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)

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