On 22 Oct 2005 18:32:00 -0700, wrote:

I think I understand this a little better now thanks to everyone's
responses.

Let me restate what I think some people have said plus what else I've
managed to google.

If I pretend the electron flow was water instead of electrons, then
what's happening is that the electric company is pushing and pulling
"water" through the black wires at the rate of 60 cycles per second at
an energy level of 120 volts, hence this is "hot".

The white wire, e.g. "pipe" is connected to a large calm lake, e.g.
ground potential.

Now If I were to touch the white wire (assuming it was wired correctly
to the "calm lake", it's just connected a resevoir of electrons at
ground potential so there's no flow. However if I were to touch the
black wire and provide a path to ground, then this "water" would be
flowing through me, e.g. an electrical shock.

Is this at least a reasonable analofy of why black is "hot" and why
white is "neutral"?

Thanks to everyone for their response.


I think you might be confused with the terms AC and DC, current flow
and electron flow.

In a DC circuit, current flow was described as flowing from the (+)
terminal to the minus terminal (-). This convention existed since
the days of Ben Franklin. However, electrons flow from the (-)
terminal to the (+) terminal (the opposite direction to current flow).
Electricians and circuit designers are interested in current flow.
Electron flow might be of interest to a scientist.

In an AC circuit, the poles are changing 50 or 60 times a second.
This has no effect on the magnitude of the current flow. The
electron flow (unlike a DC circuit) will effectively be zero, but the
AC current flow could be huge. Usually (just for convention) we say
the current is flowing from the hot wire and back through the neutral,
but this is just a concept, it actually does not have a direction.

Beachcomber