 When we're talking about energy one of the things that it's important to think about is what's the driving force? Why do electrons move from one place to another? And what we're going to do today is we're going to look at taking a piece of copper and a piece of zinc and if we put them in a solution where electrons can move freely then we'll be able to produce a Current and that is the the driving force is the potential difference between the copper and the zinc in solution in order to measure that we're going to use a volt probe connected to our computer as You can see the computer Monitor is reading 1.4 Plus or minus volts and That is because your USB Supplies one and a half volts and that's how you can operate things or charge things using your computer, but when we connect this You will see that it falls back to zero. So what we're going to use the computer as our volt meter So what we have in two test tubes are Solutions of sodium sulfate and those are not going to react, but they're going to give us a charged particle so that we can have a flow of electrons To connect the two Tubes together. We're going to use a salt bridge. This is just a little Bit of auger in a potassium nitrate solution just to slow down the flow but again to give a a charged positive potassium and negative nitrate to facilitate the flow and Then from there we're going to add our copper electrode and our zinc electrode And we're going to connect our circuit So let's see what the volt meter has to say so you can see that simply having copper and zinc connected by a wet solution that has Ions in it You're going to be able to produce a battery So you what we have made here is a battery that's going to provide about 0.9 volts Theoretically a cell made of copper and zinc and a one molar solution should produce 1.1 volt Let's suppose we have a solution and a piece of metal And we're going to look at is there enough driving force to produce a voltage and give us some energy simply by using metal and Solution so this time I'm going to use copper sulfate. We're using copper ions The sulfate shouldn't do anything in our reaction. It's not very reactive We're going to put our salt bridge To connect the two test tubes Then on one side we're going to use a graphite rod a graphite rod is just like your pencil lead It's not reactive We're going to use that because it does conduct electricity and on the other side. We're going to use our copper electrode Once we have connected our graphite electrode and our copper electrodes you can see that we have 0.43 volts of Potential difference between each of the test tubes. So there's a driving force There's enough energy that is created by the potential difference between these two test tubes to give us 0.4 volts and if we let this run long enough you'll see that copper ions are Gaining electrons and are actually producing solid copper. So see that copper on the graphite electrode