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 cold dry day, scuff your feet along the
carpet, then reach your hand into a friend’s mouth and touch one of
his fillings. Did you notice how your friend twitched violently and
cried out in pain? Did he bite off your finger? This teaches us two
things: one is that electricity can be a very powerful force (but we
must never use it to hurt others, unless they deserve it) and the
second is that electricity can hurt us, as experienced when your
friend bit your finger.
It also teaches us how an electrical circuit works. When you scuffed
your feet, you picked up batches of “electrons,” which are very tiny
objects that carpet manufacturers weave into carpet so that they will
attract dirt (this makes sense when you realize that the carpet
companies own the vacuum cleaner industry). These electrons travel
through your bloodstream and collect in your fingers, where they form
a spark that leaps to your friend’s filling, which then travel down to
his feet and back into the carpet, thus completing the circuit.
CAUTION: Do not perform this experiment on your pet cat!
AMAZING ELECTRONIC FACT: If you scuffed your feet on carpeting long
enough without touching anything, you would build up so many electrons
that your finger would explode! There is however, nothing to worry
about unless you have carpeting.
Although we as a modern society tend to take our electric lights,
radios, blenders, etc. for granted, hundreds of years ago people did
not have any 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 is powered by the
same force as carpets. Unfortunately, the experiment also damaged
Franklin’s brain so severely that he started speaking in
incomprehensible maxims, such as, “A penny saved is a penny earned.”
Eventually he was given a job running the post office.
After Franklin came a herd of Electrical Pioneers whose names have
become part of our electrical terminology: Charles Coulomb, George
Ohm, Myron Volt, Mary Louis Amp, James Watt, Joe Transformer, etc.
These pioneers researched theories and 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 he wasn’t on carpet. Galvani’s discovery led to enormous
advances in the field of amphibian medicine.
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 soon found its way into thousands of
American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was
invented. 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.
This has resulted in tremendous profits for the electric companies. If
Californians ever figure this out, I suspect that there will be
another bloody revolution. You may be surprised to learn that the last
time any new electricity was generated was in 1964 for a Beatles
Today, thanks to many men like Edison, Franklin, and Galvani’s frog,
we receive almost unlimited benefits from electricity. For example, in
the past decades, scientists have developed and refined the laser, an
electronic device so powerful that it can vaporize an enemy tank 2000
yards away, yet so precise that doctors can use it to perform delicate
operations on the human eyeball. They simply have to remember to
change the power setting from “tank” to “eyeball.”