SCIENCE and ELECTRICITY 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 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 one that electricity can be a very powerful force, but we must never use it to hurt others unless we need to learn an important lesson about electricity. It also illustrates how an electrical circut 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 friends filling, then travel down to his feet and back into the carpet, thus completing the circut. 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 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 since there was no place to plug them in. Then along came the first electrical pioneer, Benjamin Franklin, who flew a kite in an electrical 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. 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 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 ... almost. The greatest electrical pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison. He was a brillian 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. It could be found in thousands of american homes where it sat until 1923 when the record was invented. Edison's greatest achievment came in 1879 when he invented the electric company. Edison's design was a brilliant adaptation of the simple electrical circut. The electric company sends the electricity through a wire to the customer, then immediately gets the electricity back through another wire. Then (this is the brilliant part) they send it right back to the customer again. This means that the 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 very closely. In fact, the last year any NEW electricity was generated was 1937. Today, thanks to men like Edison and Franklin, and frogs like Galvani's, we receive almost unlimited benefits from electricity. In the past decade, scientists have developed the laser, an electronic device so powerful that it can vaporize a bulldozer at 2000 yards, yet so precise that doctors can use it to perform delicate operations on the human eyeball, provided they remember to change the power setting from "bulldozer" to "eyeball".