# ABOUT CURRENT

When electricity was first discovered, nobody knew what it was, it was just this mysterious stuff that flowed in wires. They arbitrarily called one end of the battery positive and the other negative, and said that current flows from positive to negative.
Later they found that the wires are full of tiny things called electrons, and they're what's moving when an electric current flows. Unfortunately, it turned out that the electrons have a negative electric charge and flow from negative to positive. But they didn't want to have to redraw all the arrows in their textbooks[1], so they kept on saying that current flows from positive to negative. This is called "conventional current"[2] and it's the way we drew the arrows on the circuit a couple of pages ago.
That's how current flow works in metal, anyhow. When we come to look at silicon, we'll find that things are sometimes a bit different.
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[1] Don't look so bewildered. Remember, there was no Microsoft Office in those days. Books were written on actual, physical paper and changing them all would have been a really big job.
[2] After the so-called Great Embarrassing Convention of 1898 where the scientists all got together, looked very sheepish, and decided what to do about the problem.