This experiment is just for advanced students. If you guessed that this has to do with electricity and chemistry, you’re right! But you might wonder how they work together. Back in 1800, William Nicholson and Johann Ritter were the first ones to split water into hydrogen and oxygen using electrolysis. (Soon afterward, Ritter went on to figure out electroplating.) They added energy in the form of an electric current into a cup of water and captured the bubbles forming into two separate cups, one for hydrogen and other for oxygen.
This experiment is not an easy one, so feel free to skip it if you need to. You don’t need to do this to get the concepts of this lesson but it’s such a neat and classical experiment (my students love it) so you can give it a try if you want to. The reason I like this is because what you are really doing in this experiment is ripping molecules apart and then later crashing them back together.
Have fun and please follow the directions carefully. This could be dangerous if you’re not careful. The image shown here is using graphite from two pencils sharpened on both ends, but the instructions below use wire. Feel free to try both to see which types of electrodes provide the best results.
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It looks like the link was pointing to the wrong page. I’ve updated it, so you should be able to get to it by clicking “VIII. Static Electricity”
Sorry for the confusion!
Hi Aurora,
I think I have the same question as the other woman below. I was downloading all of the PDFs in order to print the workbooks, but I don’t see a link for Chapter 8. It sounds like you are aware of it in your comment below, but I wasn’t sure when that other comment was posted. I thought I would just bring it up again. If you’re already working on it- then I can be patient. 🙂 If it’s not on your radar, then I just wanted to bring attention to it again.
Thank you so much!
Amy
Yes there should be workbooks for each of the 14 sections.
And yikes! You found a link that is wrong – sorry about that! I’ll get that fixed right away.
This section appears to have a slightly different format than the previous 7 sections. There were workbooks for those, but I noticed there isn’t for this section. I have not checked the remaining sections. Am I missing something or is it not suppose to have the same type of workbooks?