How cell drives electrons to flow in a metal wire?

Question

This was my approach using some facts I'd known- At cathode and anode of a cell reactions take place making positive terminal positively charged and negative terminal negatively charged I.e. there are more electrons at the negative terminal and dearth at positive .When connected by a wire electrons of the wire move towards the positive terminal and when some enter the terminal the others depart from surplus hoarded electrons at the negative terminal causing a continuous flow of electrons .

Please help if i went wrong somewhere.

Answer 1

You're most of the way there. The surplus of oppositely charged particles at opposite ends of a wire creates an electric field between the anode and cathode which exerts Coulomb's Force (electrical analog to the force of gravity) on the electrons everywhere throughout the metal wire, pulling them through the atomic lattice of the metal wire. To be clear, this electric field pulls on all electrons that reside in the metal wire (not just at the cathode) and creates a very slow moving current throughout the entire wire almost instantaneously because the electric field propagates through the wire at near the speed of light. The number of valence electrons present in metals is what makes metal wire a good conductor as opposed to another material such as wood.