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Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

Since seeing this article I've been curious about organic conductors .. apparently most carbohydrates / celluloses are really not good basis for conduction but maybe there are tricks to change that.

- https://www.quora.com/Is-cellulose-fibre-conductive?share=1

- https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=conducting+polymers+example...

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Paper and cotton were both used in cable insulation in ye olden days, impregnated with oils and tars

What do they use now?

Conductive polymers are commonly used these days. Pedot:pss can be engineered expressly this way, but less exotic ones like polyamides can do this too.

Essentially you need loose electrons to conduct.

That's not exactly correct. Electrons don't flow through wires - there's a one-way flow of the ambient electrons around the wire from the field created.

See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHIhgxav9LY

That video is misleading. Electrons must be relatively loose in their orbitals in order for the electromagnetic field to be established with reasonable strength. This does not mean that electricity is the literal flow of electrons. However, electrons actually do flow at a speed of about 1 mm/min due to the electrostatic field in DC circuits. This is not what’s called electricity but they do flow.

Well .. they do flow in the conductor, and in particular they flow through silicon junctions or none of the semiconductor physics would make sense, but the energy is carried in the field which is indeed outside the conductor.

You're confusing the electrons and the electromagnetic fields. The electrons absolutely do migrate through the wires; the electric field does not. P.S. that video appears to have been written to confuse/generate controversy and does a terrible job of actually explaining.

> The electrons absolutely do migrate through the wires;

That’s true. But very slowly in electrical terms. If I remember right the actual electronics in a reasonable circuit I read about was something like 1” per second. The vast majority of work done is an electron shuffle of bouncing into the next one in space.

When you say "work", what do you mean? I get the impression you're talking about a model like there's a long tube full of ball-bearings and when you push one in, one drops out the other end?

That model isn't right; think about a transformer - energy is transferred between conductors that are not physically connected at all.

The idea that electrons "push each other" is misleading and an oversimplification.

Watch the video. Like waves in the ocean, are water molecules pushing each other and making the wave? Or is the wave carrying the molecules with itself? Or both things at the same time?

But maybe you could have different organic crystalline structures allowing AC currents to flow. Wildly speculating of course.. I was just hoping to tape in forest materials to manufacture low power electric devices :)

Graphite counts; if you want to manufacture it from forest materials, compressed bonded charcoal might work. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01675...

True but its resistance might be too high maybe ? also it's not easy to make graphite.

Thanks a lot for the link though. Are you into green electronics by any means ?

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