
                 ASK DAVE:  WHAT IS ELECTRICITY?
                          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 
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 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 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 the 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 bulldozer 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".

