Electricity – Video 6 – Second Timers Quiz

HISTORY OF PIEZOELECTRICITY: Marie Curie’s husband, Pierre and his older brother, Jaques, were the first to demonstrate piezoelectricity. Fifteen years after the Civil War (1880), Jacques, then 24, and Pierre, 21, began experimenting with different crystals.

HISTORY OF PIEZOELECTRICITY: The Curie brothers would take a slab of quartz and put it in-between two copper plates. With a wooden lever, they would press the quartz with the weight of iron in their apparatus.  To their amazement, they found that electricity was given off by the quartz when it was compressed. This electricity is  called piezoelectricity.  Piezo means “press” in Greek.

HISTORY OF PIEZOELECTRICITY: The brothers experimented with many other kinds of crystals including tourmaline, topaz, and even salt and sugar. They surprisingly discovered that different crystals gave off the same amounts of electricity as the crystals deformed.

HISTORY OF PIEZOELECTRICITY: The crystals didn’t have to be squeezed much. If the slab of quartz was one inch thick, it would only have to be pressed 1/10th of an inch to produce electricity.

USES OF PIEZOELECTRICITY: Sonograms and sonar produce their pulses for their images from pulsating piezoelectricity. 

USES OF PIEZOELECTRICITY: Buzzers on some watches, lighters for barbecues and stoves, cigarette lighters in cars, condenser microphones and guitar amp pick-ups all use piezo electricity–electricity generated by the squeezing of a crystal in the device.

USES OF PIEZOELECTRICITY: Piezoelectric crystals drive the ejection of air to dry the ink in inkjet printers. Diesel engines use Piezoelectric crystals in their fuel tanks.

USES OF PIEZOELECTRICITY: In 2013, Kyocera corporation in Japan introduced their revolutionary six-inch thick, seven-gram speaker for their 55” television. That’s a speaker as wide as 2 pencil leads and the weight of 2 pennies!

USES OF PIEZOELECTRICITY: One company has made piezoelectric devices that cars drive over.  These plate devices generate enough electricity to power nearby streetlights, billboards and signs. Train stations in Tokyo have floors that people walk on that generate electricity by the weight of people walking on them. This power runs their auto-ticket dispensers and electronic displays.  

USES OF PIEZOELECTRICITY: Goodyear Tire scientists have invented a tire that generates electricity as the car moves along because the weight of the car squashes the tire slightly as it drives!