Electricity Goes Back and Forth

Something that I recently found out was that alternating current has no net direction. Alternating current is a very common form of electricity. It is the electricity used for the wall outlets in your home. Typical alternating current in the U.S. moves back and forth 60 times per second. Because it goes back and forth, it has no net direction.

This was a really strange thing for me to hear, as I previously thought that electricity "flowed" out of the outlet and through the device.

A major benefit of alternating current over direct current is that the voltage of alternating current can be changed with the use of a transformer. High voltage is used to transmit a large amount of electrical power, without the need for much current to flow. It is then changed to a lower voltage through the use of a transformer.

This is useful because the more current flowing through a wire, the thicker the wire needs to be. Copper, which is used to make wires is not cheap.