The Loony Bin
(
loonies@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk
)
Sun, 28 Apr 1996 01:07:52 +0100
Hiya People...
A lesson in electricity from an anonymous author which I found on the
web for you...
Wishes & Dreams...
- ANDREA
xx
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************<andrea@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk>************
******************<ajc6@ukc.ac.uk>*******************
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*** THE LOONY BIN ***
*** loonies@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk ***
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******************Internet Goddess*******************
*********************ANDROMEDA***********************
------- Forwarded message follows -------
ELECTRICITY
-Author Unknown
[As a service to members of Sacramento PC, we bring you this educational
treatise on electricity, discovered on a local bulletin board.]
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 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 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 -- almost.
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 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"