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POTATO
CLOCK
John Harrison spent all his adult life building
a clock to solve the problem of Longitude.
Building a potato clock will take you just
a few moments.
Things
you need
One of mums baking potato
A plate or plastic tray
Two coins (copper)
Two galvanized nails (or Zinc)
Three lengths of speaker wire about 20cm
long
Sticky tape
An old digital clock or watch. Ask
permission to use it
Remove the back of your watch or clock to
expose the battery compartment. Then
take out the old battery and make sure you
can see the clocks two battery terminals.
Now your ready to build your potato clock
First, cut a potato in half and place the
two pieces flat ends down on a plate.
Then, remove 3 or 4cm of insulating from
each end of your three lengths of speaker
wire. don’t use your teeth, it hurts.
Using one piece of wire twists one end around
a galvanized nail and wrap the end of a
second piece of wire around a copper coin.
Use some sticky tape to help secure a good
contact.
Push firmly the nail and the penny into
the same potato half making sure they are
not touching each other.
Next step is to take the last piece of speaker
wire and wrap one end around the other coin.
Push this coin firmly into the second potato
half. Like wise the remaining galvanised
nail without any wire attached.
Its now power up time for your clock
Connect the two potato halves together by
attaching the wire from the coin of the
first potato half to the nail in second
potato half. Finally, touch the free ends
of the two remaining wires, one from each
potato half to the battery terminals of
your digital clock. Just like putting
batteries into a clock, they need to go
in the right way around so you will probably
need to try connecting the wires to the
clock in different ways to get the energy
from the potato flowing through the clock
correctly. Hopefully your clock should
start working.
Try replacing the potato with a lemon or
other fruit or vegetable or try some cola
to see which are better power sources. Using
pure Copper and Zinc will improve results
How come it works?
Your digital clock is energised by two power
sources in series. These power sources consist
of two electrodes (one zinc and the other
copper) and two potatoes or other suitable
mediums such as lemon, orange, salt water,
cola, even dads beer. Electrons are liberated
at the zinc electrode and consumed at the
copper electrode, thus an electric current
is created
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