Hi Rosemary:
More coils might get you more power, but never more power than in supplied by the source battery.
Not to open up a big current debate but I plucked some of your writing:
Then there's another problem with the concept of electrons flowing anywhere at all. Say one charges a flat battery from a wall plug. Then the idea is that the battery will be replenished with electrons to reconstitute the charged property of the electrolytes. But any chemist will assure you that there has been no loss of electrons in the mix. They have just been re-ordered in the molecular arrangement through that electrolytic process. Then, if indeed the plug replenished the electrons then the question is do electrons replenish the supply to produce light, motorised energy, heat from our stoves, our appliances, and on and on?
The battery is NOT replenished with electrons. The electrons give up their energy and that drives the reverse chemical reaction in the electrolyte. 100 electrons give up their energy and 50 chemical reactions are "powered" by this giving up of energy by the electrons, or whatever. Your metabolism uses the "electron transport cycle" to do a "slow burn" of the same energy, that's why your body is warm.
Think of a hot water tank. Cold water molecules enter at the bottom and hot water molecules exit at the top. They are the same molecules, but at a higher energy state when they leave the tank. The tank puts energy into the water molecules at a certain power rate. That's EXACTLY what a battery does.
There is an analogy between the water molecules and electrons. It's kind of like thinking that the battery receives "cold" electrons at ground potential at the negative terminal and outputs "hot" electrons at higher potential at the positive terminal. In reality the electrons are going in the opposite direction, but it's easier to visualize it the "backwards" way.
I'll even go out on a limb and do water and pressure. Take a long hose in a big circular loop with an in-line water pump. In this case the water pump is acting like a battery. Water enters the pump at low pressure on one side and exits the pump at high pressure on the other side. The water pump is acting like a battery and the long hose is acting like a resistor. The hose is literally giving off heat when you do this. That's because the high pressure water molecules are "giving up" some of their energy and as result they loose some pressure. If you could measure the pressure along the length of the hose you would observe the pressure dropping the further you are away from the pump output.
I am making reference to a pump that can generate a certain amount of pressure. If you block the hose then the pressure is at the maximum and the water flow stops. That's just like a battery, it's a voltage source.
If you change to a different type of pump, one that has pistons like an automobile engine, that pump produces a fixed flow rate. With that kind of pump if you try to block the hose you can't. The pistons will keep on pushing water and the hose will burst because the pressure will get too high. Voila, that type of pump is identical to a current source. I have already said dozens of times in this thread that discharging coils are current sources, not voltage sources. There's your analogy for that.
The concept of current flow makes perfect sense, just like the concept of flowing hot water giving up it's energy to heat the radiators in a house and then circulating back to the hot water heater to start the whole process all over again. You can substitute the radiators with electric baseboard heaters (resistors) and now you are doing the same thing with electrons.
I hope you can grasp that because I don't want to hijack my own thread.
MileHigh