Materials Required
  • Hard rubber comb or balloon
  • Fluorescent light bulb (not an incandescent bulb)

How to do it

  • Take the light bulb and comb into the dark room.
  • Charge the comb by rubbing the comb on your hair or sweater. Make sure to build up a lot of charge for this experiment.
  • Touch the charged part of the comb to the light bulb and ask the child to watch very carefully.
  • You and your child should be able to see small sparks.
  • Experiment with touching different parts of the bulb.

Explanation

  • When the charged comb is touched with the bulb, the electrons from the comb moved to the bulb, causing the small flash of light inside.