Magnet making Current - Smarter Every Day 16

Hey, it's me, Destin. I'm in Baltimore. [Mascot blows raspberries] [Destin laughs] Thanks. [Music]

So let's say you want to make yourself smarter on electronics, but you're not, uh... You're not really swoofed on that kinda stuff. Oh, looky here, it's the National Electronics Museum. Why don't we go have a look?

John McCarty is here. He's a volunteer at the museum. We have a demonstration for you to show you the relation between current flow and magnetism. So there's a magnet right here, on this side of this tube. We have a coil of wire hooked up to a galvanometer, basically, that's measuring amps. It's set up for DC amps.

So when we twist this, the magnet's gonna fall through the coil and you'll get current flow here. So you can see the current spike. So here's the question: when we turn it the other way, are we going to get positive current or negative current? So that's the question.

So if you think it's gonna be positive - if the needle's gonna go that way, click here. If you think the needle's gonna go that way, click here, and afterwards we'll get Mr. McCarty to explain it, so... Click now. [Music]

Captioning in different languages welcome. Please contact Destin if you can help.