How Fruit Turns Into Electricity

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]What's happening inside of this battery is this zinc that's on this nail is oxidizing right before your very eyes, so to speak, inside of this acid. The acid in the lemon simply provides an uh an environment where the oxidation can really happen and and and do a good job of oxidation. So, this zinc is losing electrons, right? It's losing electrons.

[00:00:20]That's what oxidation means. Where do you think the electrons go? Well, they're not just going to just sit there. They're going to try to go somewhere. When we hook them up an electric circuit, the electrons bleed off of this nail, go through the circuit, in this case through the calculator, come back to the positive terminal, which is the penny, and that's why the nail is negative. The nail's negative because it's the guy donating and creating the electrons. It's not really creating them. It has the electrons inside of the nail, but it's donating them to the circuit. They go through the circuit. They come back around, and the penny is sort of trying to attract these electrons and kind of take them in. And that's what what you have here. And that is the fundamental concept of any battery. If you could take this apart, this little AA battery, I I don't recommend it, but if you could, you would see an acid in there, and you would see metals in there. And it's the same kind of chemistry. One of these metals is donating its electrons, and then the other metal is accepting the electrons, you know, after the electrons go through the through the device, through your iPod or whatever, the other side of the battery takes those electrons in. And after a while, you basically deplete the uh the ability of these metals to create more electrons, and the battery is dead. So, if I hook this guy up and leave it for few weeks or whatever, eventually this lemon battery will actually die, and it won't be able to produce any more electrons because the chemical reaction going on here is going to stop. Once you uh once you oxidize too much of this zinc, it can't go on forever. Learn anything at mathandscience.com.