HUM: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 scuff
your feet, you pick up batches of "electrons," which are very small
objects that carpet manufactures weave into carpet so that 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 travel down to his feet and back into the carpet, thus
completing the circuit.

   AMAZING ELECTRICAL 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 it. 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 a penny earned." Eventually he had to be given a job running
the post office.

   After Franklin came a heard 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. Among them, Galvani discovered (this
is the truth) that 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 lead to enormous advances in the field
of amphibian medicine. Today skilled veterinary surgeons can take a
frog that has been serious injured or killed, implant pieces of metal
in its muscles, and watch it hop back into the pond -- where it 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 the record was
invented. but Edison's greatest design was a brilliant adaptation of
the simple electrical circuit: the electric company sends electricity
through a wire to a customer, then the electric company sends 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 customers take the time to examine their electricity
closely. In fact, the last year any new electricity was generated was
in 1937.

   Today, thanks to men like Edison and Franklin, 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 use it to perform delicate operations
to the human eyeball, provided they remember to change the power
setting from "Bulldozer" to "Eyeball."
