From buddy Mon Nov 20 09:19:56 1995 Date: Mon, 20 Nov 1995 09:19:52 Subject: What is electricity? Today's scientific question is: WHAT IN THE WORLD IS ELECTRICITY? - and WHERE DOES IT GO AFTER IT LEAVES THE TOASTER?? Here is a simple experiment you can all do: On a cold dry day, scuff your feet along a carpet, then reach your hand into a friend's mouth and touch one of his dental fillings. Did you notice how he twitched violently and cried out in pain? This teaches us that electricity can be a very powerful force, but we must never use it to hurt others unless we need to learn an important electrical lesson. It also teaches us how an electrical circuit works. When you scuffed your feet, you picked up bunches of "electrons" which are very small objects that carpet manufacturers impregnate into carpets so they will attract dirt. The electrons travel through your bloodstream and collect in your finger, where they form a spark that leaps to your friend's filling, then travels down to his feet and back into the carpet, thus completing the circuit. Amazing Electronic Fact: if you scuffed your feet long enough without touching anything, you would build up so many electrons that your finger would explode! But this is nothing to worry about unless you often walk on carpets. Although we modern persons tend to take our electric lights, radios, mixers etc for granted, hundreds of years ago people did not have any of these things, which is just as well as there was nowhere to plug them in. Then along came the first electrical pioneer, Benjamin Franklin, who flew a kite in a lightning storm and received a serious electrical shock. This proved that lightning was powered by the same force as carpets - but also damaged Franklin's brain so severely that he started speaking only in incomprehensible maxims such as "A penny saved is a penny earned". Eventually he had to be given a job running a Post Office. After him came a herd of Electrical Pioneers whose names have become part of our electrical terminology - such as Myron 250-Volts, Mary Lamp, Jim Watt, Bob Transformer etc. These pioneers conducted many important experiments. For example in 1780 Luigi Galvani discovered that when he attached two different kinds of metal to the leg of a frog, an electric current developed and the leg kicked - even though it was no longer attached to the frog (which from a historical standpoint is felt was probably even dead at the time). Galvani's discovery led to enormous advances in the field of amphibian medicine. Today, skilled veterinary surgeons can take a frog which has been seriously injured or killed, implant pieces of metal in its muscles, and watch it hop back to its pond just like a normal frog (except that it then sinks like a stone). But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison who was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal education and lived in New Jersey. Edison's first major invention in 1877 was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of American homes - where it basically sat until 1923, when someone invented records. But Edison's greatest achievement came in 1879, when he invented the electric company. His design was a brilliant adaptation of the simple electric circuit: the company sends electricity through a wire to a customer, then immediately GETS IT BACK THROUGH ANOTHER WIRE. Then, brilliant masterstroke, it can charge the customer for the electricity EVEN THOUGH THE COMPANY HAS GOT IT BACK AGAIN! This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch of electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since very few customers take the trouble to examine their electricity closely. In fact the last year in which any NEW electricity was generated was 1937: the electric companies have merely been reselling it ever since. Today, thanks to men like Edison and Franklin, and frogs like Galvani's, we receive almost unlimited benefits from electricity. For example in the past decade scientists have developed the LASER, an electronic appliance so powerful that it can vaporize a bulldozer 2000 yards away, yet so precise that doctors can perform delicate operations on the human eyeball with it (provided they remember to change the power setting from "VAPORIZE BULLDOZER" to "DELICATE").