# Resistance Being Proportional to Length And Its Relation to Magnitude of Current

"Resistance of an electrical conductor is proportional to it length"

The intuitive explanation I found in many articles was that the greater the length of the conductor, such as a wire, the greater the number of collisions of the electrons with ions and therefore greater resistance. But how would this greater number of collision do anything to the drift velocity and therefore to the current $I$? Between any two collisions, the average speed of the electrons is the same and this affects the current? How would a greater length change this average speed between two collisions?

• Imagine walking through a crowd of people standing still in a corridor of length $\ell$. You will be twice as tired from collisions if you need to walk through a crowd in a corridor of length $2\ell$, irrespective of your walking speed. Each individual collision remains equally probable, but the total number of collisions in the longer corridor can be expected to be twice what it is in shorter one. – ZeroTheHero Jul 9 '17 at 17:32
• Incidentally, the resistance is proportional to the length of the wire. – ZeroTheHero Jul 9 '17 at 17:38
• But if you change the resistance and keep the voltage same, you change the current? – Samama Fahim Jul 9 '17 at 17:40
• $I = \frac{V}{R}$ and so a wire of greater length should decrease the current? Which means decreasing the drift velocity or 'walking speed' in the analogy? – Samama Fahim Jul 9 '17 at 17:46
• Yes but the analogy is more like keeping the current constant and observing a larger drop in potential, i.e. you arrive at the end with less energy. – ZeroTheHero Jul 9 '17 at 17:47

Suppose we apply the same pd across a wire of twice the length. In that case the potential gradient halves, so the electric field strength halves. [This follows from $work=force \times distance$; the pd gives the work per unit charge; the field strength is the force per unit charge.]
• I suspect they're equivalent ways of looking at it, but in my answer I tried to get away from a hand-wavy idea of resistance and discussed resistance as defined by $R=\frac{V}{I}$. – Philip Wood Jul 9 '17 at 21:01