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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.
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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.
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