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Subject:
From:
Jack Olson <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
TechNet E-Mail Forum <[log in to unmask]>, Jack Olson <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 10 Nov 2010 09:02:29 -0600
Content-Type:
text/plain
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text/plain (101 lines)
Do you start feeling lonely when your mailbox drops below 200 per week?
I will fill it with this, hope it helps....

-=-=-=-

T H E   H I S T O R Y   O F   E L E C T R I C I T Y
 
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 
friends 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 friends 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 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 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 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 was 1937; the electric companies have 
been merely re-selling it ever since, which is why they have so much 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 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  "Vaporize Bulldozer" to "Delicate."

-=-=-=-

surfin' the learnin' curve,
Jack


.

On Tue, 9 Nov 2010 19:17:02 +0100, Inge <[log in to unmask]> 
wrote:

>Hi, someone there? Only  two mails in one week. Is there a technical
>problem?
>/Inge

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