[1954] in Humor
HUMOR: The Shocking Truth
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (abennett@MIT.EDU)
Tue Mar 11 22:50:54 1997
From: <abennett@MIT.EDU>
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1997 22:37:27 EST
Historical note: Franklin liked to electrocute turkeys for dinner to
show off. One night he was holding the turkey and grabbed the rod
without noticing that he was standing on the grounding chain. He woke
up a few minutes (and a few meters) later...
-Drew
From: Merlyn Liberty <merlyn@swcp.com>
From: vardeman@juno.com (Robert E Vardeman)
Date: Sun, 23 Feb 1997 12:03:32 EST
ELECTRICITY
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, the 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 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 electrical current works. When
you scuffed your feet, you picked up batches 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 travels to your friend's filling, then travel down to
his feet and back into the carpet, thus completing the circuit.
AMAZING ELECTRIC 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. This is just as well, because
there was no place to plug them in. Then 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
a post office. After Franklin came a herd of electrical pioneers
whose names have become part of our electrical terminology: Mary
Louise Amp, James Watt, Bob Transformer, Myron Volt, 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 any-
way. 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 muscle, and watch it hop back into the
pond just like a normal frog, except for the fact that it sinks
like a stone. The greatest electrical pioneer 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 sat until 1923
when the record was invented. But Edison's greatest achievement
was 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 rate increases. Today, thanks to
men like Edison and Franklin, and the frogs like Galvani's, we
receive almost unlimited benefits from electricity. For example,
in the past decade, scientists have invented the LASER, an
electronic appliance 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."
