The beauty of taking notes

Can you recall your last birthday party? How old did you turn? What color clothes were you wearing? How many friends came to your birthday party? What were they all wearing? Of course you can recall all that by looking into your photo-album!

What were you thinking when you opened your best friend's present? Could that thought be captured in camera? No! Do you want to base your future interactions with your best friend based on how special they made you feel on that day? Yes!

Human thoughts and memories are short-lived; they change with time and new experiences. As we discussed, solving a problem takes a lot of time because each question leads to more! It is tough to keep a tab on all the thoughts.

But if you write it down, it's yours forever, as it was in that moment! As clear as a photograph! Clarity of your last thought is very important when you are trying to invent something new as you are linking the information you already knew to newer information. It is a chain that keeps on increasing with experience.

Hence, your inventors-notebook is your best friend!

Let's conduct a simple experiment to test your newly acquired inventor-power! Adult supervision is needed. The requirements are: a lemon, a paper clip, and a copper wire.

Procedure:

1. Request the adult to straighten the paper clip and cut about two inches of it and give you. Request the elder to remove the insulation from the household copper wire and cut two inches of it.
2. IN FRONT OF THE ADULT, try touching both the wires with your tongue (I know, it's not my favorite snack either!).
3. Now fix the two wires in the lemon in a way that they are as close as possible but DO NOT touch each other.
4. Now try licking the end of the wires.

Observation: Taste something tingly on your tongue?

Conclusion: Congratulations! You just 'tasted' electricity! Go brag to your friends!

Note

If you add one more lemon with similar paper clips and connect them, you can power an LED! Cool, eh?

Warning Cool as it may seem, electricity is a highly dangerous power, and you must ALWAYS have adult supervision while handling it. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO TASTE ANY ELECTRICITY THAT IS NOT COMING FROM the LEMON. This tingling sensation is magnified by several thousand times in real life, and all our appliances are built to withstand that kind of power; our human body is not, and imitating this stunt can be disastrous!

What kind of questions have you noted in your inventors-notebook? Why is this happening? What will happen if you replace the copper wire with the same kind of paper clip instead? Write back to me at <mail@priyakuber.in>.

Tip

Cool as it may seem, all the experiments in this book come with a warning sign: do not swallow the parts that we use to create a solution, and when in doubt, always call for an adult. Safety first!