Displacement Lab

Drop a metal into a solution of another metal’s salt. Sometimes the metal you add pushes the other one out of solution — and sometimes nothing happens at all. The nothing is the lesson: it tells you which metal is more reactive.

Pick a metal and a solution, then press Dip Watch the colour and the coating on the strip When nothing changes, the added metal is less reactive

Choose a metal and a solution.

Set up the experiment

Metal strip

Salt solution

The solution is named after the metal already dissolved in it. Copper sulphate holds copper; the question is whether your strip can push that copper out.

What happened

Press Dip to run the experiment.

Reactivity series

ZnZincmost reactive
FeIron
PbLead
CuCopper
AgSilverleast reactive

A metal higher in this list displaces any metal below it — never the other way round.