But good sir, what is electricity?

A recurring theme of this Substack are my attempts to build out an accessible curriculum for hobby electronics. The target audience are folks who are no longer content with dumbed-down analogies, but who aren’t keen on academic textbooks brimming with obtuse jargon and advanced calculus. I’m particularly fond of the following foundational articles: Today, I’d like to take a step back and tackle a more basic question that isn’t always satisfactorily answered in high school: what is electricity and what makes certain materials “conduct” it in the first place? The structure of the atom Most readers should be familiar with the basic structure of the atom: a nucleus consisting of neutrons and protons, surrounded by a swarm of electrons that are stratified into a number of “shells”. In pop-science articles and videos, the concept is usually illustrated using the dated but intuitive model developed by Niels Bohr around 1918. The model envisions electrons that travel around the nucleus in c ... Read full article.