Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index The thermoelectric effect or Seebeck effect is the voltage created from one end of a conductor to the other when one end is a different temperature then the other. The thermoelectric effect was discovered by Thomas Seebeck. The reverse is also possible, whereby a voltage across two different materials creates a difference in temperature. This is the Peltier effect. Electrons flow from the hot end to the cold end. Different materials will create different voltage potentials. Thus, a thermocouple works by measuring the difference in potential caused by the dissimilar wires. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.