Homemade Electroscope...!

Homemade Electroscope

First of all, get to know what the electroscope is. In fact, it's a device usually consisting of two pieces of gold leaf enclosed in a glass-walled chamber, for detecting the presence and determining the sign of electric charges by means of electrostatic attraction and repulsion.

Articles required for this are a bottle with a big mouth, aluminum plate, small piece of copper wire and thin metal foil.

To make a simplified version of it you'll have to first bend the copper wire in the shape of a Z' as shown in the figure here. Put this bent wire into the bottle and cover its mouth with an aluminium plate. But be careful to first hang a small metal foil on the wire inside the bottle.
Well, this plate-covered ordinary bottle will serve as your electroscope.

Now just comb some dry hair - yours or of someone else-and bring this charged comb close to the exposed end of the wire. Do you know what happens now? The metal foils in the bottle gets separated. It's the electric charge that does it. One very important thing: to demonstrate this you must make sure that the wire, foil and comb are absolutely dry.