Post #17 Electricity and Magic Smoke Part 1

This week is another post on some basic skills that you may find helpful when designing escape rooms or escape puzzle boxes. Let’s talk about electricity. fortunately, you don’t have to understand physics to understand how electricity works and how to use it in your projects. There are some basic rules and laws that govern its behavior and once you understand them, you can figure out how to make electricity work for you.

If you are looking to design escape rooms or escape game boxes you are probably going to use some form or another of electronics. This involves electricity although on a smaller scale than what usually flows through the wires in your home or business.

One of the biggest advantages of electricity is you can move it from place to place with very little effort. String a pair of wires from point A to point B and you can turn on a light, a fan or a waffle iron. Notice I said a pair of wires. Electricity moves in a circular pattern from where it’s created (referred to as the source) to where it’s used (called the sink) and back again. Imagine you have a garden hose hooked to a faucet. You turn on the faucet and eventually water will come out the other end of the hose. Same thing if you hook a piece of copper wire to a battery or a generator, then to a light bulb and back to the generator or battery. When there is electricity present, the light bulb will go on. Now, unlike electricity, water is a one-way trip. The water goes from the faucet down the hose and out the end of the hose and that’s all there is to it. Electricity is always a round-trip situation. It requires two wires going from the source ( battery or generator), to the sink (light bulb, ceiling fan or waffle iron).

Real quick, let’s talk about the difference between a generator and a battery. Both can supply electrical power but, batteries normally do it with a chemical reaction. When the battery is charged there is a substance attached to one side of a series of plates and when it discharges that substance normally moves through some kind of chemical medium to another set of plates creating an electrical current. A generator, on the other hand, converts some sort of other energy into electricity, most often mechanical. A gasoline motor can be used to turn the generator and so can a wind turbine or a human on a bicycle. (This process involves spinning magnets and wire wound in a coil and is outside the scope of this article.) All of these are mechanical energy that is being turned into electricity.

If we turn this back into our water analogy a battery would be a very large tank of water that will supply some amount of water pressure depending on how full the tank is and how big the hose or pipe is coming out of it. A generator would be like a pump in which water is being moved from some source, say a river or a lake through a pipe and out the other end. With electricity, wires act as pipes allowing the flow to happen. Switches are like valves used to start or stop the flow of power. Now water valves close to stop water whereas switches open to stop the flow of electricity. Think of a drawbridge over a river. Cars move back and forth over the bridge like an electrical current when it’s down (closed) but have to stop when the bridge raises up (opens) (unless it’s a Mission Impossible movie, then Tom just shoots his car over the gap and keeps going … faulty switch.) This is the most common way to control the flow of electricity.

Things through which current flows easily are called conductors (copper wire and almost any type of metal). Materials which don’t allow electric current to flow are called insulators. Glass, wood, plastic, rubber and air are items that can be used to insulate against electrical current flow. Gloves used by electricians are coated with rubber to prevent electrocution while they work on high voltage circuits. Handles on all tools made for electrical work are made of plastic to keep the user insulated from the electricity. Even wire itself has a plastic, vinyl or rubber coating to prevent a short circuit (electricity being conducted along a path other than what the circuit designer had planned). Both good conductors and good insulators are required for an electrical circuit to operate correctly. The secret of the magic smoke is coming in Part 2 next post so stay tuned.