Creepy video shows you how to make batteries out of lemons

Posted March 13, 2008 at 12:48 AM by David Gonzales

Section: Gadgets / Other, Green, Household, Miscellaneous

Forget concepts! An instructional (albeit a bit creepy) video from Hila Science Camp shows you how to make live, working batteries out of ordinary pieces of lemon. The process is fairly simple: all you’ll need are a few inches of wiring, a nail that’s coated with Zinc, a copper penny, and of course, the lemon itself. Where would we be without Science?

According to the voiceover, a lemon is able to produce power because of the citric acid that’s contained inside it. It works just like a normal battery, since all you really need to do is to float two metals in an acid to produce energy. The metals in this case, will be the zinc-galvanized nail and the copper penny. The copper penny represents the positive end, while the nail becomes the opposite, negative end of the battery.

Throughout the video, the power output is tested to see how much it would take to power a single LED light bulb, and even a pocket calculator. Apparently, one lemon is only able to produce more or less one volt of electricity, which wasn’t even enough to power the lone LED. Clearly, it won’t be replacing our Lithium ion batteries any time soon, but given the right tweaks, this just might prove useful.

Keep reading to check out the video…

Via [Science Base]