So the battery (or any voltage source) just makes
electrons move.
Nope. (see my 1st misconception, "electric current is not electron
flow.") And here's another misconception I had to scrape out of my
brain:
Quantities of "electricity" are composed of electrons.
Batteries force "charges" or "charged particles" to move. What harm is
there in saying "electrons" instead of "charges?" Anyone who equates
Electric Current with "electron flow" will grasp metal wires
(conceptually!), but they will have serious problems when they confront
the electric current within the battery electrolyte ...which was exactly
my own problem as a student. Yet there is no fundamental difference
between the wires and the electrolyte: both are full of movable charges,
and when those charges flow, we call it "electric current." The electric
current in the wires and in the electrolyte are flows of charged
particles.
As a student, I thought that there WAS no current in the battery's
electrolyte. I'd seen many diagrams which show that the current exists
only in the wires connected to the battery terminals. Apparantly many
authors of K-12 textbooks have the same misconception I did: that electric
currents are made of flowing electrons. In their diagrams of flashlights,
the arrows depicting the current start and end at the battery plates, and
there is no arrow in the electrolyte between the plates. This is
"correct" because there are no electrons flowing between the plates, yet
it's totally incorrect because there *IS* an electric current between the
battery plates. The amperes in the electrolyte are identical to the
amperes in each wire conneted to the battery. It's just that the electric
current between the battery plates is made of flowing charged particles
(ions), not of flowing electrons.