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From: curran@euclid.DEC (Karen Vogel Curran)
Newsgroups: net.jokes
Subject: Shocking new discoveries !!
Message-ID: <253@decwrl.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 18-Jan-85 07:29:31 EST
Article-I.D.: decwrl.253
Posted: Fri Jan 18 07:29:31 1985
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From:	THURBER      "H. Douglas Thurber"   17-JAN-1985 07:19  
To:	@TEG.LIS
Subj:	SINKING ONES TEETH INTO THE SUBJECT?


 
			Ask Dave: What is Electricity? 
  
		Or, how science columns should be written. 
  
				By Dave Barry 
  
  
	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 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 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 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 along came the first 
        Electrical Pioneer, Benjamin Franklin, who flew a kite in a 
        lighting storm and received a serious electrical shock.  This 
        proved that lighting 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 
        the post office. (Editor's Note: See page 6) 
  
	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, 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 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 Electricl 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 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 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 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 so powerful that it can vaporize a bull-
        dozer 2,000 yards away, yet so precise that doctors can use it 
        to perform delicate operations to the human eyeball, provided 
        they remember to change the power setting from "Vaporize Bulldozer" 
        to "Delicate."