Some lighter stuff

["Donald E. Simanek" <dsimanek@eagle.lhup.edu>]

> From off-list, but relevant to physics teaching. :-)

> From Zongrik007@wport.com Sat Jul 26 22:28:05 1997
Date: 26 Jul 1997 16:27:52 PST
From: Zongrik007@wport.com
To: dsimanek@eagle.lhup.edu
Subject: electricity

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                  SHOCKING FACTS ABOUT 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, 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 manufactures 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 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 tends 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 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
the leg of a frog, and electrical current developed and the frog's leg
kicked, even though it was no longer actually 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 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
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, an electronic appliance
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 too
change the power setting from "VAPORIZE BULLDOZER" to "DELICATE." 

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