The kind of electricity you get from rubbing (friction) is not of much practical use, you remember. Men had to find a way to get a steady current of electricity before they could make electricity do any work for them. The difference between static electricity--when it leaps from one thing to another--and flowing electricity is a good deal like the difference between a short shower of rain and a river. Both rain and river are water, and the water of each is moving from one place to another; but you cannot get the raindrops to make any really practical machine go, while the rivers can do real work by turning the wheels in factories and mills. Within the past century two devices for making electricity flow and do work have been perfected: One of these is the electric battery; the other is the dynamo. THE ELECTRIC BATTERY. A battery consists of two pieces of different kinds of metal, or a metal and some carbon, in a chemical solution. If you hang a piece of zinc and a carbon, such as comes from an arc light, in some water, and then dissolve sal ammoniac in the water, you will have a battery. Some of the molecules of the sal ammoniac divide into two parts when the sal ammoniac gets into the water, and the molecules continue to divide as long as the battery is in use or until it "wears out." One part of each molecule has an unusually large number of electrons; the other part has unusually few. The parts with unusually large numbers of electrons gather around the zinc; so the zinc is _negatively charged_,--it has more than the ordinary number of electrons. The part of the sal ammoniac with unusually few electrons goes over to the carbon; so the carbon is _positively charged_,--it has fewer than the ordinary number of electrons. MAKING THE CURRENT FLOW. Now if we can make some kind of bridge between the carbon and the zinc, the electrons will flow from the place where there are many to the place where there are few. Electrons can flow through copper wire very easily. So if we fasten one end of the copper wire to the carbon and the other end to the zinc, the electrons will flow from the zinc to the carbon as long as there are more electrons on the zinc; that is, until the battery wears out. Therefore we have a steady flow of electricity through the wire. While the electricity is flowing from one pole to the other, we can make it do work. EXPERIMENT 64. Set up two or three Samson cells. They consist of a glass jar, an open zinc cylinder, and a smaller carbon cylinder. Dissolve a little over half a cup of sal ammoniac in water and put it into the glass jar; then fill the jar with water up to the line that is marked on it. Put the carbon and zinc which are attached to the black jar cover into the jar. Be careful not to let the carbon touch the zinc. One of these cells will probably not be strong enough to ring a doorbell for you; so connect two or three together in series as follows: