Accueil > BLAGUES-L > Archives 1996 >


Date: Fri, 23 Feb 1996 09:27:24 -0500 (EST)
Subject: BLAGUES-L: What is electricity?

Contributed by Tom Mannion
Written by No One Knows Who

                         WHAT IS 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
scuffed your feet, you picked up batches of "electrons", which are very
small objects that carpet manufacturers weave into carpets so 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 travels 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 shag 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
severe 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
now 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 just like a normal
frog, except for the fact that it now 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 phonograph
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 electric 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 to make sure they have new electrons.  In fact the last year
any new electricity was generated in the United States was 1937; the
electric companies have been re-selling it ever since, which is why
they have so much time to apply rate increases.

     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 developed the laser, an
electronic appliance so powerful that it can vaporize a bulldozer
2,000 yards away, yet so precise that doctors can use it to perform
delicate operations on the human eyeball, provided they remember to
change the power setting from "Vaporize Bulldozer" to "Delicate".



Accueil > BLAGUES-L > Archives 1996 >