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Solved: the mystery of static electricity

I remember being fascinated by static electricity as a young lad.

Of course in those days I had a full head of hair -- and being the 1960s, that hair was long. This meant that whenever I wanted a bit of static electricity, all I had to do was drag my plastic comb through those luxurious locks to charge it up.

Today I guess I could use my beard as the source of such scintilating high voltage but being more involved in the use of sensitive electronics, I see static electricity as my enemy, not my friend.

However, when I was in love with the crackle, bang and strangely attractant powers of this mysterious force, I always wondered what made it happen.

Yes, I understood that static electricity was simply a surplus or deficit of electrons on an insulator. But how did that unbalanced situation occur? Why was it that simply rubbing a couple of insulators together was able to separate the electrons from one and transfer them to the other?

I recall my science teacher telling me that it was the friction that pulled the electrons off my hair and deposited them on my comb.

Seriously?

This sounded rather incredible to me and I never really swallowed that explanation.

Seems I was right to be skeptical because...

Apparently the mechanisms behind the generation of static electricity via friction has always been a mystery... or at least according to this Science Daily report.

However, it seems they've finally figured it out.

Apparently it's down to triboelectricity, a well-known (but perhaps still not fully understood) phenomenon where bending a material causes a change to its electrical potential.

We all know that piezo-electric devices create a voltage when a physical force is applied to them. Indeed, this is the underlying process behind such things as piezo microphones, piezo record-player pickups and even those "no batteries required" BBQ starters.

So who'd have thought that the static charge imparted on a piece of plastic when rubbed against something like a piece of wool or other fibrous insulator was down to the same effect?

Seems (as I suspected) my science teacher was wrong. Perhaps he also believed you could split an atom using an axe?

I found this article fascinating because it shows just how many of the little things we take for granted are yet to be fully understood or explained by science.

Everyone knows about static electricity, everyone's seen it in action (even if only by watching the lightning in a thunder-storm) but nobody actually worked out how it was created. Mind you, I'm having trouble working out how the triboelectric effect causes clouds to become highly charged to the point where they generate bolts of lightning. Maybe it's the air interacting with the surface of falling raindrops that imparts a charge... or perhaps there is some other mechanism going on there.

I guess the next question will be "how can this improved understanding of how static electricity is generated allow us to better harness this energy or perhaps come up with new ideas and technologies that employ it?"

Whatever happens, I'm just glad that another of the long-standing mysteries of the universe has been solved -- and in my lifetime too! :-)

Can readers think of any other simple phenomena that are as-yet not fully explained by known science? (aside from the fact that light acts strangely like both a particle and a wave -- although I believe quantum theory has addressed that, at least to a degree). Meanwhile... time to break out the Van de Graaff generator, or perhaps the Wimshurst machine and reacquaint myself with the joys of static electricity.

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