Charge your gadgets with a piece of fruit and some pocket change
Posted 05.01.2009 at 1:25 pm
7 Comments
Quick Charge
Six apple-penny batteries wired in parallel, each with 20 to 25 cells (apple slices) is just barely enough to charge an iPhone for about a second
Mike Walker
Arthur C. Clarke wrote that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," but he was wrong. It's easy to tell the difference -- technology works. For example, "remote-viewing" mentalists claim they can see events far away, yet they fail every test. In fact, remote viewing is simple: It’s called TV.
Another example that recently circulated online was a fake video of someone charging his iPhone by jamming the end of a USB cable into an onion. How do I know it was fake? First, you need contacts made of two different metals, and second, you can't get enough voltage out of a single vegetable. What makes the ruse so disappointing is that it is possible to charge an iPhone this way, if you do it right.
Slice: Mike Walker
Fruit Power
A regulation vegetable battery, made by sticking strips of zinc and copper into a potato, generates about half a volt. The electricity comes from the oxidation of zinc; the vegetable is just an electrolyte (conductive barrier), and the copper completes the circuit. Stacking alternating layers of vegetable, zinc and copper is like wiring batteries in series, each set adding its voltage to the total.
Rods and Slices
After some 10 volts' worth of teary-eyed onion peeling, I decided to switch to apples, using a fruit corer to cut out the apple rods and a cheese slicer to cut them into disks. Pennies with the copper plating sanded off on one side made a handy source of copper and zinc layers in one.
Connect: Mike Walker
Apple to Apple
About 150 of these, arranged into six parallel batteries of 25 apple/zinc/copper layers each, yielded enough power to charge an iPhone, but only for about a second. (Much larger zinc plates and whole slices of apple would have provided more power for longer.) Around 200 of the layers went into one three-foot-long apple battery, delivering much higher voltage. I was able to create a visible, and potentially fatal, spark with this battery. Yes, in the right configuration, you can electrocute yourself with an apple.
Achtung! This experiment could damage your iPhone if done improperly.
Want to read more articles like this, plus tips and tricks, home hacks, DIY projects, and more? Subscribe to Popular Science today, for less than $1 per issue!
7 Comments
To comment, please Login.
Popular Tags
Regular Features
|
|
|
|
|
|
June 2013: American Energy Independence
Five amazing, clean technologies that will set us free, in this month's energy-focused issue. Also: how to build a better bomb detector, the robotic toys that are raising your children, a human catapult, the world's smallest arcade, and much more.
Popular on Popsci
Most Commented
Most Emailed
Online Content Director: Suzanne LaBarre | Email
Senior Editor: Paul Adams | Email
Associate Editor: Dan Nosowitz | Email
Assistant Editor: Colin Lecher | Email
Assistant Editor: Rose Pastore | Email
Contributing Writers:
Rebecca Boyle | Email
Kelsey D. Atherton | Email
Francie Diep | Email
Shaunacy Ferro | Email
Today on PopSci.com
Copyright © 2012 Popular Science
A Bonnier Corporation Company. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
Well I like apples and its a waste to see them get used as a 1 second battery, even cutting a pan with bacon seems smarter then this -_- but hey electrocuting your self with an apple is pretty funny, might try that sometime.
Science used to its fullest potential - again to show that sometimes the world works in ways opposed to intuition. Cool story
Did the iPhone really hover above the table for that 1 second too, as in the picture? if so, definitely work spending the day chopping apples.
Clarke was (as usual) correct. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." How many times in the last 150 years has someone shown "magic" to a newly discovered tribe in Indonesia or Brazil or wherever? Clarke never said it IS magic, just that it would seem like magic. Photography, flying machines, lasers, spaceflight, cars, computers..... I can't even understand all the mechanisms of quantum mechanics! Don't tell me that isn't magic!
Sometimes the way these articles are worded just makes me want to burst out into laughter. When I die, my family knows not to bury me, but if they did, I'd want to have died because of something funny, that way I could amuse visitors to the cemetery for many years afterward with a statement on my tombstone like, "Yes, you can electrocute yourself with an apple."
Alice Reilly
Department of Biology
Mercer University
i used a voltmeter to test it and, of course, it had an actual charge. it was pretty cool.
"I was able to create a visible, and potentially fatal, spark with this battery"
Fatal?! ha! simply touching this spark would not only not penetrate the skin, as dc voltage is being produced in an extremely small form....but dont play with sparks if you dont know what your dealing with.