What is the direction of the flow in a battery?

Answer 1

Yes. Any source of "Direct current" exists on the physics of electron flow at a constant charge or fixed polarity . A battery is essentially a can full of chemicals that produce electrons through the process of electrochemical reactions. The directional flow of these electrons, caused by the Chemical reactions, characterizes polarity. Depending on whichever ends of the circuit the poles of the battery are placed, the electrons or "charge" will always flow from Negative to Positive.

Answer 2

Electricity is a flow of electrons. When a battery is hooked up to a circuit, electrons flow from the negative pole (-) to the positive pole (+). The negative pole has higher potential energy in the form of presence of electrons, and like water flowing downhill, they rush into the positive side when you connect the circuit.

This might sound backwards to you. It does to me, too. It arises from an early wrong guess. Back in the days when people were first experimenting with electricity, they didn't really understand it at all.

The first experiments were with static electricity. For instance, when you stroke a glass rod with a silk cloth, the rod and the cloth become oppositely polarized. It was evident to those early researchers that something was being transferred either from the rod to the cloth, or from the cloth to the rod. This something, they called charge.

They knew whatever it was, had a quantity associated with it. If you rubbed the glass rod a little, you got a little charge, and if you rubbed it a lot, you got a larger charge. They could measure the amount of charge, even if they didn't understand how it worked. One glass rod had 5 units of charge, and the other one had 9. But the silk, which had 5 units, if you put it with the 5-unit rod, they didn't add up to 10; they canceled each other out. Two of the rods, on the other hand, did add upwards. There were two kinds of charge, one the opposite of the other, and when you put one kind with the other kind, you had to subtract to get the total charge instead of adding. So it seemed natural to represent one kind of charge with positive numbers, and the other kind with negative numbers.

It made the math work. Much of what we think we know in science, we believe to be so because it makes the math work better.

But they didn't have any idea what was being transferred, and in which direction. So they guessed. They arbitrarily chose to call type of charge positive, and the other negative.

They guessed wrong. Well, not exactly wrong, but in a way that, now that we know more, seems counter-intuitive. But by the time they discovered this, it was much later. They'd already written lots of scientific papers and textbooks and what-not, and it would've caused too much confusion to go back and change it all. So that's why the charge on an electron is considered to be negative.