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)
[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?
