 
                        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
customer 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 scientist developed the laser, an electronic
appliance so powerful that it can vapoize 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."
 
 
 
 
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