When I have series circuit with 3 light bubbles the voltage in second should be less than in first and the voltage in third should be less than in second. Conventional current flow is from positive to negative while electron flow is from negative to positive. Which light bulb will get the lowest voltage – the one closest to negative charge of battery or the one closest to positive charge of battery? (correct me if my reasoning is wrong)
Understanding current flow in example
currentvoltagewire
Related Solutions
You need to be careful with analogies. Here are some problems in the analogy you describe:
water starts flowing from a collector (battery)
Nothing in an electric circuit really works like a collector of water. In your analogy, water is electric charge which, in metals, is carried by electrons slowly drifting. Batteries do not store charge, they are not a reservoir of charge (nor of electrons).
Batteries store energy in chemical form. A better analogy is that a primary battery is a coal-fired water pump that will deplete it's store of coal as it pumps water. A secondary battery is a bit like a pump powered by a wind-up spring, it can be run in reverse to wind up the spring. These pumps can only pump water if their outlets are connected to a circuit of pipes that eventually returns to their inlets.
does that mean that the voltage and current increase ...
Voltage isn't something you measure at one point, it's something you measure between two points - it's a difference.
If you measure the voltage at every millimeter of the circuit with respect to the batteries negative terminal you will see the voltage monotonically decreasing as you progress around the circuit‡.
The current measured at any point in the circuit‡ is the same. It neither increases nor decreases
... but the number of electrons would decrease
It isn't very useful to think of the number of electrons increasing or decreasing. Where would they go? Where would they appear from?
You measure a current† of water in litres per second. You measure a current of electricity in coulombs per second (amperes). In a steady-state system, this current is the same in all parts of a simple serial circuit - whether of pipes or of water. A constriction in a pipe cannot make n litres per second of water disappear.
If you slightly turn a gate-valve in a water pipe, the flow of water (litres per second) decreases in all parts of the circuit, including in the pump.
resistance increases causing the pressure and speed of the water to increase but the volume would decrease.
That's not how water works!
If we imagine a simple circuit where a water pump is pumping water around a loop of pipe. The pipe is of uniform size apart from one place where we have a section of narrower pipe.
resistance
The resistance is greater in the narrower pipe (a greater proportion of the water is close to the pipe walls and experiencing friction)
pressure
However the pressure is lower, not higher!
speed
It's the lower pressure that causes the water to accellerate to a higher velocity as it enters the narrow section.
volume
When you say the volume increases, I think you mean the velocity increases. Water is relatively incompressible, it's volume doesn't change much at the pressures applying in our analogy.
The flow rate (volume per second) is unchanged.
Footnotes
† This is one of the areas where the analogy starts to break down. The word "current" is used inconsistently. If you asked someone to measure the current in a river they might give you an answer in metres per second ("current" = average drift velocity of H2O molecules) instead of litres per second ("flow" = litres per second passing a fixed point).
‡ This answer applies only to a simple circuit of battery and resistor connected by copper wires.
why can't electrons also flow from the negative terminal in battery 2, through the right bulb, and into the positive terminal of battery 1?
Because the only way to get to the negative terminal of battery 2 is to come from the body of the battery, and the only way to get there is from the positive terminal of the battery. And the only way to get there is through the switch in the friend's house, which is open so no current can flow through it.
Batteries don't create electrons from nothing. They "pump" them from one terminal to the other via a chemical reaction, causing current to flow (through the battery) from a low potential to a high potential.
Current only flows in complete circuit means the current has to flow through the battery just as much as it has to flow through every other circuit element.
As an aside, it's also why it's silly to say that current always flows from high potential to low --- the battery is a trivial example of when it's the other way around. And it's also silly to say that all current is a flow of electrons in the opposite direction from conventional current --- the battery is a trivial and everyday example of when ionic currents should be considered.
Related Topic
- Electronic – Why is there no net current in a wire without a voltage applied
- Electronic – DC Voltage Polarity and Current Flow
- Electronic – Confusion about conventional current and electron flow and how it runs through and powers a circuit
- Potential Difference and Current Flow – Basic Concepts
- Electronic – Confused with diodes and conventional vs real current flow
Best Answer
Assuming that the three light bulbs have identical characteristics, the voltage in their terminals will be exactly the same for each one. In this way, the sum of the voltages of the three bulbs will be equal to the voltage of the source, as follows
Vs = Vb1 + Vb2 + Vb3
where: Vs = Voltage source (battery) Vb1...3 = Voltage of bulb 1...3
The difference in voltages when measuring (e.g. with a voltmeter) depends on the terminal that you use for reference (negative, ground reference). If you measure with respect to the source's negative terminal (typical measurements), the bulb closer to the positive terminal will measure the maximum voltage, then the second and the lower voltage for the third.
The bottom line is that when measuring the reading is a sum of the voltages across the device's terminals, but the voltage in each device must be exactly the same.