[1183] in Humor
HUMOR: Electricity
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew A. Bennett)
Fri Nov 3 14:14:08 1995
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 03 Nov 1995 14:09:03 EST
From: "Andrew A. Bennett" <abennett@MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 03 Nov 1995 13:21:01 EST
From: Erik Nygren <nygren@MIT.EDU>
From: Katy King <katyking@MIT.EDU>
From: Barbara King <barbar@freenet.scri.fsu.edu>
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.
It also teaches us how an electrical circuit works. When you scuffed your
feet, you picked up a batch of 'electrons', which are very small objects that
carpet manufacturers weave into carpets so they will attract dirt. The
electrons travel through your bloodstream and collect in your finger, where
they form a spark that leaps to your friend's filling, then travels down to
his feet and back into the carpet, thus completing the circuit.
AMAZING ELECTRICAL FACT: If you scuffed your feet long enough without
touching anything you could 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 a
part of our electrical terminology: Myron Volt, Mary Louise Amp, James Watt,
Bob Transformer, etc. These pioneers conducted many important experiments.
For example, in 1780 Luigi Galvani discovered (this is the truth) that when he
attached two different kinds of metal to the legs of a frog, an electrical
current developed and the frog's leg kicked, even thought 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 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 thousands of American homes, where
it basically just sat until 1923, when the first 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 tot 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
consumers take the time to examine their electricity closely. In fact, the
last year in which any new electricity was generated in the United States was
1937; the electric companies have been merely re-selling it ever since, which
is 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 past
decade scientists developed the laser, and electronic device that emits a
beam of light so powerful that it can vaporize a bulldozer 2,000 yards away,
yet so precise that doctors can use it to perform delicate operations on the
human eyeball, provided they remember to change the power setting from
'vaporize bulldozer' to 'delicate'.
