system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How do touch lamps work?

Also, how do touch lamp adapters work? My friend made his regular lamp into a touch lamp by plugging it into an adapter which baffles me.
gpt
The same way your phone's touchscreen works. 

An electric charge is sent to the lamps housing. The lamp can store a set number of elections based on its size. It has an electrical *capacity*. Basically, it builds up a slight static charge just like a sock in a dryer. 


You can measure how many elections it's storing by how long you can send it electrons before they start slowing down as it fills up. If you reverse the flow of elections and empty it out, you can reverse it again and measure how long it takes to fill the second time. If it takes longer the second time, something has changed. 


Anything conductive that touches it will allow it to store more because you effectively made the lamp larger by adding more conductive material. People are conductive. So when you touch the lamp, it takes much longer to fill with electrons because some of them flow into you. 


The plug can measure the lamp wirelessly, the same way wireless chargers work. The fast switching electric current in the lamps wire induces a magnetic field which induces an electric current in the nearby lamp housing. This field should switch at the same speed of the capacity of the lamp stays the same. But the capacity goes up when you add yourself to the field. This is also how a theramin works.