Socket
to Them
by Dave Berry from his book 'Bad Habits' page 173
Thanks to Lenny
Frank for passing on the authors name.
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 batches of
"electrons," which are very small objects that carpet manufacturers 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 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 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 herd of Electrical pioneers whose names have become parts 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 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 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 thousand of American 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 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 customers take the time to
examine their electricity closely. In fact, the last year any new electricity was
generated was 1937. Today, thanks to men like Edison and Franklin, and frogs like
Gaivani'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."
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