ELECTRICITY\Author Unknown

          [As a service to members of Sacramento PC, we bring you this
          educational treatise on electricity, discovered on a local
          bulletin board.]

          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
          carpet so that 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 travel
          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
          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 a 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.  Among them,
          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 --
          almost.

          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 thousand 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 electric-
          ity 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 was 1937.

          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 use it
          to perform delicate operations to the human eyeball, provided
          they remember to change the power setting from "Bulldozer" to
          "Eyeball."
          



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