User:Cameal Davidson/sandbox

What is Static Electricity? Electric charge that has accumulated on an object. Static electricity is often created when two objects that are not good electrical conductors are rubbed together, and electrons from one of the objects rub off onto the other. This happens, for example, when combing one's hair or taking off a sweater.

Potential and kinetic energy Just quickly, in passing, it's worth noting that there's another way to think of static and current electricity and to relate them to things we already know about energy. We can think of static electricity as a kind of potential energy: it's stored energy ready and waiting to do something useful for us. In a similar way, current electricity is (loosely speaking) analogous to kinetic energy: energy in movement—albeit of an electrical kind. Just as you can turn potential energy into kinetic energy (for example, by letting a bolder roll down a hill), so you can turn static electricity into current electricity (that's what a lightning bolt does) and back again (that's how a Van de Graaff generator works).

What causes static electricity? Until a few years ago, scientists were confident that they understood static electricity and exactly how it worked. The explanation went like this... Just like the ancient Greeks, we tend to think static electricity comes from rubbing things. So if you live in a home with nylon carpets and metal doorknobs, you'll soon learn that your body builds up a static charge when you walk across the floor, which can discharge when you touch a doorknob, giving you a tiny electric shock. In most school experiments, we also learn about static by rubbing things. You've probably tried that trick where you rub a balloon on your clothes to make it stick? You might conclude from this that static electricity is somehow connected to friction—that it's the very act of rubbing something vigorously that produces a buildup of electrical energy (in the same way that friction can produce heat and even fire).

The Triboelectric Effect It's not the rubbing that's important but the fact that we're bringing two different materials into contact. Rubbing two things together vigorously simply brings them into contact again and again—and it's this that produces the static electricity through a phenomenon known as triboelectricity (or the triboelectric effect). All materials are built from atoms, which have a positive central core (the nucleus) surrounded by a kind of fuzzy "cloud" of electrons, which are the really exciting bits. Now some atoms have a more powerful pull on electrons than others; a great deal of chemistry stems from that fact. If we put two different materials in contact, and one attracts electrons more than the other, it's possible for electrons to be pulled from one of the materials to the other. When we separate the materials, the electrons effectively jump ship to the material that attracts them most strongly. As a result, one of the materials has gained some extra electrons (and becomes negatively charged) while the other material has lost some electrons (and becomes positively charged). Hey presto, we have static electricity! When we rub things together again and again, we increase the chances that more atoms will take part in this electron-swap, and that's why a static charge builds up.