Generating Electricity for Dummies

Faraday's law of induction

We all know the saying, "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime" -- right? Well, around the Antisocial Network we're really big on teaching people to fish, at least in the metaphorical sense. That's why, if the topic "How to Convert Mechanical Energy Into Electric Energy"¹ were to come across our desk, we're pretty certain we'd have a discussion about magnetic fields, coils of wire, and induced currents. That is not, whoever, what eHow's Kurt Schanaman decided was the answer. No, Kurt handed this particular OQ a fish (and Leaf Group thinks that fish belongs at Sciencing.com)...

It's not like Schanaman's a newbie... no, this is Kurt's eighth trip to the DotD podium to receive an award. And it's not as if he didn't carefully search for a home-brewed science experiment that would allow you to pedal a bicycle connected to an alternator, which would generate a little electricity, enough to power a few light bulbs. And it's not as if he didn't explain the principles at work -- after all, in his introduction he told the world that,

"The mechanical energy can then be converted to electrical energy through a generator where magnets and coils turn motion into voltage and current...."

...and thoughtfully provided a link to a discussion of Faraday's law of induction. Unfortunately, his "teaching a man to fish" went no further. Instead, he just handed us a fish. He merely reworded – or, more accurately, attempted to reword – some guy's website about how he generates power with his exercise bike and treadmill. We should state here that we aren't in any way trying to say that the original author deserves a DotD award, since he's pretty ingenious. Eccentric, but ingenious...

No, our DotD award is reserved for the likes of Kurt. After all, he's the yutz who thinks that you can, "Mount a car alternator onto [a] piece of plywood so the alternator sits upright. Use bolts to attach the alternator into place, then set the flat surface of the plywood into the corner of a wall to prevent the unit from sliding..." ...which we suspect needs a little additional work, since the bolt heads are sticking out of the bottom of the plywood. And then there's, "Position the bicycle so the rear tire is resting on the taped pulley and then raise the back wheel of the bicycle off the ground, holding it up by placing one or two railroad ties under the bicycle frame..." Yeah, right -- that certainly says a lot about Kurt's familiarity with bicycles! That's not to mention that we suspect that you need something more... adjustable, perhaps? than "one or two railroad ties."

No, Schanaman's not here again just because he did a lousy copy-reword-paste job (although he did!). Kurt's here because we think that what the OQ really wanted was a discussion of how moving a wire through a magnetic field induces an electric current. But Kurt didn't discuss that beyond the throwaway sentence in his introduction and a second, similar generality near the end:

"A generator of some sort, consisting of internal coils and magnets, is always used to convert mechanical energy into electrical energy."

All Kurt needed to do was build on those two ideas, and his metaphorical student would have the tools he or she needed to build a generator from bicycle parts or, for that matter, build a hydroelectric dam. But he didn't – and that's why he's our Dumbass of the Day... again.

¹ Leaf Group got one of their fixers to rewrite Schanaman's rubbish, but his original can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_7561716_convert-mechanical-energy-electric-energy.html

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