Electric Current

The word current comes from the Latin word currere, which means to run or to flow. An electric current is nothing more than the flow of electric charges. Electric charges can only flow through certain materials, called conductors. Although the electrons in most materials are confined to fixed orbits, some materials, including most metals, have many loose electrons which are free to wander around through the material. Materials with this property act as conductors. When a conductor is placed between two charged objects, these loose electrons are pushed away by the negatively charged object and are sucked into the positively charged object. The result is that there is a flow of charge, called a current, and the two object's charges become balanced. The amount of current flowing through a conductor at any given time in measured in amperes, or amps for short. When you read that something uses so many amps, what you are being told is the amount of current flowing through the device. One ampere is equal to the flow of one coulomb of charge in one second.