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I've always wondered about the design choice for the shape of batteries. It seems like the shape would indicate the current is flowing the opposite way than it does. Something about the positive terminal just says to me "I'm shooting electrons this way"


I got the impression from somewhere that plus and minus was defined long before they could track actual electrons, and thus discover that they had them backwards.


Yes, Benjamin Franklin was the first to assign positive and negative, and got the sign wrong. It looks like it took around another century to figure out that detail.



It's an historical accident. But electricity as the flow of positive charge is a pretty reliable model outside of materials science and nano-electronics, so why worry?


Something that bugged me as a kid trying to learn electronics: everything is connected to ground, negative is on ground, so we're dumping electrons onto every path in the circuit. It's the job of the resistor, capacitor, transistor, IC, etc, to direct those electrons, putting their energy to use, and then dumping them back to positive.




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