Currents from the Kitchen

Which Fruit or Vegetable has the most electric charge?

In our science class we tested which fruit or vegetable would have the most electric charge. I chose to try the apple and potato and compare them to see which one would have more of a charge . I thought that the potato would work the best and it did. What we did to find out the electric charge what we clipped zinc and copper with alligator clips and stuck them on either side of the fruit / vegetable and connected the other end to a lightbulb to see if it would light up, sadly it didn’t. We decided to then try to find out how much charge each object had to we connected it to a voltmeter and we got some results:

The potato got : 0.5 V and the apple got : 0.2 V. but we weren’t able to light the lightbulb because the lightbulb requires 2V of power.

A variable that we changed were the amount of zinc that we used, we thought if we added more zinc or a bigger piece of it the zinc might give it more power but we didn’t really notice a difference in the amount of electricity produced.

I think that this was a pretty cool experiment, our teacher gave us complete freedom to try different things to see if they would work and to try to figure it out on our own. What I liked most about the experiment was that I had never done anything like this before so it was all new to me and I got to figure things out.