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  • So the people from the Hunger Games came to me and they asked me if I wanted to do an experiment

  • that would be related to power generation.

  • And strangely, there is this one idea that I've been thinking about for years,

  • and now finally I have the chance to do it.

  • Come check it out!

  • Positions...Here we go...Set...Yeah...Dolly...Lights! and... Action!

  • We have a setup here with two rain shower heads, making two strings of water.

  • Now each stream is gonna pass through a set of coils - right up by where they're released -

  • and then it passes through this wire mesh down below.

  • Now these two sets of coils... So this set of coils is separate from this set of coils.

  • And they're each connected to one of these bowls here.

  • Once we get the water flowing, we should be able to generate a little electric spark right here.

  • There it is...!

  • What's incredible is that we're generating a spark, which is probably five to ten thousand volts.

  • It would give you a decent little shock. I mean it's not actually dangerous,

  • because, although the voltage is high, there is not that much charge behind it.

  • So you can't get that much current flowing. And current is what does really does damage.

  • Now the question is: 'how, just out of this setup where we have falling water and some pieces of metal,

  • do we generate ten thousand volts?!'

  • Well the way it works is that ... normally water is perfectly neutral;

  • there's even numbers of positive ions and negative ions.

  • But, as the water comes down of these two shower heads, sometimes there's gonna be a slight imbalance;

  • maybe a little more negative in this stream and a little more positive in that stream.

  • Now normally that just kind of washes out over time...

  • But not in this case...! Here's the ingenious part...

  • The mesh on the left is connected to the ring on the right...

  • So, if this mesh becomes negatively charged, then so does this ring...

  • And now that ring will attract the positively-charged water.

  • So this whole stream becomes positively charged.

  • Therefore, when it lands on this mesh, this mesh becomes positively charged aswell.

  • Which means this coil over here is positively charged,

  • forcing the negative ions to be coming out of this stream more.

  • And so, what we have is a clear separation of charge.

  • There's a positively-charged stream on the right, and a negatively-charged stream on the left.

  • If you look closely at the streams, what you can actually see is

  • they get more and more attracted to these top coils.

  • And then the spark goes... and they reset.

  • So basically, what's happening is we're building up charge on these coils

  • And then, when the charge gets big enough, it jumps across from the negative side to the positive side,

  • and everything becomes neutral again, and the charging process can start afresh.

  • It's a pretty phenomenal piece of physics. I mean, it's such a basic setup ...

  • and yet it produces this very impressive result.

  • This was noticed over a hundred of years ago by a guy named Lord Kelvin.

  • So it's often called or 'Kelvin's Water Dropper', or 'Lord Kelvin's Rainstorm'.

  • It's a really impressive phenomenon.

  • But you might be wondering 'how much energy could I really get out of this system?'

  • Well, to put this in perspective, if you were to charge your phone on the energy generated by this setup,

  • it would take six and a half years to reach full charge...

  • So this is a very tiny amount of energy generation that we're talking about.

  • You know, an interesting thing to consider is 'where does this electrical energy come from?'

  • All we really have is just falling water and metal pipes...

  • I want you to leave me your answer in the comments below, or make me a video response.

So the people from the Hunger Games came to me and they asked me if I wanted to do an experiment

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