Nina --
Thanks for forwarding the Hand Battery reply. Adela actually also sent me a
separate reply, which I'm sending to you here -- much the same thing, only a
bit more detailed. For some reason it won't forward, so I just copied it and
put it after the ************* line below.
Incidentally, in the course of all this I finally realized that the person
who had set this up in their kitchen at an earlier date -- who both you and I
referenced in our replies -- was..... me! I had completely forgotten I had
done this (I thought it was probably Paul!) until I happened to look at the
snacktalk comments myself! Oh, well! At least the aluminum foil was a new
twist, and fortunately it isn't a very elaborate setup!
******************
Don-
Thank you so very much for your response. Although it came a bit too late
for the institute, it certainly will help me in future work with this
set-up. I don't know if you were forwarded my latest response in my line of
questioning... I returned to Radio Shack with the whole set-up. The minute
the salesperson there put his hands on it, he got a good reading on the
analog ammeter. I tried it again -- nothing. He determined that my hands
were probably too clean and too dry. Wetting them with tap water produced
no results, but spitting on them did allow me to see a reading. When I set
it up last week for the teacher group, all of them got some sort of a
reading (but not me), although not quite as high as I recall my students
getting. Also, the Radio Shack person said the only digital meters he had
were way over $100, and that seemed a bit steep for my purposes --
especially since I had seen the analog meter work for him. We tried one of
the digital meters they had behind the counter - the best he said he had,
and we got no readings.
I intend to keep playing, but, again, I do thank you very nuch for your
thorough response to my question. Since I am being transferred to out high
school this year, I figure I can borrow whatever meters our physics teacher
has and try some more.
-Adela
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Mon Apr 24 2006 - 11:34:47 PDT