Today's most pressing scientific questions are: "What is electricity?" and "Where does it go after it leaves the power supply?"
Here is a simple experiment that will teach you an important lesson about electricity:
On a cool, dry day, scuff your feet along a carpet, then reach into your friend's mouth and touch one of his dental fillings. Notice how he twitches violently and cries out in pain?
This teaches us that electricity can be a very powerful force and we must never misuse it or use it to hurt others (unless we need to learn something that he won't tell).
When you scuffed your feet on the carpet, you picked up batches of "electrons" which are incredibly tiny objects that the carpet manufacturers weave into the carpets so they will attract dirt.
The electrons travel through your bloodstream and collect in your fingers. There they form a spark that jumps to your friend's filling, then they travel down to his feet and back into the carpet, thereby 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! (This is nothing to worry about if you don't have carpeting.) It is said that putting a thimble on each fingertip will prevent this.
Although we modern people tend to take our electric lights, radios, mixers, and so on 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 anyway).
Then along came the first Electrical Pioneer, Benjamin Franklin, who flew a kite in a lightning storm and received a serious electric shock. This proved that clouds were powered by the same force as carpets, but it also damaged his brain to the extent that he spent a great deal of time speaking in incomprehensible maxims such as "A penny saved is a penny earned."
Eventually, to protect the general public, he was given a job in the Post Office. He died of syphilis, which only proves that one should never fool around with Mother Nature!
After Franklin came a herd of Electrical Pioneers whose names have become a part of our electrical terminology: Myron Volt, Mary Lou Amp, James Watt, Bob Transformer, Billy Joe Farad, and Ozro Henry. These pioneers conducted many important electrical experiments--among them, Galvani discovered (honestly) that when he attached two different kinds of metal to the legs of a frog, an electrical current developed and the frog's leg kicked, even though it was dead as a hammer.
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 by a car, implant pieces of metal in its muscles, and watch it jump back into the pond like a normal frog (except that now it will sink like a stone!).
The greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Alva Edison, who was a brilliant inventor (despite the fact that he had little education, and lived in New Jersey!).
Edison's first major invention was the phonograph (in 1877), which soon could 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 (3600 times a minute in America, 3000 times a minute in the UK).
This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch of electricity over five million times a day. In fact, the last time any NEW electric current was generated in this country was in 1937.
Incidentally, Edison is widely credited with the "smoke theory" of electronics which maintains that all components in any given circuit really operate on a minute charge of white smoke and when the component fatigues and releases its smoke, it is rendered useless since its source of energy has escaped.
Today, thanks to men like Edison and Franklin (and frogs like Galvani's Kermit) 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 vaporise a bulldozer at 2,000 yards, yet so precise that a doctor can use it to perform delicate operations on the human eyeball (provided, of course, that they remember to change the setting from "VAPORISE BULLDOZER" to "DELICATE").