Scientific question of the day
Posted: Tue May 11, 2004 10:18 pm
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.
This also teaches us how an electrical circuit works. When
you scuffed your feet on the carpet you picked up batches of
electrons which are very small objects that the carpet
manufacturers weave into the carpet so they will attract dirt.
The electrons travel through your bloodstream and
collect in your fingertipwhere they form a spark. The spark then
leaps to your friend's filling, then travels down his legs to his
feet and back into the carpet, thus completing the circuit.
Electronic fact: If you scuffed your feet long enough without
touching anything, you would build up so many electrons that
your finger would explode. However, this is nothing to worry
about unless you have expensive carpeting.
Although we modern persons tend to take 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 into a severe
lightning storm and received a serious electrical shock.
This proved that lightning is powered by the same force as
carpets, but it also damaged Franklin's brain so severely that he
started speaking 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.
For example, in 1780 Luigi Galvani discovered (this is the truth)
that when he attached two different kinds of metal to a frog's leg,
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 many enormous advances inthe field
of amphibian medicine. Today, skilled veterinary surgeons can
take a frog that has been seriously injured or killed, implant pieces
of metal into 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 pioneer of all was Thomas Edison, who was a
brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal education
and he lived in New Jersey. Edison's first major invention was the
phonograph which could soon be found in thousandsof American
homes, where it basically sat until 1927 when the record was
invented.
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 to the
customer through a wire, then immediately gets the electricity back
through another wire, then (and this is the brilliant part) sends it right
back to the customer again to repeat the process continually.
This means that an electric company can sell the customer the same
batch of electricity 60 times a second, virtually thousands of times a
day, and never get caught, since very few customers take the time
to examine their electricity very carefully. In fact, the last time
any electricity was generated in the United States was 1937.
The electric companies have been merely reselling the same energy
ever since, which explains why they have so much free 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 last few decades, scientists have
developed the laser, an electronic appliance so powerful that it can
vaporize a bulldozer 2000 yards away, yet so precise that it can be
used to perform delicate operations on the human eyeball, provided
of course, that they remember to change the power setting from
bulldozer to delicate.
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.
This also teaches us how an electrical circuit works. When
you scuffed your feet on the carpet you picked up batches of
electrons which are very small objects that the carpet
manufacturers weave into the carpet so they will attract dirt.
The electrons travel through your bloodstream and
collect in your fingertipwhere they form a spark. The spark then
leaps to your friend's filling, then travels down his legs to his
feet and back into the carpet, thus completing the circuit.
Electronic fact: If you scuffed your feet long enough without
touching anything, you would build up so many electrons that
your finger would explode. However, this is nothing to worry
about unless you have expensive carpeting.
Although we modern persons tend to take 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 into a severe
lightning storm and received a serious electrical shock.
This proved that lightning is powered by the same force as
carpets, but it also damaged Franklin's brain so severely that he
started speaking 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.
For example, in 1780 Luigi Galvani discovered (this is the truth)
that when he attached two different kinds of metal to a frog's leg,
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 many enormous advances inthe field
of amphibian medicine. Today, skilled veterinary surgeons can
take a frog that has been seriously injured or killed, implant pieces
of metal into 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 pioneer of all was Thomas Edison, who was a
brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal education
and he lived in New Jersey. Edison's first major invention was the
phonograph which could soon be found in thousandsof American
homes, where it basically sat until 1927 when the record was
invented.
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 to the
customer through a wire, then immediately gets the electricity back
through another wire, then (and this is the brilliant part) sends it right
back to the customer again to repeat the process continually.
This means that an electric company can sell the customer the same
batch of electricity 60 times a second, virtually thousands of times a
day, and never get caught, since very few customers take the time
to examine their electricity very carefully. In fact, the last time
any electricity was generated in the United States was 1937.
The electric companies have been merely reselling the same energy
ever since, which explains why they have so much free 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 last few decades, scientists have
developed the laser, an electronic appliance so powerful that it can
vaporize a bulldozer 2000 yards away, yet so precise that it can be
used to perform delicate operations on the human eyeball, provided
of course, that they remember to change the power setting from
bulldozer to delicate.
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