On Mon, Jan 23, 2006 at 11:39:41AM +0100, Enrico Schuerrer wrote:
> As part of the art you can use a serial connection of natural elements - 2
> apples or potatoes with magnesium- and silver-electrodes - will deliver
> around 5 Volts... and you can burnish the electrodes to high gloss.
> 
> But don't forget - for 75 years lifetime you have to dimension the
> Mg-electrode rather thick :-)

Reminds me of the Rube Goldberg machine I helped my brother build for
his physics class awhile back... It could do anything, so long as it
demonstrated science, somehow. So we settled on making a song play using
a tape deck and a battery. The tape deck was pretty standard... as for
the battery... think 4 litres of hot kool-aid.

See kool-aid's main ingrediant, other than sugar, is citric acid. Add
copper and zinc for the electrods and you have a nice battery. To make
it work as well as possible we used a long trough heated by candles that
the kool-aid passed through after mixing from powdered form...

My brother told me that when he tried it, everything worked fine, so
well in fact they got bored of their little tape player and hooked it up
to a large boombox!

-- 
pete@petertodd.ca http://www.petertodd.ca
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