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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. For
example in 1780, Luigi Galvani discovered 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 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.
cont.......
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