[lfjokes] electricity lessons.

[Adam Shand]

Via: Andrea Clarkson <andrea at earthlight.co.nz>

TOPICAL SUBJECT #1.

WHERE DOES THE ELECTRICITY GO AFTER IT LEAVES THE TOASTER?

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 one that electricity can be a very powerful force, but we must
never use it to hurt others unless we need to learn an important lesson
about electricity.

It also illustrates 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 carpets 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 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: Fred Volt, Mary Louise Amp, Jim 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 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 electrical
circuit:  the electric company sends electricity through a wire to a
customer, then immediately gets the electricity back through another wire,
and 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
recent times 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
"Vaporize Bulldozer" to "Delicate Eye Operation."