Metuchen Tutor

Hey parents! Here is another activity and this time it is about electrochemistry, the part of chemistry dealing with electricity.

Gather these materials:
1. a lemon
2. a small dish
3. 9 small strips of a paper towel (about the size of a penny)
4. 5 pennies
5. 5 dimes

To conduct the experiment, do the following:
1. Squeeze your lemon over the small dish.
2. Soak all of the paper towel strips in the lemon juice
3. Make a tower out of your coins by creating a pattern of a dime, paper towel, penny, paper towel, and repeating them until you have the last penny on top.
4. Moisten one fingertip (your index finger will work best for this) on each hand and hold the tower of coins horizontally between your fingers.
5. What happens?
6. If you have an LED, put one wire on each side of the stack and see it light up! You can also see how many volts you produced using a multimeter on either side. You can even change up the number of pennies and dimes, as long as there is the same number of pennies as the number of dimes.

You have now made a wet cell! This was the ancestors of the battery that you find in stores everywhere.

This works because lemon juice is an acidic solution that is able to conduct the electricity generated by the separation of the two metals in the coin tower.

In real batteries, there are dry cells where there are 32 kinds of metals that are separated by blotting paper (quite similar to the paper towel) that is soaked in a very strong acid!

For more information, check out these links:
https://www.ducksters.com/science/electricity_102.php
https://www.ducksters.com/science/acids_and_bases.php
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkRwuM4S8BQ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_battery

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