Thinking about the first experiment in Jeff Feddersen’s Sustainable Energy class, I repeated (though not exactly) an experiment of Michael Faraday’s originally conducted in 1831.  

It was his observation that by varying a magnetic field over time, an electric field would be generated.  This phenomenon came to be known as the law of (electromagnetic) induction.   The two videos below use LEDs, a coil of wire, jumper wires, and a large magnet hanging on a string as a pendulum.[quicktime]http://www.terezakis.org/itp/video/led-double-4-blog.mov[/quicktime]
I have a few more eighteenth century concepts I would like to physically review in order to prepare for my midterm project.

I couldn’t quite do the math on the setup in the videos as I didn’t know the coil length. The voltage was pretty high – 7.5 – 8.1 Volts. As expected it was not enough power to be able to drive a small motor.

The next tests will use a capacitor.

[quicktime]http://www.terezakis.org/itp/video/led-strip.mov[/quicktime]
Peter Terezakis
ITP
Tisch School of the Arts
http://www.terezakis.com