Book Review

This reliable hands-on guide to two dozen experiments makes free electric charge and very much more available to... kids and their teachers who can build, learn, and have fun.

Would you like an electrophorus--a long-time carrier of electric charge at ten or twenty sparky kilovolts of potential--easy to make in fifteen minutes out of cheap stuff, and tested for workability in the damp leaky air of San Francisco Bay? It’s here right on the first pages. Items: an aluminum-foil pie tin, a Styrofoam coffee cup, hot glue or tape (avoid household glues, they dissolve the plastic and won’t work). A Leyden jar? Another small piece of foil, a nail, and a plastic 35 mm film can. Drawings and simple, satisfying explanatory instructions follow. If you go on you can make electroscopes in the same style, detect electrical charge transfer, and show the most basic of facts within matter, the conservation of electric charge...

...you’ll become a doer and a source of your own understanding, not just dependent on words.

~ Philip amd Phylis Morrison, Scientific American exerpt