A) What in the world is electricity?
B) 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 and collect
in your finger, where they form a spark that leaps to your friends 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.
AfterFranklin 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 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
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 adaption of the simple electrical
circuit: the electric company sends electricity through a wire to a cutomer,
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; 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 perform delicate operations to the human eyeball,
provided they remember to change the power setting from "Vaporize
Bulldozer" to "Delicate."
A. N. Agrawal