Talk:Lemon battery
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This article was nominated for deletion on January 25, 2006. The result of the discussion was Keep. An archived record of this discussion can be found here. |
The experiment as shown does not work. Yet textbooks going back decades contain just this experiment! It actually takes about thirty lemons in parallel to light even the smallest grain-of-wheat incandescent bulb.
Once I find out how to post graphics to wiki, I'll rewrite this page to use four lemons wired in series to light a single red LED.
- Thanks, I must admit that i wrote the page without actually doing the experiment myself :-(
- To upload a graphic click on the "upload file" link on the left hand pane of the page.If you name the file Lemon_battery.png the new file will simply replace the old one and you wont have to do anything else apart from refreshing your browser to see the effect. Please add something about the copyrite status in the comment box, i.e. you drew the diagram yourself. Or the diagram was drawn by name: who gave you permission to put it on wikipedia.
See these two pages for more details.
Having said that, there have been a few problems with hardware over the past few days and image uploads have had to be disabled from time to time (see the Village pump for discussion) so if you have any trouble try again in a couple of days.Thanks theresa knott 09:52, 7 Jan 2004 (UTC)
- I've provided a link to a page with images of the four-lemons-and-an-LED version. Melchoir 20:58, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
!!! REAL WORLD UPDATE FROM AN ORDINARY HUMAN !!! 01/24/2007
Hello, I am NOT a science professor, merely a frustrated Floridian father of a Fifth Grade boy. This means I need to guide my son through an annual ritual known as the "Science Fair Project." This year my son came upon the lemon battery, and thought that looked like a ballyhoo of a good time. He started combing the web looking for information. I was impressed by two things: the amount of websites he took the time to visit and study, and the generally useless content he found. To clarify:
MATERIALS, and where to get them: Many web pages STILL suggest a "trip to your local hardware store" for "strips" of Zinc and Copper. REALITY: In the modern day of Home Depot and Loews stores within a mile of each other, "local" hardware stores are as scarce as hen's teeth. Sadly, Home Depot does NOT stock strips of Zinc and Copper (neither does your local Radio Shack, for that matter). ALTERNATIVE: Thankfully, a couple of web pages mentioned substituting a Galvanized Nail for the Zinc Strip. I was assured by many sources that galvanized nails are, in fact, steel nails that have been coated with zinc. A trip to Home Depot's Plumbing Department yielded a cylindrical copper pipe fitting, about 3/4 inches in diameter and 1 inch long. Finally, the Electrical department had a multimeter (many websites still datedly call for a "voltmeter") with positive and negative probes. A trip to our corner supermarket yielded three (3) each of apples, lemons and potatoes. TOTAL Materials Cost: Around $20.00 US (January 2007).
PROCEDURE, and the pulling of many hairs: Not nearly enough websites indicate the best placement of your zinc and copper "electrodes," though a few suggested spacing them about 1 inch apart. Even FEWER websites indicated that the Positive Probe of the multimeter should be placed on the copper, and the Negative Probe on the zinc. Please realize that there are likely many "ordinary" folks like myself who try this experiment, who do NOT fully understand the electrochemistry, and absolutely need this level of detail! Finally, we did not find a single website that indicated what "Range" setting to set the multimeter to in order to get a reading. This omission alone should be considered criminal. There are 14 possible settings within 5 labeled groups on our multimeter. We wound up testing ALL 14…
INITIAL RESULTS: NO reading on the multimeter whatsoever. We moved the probes slowly up and down the nail, and all around the copper fitting. We tried waiting -- 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour -- in case it took time for the chemical reaction to "generate" a result. ZIP. NADA. ZILCH. Back to the web. More research yielded a few sites that scrapped the zinc and copper strips for an ordinary STEEL PAPERCLIP, and a copper Lincoln PENNY (being downright suspicious of everything we found at this point, and realizing that "modern" copper pennies have less and less actual copper in them, we made sure to dig up a penny from 1961.) With our trusty paperclip and 1961 penny inserted approximately 1 inch apart, we began probing with our multimeter again…
FINAL RESULTS (???): Here's the part I would love to have explained to me in LAYMAN'S terms: The ONLY readings we were able to generate were on the "10" ACV scale, and on the OHM scale. My limited knowledge of electricity leads me be believe that the OHMs reading is a measure of resistance, or how difficult a time the electrons are having traveling around their circuitous route. So we ignored the OHM reading. A great book titled "Tesla: Master of Lightning" makes it pretty clear that Nikola Tesla deserves far more credit as an electrical visionary, and Edison a lot less. Among many such discoveries, Tesla was the pioneer of Alternating Current (AC), without which our modern society would be much the poorer. Well, our lemon generated 8 volts AC, which as far as I can tell, means the electrons were REVERSING direction – perhaps 60 times a second! By the way, the apple measured 7 volts AC, and the potato 5 volts AC. These results were consistent and repeatable. I can e-mail you a photo of our probes touching the lemon electrodes and the gauge face of the multimeter (awabooks@hotmail.com).
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[edit] Where do you get the zinc strips?
You know, when I was a kid, you could still find zinc pennies that were actually made of zinc. At least I think they were (probably an alloy). I made Voltaic cells out of copper pennies, zinc pennies, and wads of paper towel soaked in salt water.
But these days, where do you find zinc? If you're going to go to a hardware store to buy zinc, why not just pick up an alkaline cell?
Wouldn't it be more practical to suggest aluminum?
As a kid I always suffered from home science project books that used materials that no doubt were once easy to come by, but no longer were. All those static electricity experiments with sticks of sealing-wax and gutta percha... and "photographer's collodian..."
I wonder whether you can still buy Rochelle salts at a drugstore? I once tried to grow my own piezoelectric crystals—they didn't work, I don't know why—and I remember the druggist giving me a slightly funny look since I bought a pound of the stuff and the only pharmaceutical use for it was as a laxative. Dpbsmith (talk) 19:12, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Chemistry Problems
The way it is written now, it seems that a reduction and an oxidation reaction occur at the anode. However, I learned that reduction occurs at the cathode and oxidation occurs at the anode. Unless anyone has a reason for this, I will change it.
It seems that my editing has been negated. Why? How can reduction and oxidation occur at the anode?
[edit] personal external links
I just noticed that User:Msdaif is (presumably) the owner and originator of the content to which he has posting external links. This is generally frowned on (see WP:EL and WP:COI). Is some other editor really thinks we ought to have those links, they can add them. I'm going to take them out for now. Dicklyon 21:04, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
[edit] lemons limes and grapefruit OH MY!
when i did an experiment, the grapefruit had more electricity than a lemon —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.9.171.178 (talk) 19:45, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
[edit] The voltage of this battery is higher than an Zn/Cu electrochemical battery
Why the voltage of this battery is higher than an Zn/Cu electrochemical battery (0,95 versus 0,76) ? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.247.227.4 (talk) 10:32, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
