An Introduction to Volts, Amps & Watts

An Introduction to Volts, Amps & Watts

An Introduction to Volts, Amps & Watts

One discovery has completely revolutionized the way the world works: electricity. To demonstrate this, all you to do is to look around yourself and consider what parts of your home or workspace would work without electricity. In this case, it would seem to be important to have some idea of how electricity works; this article has been written for just this purpose.

The basic definition of electricity is quite intuitive: electricity is a flow of electric charge. Electric charge is one of the fundamental quantities which form the basis of physics.

The basic unit of electric current is the amp, a shortening of Ampere (named after a French physicist named Andre-Marie Ampere). The definition of electric current is very similar to the definition of a flow of water, except that the "stuff" being measured is the amount of electric current passing through an area such as a point on a wire.

Voltage, on the other hand, is not so easy to explain in simple terms. The quantity which we informally refer to as "voltage" is actually electric potential difference (no wonder we find it easier to say "voltage" instead!). Here we can draw an analogy to the pressure difference in a pipe, which drives the flow of water. In the case of electric current, it is a difference in charge which creates this potential: electric current is simply nature's way of trying to balance out an imbalance of charge by sending negative charges to a more positively charged region, or positive charges to a more negatively charged region.

The basic unit of potential difference is the volt, which may be thought of as the amount of desire electrons in the current have to get across the distance separating two differently charged regions. If one side of the gap has five units of positive charge and the other side five units of negative charge, the voltage will be five times greater across the gap than if there were one unit of positive or negative charge on each respective side.

There is nothing about watts that is particular to electricity; the watt is a unit of power, a measure of the amount of work done per unit time. Imagine two cars, a high-powered racing car and a run-of-the-mill family car, each given the same amount of the same type of fuel. Since each car has the same amount of the same fuel, each will theoretically travel exactly the same distance before running out of fuel and rolling to a stop (assuming all else is equal). If both cars are cranked to their maximum output and it takes the family car twice as long as the race car before it finally rolls to a halt beside its sexier counterpart, we would say it has half the power of the race car (but equal energy).

In electricity, it turns out that power is current multiplied by voltage: the potential difference (in volts) in a wire by the current (in amps) gives you the power coursing though the wire, in watts.

Though it seems simple to plug in a TV and zone out in front of the tube, there is good reason to understand the basics of electricity. The world is not as simple as it may seem, because each appliance, cell phone, and laptop computer is designed to run on a different power rating. While feeding a part less power than it needs would be relatively harmless, doing the opposite can destroy that device you shelled out your hard earned money for! Understanding the meanings of words like "volts" and "amps," you may now feel more secure when reading that user's guide when it describes the power requirements for your new plasma TV!

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