TEXT 12. Conductors and insulators
All substances have some ability of conducting the electric current, however, they differ greatly in the ease with which the current can pass through them. Solid metals conduct electricity with ease while non-metals do not allow it to flow freely. Thus, there are conductors and insulators.
What do the terms "conductors" and "insulators" mean? This difference is expressed by what is called electrical conductivity of the body. It depends upon the atomic constitution of the body. Substances through which electricity is easily transmitted are called conductors. Any material that strongly resists the electric current flow is known as an insulator. Conductance, that is the conductor's ability of passing electric charges, depends on the four factors: the size of the wire used, its length and temperature as well as the kind of material to be employed.
A large conductor will carry the current more readily than a thinner one. To flow through a short conductor is certainly easier for the current than through a long one in spite of their being made of similar material. Hence, the longer the wire, the greater is its opposition, that is resistance, to the passage of current. There is a great difference in the conducting ability of various substances. Almost all metals are good electric current conductors. The best conductors are silver, copper, gold and aluminum. Nevertheless, copper carries the current more freely than iron; and silver, in its turn, is a better conductor than copper. Copper is the most widely used conductor. The electrically operated devices are connected to the wall socket by copper wires.
A material which resists the flow of the electric current is called an insulator. The higher the opposition is, the better the insulator is. There are many kinds of insulation used to cover the wires. The kind used depends upon the purposes the wire or cord is meant for. The insulating materials generally used to cover the wires are rubber, asbestos, glass, plastics and others. The best insulators are oil, rubber and glass. Rubber covered with cotton, or rubber alone is the insulating material usually used to cover desk lamp cords and radio cords. Glass is the insulator to be often seen on the poles that carry the telephone wires in city streets. Glass insulator strings are usually suspended from the towers of high voltage transmission lines. One of the most important insulators of all, however, is air. That is why power transmission line wires are bare wires depending on air to keep the current from leaking off.
Conducting materials are by no means the only materials to play an important part in electrical engineering. There must certainly be a conductor, that is a path, along which electricity is to travel and there must be insulators keeping it from leaking off the conductor.
TEXT 13. Semiconductors
There are materials that really occupy a place between the conductors of the electric current and the non-conductors. They are called semiconductors. These materials conduct electricity less readily than conductors but much better than insulators. Semiconductors include almost all minerals, many chemical elements, a great variety of chemical compounds, alloys of metals, and a number of organic compounds. Like metals, they conduct electricity but they do it less effectively. In metals all electrons are free and in insulators they are fixed. In semiconductors electrons are fixed, too, but the connection is so weak that the heat motion of the atoms of a body easily pulls them away and sets them free.
Minerals and crystals appear to possess some unexpected properties. It is well known that their conductivity increases with heating and falls with cooling. As a semiconductor is heated, free electrons in it increase in number, hence, its conductivity increases as well. Heat is by no means the only phenomenon influencing semiconductors. They are sensitive to light, too. Take germanium as an example. Its electrical properties may greatly change when it is exposed to light. With the help of a ray of light directed at a semiconductor, we can start or stop various machines, effect remote control, and perform lots of other useful things. Just as they are influenced by falling light, semiconductors are also influenced by all radiation. Generally speaking, they are so sensitive that a heated object can be detected by its radiation. Such dependence of conductivity on heat and light has opened up great possibilities for various uses of semiconductors. The semiconductor devices are applied for transmission of signals, for automatic control of a variety of processes, for switching on engines, for the reproduction of sound, protection of high-voltage transmission lines, speeding up of some chemical reactions, and so on. On the one hand they may be used to transform light and heat energy directly into electric energy without any complex mechanism with moving parts, and on the other hand, they are capable of generating heat or cold from electricity.
Ukrainian engineers and scientists turned their attention to semiconductors many years ago. They saw in them a means of solving an old engineering problem, namely, that of direct conversion of heat into electricity without boilers or machines. Semiconductor thermocouples created in Ukraine convert heat directly into electricity just as a complex system consisting of a steam boiler, a steam engine and a generator does it.