NEW HISTORY OF ELECTRICITY

THE HISTORY OF ELECTRICITY

Today’s scientific ques-tion is: What in the world is electricity? And where does it go after it leaves the toaster?

 Here is a simple experi-ment that will teach you an important electrical lesson: On a cool, dry day, scuff your feet along a carpet, then reach 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 elec-tricity can be a very pow-erful force, but we must never use it to hurt others unless we need to learn an important electrical les-son.

It also teaches us how an electrical circuit works. When you scuffed your feet, you picked up small batches of “electrons,” which are very small ob-jects that carpet manu-facturers weave into car-pets so they will attract dirt. (That will cause the carpet to wear out faster so you will need to buy a new one sooner, but that’s another story.) The elec-trons travel through your blood stream 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 cir-cuit. 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 carpet-ing.

Although we modern per-sons 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 came along the first Electrical Pioneer, Ben-jamin Franklin, who flew a kite in a lightning storm and electrical shock. This proved that lightning was powered by the same force as carpets, but it also damaged Franklin’s brain so badly that he started speaking in max-ims, such as “a penny saved is a penny earned.” (Eventually he got so bad he had to be given a job running the post office, but that’s another story.)

After Franklin came a herd of Electrical Pio-neers whose names have become part of our elec-trical terminology: Myron Volt, Mary Louise Amp, James Watt, Bob Trans-former, etc. These pio-neers conducted many important electrical ex-periments. For example, in 1780 Luigi Galvani discovered this is the truth by the way) 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 anyway. Galvani’s discovery led to enormous advances in the field of amphibian medi-cine. Today skilled veteri-nary surgeons can take a frog that has been seri-ously 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 them all was Thomas Edison, who was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal training and lived in New Jersey. Edison’s first major invention in 1877, was the phono-graph, which could be found in thousands of American homes, where it basically sat until 1923 when the record was in-vented. But Edison’s greatest achievement came in 1879, when he invented the electric com-pany. Edison’s design was a brilliant adaptation of the simple electric cir-cuit: The electric com-pany sends electricity through a wire to a cus-tomer, 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 the electric com-pany can sell a customer the same batch of elec-tricity 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 in the United States was 1937; the electric companies have merely been 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 frog’s like Galvani’s, we receive unlimited benefits from electricity. For ex-ample, in the past decade scientists developed the laser, an electronic appli-ance 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 eye, provided they re-member to change the power setting from “Vaporize Bulldozer” to “Delicate.”

Today’s scientific ques-tion is: What in the world is electricity? And where does it go after it leaves the toaster?

Here is a simple experi-ment that will teach you an important electrical lesson: On a cool, dry day, scuff your feet along a carpet, then reach 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 elec-tricity can be a very pow-erful force, but we must never use it to hurt others unless we need to learn an important electrical les-son.

It also teaches us how an electrical circuit works. When you scuffed your feet, you picked up small batches of “electrons,” which are very small ob-jects that carpet manu-facturers weave into car-pets so they will attract dirt. (That will cause the carpet to wear out faster so you will need to buy a new one sooner, but that’s another story.) The elec-trons travel through your blood stream 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 cir-cuit. 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 carpet-ing.

Although we modern per-sons 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 came along the first Electrical Pioneer, Ben-jamin Franklin, who flew a kite in a lightning storm and electrical shock. This proved that lightning was powered by the same force as carpets, but it also damaged Franklin’s brain so badly that he started speaking in max-ims, such as “a penny saved is a penny earned.” (Eventually he got so bad he had to be given a job running the post office, but that’s another story.)

After Franklin came a herd of Electrical Pio-neers whose names have become part of our elec-trical terminology: Myron Volt, Mary Louise Amp, James Watt, Bob Trans-former, etc. These pio-neers conducted many important electrical ex-periments. For example, in 1780 Luigi Galvani discovered this is the truth by the way) 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 anyway. Galvani’s discovery led to enormous advances in the field of amphibian medi-cine. Today skilled veteri-nary surgeons can take a frog that has been seri-ously 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 them all was Thomas Edison, who was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal training and lived in New Jersey. Edison’s first major invention in 1877, was the phono-graph, which could be found in thousands of American homes, where it basically sat until 1923 when the record was in-vented. But Edison’s greatest achievement came in 1879, when he invented the electric com-pany. Edison’s design was a brilliant adaptation of the simple electric cir-cuit: The electric com-pany sends electricity through a wire to a cus-tomer, 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 the electric com-pany can sell a customer the same batch of elec-tricity 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 in the United States was 1937; the electric companies have merely been 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 frog’s like Galvani’s, we receive unlimited benefits from electricity. For ex-ample, in the past decade scientists developed the laser, an electronic appli-ance 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 eye, provided they re-member to change the power setting from “Vaporize Bulldozer” to “Delicate.”

BY CREANOVA ENGINEERS www.creanovaengineers.in