual amount of extra energy during its passage—that's not always the case. To understand this fact, let's look at how charges "pass through" the battery and how they pick up energy.

What's really happening is that electrochemical processes are spontaneously separating charges from one another inside the battery and placing those separated charges on the battery's terminals—the battery's negative terminal becomes negatively charged and its positive terminal becomes positively charged. This charge separating process proceeds in a random, statistical manner until enough charges accumulate on the terminals to prevent any further charge separation. Because like charges repel one another, sufficiently large accumulations of positive charges on the positive terminal and negative charges on the negative terminal stop further arrivals of those charges.

But when you send a positive charge through a wire and onto the battery's negative terminal, you reduce the amount of negative charge there and weaken the repulsive forces. As a result, the chemicals in the battery separate another pair of charges. The battery's negative terminal returns to normal, but now there is an extra positive charge on the battery's positive terminal. This extra charge flows away through a wire. Overall, it appears that your positive charge "passed through" the battery—entering the battery's negative terminal and emerging from the positive terminal with more energy than it had when it arrived at the negative terminal. But what really happened was that the battery's chemicals separated another pair of charges.

In a warm environment, the battery's chemicals can separate charges rapidly and can keep up with reasonably large currents of arriving charges. But in a cold battery, the electrochemical processes slow down and it becomes hard for the battery to keep up. If you try to send too much current through the battery while it's cold, it is unable to replace the charges on its terminals quickly enough and it voltage sags—it doesn't have enough separated charges on its terminals to give the charges "passing through" it their full increase in energy. If you use a battery while it's very cold, you should be careful not to send too much current through it because it will become inefficient and will provide less than its usual voltage.

When you connect a battery in a circuit, negatively charged electrons flow away from the battery's negative end and they return toward the battery's positive end. The battery then pumps the electrons back to its negatively charged end and they begin the journey all over again (hence the name "circuit"). But because the electrons have a negative charge, current does not flow in their direction. Instead, current is defined as flowing in the direction of positive charge flow. In the present case, current flows from the battery's positive end, through the circuit, and back to the battery's negative end. Current is thus flowing in the direction opposite to the direction of electron movement! If you want to know which way current is flowing, you can normally find the direction in which electrons are flowing and then reverse it. Life for physicists and electrical engineers would be so much simpler if Benjamin Franklin hadn't made an unfortunate choice that gave electrons—the principal carriers of electricity—a negative electric charge. We have been living with the consequences of that choice ever since.

Amazingly enough, the speed at which electric power travels through a wire is very different from the speed at which electrons move through that wire. In most wires, electric power travels at very nearly the speed of light while the electrons themselves travel only millimeters per second! This statement is true whether the electricity is traveling in a copper wire or a superconductor!

To understand how this difference in speeds is possible, think about what happens when you turn on the water to a long hose. If that hose is already filled with water, water will immediately begin pouring out of the hose's end even though the water is flowing quite slowly through the hose. While the water itself moves slowly, the water's effects travel through the hose at the speed of sound in water—several miles per second! Water at the end of the hose "knows" that you have opened the faucet long before new water from the faucet arrives.

Similarly, when you turn on a flashlight, electrons begin to flow out of the battery's negative terminal at speeds of only a few millimeters per second. But these electrons don't have to travel all the way to the light bulb for the bulb to light up. When these electrons leave the battery, they push on the electrons in front of them, which push on the electrons in front of them, and so on. They produce an electromagnetic wave that rushes through the wire at an incredible speed. As a result, electrons begin flowing through the light bulb only a few billionths of a second after the first electron left the battery. So while the electrons that carry electricity through the power grid flow rather slowly, the power they deliver moves remarkably fast.

Generating heat from a battery is relatively easy. All you need is a material that conducts electricity only moderately well and you're in business. If you allow current to flow through that material from the battery's positive terminal to its negative terminal, the current will lose energy as it struggles to get through the material and the current's lost energy will become thermal energy in the material. The only difficult part of this task is in choosing the right material so that it doesn't produce too much or too little heat. In short, the electric resistance of the finished material has to be in the right range. For a solid system that you can cut and tailor, that's not much of a problem. But for a paint, it could be tricky. To make an inexpensive paint, it would probably need to use carbon powder as the electric conductor. A thin layer of carbon granules held in place by a plastic of some sort would probably provide a suitable conducting surface that would become warm when you allowed current to flow through it from a battery. There are copper and silver conducting paints that might also work, but these are rather expensive and I'm not sure how they behave at elevated temperatures.

The voltage of any battery—the amount of energy it gives to each positive charge that it transfers from its negative terminal to its positive terminal—increases slightly when the battery is fully charged. That's because when the battery is fully charged and its chemicals are highly ordered, the laws of thermodynamics that encourage the development of disorder act to increase the battery's disorder through effects that also increase the battery's voltage. But as the battery discharges, these thermodynamic effects fade and the battery's voltage diminishes slightly. So the easiest way to determine the battery's charging status electronically is to look at the voltage rise across the battery when little or no current is flowing through it. The higher the voltage, the more fully charged the battery is.

Yes, static electricity has energy associated with it and that energy can be used to charge batteries, at least in principle. Static electricity is literally stationary separated electric charges—essentially separated charges stored on capacitor-like surfaces. As you suggest, it may be easiest to transfer these separated charges into a real capacitor and then to use this charged capacitor to recharge an electrochemical cell. Whether such a procedure can be carried out efficiently and in a cost-effective manner isn't clear to me. The charges involved in lightning have so much energy per charge—so much voltage—that they're hard to use for anything. Even the charges that you accumulate when you rub your feet on a wool carpet on a cold, dry winter day acquire an enormous amount of energy per charge. To charge most batteries, you need lots of low energy charges, not the small numbers of high-energy charges that are typical of static electricity. Using this tiny current of high-energy charges to charge a battery is equivalent to trying to fill a swimming pool with water from a high-pressure car-washing nozzle—too little water under too much pressure. You can do it, but there are better ways.

Any rechargeable battery will do for this job, although I'd recommend using a lead-acid battery. To charge it, you need a wind-powered DC generator. You can make such a generator by attaching a DC motor to the blades of a fan and providing some weather-vane mechanism to ensure that the fan always points into the wind. The wind will then cause the fan to spin, and with it the motor. Wind energy will become mechanical energy and that will in turn become electric energy. The DC motor will act as a generator and will produce electric power.

To make this generator recharge the battery, you first need to ensure that the motor can generate a voltage that's at least 20% higher than the voltage of the battery while the wind is blowing at its usual rate. If it can't, you need a higher voltage motor or a lower voltage battery. Now you should connect the negative output wire of the generator to the negative terminal of the battery and use a power rectifier (a power diode) to connect the positive output wire of the generator to the positive terminal of the battery. You need this diode to prevent the battery from sending its power into the motor and making the fan turn when the wind isn't blowing hard. If the fan starts turning when you've inserted the diode, you have it installed backward. When correctly inserted, the diode will prevent the battery from operating the fan so that the fan can only charge the battery. When the wind starts blowing and the fan starts turning, it will charge the battery.

I'll assume that you are asking about moving or dynamic electricity, the type that lights the bulb in a flashlight (as opposed to static or stationary electricity). In that case, you are referring to a flow of electric charges that is generally called an electric current. This movement of electrically charged particles carries with it energy, both as kinetic energy (energy of motion) in the charged particles and as potential energy in the electrostatic attractions and repulsions of these particles. The particles typically acquire this energy from a battery. The battery pulls opposite charges away from one another and pushes like charges together. These actions increase the energy of those charges. The charges then rush through electrically conducting materials, generally metals, in order to bring opposite charges closer together. This flow of charges releases the energy given them by the battery.

In a flashlight, the batteries provide the charges with power and the light bulb makes use of the power. The charges first flow through the battery (which gives them energy), then through wires to the light bulb, then through the light bulb (where they give up their energy), and finally back through wires to the battery. The charges move in a loop—a circuit—so that they don't accumulate anywhere. They travel endlessly between battery and bulb, shuttling energy from the battery to the bulb. As is always the case in electric circuits, two wires connect the battery and bulb—one wire to carry charges to the bulb and one wire to return them to the battery to begin their trip over again.

The term "digital display" usually refers to a system that reports the value of a physical quantity in numerical form. A digital watch display is a good example. The physical quantity it reports is time and it makes its report in the form of hours, minutes, and second—all in numerical form. In a digital watch, the display makes use of liquid crystals that are sensitive to electric fields. When you look at the display, you are actually looking through a layer of polarizing filter, some transparent electric wires, and a layer of liquid crystals. Liquid crystals are liquids that contain molecules that naturally orient themselves relative to one another. In the display, these liquid crystals adopt different orientations when they are exposed to electric fields than when they're not exposed to such fields. This electrically altered orientation affects their optical properties and causes them to appear dark when viewed through the polarizing filter. The watch can control the appearance of each segment of its digital display by the pattern of electric charge on its transparent wires. Since it takes very little energy to change the orientation of the liquid crystals, the watch uses almost no power for its display and can operate for years on a button battery.

First, you would need to put enough solar panels in series to develop a voltage greater than that of your battery. For example, to recharge a 1.5 volt battery, you would probably have to attach three or four simple solar cells in series because each one only provides a current passing through it with about 0.5 volts of voltage rise. Having assembled enough solar cells, you should then attach the positive output terminal of the solar cell chain to the positive terminal of your battery and attach the negative output terminal of the solar cell chain to the negative terminal of your battery. When you put the solar cells in the light, they will begin to push electric current backward through the battery and the battery will recharge. Whenever you send current backward through a battery, its electrochemical reactions can run backward and it can recharge to some extent. Unfortunately, some batteries recharge more effectively than others—the bad ones just turn the recharging energy into thermal energy. The only real subtlety in this business is in stopping the charging when the battery is fully recharged. You should check the battery voltage periodically and when it's close to the voltage of a new battery, it probably can't take any more charging.

The classic technique is to insert two dissimilar metal strips into the potato in order to build a simple battery. You can then run an electronic clock with the power provided by that battery. But the energy in that battery is coming from chemical reactions of the metals and not really from the potato. If you really want to use a potato as the power source for a clock, you should dry the potato out and burn it. You can use the heat of the fire to run a steam engine or to generate electricity.

An "analog" clock is a clock that has an hour hand and a minute hand. Twenty years ago, virtually all clocks were analog clocks but nowadays electronics has made it easier to display time with digits ("digital" clocks) than with hands ("analog" clocks). However, there are some clocks and wristwatches that still use moving mechanical hands to display the time. Most of these devices use quartz crystal oscillators to control electronic pulsing devices that drive electric motors that advance the hands. In such clocks, the batteries power the oscillators and the motors. You connect them as you would any electronic device: you form a string of batteries with the correct voltage, attach the negative lead from the clock to the negative terminal of the battery string, and attach the positive lead from the clock to the positive terminal of the battery string.

There are also some analog clocks in which the hands are just lines on a computer display, an arrangement that strikes me as silly. Finally, long ago there were two interesting types of analog electric clocks: the electric clocks that used the AC power line to run synchronous electric motors to advance their hands and the electric clocks that were used in automobiles. The automobile clocks were actually mechanical clocks, with mainsprings and everything, but they were wound by electromagnetic devices. Every minute or two, this device would give the spring a small wind and you would hear a click.

An electric circuit is racetrack for electric charges. It must be a complete loop—a "circuit"—so that the charges don't pile up somewhere along the track. The simplest circuit has a source of energy for the electric charges (e.g., a battery) and a device that takes energy away from the electric charges (e.g., a light bulb). When the charges are in motion through the circuit, they are an electric current. By convention, current points in the direction of positive charge flow, so you can imagine a stream of positive charges circling this circuit over and over again, with current pointing always in the direction that those positive charges are moving. As the current passes through the battery, entering it at the battery's negative terminal and leaving it at its positive terminal, the charges pick up energy. The battery is converting some of its stored chemical potential energy into electric energy and giving that energy steadily to the current flowing through it. The battery is "pumping" the charges from its negative terminal to its positive terminal. The current continues around the circuit and then passes through the light bulb. In the light bulb, the charges give up most of their energies to the filament and the filament becomes white hot. The current continues out of the bulb and returns to the negative terminal of the battery to pick up more energy. This simple circuit is present in a flashlight. The same charges complete this circuit millions of times each second, shuttling energy from the battery to the bulb.

Those different alkaline battery sizes are chemically equivalent, which is why they all produce the same voltage rises for currents passing through them from their negative terminals to their positive terminals. The same chemical reactions allow each of these batteries to pump the charges, giving each coulomb of positive charge about 1.5 joules of energy—a voltage rise of 1.5 joules-per-coulomb or 1.5 volts. Where these batteries differ is in how many charges they can pump each second—their maximum currents—and in how many charges they can pump before running out of chemical potential energy—their total stored energy. The bigger cells (C and D) can handle far more current than the smaller cells (AAA and AA) and they also contain more stored energy.

Yes. While the other batteries in the string will pump positive charge from their negative terminals to their positive terminals, the reversed battery will extract energy from the positive charge as it flows from that battery's positive terminal toward its negative terminal. The charge will lose energy and the battery will gain energy. Some of the battery's additional energy will go into recharging the battery—converting its used chemicals back into their original forms. But some types of batteries are better at recharging than other. Those that aren't meant to be recharged may turn most of this energy into thermal energy and thus waste it.

As current flows through a battery, from its negative terminal to its positive terminal, the battery does work on that current. It must pull positive charges away from the negatively charged negative terminal and push them toward the positively charged positive terminal. An alkaline battery needs 1.5 joules of energy to transfer each coulomb of positive charge in this manner. This transfer operation consumes the stored chemical potential energy inside the battery and eventually causes the battery to go dead. Just because you don't see anything moving in the wires or in the battery doesn't mean that something substantial isn't occurring inside the battery—it undergoes electrochemical reactions whenever current is flowing through it.

When the atoms that make up a metal assemble together, some of their electrons become delocalized—they stop associating with specific atoms and can move throughout the overall metal. Most importantly, these mobile electrons can respond to the presence of electric fields and electric forces by accelerating and traveling through the metal. When you turn on a flashlight, you are creating a system in which positive charges on one terminal of the battery and negative charges on the other terminal can begin to push electrons through the flashlight's wires. The mobile electrons in those wires are negatively charged and they accelerate toward the positive terminal of the battery. New electrons from the negative terminal of the battery replace the departing electrons and soon a steady flow of electrons through the flashlight is established.

Circuits themselves are as old as electricity. A circuit is literally a complete loop through which electric current can flow. For example, a flashlight contains a circuit whenever it's turned on—the current flows from the battery's positive terminal, through the switch (which is on), through the filament of the light bulb (which glows), and back to the battery's negative terminal. The battery then gives the current some more energy and sends it around this "circuit" again and again.

But electronic "circuits" are much more modern. Here the word circuit is equivalent to "device," "board," or "chip." Such electronic devices date to somewhere around the beginning of the twentieth century. As radio developed, with tube amplifiers and other electronic components, so did these circuits. Modern electronic systems place many of the components involved in an electronic device on a single sheet of plastic or fiberglass and many of the components on that board may exist on the surface of one or more tiny silicon wafers. These single wafer circuits, called integrated circuits, were invented in 1959 by Texas Instruments and became commercial products at Fairchild Semiconductors in 1965.

NiCad batteries are more rechargeable than most batteries because the chemicals that power NiCad batteries remain solid throughout the discharge cycle. The chemicals in most other batteries, including alkaline batteries, go into solution or otherwise change shape during the discharge cycle so that it difficult to reconstruct the original battery electrodes during recharging.

Unfortunately, the two solid electrodes in a NiCad battery are damaged by repeated charging and discharging. These electrodes work best when they are both fine powders (the positive electrode is nickel hydroxide powder and the negative electrode is cadmium metal powder). With repeated use, the powder particles grow larger and larger and they stop contributing to the battery's power. "Memory" appears during the discharge cycle when all the useful small particles have been used up and only the undesirable large particles remain. Repeated charging and partial discharging tends to convert many of the small particles into large particles. You can improve the battery by fully discharging it before recharging it, presumably because this deep discharge breaks up the larger particles so that the battery contains mostly small particles once again.

A short circuit is a conducting path that allows electric current to flow from its source (typically the positive terminal of a battery) to its destination (typically the negative terminal of that battery) without passing through the equipment that the current is supposed to operate. The conducting path is thus a short cut for the current that allows it to complete its circuit too quickly, hence the name "short circuit." In virtually all automobiles, the whole body of the car is connected to the negative terminal of the battery so that any accidental conducting path from the battery's positive terminal to the body of the car is a short circuit. Since a short circuit doesn't include a device that's designed to consume electric power, the wires of the short circuit must consume that electric power. They often become hot and may cause a fire.

Moving electric charges are inherently magnetic. That's because electricity and magnetism are intimately related and aren't really separate phenomena. To see why this is true, imagine two electrons sitting motionless in front of you—they push one another away with electric forces. But now imagine that you and those two electrons are moving northward in a train and someone standing beside the track is watching all of you pass. From that person's perspective, the two electrons are moving and they exert both electric and magnetic forces on one another. What appears to you to be a purely electric effect appears to the person near the track to involve both electricity and magnetism. Without the appearance of magnetic effects in moving charges, grave inconsistencies would appear in the dynamics of objects view from different perspectives.

So the current in the wire of your electromagnet is inherently magnetic. The magnetic field it produces aligns the tiny magnetic domains in the steel nail so that the nail's magnetic field greatly strengthens that of the current in the wire.

You'll need a large steel nail or bolt, too. Wrap about 100 turns of copper wire around the nail, keeping the turns fairly uniformly spaced. Make sure that both ends of the wire coil, start and finish, project out from the windings. When you're done winding the coil, strip off about 1 cm of the insulation from each end of the wire. Now connect one end of the wire to the positive terminal of a AA alkaline battery and the other end of the wire to the negative terminal of that battery. The nail will become a strong magnet and will be able to pick up other nails or paper clips with ease. Electricity will also heat the wire, so be prepared for the electromagnet to become uncomfortably hot. Detach the wires from the battery when you're no longer able to hold everything safely.

An alternator is a device that uses rotary motion to generate electricity. As the car engine turns, it spins a magnet (the rotor) in the alternator and this spinning magnet induces electric currents in a set of stationary wire coils (the stator). The alternator's ability to generate electric currents by spinning a magnet past stationary wires is an example of electromagnetic induction. Induction is a general phenomenon in which a moving or changing magnetic field creates an electric field, which in turn pushes electric charges through a conducting material. Overall, some of the engine's mechanical energy is converted into electric energy.

The amount of energy given to each electric charge that flows through the wires in the stator depends on the speed with which the magnet turns and the strength of that magnet. Whether it's internal or external, the voltage regulator monitors this energy per charge—also known as the voltage—to make sure that it's correct. If not, it adjusts the strength of the alternator's magnet. It can do this because the alternator's magnet is actually an electromagnet and its strength depends on how much current is flowing through its wire coils. The voltage regulator carefully adjusts the current flowing through the electromagnet in order to obtain the proper output voltage from the alternator. Actually, the alternator itself produces alternating current, so a set of solid-state diodes converts this alternating current into direct current. A car's electric system, particularly its battery, operates on direct current. Since the alternator's operation is the same whether the voltage regulator is inside it or external to it, neither version should be better than the other.

The answer is yes, but the method may not be what you had in mind. While it's possible to make a battery by inserting two dissimilar metal strips into the fruit, the battery that results is really powered by the metals themselves. The fruit juice just acts as an "electrolyte"—an electrically conductive liquid that facilitates the movement of electric charges. Claiming that the fruit is responsible for the energy is like claiming that the stone in "stone soup" (an old tale about a beggar who tricks the villagers in a community into contributing vegetables to spice up the soup that he's making with his magic stone) is really the basis for the soup.

The best way to obtain energy from the fruit is to eat it! The sugars and starches in the fruit have plenty of chemical potential energy that's released when those chemicals are oxidized in your body. This released energy is what allows you to live, work, and play.

Batteries use chemical reactions to move electric charges from one terminal to another. A chemical reaction is a process that rearranges molecules—you begin with a certain collection of molecules and end up with a different collection of molecules. As the atoms in those molecules rearrange, they stick to one another more tightly than before and they release some of their chemical potential energy. This released energy then takes another form. While some chemical reactions such as burning will turn this released energy into thermal energy, a battery uses this released energy to move electric charges from one place to another. The battery moves extra positive charges onto its positive terminal and extra negative charges onto its negative terminal. While you can't see those charges, you can tell that they're there. If you use wires to connect the terminals to the two sides of a light bulb, the charges will rush through the wires and the light bulb will glow.

There are many types of batteries, but two of the most important modern batteries are alkaline batteries (used in flashlights and toys) and lead-acid batteries (used in automobiles). An alkaline battery uses a reaction between zinc metal and manganese dioxide to move electric charges between its two terminals. The battery's negative terminal is made of powdered zinc and its positive terminal is surrounded by manganese dioxide. Between the two terminals is an alkaline paste of potassium hydroxide. As the chemical reaction proceeds, negative charges are transferred to the battery's negative terminal and positive charges are transferred to the battery's positive terminal. As these charges are used by the flashlight or toy, the battery replaces them with new charges. Since each transfer of charges consumes some of the battery's original chemicals, the more the battery's charges are used, the more its chemicals are consumed. Eventually the powdered zinc is gone and the battery stops working. Once the powdered zinc has been used up, it can't be replaced.

A lead-acid battery uses a reaction between lead metal, lead oxide, and sulfuric acid to move electric charges. It, too, consumes its original chemicals while transferring charges. However, a lead-acid battery can be recharged easily by pushing charges through it backward. When a car is running, its generator pushes charges backward through the lead-acid battery and converts the consumed chemicals back into their original forms. This recharged battery is almost as good as new, so it can be used over and over again and lasts for several years.

Although I've never heard of such a device myself, I can guess what it means. A coulomb is a standard unit of electric charge. Since a battery is a pump for electric charge, measuring the number of coulombs that have flowed through a battery is a way to determine what fraction of that battery's storage capacity has been used. (It's analogous to measuring how many grams of sand have flowed through the neck of an egg timer or how many liters of water have flowed out of a water tower.) When a battery is being recharged, measuring the number of coulombs that have flowed in the reverse direction through the battery is a way to determine how much recharging has occurred. Thus, I suspect that a "reverse coulomb counter" is a device that monitors the flow of charge backward through a battery as it is being recharged. This backward flow of charge should be almost exactly proportional to the extent of recharging.

Flashbulbs contain a wad of very fine magnesium wire that burns almost instantly in a gas of pure oxygen. The wire is ignited by a small piece of gunpowder-like primer material that is itself ignited by the camera. There are/were three techniques for igniting the primer: impact (a little lever smacked the side of a tube containing the primer and it burst into flame, just like a cap), electric current (a thin filament inside the bulb overheated when current ran through it), and spark (a spark jumped between two wires and ignited the primer). A camera that uses/used the current-ignited bulbs has a battery in it and taking a picture closes a circuit that then sends current through the bulb. A camera that uses/used the spark-ignited bulbs used a piezoelectric spark igniter, like the ones in outdoor gas grills. A camera that uses/used the impact-ignited bulbs just hit the primer itself. Modern cameras uses gas discharges to produce light. Since the flashlamp isn't burned up during a flash, it can be used many times.

Generators can produce either DC or AC power, depending on how they're arranged. A car generator was one that produced DC power. An alternator produces AC power. Since all cars operate on DC power (they use a battery, after all), the AC power is always converted to DC power. In modern cars, this is done with electronic devices, similar to those used in electronic equipment such as stereos and televisions. Converting DC to AC or vice versa is no big deal anymore. In the old days, it was harder and they used DC generators.

Wires obey Ohm's law: the current flowing through them is proportional to the voltage drop across them. But the precise relationship depends on the wire's length. A short wire will carry a large current even when the voltage drop across it is small because that wire has a small electrical resistance; it does not impede the flow of electricity very much. But a long wire has a large electrical resistance and will only carry a large current if the voltage drop across it is large. If you do not change the source of electrical power (e.g. a battery) and replace short wires with long wires, those wires will not be able to carry as much current.

When current flows through a battery or the secondary of a transformer, its receives power. Each charge leaves the battery with more energy than it had when it arrived. Since the energy of each charge has increased, the voltage (energy per charge) of the current has increased. Thus the current passing through the battery experiences a rise in voltage or a "voltage rise".

These devices use diodes, which are one-way devices for current. They only allow the current to flow a certain direction and block its flow the other way. With the help of some charge storage devices called capacitors, these diodes can stop the reversals of AC and turn it into DC. Those little black battery eliminators that you use for household electronic devices contain a transformer, a few diodes and a capacitor or two.

A step-up transformer has a secondary coil with many, many turns. As the current in the primary circuit flows back and forth, it creates a reversing electric field around the iron core of the transformer. This electric field pushes charges through the secondary coil so that it travels around and around the core. Each charge goes around many times, picking up more energy with each passage. By the time the charge leaves the transformer, it has lots of energy so its voltage is very high.

A battery uses its chemical potential energy to pump electric charges from its negative terminal to its positive terminal. Eventually it runs out of chemical potential energy. In an alkaline battery, the chemical potential energy is mostly contained in zinc powder and this powder oxidizes as the battery operates; in effect, it burns up in a very controlled manner. By the time the battery is dead, there just isn't much pure zinc metal left.

The battery maintains a steady positive charge on its positive terminal and a negative charge on its negative terminal, month after month. These opposite charges attract one another and they do manage to get back together occasionally. They usually travel right through the battery itself, assisted by thermal energy. When that happens, the battery has to pump additional charge from the negative terminal to the positive terminal to make up for the lost charge and consumes a little more of its chemical potential energy. You can slow down this aging process by refrigerating the batteries. With less thermal energy available, the accidental movements of charge through the battery become less frequent.