Shocking Facts about 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 that will teach you an important
electrical lesson: On a cool, 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 your
friend 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 a batch of "electrons,"
which are very small objects that carpet manufactures weave
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 have carpeting.
.........................................................

Although we modern persons tends 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 because there was no place 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 it also damaged Franklin's
brain so severely that he started speaking only in
incomprehensible maxims, such as, "A penny saved is penny
earned." Eventually, he had to be given a job running the
post office.

After Franklin, came a herd of Electrical Pioneers whose
names have become part of our electrical terminology: Myron
Volt, Mary Louise Amp, James Watt, Bob Transformer, etc.
These pioneers conducted many important electrical
experiments.  For example, in 1780 Luigi Galvani discovered
(this is the truth) that when he attached two different kinds
of metal to the leg of a frog, and electrical current
developed and the frog's leg kicked, even though it was no
longer actually attached to the frog, which was dead anyway.
Galvani's discovery led to enormous advances in the field of
amphibian medicine.  Today, skilled veterinary surgeons can
take a frog that has been seriously injured of killed,
implant pieces of metal in its muscles, and watch in hop back
into the pond just like a normal frog, except for the fact
that it sinks like a stone.

But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of 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 just sat until 1923, when the record was invented.
But Edison's greatest achievement came in 1879, when he
invented the electric company.  Edison's design was a
brilliant adaptation of the simple electrical circuit: The
electric company sends electricity through a wire to a
customer, then immediately gets the electricity back through
another wire, then (this is the brilliant part) sends it
right back to the customer 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 consumers take the time to examine
their electricity closely.  In fact, the last year in which
any new electricity was generated in the United States was
1937: the electric companies have been merely re-selling it
ever since, which is why they have so much free time to apply
for rate increases.

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
developed the laser, an electronic appliance that emits a
beam of light so powerful that it can vaporize a bulldozer
2,000 yards away, yet so precise that doctors can use it to
perform delicate operations on the human eyeball, provided
they remember too change the power setting from "VAPORIZE
BULLDOZER" to "DELICATE."

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