www.cyberslayer.co.uk

 


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 you can all do: On a cold 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 he 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 bunches of "electrons" which are very small objects
that carpet manufacturers impregnate 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 often walk on
carpets.

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 as there was nowhere 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 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 him came a
herd of Electrical Pioneers whose names have become part of our electrical
terminology - such as Myron 250-Volts, Mary Lamp, Jim Watt, Bob Transformer
etc. These pioneers conducted many important experiments. For example in
1780 Luigi Galvani discovered that when he attached two different kinds of
metal to the leg of a frog, an electric current developed and the leg
kicked - even though it was no longer attached to the frog (which from a
historical standpoint is felt was probably even dead at the time).
Galvani's discovery led to enormous advances in the field of amphibian
medicine. Today, skilled veterinary surgeons can take a frog which has been
seriously injured or killed, implant pieces of metal in its muscles, and
watch it hop back to its pond just like a normal frog (except that it then
sinks like a stone).

But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of them 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 sat until 1923, when someone invented records. But
Edison's greatest achievement came in 1879, when he invented the electric
company. His design was a brilliant adaptation of the simple electric
circuit: the company sends electricity through a wire to a customer, then
immediately GETS IT BACK THROUGH ANOTHER WIRE. Then, brilliant
masterstroke, it can charge the customer for the electricity EVEN THOUGH
THE COMPANY HAS GOT IT BACK 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 trouble to examine their electricity closely. In fact
the last year in which any NEW electricity was generated was 1937: the
electric companies have merely been reselling it ever since.

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 have developed the LASER, an electronic appliance so
powerful that it can vaporize a bulldozer 2000 yards away, yet so precise
that doctors can perform delicate operations on the human eyeball with it
(provided they remember to change the power setting from "VAPORIZE
BULLDOZER" to "DELICATE").


		

Share this Joke with friends:
reddit	Facebook	StumbleUpon	Del.icio.us	Digg	Google	Spurl	Blink
		Furl	Simpy	Y! MyWeb