What is Electricity? Part Two: The Atomic Structure of Copper

[Music] hello and welcome to this electrical principles training video in this second video in this series we're going to continue considering the question what is electricity in a previous video we considered the structure of an atom we considered what that looked like and we looked at the various parts that made up an atom what we're now going to do is to

continue and look at a very specific specific atom we're going to look at this atom now this atom that we've got on the screen here is one that's very dear to the heart of electricians it's a material that we use all the time this is an atom of copper now you'll notice on this copper atom that there are 29

protons 29 neutrons and really importantly 29 electrons all uh whizzing around the outside of the atom so we discussed in a previous video how atoms are made up of uh two parts you have the nucleus that sits in the middle of the atom and then you have the shells that are wrapped around the outside now

each shell is where the electrons sit and each shell can only accommodate a certain number of electrons before it's considered to be full and we need to go to the next layer so looking at our copper atom you can see that the first three shells or layers of electrons are all full they've all got their maximum

quantity of electrons if you look at Shell number four though you can see there that there's just one electron sitting on that outer shell and it's just all there by itself uh with no other electrons on that Shell at all now because there are so many complete layers between that one electron and the

nucleus it means that that electron has only got a very very casual relationship with its parent atom and that means it will very easily jump from one atom to another atom now when that happens it leaves the parent atom slightly positively charged because now there's more protons in the nucleus than there are electrons going around the outside