Joey Green's Mad Scientist

Electric Lemon

What You Need

Wire cutters
Five stiff copper wires, 6 inches long, 14 grade
Four galvanized nails
Four lemons
Bulb holder
1.2-volt flashlight bulb

What to Do
With the wire cutters, strip 1 inch of insulation off both ends of each wire. Wrap one end of the first four wires to its own nail.
Squeeze the lemons, crushing them gently, to loosen the pulp inside so the juice flows inside.
Insert the nail end of the first wire into the first lemon.
Insert the bare end of the second wire into the first lemon (without letting the wire and the nail touch each other inside the lemon). Insert the nail end of that same wire into the second lemon.
Repeat until all the lemons are wired together. Attach the remaining two wires to the bulb holder, and insert the bulb.

What Happens
The lemons light up the light bulb.

Why It Works
The citric acid in the lemon juice acts as an electrolyte, conducting an electron flow between the copper in the wire and the bit of steel in the nail, turning each lemon into a battery. (If the lightbulb doesn't light up, add more lemons.)

Bizarre Facts

The battery owes its discovery to frogs' legs. In the 1780s, Luigi Galvani, a professor of anatomy at Bologna University, noticed that the legs of dead frogs twitched when they were hung from hooks on a rail. Fellow professor Allesandro Volta of Pavia University deduced that the frogs' legs were completing the circuit between the copper hooks and the iron rail, prompting him to produce a Voltaic cell in 1800.
The modern-day household battery should be called a cell, not a battery. A battery is an array of single cells.
The lemon is actually a type of berry called a hesperidium.
Lemons are believed to have originated in northeastern India, near the Himalayas.
The first lemon trees in America were planted in 1493 by Christopher Columbus.
Actor Jack Lemmon's last name really is Lemmon.
The word lemon is slang for "a defective automobile," derived from the fruit's unavoidable sour taste.
The amount of energy needed to make a battery is fifty times greater than the amount of energy that same battery produces.

The Lemon Electric Chair
Upon learning that the first electric chair had been put to use in Auburn Prison in New York on August 6, 1890, Abyssinian Emperor Memelik II, determined to modernize his country, ordered three electric chairs from the American manufacturer. When the chairs arrived in Abyssinia, Emperor Memelik discovered they would not work without electricity (which his country did not have), so he made one of the electric chairs his royal throne.

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