Electromagnets for Dummies

electromagnet poles

More than a few of the eHow.com freelancers to whom we award the DotD managed to find a reference that answered the question they were tasked to address yet managed to botch the copy-reword-paste job they performed. Part of the reason was, of course, having to fit the "answer" into a rigid framework; the rest seems to have been that the writers were just plain ignorant. Today's award goes to one such eHow.com post, now at Sciencing.com. Let's have a look at "How to Make Electromagnets Repel" by Darby Stevenson

Stevenson found simple directions for making an electromagnet with a battery, a nail, and some wire. He managed to do a fairly good job of rewording the instructions. Once that was over, however, Darby ran into trouble. According to him, you make a one wire-wrapped nail and then,

"Wrap the wire around the other nail and connect it to the battery using the same sides as used on the first battery."

You'll excuse us if we opine that "using the same sides" is rather ambiguous. But that lack of specificity pales alongside the next step in Darby's instructions:

"Place the two nails on a table, with the points parallel to each other and the heads parallel to each other."

We tried and tried, but we can't figure out how the points (or the heads) can be "parallel to each other" – if we remember our geometry correctly (and we do), points can't be parallel. That takes lines. When you come right down to it, though, Stevenson should have been talking about how to find the poles of the magnets and turn the magnets so that the north or south poles of both magnets are adjacent.
Of course, our Dumbass of Day didn't do that. But, then, he's the one who told his readers in his introduction that, "Magnets can be found in the material magnetite"... whatever the heck that means.

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