• Electricity Explained

    From Daryl Stout@316:36/20 to All on Wed Mar 22 00:03:34 2023
    Today's scientific questions are "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 friends' 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, & collect in
    your finger, where they form a spark that leaps to your friends' filling,
    then travel down 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 an electrical storm, & 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...such as 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 2 different kinds of metal to the leg of
    a frog, an electrical current developed and the frogs' leg kicked; even
    though it was no longer attached to the frog, which was dead anyway.
    Gilvani'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 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, & lived in New Jersey. Edison's first major invention in 1877
    was the phonograph, which could be found in thousands 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 send electricity through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets the electricity back through another wire. Then (this
    is the brilliant part), sends it 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 in 1937; the electric companies
    have been merely re-selling it ever since; which is why they have so much
    time to apply for 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 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 perfrom delicate operations to the
    human eyeball; provided they remember to change the power setting from "Vaporize Bulldozer" to "Delicate".

    (Author unknown)
    --- SBBSecho 3.14-Win32
    * Origin: The Thunderbolt BBS - Little Rock, Arkansas (316:36/20)