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I thought some of you might get a chuckle out of this if you haven't already
seen it. Please understand this is a joke. So take it as such & don't bother
sending me corrections.
*


Electricity

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 carpet so that they will attract dirt. The electrons travel through
your blood stream and collect in your finger, where they form a spark that
leaps to your friend's 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 -- where 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. This
means that an electric company can sell a customer the batch of electricity
thousands of times a day and ever
since very few customers take the time to examine their electricity closely.
In fact, the last year any new electricity was made 1937.
Today, thanks to men like Edison and Franklin, and 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 power setting from "Bulldozer" to
"Eyeball."

I always thought that it was 'Milly' Amp! ;-)
Keith Messent, Skipton, UK