How long would it take a single electron in a communications cable to cross the Atlantic?.?
538819
I found this wikipedia article about electric current and electron flow.  Here's a quote: "Electric currents in solid matter are typically very slow flows. For example, in a copper wire of cross-section 0.5 mm², carrying a current of 5 A,the drift velocity of the electrons is of the order of a millimetre per second."  \n--- So, at a millimeter per second and assuming a 3000 mile cable, it takes over 150 years for the individual electron to cross!  \n\nHere's the link:  \nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_current
544865
depends on how much an electron has been drinking
1178302
Mean distance from earth149.6×10^6 km or (92.95×10^6 mi)\nIt would take about 8.31 minutes at the speed of light to go from earth to sun.
568260
Get in touch with me, buong, I am, and I will be leaving in 4 days. My name here is Glalien, I come from Pleedeeze, it takes 8 hours to arrive here from our planet, via time warping. Our ships are made of nothing you have on this planet. Our propulsion is of magnetics. You will not believe me if I tell you why we are here. Look me up.
47440
I don't think so.  A signal having to fight through a mile of earth would get deflected/weakened unless you had relay nodes already burried.  Without those, communication would be spotty at best even with high grade equipment.
49892
The standard gives the maximum length of cable is 100 meters.\n\nIf you need longer, look into coax or fiber-optic cable.  Or put an amplifier (switch or hub) at 100 meter intervals.\n\nAnd thanks Janus.  If you are trying to go over 200 meters, you are probably better off useing coax or Fiber.  Then, your limits are 185 meters.  Plus you will find it is more durable and cheaper then all-weather Cat-5/6.  About the only time coax is used anymore is for bridging distances outside.\n\nIf your distances are longer then that, look into some other form of transmission.
828272
You will find all the answers here:\n\nhttp://library.thinkquest.org/10429/high/eleconfig/electron.htm
116731
about 3-4 days.  Everything long distance goes via air
754811
depends on your connection\ncould be a couple of minutes or days
40471
E=mc^2 \nEnergy = mass * (speed of light)^2, c = the speed of light (approx. 186,000 miles per second).
250629
The easy answer is no, you would never get there.\n\nBut if you take quantum physics into effect, there is a point when the distance remaining between you and your destination is too small to measure and you might as well be there.\n\nThere is a length called a "Planck Length" which is equal to about 1.6160(12) E-35 meters, smaller than this, and your measurement doesn’t have any meaning.  This length is EXTREAMLY small, and when I say extremely, I mean EXTREMELY SMALL.  To give you a sense of this length....an atom has a diameter on the scale of Angstroms (E-10 meters), so a Plank Length would be on the order of 1/10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 th of an atom's diameter. [I dont know why Yahoo answers cuts off my number and puts ... on it, but it should be a 1 with 25 zeros after it]\n\nAnother things, thanks to the Heisenberg uncertainly principle, the more accurately you know your position (i.e. the distance you are away from the destination), the less you know about your velocity.  So if you KNOW you are EXACTLY 1/2 the distance between your starting point and your destination, you have absolutely no idea how fast you’re traveling.\n\nI have severely over complicated the problem.
1099266
The points made by the previous responders are reasonable. In the context of communication, speed more often means bits per unit time, rather than physical speed which is distance per unit time. Electricity does travel very fast in the *latter sense*, close to the speed of light - but what is it about an electrical circuit which limits the number of bits which can be transmitted per second?\n\nSuppose you tried to send information by switching on and off the power to an electric fan being observed by someone else. It takes five or ten seconds for the fan to slow down or regain normal speed after it's been switched off or on, so it would be impossible to communicate much more than 3 or 4 bits per minute reliably using such a system. If you tried to do it faster there would be no change observable at the other end.\n\nThere's a similar limitation for any pair of copper wires. If L is the inductance and R the resistance, it takes a time roughly t ~ L/R for the current to drop at one end when the voltage has been switched off at the other end. The magnetic field surrounding the wires keeps the current going just like the momentum of the fan blades.\n\nThere's nothing much that can be done about this except for changing the structure of the cable. For example the pair of copper wires can be replaced by a coaxial cable in which one conductor forms a cylinder surrounding the other. The magnetic fields produced by the two currents tend to cancel which substantially reduces the inductance L, allowing a much faster (bits/second) speed.\n\nWhen most of the telephone network was implemented there was no reason to use coax since a pair of copper wires works fine for voice (audio frequencies = roughly 10K-100K bit/sec), although these will probably be upgraded if the phone companies are allowed to compete with the cable companies. \n\nFiber optic cable also has a very high bandwidth (bits/second) ... but your question is specifically about electricity.
604274
It takes light 8 minutes (plus or minus seconds) to travel from the Sun to the Earth. So if the sun 'Died' this second, it will take 8 minutes till we know about it, i.e. the lights go out and the heating is turned off.\n\nHopefully we will still have the stars and moon to merrily sooth us into our freezing tombs.
313161
about 186,000 miles per second.  With our present technology, it would take hundreds of thousands of years. At the speed of light, it would only take thousands of years.
952318
there will stretching to the string, and the amplitude and frequency will be tranmitted....but the cycles wont be at light speed...so they wont allow for instantaneous communication.  Now if the cable was fiberoptic...and pulses were transmitted...hmm
333904
It depends on the Voltage.   Imagine an electron (which has known charge q = 1.6x10^-19 and mass m = 9.11x10^-31) that is inside a wire which is a perfect conductor.   Since the electron will move in a perfect conductor, all the potential energy given by the power source (Voltage * electron charge) will transform into kinetic energy (K = (m*v^2)/2), so:\n\n(m*v^2)/2 = V*q     ;     where v is the speed of the electron and V is the voltage\n\nWith this we get:   v = (2*V*q/m)^(1/2)\n\nAll the electrons would move at this same speed, and so the "speed of electricity" is given by the above formula.   For a voltage of 110V, the kind we have at home, the speed would be:\n\nv = 6'216,016.3 m/s\n\nCompared to the speed of light:\n\nc = 300'000,000 m/s\n\nThis analysis is for didactic purpouses, since for such high speeds we would need to consider relativistic effects.   Also, remember that we don't have perfect conductors, so the actual "speed of electricity" at 110V would be a lot less than the value shown above.\n\nI hope this answer was good enough.   :)
1112253
Photons are produced by the sun in it´s core, because it is only there that fusion takes place. But the plasma of the sun is dense \nand the photon is continuously absorbed and re-emitted during its rise to the surface. Hence the photon will take about a million year to make the trip.\n\nAnd 8 minutes 20 seconds more to travel from the surface to the earth.