Attractive water
Image: Kagen McLeod
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Key concepts
Electricity
Magnetism
Gravity
From National Science Education Standards: Light, heat, electricity and magnetism
Introduction
Have you ever noticed your hair standing out on a dry day, or how a fuzzy fleece blanket can make sparks if you rub two sections of the blanket together in the dark? Both of these things are caused by electricity—which also runs as current through wires behind light switches and electrical outlets. But the form of electricity that causes hair to stand up, known as static electricity, is much weaker (though strong enough that a buildup of static electricity can cause a slightly painful shock if you touch the right surface).
Because it's weaker, static electricity doesn't work as well to power light bulbs or appliances, but you can make it do some surprising things around the house.
Background
Static electricity works on similar principles as a magnet. It can create a positive or negative charge that can either attract or repel other objects.
Have you ever rubbed a balloon or fuzzy fabric against your hair and watched what happens? The rubbing action moves some of the loose negative charges (from atoms' electrons) in your hair to the surface of the balloon or fabric. This makes your (now) positively charged hair attracted to the (now) more negatively charged surface of the balloon or fabric. And because each of your hairs has a slight positive charge, like similar sides of a magnet, they will want to move away from each other, fluffing out your hair even more!
Water, which is two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, also is made up of charged particles, with the two hydrogen atoms having a positive charge. Because in water’s liquid form these atoms are free to move around any which way, it can easily be affected by a static electrical charge.
Materials
• Three small Styrofoam cups (alternatively, you can use two paper cups to hold the water and an inflated balloon to provide the static charge)
• Toothpick
• Water
• Someone with a head of clean, dry hair
Preparation
• Carefully push a toothpick half way through the bottom of one of the Styrofoam cups. Don’t remove the toothpick—leave it stuck in the cup to ensure a gentle trickle of water when you fill it up.
• Hold this cup directly over the second Styrofoam cup.
• Fill the top Styrofoam cup (with the toothpick in the bottom) with water, and make sure that it is leaking a steady but small stream of water into the cup below.
Procedure
• Observe how the water is flowing straight down from the top cup into the one below.
• Rub the third Styrofoam cup against the head of someone with clean dry hair for several seconds to get a static electrical charge (you can tell this happens when the hairs start to stand apart from each other).
• Hold this statically charged cup near the stream of water without letting it get wet.
• What happens to the stream of water?
• Now move the cup away from the water stream. What does the water do?
• Extra: Try the activity with other objects, such as a paper cup, a balloon you've rubbed against your hair or other items. What works to change the water's stream? What doesn't?
Read on for observations, results and more resources.
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5 Comments
Add CommentAnd, even more fun...rub the balloon aganist your hair and then place it on the nearest wall...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm going to go home and see if the wall 'trick' works with a styrofoam cup as well. I'll have my grand-kids hypothosize what will happen.
Check "Lord Kelvin's water-drop electrostatic generator" for more interesting electrostatic effects using water.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso fun: fill a sink (with a metal drain at the bottom) with water and let it become still and waveless. Then, walk across the carpet in your socks, sliding your feet instead of lifting them. (Works best when the air is dry.) Don't touch anything — especially the counter around the sink — but slowly lower a single finger to the water's surface. Slowly! When you are just a few millimeters from the water, it will start to rise up to meet your finger. If it gets close enough, the static will spark and ripples will propagate out from your finger — even though you never touched the water!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is especially fun for kids, because it requires no tools or fancy materials. It's like the magic is in their finger, and so then they get a better feeling about how magic is electricity, and electricity is matter, and matter is everything around us — including us. The difference between us and a muddy pool is mostly in the arrangement of the bits, and that's a difficult concept to get across because we feel that life is so very different than stuff.
"The difference between us and a muddy pool is mostly in the arrangement of the bits."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThanks quixote - that's beautiful. My new email tag line. (nice experiment too!)
The only cause of this experiment to succeed is the ability to reform the Earth's surface in small quantity not as past but it take a meaning shape to control the surrounding environment so microscopes use nowadays is keen to us to watch and effect for who needs to make a difference or to play.Don't forget Mickey mouse cartoon.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this