When life gives you lemons, make a crude electrochemical battery.

Fun fact I CAME here after my teacher send us this link for online class

Fun fact: You searched for this

Lemon: "I never asked for this."

This is actually the best explication of this experience I've ever heard. Thanks a lot!

This science has been around for quite awhile. I personally use a watermelon as a car battery.

I have a state science fair tomorrow. This is going to help me a lot!! Thanks Hank!!

I made this in 6th grade! Turned out to be a great experiment. I can't remember how many lemons it took to get a good reading. But I definitely recommend this to anyone.

Thanks for the fun revision Hank! I have a chemistry exam on saturday that has a section on electrochemistry, this definitely made my study slightly more fun.

When life gives you lemons, make electricity!

When you don’t have a charger for your phone

Knowledge is a wonderful thing to share. I do love all of these videos.

@scishow I really wish I could understand this more intuitively. I think a diagram would've been useful for this episode. Thanks as always!

I like your explanation but two things: first try not to talk so fast it might be hard for someone not so familiar with English and second you should use more pictures of what you are explaining especially if you want to talk fast.

Can you not talk so fast? I almost understood nothing.

This video is awesome! Best explanation of the lemon battery I've ever heard. It's only the second one I heard, but it's the one I needed.

Oddly enough Hank, this information will be useful to me when I take the MCAT exam this spring. So Thank You! :)

It took me ages to find a science project and thanks to this I found one

you say 3x the current with the lemon but youre talking about connecting in series which changes the volts. the surface area of zinc and copper gives you the amperage as it's oxidizing faster.

When I saw mark rober’s 1000 lemon wall I was pretty much positive it doesn’t matter if you do a million lemons or 10 as the electricity isn’t in the lemon, thank you for confirming this and your explanation was very eloquent. Great video

thanks, i was miffed that this wasn't mentioned in the video, even though it was a rather critical aspect of the change to the experiment.

you are the best man I've ever met and you make a lot of great videos for science project

When life gives you lemons; make electricity! lol - Love it! Brilliant minds should be encouraged to keep thinking. I have said" When life gives you lemons, grow a lemon tree - yours is even better!

I remember doing a science experiment on lemon batteries. I don't know why but I was really interested in it. It is good remembering how to do it!

It doesn't specifically need acid, it just needs something ionic or to react with. (though acid, like acids that are used in batteries, is often most effective) You can do an identical experiment in water + quite some salt! Any vegetable will do to some degree, as water and ions (and ion transport) are essential for any lifeform.

we can hook up thousands of lemon together and put the resulting electricity in the power grid its renewable energy

Are there any Guinnes records for most lemon/potatoe batteries conected in series??? I think that with high enough number of lemon bateries you could produce plasma!

"I’ve been thinking. When life gives you lemons? Don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons! What am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought is could give me lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s going to burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m going to get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!" -Cave Johnson, Founder of Aperture Science Innovators

That makes it like a bijjillion times easier to understand! Thanks a million!

I hit the like button just for that sound of surprise when they flung a lemon at him right at the end. 2:58

Wow I have been into electronics all my life and that was the best explanation of how a battery works that I have heard. I know some might have to watch it twice because of the speed but some people are slow .

Thank you! I am doing a science fair project on how food can convert into electricity!!

That's a really good question! I hope he will make a vid to answer you :)

doing this for science fair, wish me luck

How does this work without a separator? And since it does, then why is a separator used in batteries?

please do a video on epigenetics, ive just started learning about it and its seems so amazing in what it could mean for cancer cures along with everything else and id really like to know it in more detail !

ITS NICE AND NOW I ONLY WILL WATCH SCI SHOW

Why CAN'T I power AI supercomputers that want to kill me with a potato?

I will be performing this experiment with my daughters this weekend. Thank you for your time to explain all this! You rock!

0:40 "...when asked why electrons are flowing, good change that you will be stumped or wrong". Well sir, I'm fraid that you have little clue about electrochemical cells: 0:48 "Electrochemical cells, also called batteries..." Wrong. Batteries are electrochemical cells, but not all electrochemical cells are batteries. A hoffman water electrolysis setup is also an electrochemical cell. 1:12 "... copper wants electrons more than zinc". Incorrect. Copper (Cu) does not want electrons at all, you may be mistaken with copper IONS. 1:34 "... zinc has to lose protons too". Not true. Zinc does not have any protons available, except in the its nuclei but these protons will never leave their nucleus. 1:58 "...the acid removes electrons from the zinc". This is correct, although it's the protons in the acid that remove the electrons, and as a consequence, hydrogen gas is formed. Followed by.... 2:05 "... the resulting electrons collect in the metal". You just said that the acid removes the electrons from the zinc, so the electrons are in 'the acid' and not in the zinc. This contradiction is resulting from mixing up the reactions that are happening. Yes the zinc wil be reacting with the acid forming hydrogen gas. But also the zinc atoms have a tendency to lose an electron anyway to form zinc ions that go into solution, with the resulting 'free' electron residing in the metal. 2:10 Again "...copper wants electrons more than zinc". Incorrect. 2:12 "...electrons are now in the copper and pull a couple of protons and reduce them to form hydrogen gas". What happens here is the same as what the acid does at the zinc electrode (1:58) except that the reaction at the zinc electrode's physical location involves a direct exchange of electrons (no need to transport electrons all the way to the copper electrode and therefore a waste of chemical energy not being converted into electrical energy). Bottom line, the lemon setup is a very inefficient battery. The reducing agent is the zinc of which there is plenty; the oxidising agent are the protons (H+) in the citric acid of which there is - in comparison - not a lot available near the copper electrode. So the battery will be nearly exhausted quickly.

It helps indeed, very clear and logical. Now I finally got it. Thank you very much! :)

THANK You so much this is going to be the best since project ever XD :)

In fourth grade I won a science fair by making speakers crackle with a lemon, nail and headphones. Such a cool experiment

I love your videos. At 53 I am learning something everyday and with people like you, don't feel so quite worried about the planet!

i am doing a progect and i want to do a lemon batteray but i dont think i can get galvanived nails or galvanised anything cuz of zinc and tho zinc is in lots of things i dont know if it will hurt anyone cuz this is a school scince fair and i will be disqalafied if i use something harmful and will this light fire cuz i dont know if it willl start fire then i will be disqalafied and my project will be destroyed soo i really dont know if this is harmful i neeed tihs by tomarrow sooo AHHH!!

0:35 voltmeter? gg

I'm so shocked when I saw Hank here. I only know him from Crash Course.

Wish you hadn't glossed over using a single lemon instead of several in series. I'm getting the same voltage regardless of how many copper wires and zinc nail pairs are in a single lemon.

... the atoms don't lose a proton... if it did it wouldn't be zinc anymore. i think you meant cation? edit: ok it was just poor word choice. lol

magnesium w/copper works best.

You're proposing a fascinating scenario! Let's explore this idea: 1. Carnivores and other organisms consume vast amounts of food, producing acidic waste. 2. The acidic waste reacts with the planet's sediment, lowering the pH of the environment. 3. Over billions of years, this process continues, with the acidic waste accumulating and reacting with the sediment. 4. The sediment, now rich in acidic compounds, is compressed and heated, eventually forming a massive, acidic reservoir. 5. This reservoir builds up over time, eventually reacting with other planetary materials to form a protostar. This scenario suggests that the accumulation of acidic waste from ancient organisms could have played a role in the formation of our Sun and potentially other stars in the galaxy! The idea is intriguing, and it highlights the complex and interconnected processes that shape our universe.

I am sure that you are aware the Egyptians first discovered the citric acid battery. I wonder if you were to fill a beaker with a lot of mass with lemon juice and used several copper wires and galvanized nails, would it generate a great amount of electricity. Would it make a difference if you used larger copper and galvanized posts, compared to several different copper and galvanized posts?

He is clearly confusing voltage with current. Also lemons in series builds more voltage and adding lemons in parallel or adding more nails to one lemon gets more current. Car batteries have lots of electrode surface area so you can draw lots of current all at once so a measly 12 volts can start your car.

This video is awesome. I'm trying it

thank you for that, i didnt know that you dont need more lemons to make more power :)

I fought the title said lemon party

Hank is sounding a bit mad scientist in this video. I approve. :D

Great video, I enjoyed how you simplified the processes and made it more understandable. It would be cool if you would use this process and make a motor or electromagnet using the lemon power. I definitely subscribed, and hope to see more videos.

when life gives you lemons, make lemon grenades

i saw this experiment of a small sized battery capacitor , charging it causes it to produce pressure like its being inflated it hardens up and in a serries they act together sort of prventing a sudden discharge so as it all discharges in sync .its strange science behind this. but discharges extremly slow in comparisen to chargeing .a fantasy science projectno less

Are lemons more effective than potatoes?

If life gives you lemons, keep 'em, because hey, free lemons!

When I clicked on this video I did not expected to see Hank Green here!! Omg what a beautiful surprise!! Lol

“You’d either be stumped or you’d be wrong” haha awesome

So... that means we can eat the lemon afterward, right?

How true is the possibility of combustible lemons...?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of generating electricity using lemon

I was told to watch this video for school. It's not homework when it's Hank Green and SciShow

*E* very *V* illain *I* s *L* emons

can u use kiwi fruit cuz it has twice the citric acid as compared to lemons

This video felt familiar for some reason, and then I saw Michael Aranda in the credits and I was like, "Ooh, OK. Yes, definitely."

is it bad that i flinched when he pretended to throw the lemon at the end?

"Yeah, yeah! He's saying what we're all thinking!"

HEY CAN I EAT MY LEMON AGAIN :p ?

What he meant in short is volt cell. Youll learn this in chemistry

I think Tony and Bruce would have a picture of Hank lovingly framed on their lab wall.

Subbed :P

does it works

Cave Johnson: "Demand to see life's manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I'm the man who's going to burn your house down! With the lemons! I'm going to get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!"

Looking at AMD processors, I feel somewhat compelled to create a processor-like device with half the copper pins replaced with zinc, then plugging it up to a lemon. Wonder how much power I could extract if, say, about 4 of these thousand-pin devices were plugged up to a lemon?

i got hear from a play list on my friends youtube Chanel called school their name is Sk1p1ng

who uses analogue multimeter these days? lol

+1 on the voltage argument. the multiple nails argument, however, is not flawed. it's pretty much all about active surface available for ion flow. flooded lead-acid batteries also have a common electrolyte; the separation only serves as a protection against physical contact of the plates themselves.

Ah, good point. The great part about these videos is that people are interested in expanding knowledge.

I didn't understand at least 55% of your vid... xD

this is a great project for all grades!!!!!!!

this man has protected his virginity couragously

Hank NEVER AGES

So could you just use citric acid and forget the lemon?

You lost me at 2:01 and I had to watch this over and over and had to keep pausing just to understand the other part...

I suddenly want to put as much nails as I can in a lemon for maximum power.

Haha he called the multimeter a voltmeter, and he wasn't even using it as a voltmeter, he was using it as an ammeter. But its alright, i still love his videos

Don't be rude

Damn... This guy talks way to slow! had to speed it up to even understand! 2:29

are you sure about the use of the term 'electronegative' - most often used wrt covalent bonding

Could you eat the lemon after all the hydrogen gas from the electron exchanges that occured inside the lemon?

you speak too fast

Woah woah woah sir u talk too fast you be like inthelemonbatterythereiszincblahandblahsoyeahletsgotothenextthing 2 seconds later sothisworksbyaddingzincandcoppermakesthissolookattheperiodictable

Thank you so much.I have a curricular science experiment class at saturday.I can use it for it.

When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade! Make a lemon battery!