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 a batch 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 Gaivani 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 actually attached to the frog, which was dead anyway. Gaivani’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 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 just 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 consumers take the time to examine their electricity closely. In fact, the last year in which any new electricity was generated in the United States was 1937; the electric companies have been merely reselling it ever since, which is why they have so much free time to apply for rate increases.

Today, thanks to men like Edison and Franklin, and frogs like Gaivani’s, we receive almost unlimited benefits from electricity. For example, in the past decade scientists developed the laser, an electronic appliance that emits a beam of light so powerful that it can vaporize a bulldozer two thousand yards away, 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 “VAPORIZE BULLDOZER” to “DELICATE.”

TODAY’S SCIENTIFIC QUESTION: What causes weather? And who cares?

ANSWER: Primitive man believed that weather was caused by

“high-pressure systems” and “low-pressure systems,” which were basically large, invisible spirits who lived in the sky. Today, however, we know that weather is caused by Canada, a large, invisible country near Michigan. Canada’s principal activity is exporting cold Canadian air masses to Chicago, which converts them to weather and distributes them to the rest of the country. Lately, however, Canada’s dominance in the air-mass-exporting field has been challenged by Japan, which produces warm Pacific air masses and sells them to California, which uses them to produce smog and mudslides. Some countries, such as Russia and China, try to produce their own air masses, but they usually end up importing used weather from the United States. England imports most of its weather, but it can afford only rain. Many underdeveloped nations have no weather at all.

To keep track of the weather, the United States Weather Bureau has observers in remote outposts all over the world. Once every hour, these observers go outside, scan the horizon for air masses, then go back inside and drink. By about midafternoon, most of them can see air masses and God knows what else on the horizon. The ones who can still operate their radios transmit their sightings to the Weather Bureau, which wants to know what the air masses are doing because when two air masses collide they produce thunder, which can frighten livestock. Sometimes they collide so hard that they produce lightning. There are many silly superstitions about lightning, and as a result many people-maybe even you-are terrified of it. You shouldn’t worry. Thanks to modern science, we now know that lightning is nothing more than huge chunks of electricity that can come out of the sky, any time, anywhere, and kill you.

Lightning is especially attracted to people on golf courses, but if it cannot find a golf course, it will attack anyone wearing loud clothing. Your best bet is to dress conservatively and spend the rainy season (September through July) in bars. If you are struck by lightning, do not panic, because there is always a chance you are not dead. Many people who get struck by lightning go on to lead happy, productive, somewhat hairless lives.

The Weather Bureau also sends up satellites that take photographs of the Earth from several hundred miles up. These photographs provide vital information. For example, if a photograph shows that there are clouds over Boston, an experienced meteorologist can determine that the weather in Boston is cloudy. He can then alert the Boston area to be ready to do whatever it does in the event of cloudiness.

The only other users of satellite weather photographs are television weathermen, who use them to stand in front of when they give their reports:

ANCHORMAN: And now, to fill up five minutes of valuable television time with information that any moron could get by merely looking out the window, here is our Channel 14 Insight News Team Weatherman. I understand you have good news for us, Fred.

WEATHERMAN: Indeed I do, Bob. That low-pressure system that was threatening to bring rain to the Channel 14 viewing area this weekend has instead turned into a hurricane and veered westward, destroying much of Guatemala, so I’m predicting fair skies for the Channel 14 viewing area.