(The Shocking Truth Revealed!)
Today's scientific question is: What in the world is electricity? And where does it go when it leaves the toaster?
Well, that's
really two questions, but let's be scientifical and say it's just
one big one.
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 into a friend's mouth and touch one
of his 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 small batches of "electrons", which are very
small objects that carpet manufacturers weave into carpets so they
will attract dirt. (That will cause the carpet to wear out faster
so you will need to buy a new one sooner, but that's another story.) 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 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 because there was no place to plug them in. Then came along the first Electrical Pioneer, Benjamin Franklin. Ben 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 old Ben's brain so badly that he started
speaking in maxims, such as "a penny saved is a penny earned". (Eventually, he got so bad he had to be given a job running the Post
Office, but that's also another story.)
Now, after Franklin came
a whole 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
(this is the truth by the way) discovered when he attached two different
kinds of metal to the leg of a frog, an electrical current developed,
and the frog's leg kicked, even though it was no longer 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 or killed, implant pieces of metal in its muscles, and watch
it hop back into the pond just like a normal frog, except for the
fact that it sinks like a stone (they're still working on that).
But
the greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison, who
was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal
training and lived in New Jersey. Edison's first major invention,
in 1877, was the phonograph, which could be found in thousands of
homes, where it basically 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 electric 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 the 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 time to examine their electricity closely. In fact, the
last year any new electricity was generated was in 1937; the Electric
Companies have merely been 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 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 2,000 yards
away, yet so precise that doctors can use it to perform delicate operations
on the human eye, provided they remember to change the power setting
from "Vaporize Bulldozer" to "Delicate".
