What is electricity?

Everything in the universe is made up of atoms. Atoms are made up of three primary components, which are the proton, neutron, and electron. The protons and neutrons make up the nucleus of the atom while the electrons orbit the nucleus like the moon orbits the Earth. The proton has a positive charge and the electron has a negative charge.

Electricity is created when particles become charged. Some particles become positively charged while others becomes negatively charged. Particles with opposite charges attract each other while particles with the same charge repel each other.

Since the electrons are in constant motion, occasionally an electron will escape from its atom and joins another atom. The atom that the electron escaped from now will have a net positive charge while the atom that gained the electron while having a net negative charge. Electricity is this flow of electrons.

The electrical conductivity of a metal is measured by how easily an electron can escape from its atom. Copper, Silver, and Gold are some of the best conductive materials because they have only a single valence, or outer shell, an electron that moves with little resistance.

If we connected a copper wire from one end of a battery to the other, as shown in the following diagram, the flow of electrons would go from the negatively charged end to the positively charged end.

The reason that electricity flows in this manner is oppositely charged particles attract therefor the positively charged end attracts the electrons causing them to flow from the negatively charged end. One of the easiest ways to envision the flow of electrons is to look at how water flows through a pipe. Now let's look at some properties of electricity starting with how we would measure the flow of electrons.