Please note that the black thing is a voltage regulator.

I am not quite sure how the electricity flows through this. If we were to watch one single electron in this how would it move?

Would it be like this?

Note: Orange arrows represent flow,

http://i48.tinypic.com/2d6poup.png

go to that link

Electrons flow in exactly the opposite direction. Negative to positive.

BM

Electrons flow in exactly the opposite direction. Negative to positive.

Franklin and most everybody else got it wrong like BobaMosfet said Negative to Positive.

There have been some interesting discussions here in the Nerdkits forum's.

Ralph

That little quirk goes back to the time of Ben Franklin. Back then, it was not known that electrons flow from negative to positive in a circuit. So the error took hold and has never been changed. Although we know how it really works, since most things we make these days is negative ground, it is just easier to picture it the reverse way. That's why diodes point the wrong direction and the same for transistors.

The electric fields, that we manipulate with electronics, travel at the speed of light. While electrons are fundamental to this phenomenon, the actual speed of movement of electrons, as they "drift" down the conductor, is dramatically slower than the electric fields they create. See http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/phy99/phy99092.htm

So it is not that unreasonable, regardless of how it came to us, to think of current (not electrons) as flowing from positive to negative.

Btw, a good book on the history of discovery of electricity and what was discovered is, Electric Universe by David Bodanis.