What is Electricity? Part One: The Structure of an Atom

Hello and welcome to this first in a series of electrical principles training videos. In this series of videos, we're going to answer the very important question, what is electricity? Now obviously this is a really important question as you progress through your career as an electrical trainee and onto a fully qualified electrician, you've got to understand what it is that

you're working with. Electricity is effectively your bread and butter, isn't it? And you want to understand exactly what it is. So in this series of videos, we're going to find out what electricity is, what it's made of, a little bit about why it behaves the way it does, and also how we can start to think about quantifying

electricity. In other words, how do we measure electricity? So we'll start thinking about that. So we'll make a start. So first of all, let's think about what electricity actually is. Now to answer this question, it's going to seem like we're going off on a little bit of a tangent, but what we actually

need to consider is what are the fundamental things that make up everything in the universe. Now for many, many years, people thought that the atom was the smallest building block of matter. They thought it was the smallest thing that could exist. In fact, the word atom itself means no cut as in it can't be cut into smaller

parts. As time has progressed and science has done more research, we discovered that actually atoms were made of even smaller particles. These particles we refer to as protons, neutrons, and electrons. Now there's a couple of really important things we need to know about these and these will be really important for passing your exams.