T H E
H I S T O R Y O F E L E C T R I C I T Y
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
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.
After Franklin 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 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, 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."