What Is an Electrical Current?

Where is it?

• Electrical current is present in our bodies, throughout our houses and in the air we breathe. Our brain operates on very tiny bursts of electrical current, telling the rest of our body what to do. Heart surgery has advanced to the degree that a malfunction can be solved by rerouting the circuits of the muscle.

Is it Dangerous?

• Electric current has two components: voltage and amperage. Volts, first harnessed by Alessandro Volta in what we now know as the battery, can be viewed as the outward amount of electricity to do work. Think of it like the fine mist sprayed from a hose; it will cover a lot of area but is not necessarily very strong. A static electricity charge has very high current to make a giant spark but very little strength to do damage. Towers carrying enormous voltages are high off the ground and use large insulators to insure safety.

The Strength Component

• The actual working force of electricity is the amperage, or force of electricity. First described by André Marie Ampère, a French physicist, in the early 19th century. Think of this as the size of the underlying stream. Compare the water output of a garden hose under normal pressure to that of a large fire hose with pressure from a pumping truck. The constant flow of water is measured as gallons per minute where the electricity is measured in amperage.

How Much is Enough?

• It takes a combination of volts and amps to power anything. The power consumption of any device is normally expressed as watts whose first descriptions and measurements were published in the mid-1700s by James Watt as he was trying to define horsepower (1 horsepower = 745.7 watts). The formula for determining amperage is to divide the number of watts by the voltage of the device. The typical microwave of 1100 watts is therefore 10 amperes because 1100 watts divided by 110 volts equals 10 amps.

Put Them All Together

• Volts, Amps, Watts, what do they mean? The three terms together tell you how much electric current is required or available in or by any device. Any appliance operated by electricity (batteries included) will have a label that indicates the amount of current present. You must know two of the three values to determine the third. Amperes are the most dangerous to humans because they are the "weight" of the power. You can splash your feet in a meandering creek with little fear and risk your life by wandering into a raging river.