Light Bulb in Slow Motion - Visualize AC Electricity! 

started with a lightbulbs and touched on the history of AC vs DC, Nuclear generators and power transmission infrastructure. my ADHD brain absolutely LOVES this.

Seeing the filament pulsating in slo-mo is mesmerizing. Beautiful. Thanks.

I'll be attending college for my degree in Marine Engineering and Electrotechnology, thus I'd want to purchase your Math&Science Membership to study advanced subjects. You Sir are incredibly good at expressing ideas as if they were really easy. It helps a lot. Thank you, sir, Jason Gibson.

Amazing demonstration.

The reason for the double coil is to pack the filament in a small space. A 60W bulb filament is 2 meters long. As for the movement, that is called the Lorentz force and is caused by the changing magnetic field in different parts of the wire repelling and attracting each other.

Excellent presentation; as always!

Mr. Gibson, thank you for everything you do. I take each lesson to heart, it hs helped me immensely going back to school

I was a little frustrated by the repetitive details in this video, but then, I've been playing with electricity for many decades, starting when I was still a toddler, so it all of it was old knowledge _to me._ I know all these things 'in my bones' and that early hands-on experience led to learning about MANY areas of science and engineering. Anyway, I watched this vid to the end to see how well it could explain things to a novice, since I have friends who still have a semi-mystical view of electricity, and are unnecessarily fearful of it. On that score, this vid is very good at covering the basics, though it did not go into the particulars that could allay the fears of the ignorant. Oh, well. 😕 Also, I kept waiting for the little detail that the *number of fluctuations* in AC power is *twice the frequency.* So in reality, the bulb brightness was pulsing *not* 60 times per second, but actually *120 times per second.* That did not detract from the essential message, but it does help to explain the _persistence of vision_ effect. And BTW, the early movie makers found that FLASHING becomes very noticable if the frequency goes below 20 times per second, but is usually unnoticed at 24 flashes per second. As for seeing the pulsations in an incandescent lightbulb, it is best to use a very low wattage at the highest convenient voltage, because that means a longer and thinner filament, which has larger temperature fluctuations. (The opposite is also true, with high-wattage bulbs dimming only very slowly, as can be seen with the large marker lights on radio transmission towers.) In addition, a dimmer bulb has less of the _light saturation effect_ that aids the _persistence of vision_ effect. The _light saturation effect_ is the real reason the frosted bulb had fluctuations that were more noticeable: spreading the light over a larger area reduces the light intensity and the saturation. For the purposes of this video, it might have been useful to have a loudspeaker in series with the lightbulb, and drive the pair with an audio signal generator and amplifier. Multi-sensory learning is always better! Keep up the good work, sir. 🙂

Loved your lecture on this topic...man wish I had brains like you ) I really think nobody can teach like this . That's why i consider you my teacher ) .. we call it guru over here. ... When I learn something from you it's blow my mind. ...

Thanks Gibson Sir, for nice practical as well as theoretical explanation. Great job!

Crucial video sir, much appreciation 🙏

6:00 great shot! It almost seems like the brightest parts are actually from within the inner sides of the small spirals, fascinating

Jason, I just want to say thanks. I have honestly learned so much from you and we have never met.

Hi Jason. I simply want to say a big thankyou to you. This was a superb demonstration practical. your lessons with demonstrations are awesome, entertaining but most of all interesting. I have come back to science and your lessons have helped me enormously and cant thankyou enough. Cheers !!

THANK YOU... SIR...!!!

Muy buena clase magistral.

Its all magic, 50Hz AC in the UK

Thanks for the video. I hope if you can make a video about alternating current more. For anyone wondering why using AC for long distances it is for decreasing energy loss by increasing voltage and decreasing current to almost near zero as much as possible.

The filament is a coiled coil, which was sold as a feature. Bulbs without that have a single strand that passes many times to fro between the guides.

Brothers Lumiere first proved that camera must run on 16 frames per second to remove not flickering but jittering motion movement, 24 frames later 30 frames became standard for smooth picture motion. We can say that human reaction time is at least of 1/15 second, cat is about 1/10 of the second.

Sir i think it's your new channel) . Subbed it the moment i saw it in my recommendations 🙏.

Thank you!

Was the light fluctuating at 120 Hz ( for 60Hz supply ) or 100 Hz ( for 50Hz supply ) ? 10ms between pulses ( 50Hz ) 8.3ms between pulses ( 60Hz ) The heating of the filament doesn’t care about the polarity of the alternating current. Not much time to cool down between the max of the sine wave and the next peak. Would be nice to see a graph of the light output versus time. The filament will have some retention of heat in these short periods.

Jason, Great video! One question however. In the video you mentioned "storing electricity" from solar panels late in the video. I'm not an EE but I was under the belief that you cannot "store" electricity and that's one of the big drawbacks to renewables. You can use it to power your house or charge batteries for later use but once the batteries are charged any additional power being generated is essentially lost unless you are selling it back to the power company. What am I missing??? Thanks. Tom Sunseri

i would have thought the movement of the filament would be due to magnetic induction of the electricity going through it but thermal expansion makes sense too

The coiled coil filament allows the filament to run hotter less cooling effect.

Great video Jason, I would like to see the efect on fluorescents bulbs drive by the old magnetic ballast, if the light go off when voltage pass to cero, thanks

In Germany, tests were carried out at which frequency incandescent light bulbs no longer flicker. At 40Hz there was still some flickering, at 50Hz it was good enough without any noticeable flickering. That's why 50Hz is used in Europe. T= 0.02 s/cycles = 20ms /cycle

I normally don't watch videos about electricity, but this was amazing! One concept I didn't fully understand is why the current changes direction with AC electricity? Is it based on which magnet the wire is closest to as it spins? Also, are there just giant magnets in power plants? Thanks for the great video and for sparking my interest in electricity, no pun intended!

Pretty good video but, AC and DC are just as easy to make. AC appears to go further because all it has to do is move electrons a small distance and the effect takes place throughout the entire wire. DC has to push those electrons throughout the entire wire and suffers from a drop off due to the resistance of the wire. Generators create DC. Alternators create AC. But generators and Alternators both use spinning and/or different magnet layouts. The magnets can be permanent or electromagnetic, stationary or rotating. It is the magnet and wiring layout that determines if it is a generator vs an alternator. Therefore AC and DC are just as easy to make. Its just their overall effect over distance that determines their use in large scale vs small scale projects.

I had no idea that a glowing filament had the time to visually cool down 120 times / second. The mass of the filament must be really low.

It would've been more visual if you'd powered the 2 bulbs in parallel, the flickering circle would've been much deeper

So if you ran incandescent bulbs on DC they would last longer I guess. No pulsing of the filament.

Lopez Edward Moore Joseph Smith George

What happened to math and science