Making batteries for pennies

I really loved those grade school experiments like making crystal radios and making your own electric motor. This instructable is along the same lines:

I guess you’re making a dry cell (zinc-carbon) battery, although I wonder if it would be even more effective if you could suspend the electrolyte (the vinegar) in a gel. The cardboard in this case sort of acts like a gel, but if you could make an acidic gel, that coat the interior of the cardboard lattice and wouldn’t dry out, although the example shown here seems to be working for days.

And it, of course, reminds me of McGyver’s potato-powered clock.

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Jennifer Petkus divides her time between writing Jane Austen-themed mysteries, creating websites for the dead, woodworking, aikido and building model starships. She has few credentials, having failed to graduate from the University of Texas with a journalism degree, but did manage to find employment at the Colorado Springs Sun newspaper as a cop reporter, copy editor and night city editor before the paper died in 1986. She has done little since. Her husband is the night editor at The Denver Post. Her best friend is a cop. She watched Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon live. She is the author of, Good Cop, Dead Cop: A Novel about the AfterNet. She’s writing the sequel, The Background Noise of Souls, and another AfterNet related story, Jane Austen’s Book Tour.

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