Tag
Electricity & magnets
Charge, current, and the pull of a magnet — 32 tiny stories across 6 shelves.
How things work
Everyday machines, taken apart — 20 stories.
All how things work →A sealed tank of chemicals
Why Does a Battery Run Out?
A battery stores reacting chemicals rather than electricity, and that reaction can only happen a fixed number of times before it is spent.
Let’s go →Electricity needs a full loop
Why Does a Switch Turn Things On?
Electricity only flows around an unbroken loop, so a few millimetres of air anywhere in that loop stops every last bit of it at once.
Let’s go →Rain, stored on a hillside
How Does a Dam Make Electricity?
A dam is a battery filled by the weather: it holds rain high up and lets it fall through a turbine, turning the height it loses into power.
Let’s go →A circuit that completes itself
What Happens When You Press a Doorbell?
The button is not the bell. It is a gap in a circuit your finger closes, letting current turn a coil into a magnet that swings a hammer.
Let’s go →Something has to break first
Why Do Fuses Blow?
A fuse is the weakest part of a circuit on purpose: a thin wire that melts before the cable behind it can ever get hot enough to burn.
Let’s go →A magnet, some wire, and movement
How Is Electricity Actually Made?
Every generator on Earth does one thing: it moves a magnet past coils of wire. Run the same machine backwards and it is a motor instead.
Let’s go →Steam that flips a switch
Why Does a Kettle Switch Itself Off?
Steam runs down a hidden tube to a strip of two bonded metals, which bends as it warms until it snaps the power off behind your back.
Let’s go →Rows and columns, checked constantly
How Does a Keyboard Know Which Key You Pressed?
No wire runs from every key. They are wired as a grid and scanned hundreds of times a second, so twenty wires find one key among a hundred.
Let’s go →A wire too hot to stay dark
How Does Electricity Become Light?
Only the filament is thin, so the current squeezes there and pours out white light near 2,500°C. An LED skips the heat entirely.
Let’s go →A speaker running backwards
How Does Your Voice Get Recorded?
A membrane thinner than paper flexes when your voice hits it, and that movement is measured thousands of times a second into a list of numbers.
Let’s go →Three pins, three different jobs
What Is Happening Inside a Plug?
A plug has several pins because electricity needs a way in, a way back, and an escape to the ground, plus a fuse designed to fail on purpose.
Let’s go →Pushed hard so less is lost
Why Are Power Lines So High Up?
Power lines carry electricity at enormous voltage because that wastes far less on the journey, then transformers step it back down.
Let’s go →Almost all of them boil water
How Does a Power Station Work?
Coal, gas and nuclear stations look nothing alike and all do one thing — boil water, so the steam spins a magnet inside coils of wire.
Let’s go →Light knocking electrons loose
How Does Sunlight Become Electricity?
Each packet of sunlight can knock one electron loose, and a solar cell is layered so that every freed electron flows the same way out.
Let’s go →A magnet shoving paper
How Does a Speaker Make Sound?
A coil carrying the recorded current becomes a magnet, dragging a paper cone in and out so it shoves the air at exactly that rhythm.
Let’s go →Sound turned into electricity and back
How Does a Voice Travel Down a Wire?
A telephone turns the air's vibration into a matching electrical wobble, sends that down a wire, and turns it back into sound.
Let’s go →It notices charge, not pressure
How Does Glass Feel Your Finger?
A touchscreen never notices pressure. It measures charge draining into the salty water you are made of, at every crossing of a wire grid.
Let’s go →A wire loop under the tarmac
How Does the Road Know You Are Waiting?
The saw cuts in the road just before the stop line hold a loop of wire whose field changes when metal parks over it. A bicycle barely disturbs it.
Let’s go →Not through the sky
The Internet Runs Along the Sea Floor
About 99 per cent of international internet traffic crosses the ocean floor by fibre-optic cable rather than satellite — and ships have laid it since 1858.
Let’s go →Three blades, and each one is a wing
How Does a Wind Turbine Work?
A turbine blade is not pushed by the wind, it is lifted sideways like a wing — and no turbine can take more than two-fifths of the wind's energy.
Let’s go →Physics
Invisible forces you can play with — 4 stories.
All physics →Invisible reach
How Do Magnets Work?
Iron is already full of tiny atomic magnets, and magnetising it only lines them up. That is why cutting a magnet in half gives you two whole magnets.
Let’s go →Our planet is a magnet
Why Does a Compass Point North?
Molten iron churning deep inside the planet generates a magnetic field reaching out into space. A compass needle is just a small magnet lining up with it.
Let’s go →Not the chair, not this page
You Have Never Touched Anything
Solid contact is a force, not a meeting — the outer electrons of two surfaces repel each other hard enough that nothing ever quite arrives.
Let’s go →Rubbed the wrong way
Why Do You Get Shocks?
Rubbing moves electrons by the billion, and they sit on you until the pile-up can rip air apart to escape. A door handle can hit 3,000 volts harmlessly.
Let’s go →What things are made of
Atoms, metal, glass, plastic, and every kind of stuff — 3 stories.
All what things are made of →Light, cheap to reuse, and it protects itself
Why Are Drink Cans Made of Aluminium?
Aluminium is light, does not rust because it seals itself, and can be recycled with a fraction of the energy it took to make.
Let’s go →Loose electrons, and a price that works
Why Are Wires Made of Copper?
Silver conducts slightly better, yet almost every wire is copper: its outer electrons drift free, and it wins on price and on bending.
Let’s go →A shared pool of electrons
Why Is Metal Shiny?
Polishing adds no shine at all — rough silver bounces back just as much light, only in every direction. Gold looks warm because it eats a little blue.
Let’s go →Earth & sky
Weather, light, and the air around us — 2 stories.
All earth & sky →A giant spark
What Is Lightning?
Lightning is the doorknob spark scaled up beyond imagining: a storm cloud builds millions of volts against the ground, and eventually the air gives way.
Let’s go →Giving the strike an easy road
How Does a Lightning Rod Protect a House?
A lightning rod repels nothing. It offers a strike a sharp, easy metal path to the ground, so the current goes around the house instead of through it.
Let’s go →Everyday wonders
Kitchen, bubbles, echoes, and odd little magic — 2 stories.
All everyday wonders →A magnet inside a bigger magnet
How Does a Compass Work?
Earth is a giant magnet, and a compass needle is a small one pivoted loosely enough that it can swing round and line itself up with the field.
Let’s go →Iron, made temporarily magnetic
Why Do Magnets Stick to the Fridge?
A magnet lines up the tiny magnetic regions inside the door's steel, making the fridge briefly a magnet too. What you feel is two magnets attracting.
Let’s go →Space
Crashy night-sky stories — 1 story.
All space →