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 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. We must never use it to hurt others (unless, of course, we are trying to teach 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 manufacturers weave into carpets so that they will attract dirt. The electrons traveled through your bloodstream and collected in your finger, where they formed a spark that leaped to your friend's filling. They then traveled down to his feet and back into the carpet, completing the circuit.
Although we tend to take our electric lights, radios, TVs, etc. for granted, hundreds of years ago people did not have any of these things. (Which was 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 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 became so unstable that he was given the job of running the U. S. Postal Service.
The greatest electrical pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison, who was a brilliant inventor in spite of 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 soon be found in thousands of homes (where it basically just sat until 1923 when the record was invented). His 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 out through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets it back through another wire. Then (and this is the brilliant part) sends 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 few customers take the time to check their electricity very closely). In fact, the last year any new electricity was generated in the United States was 1937. The Electric Companies have been reselling it ever since. (This is why they have so much time to apply for rate increases.)
Today, thanks to men like Edison and Franklin, we receive almost unlimited benefits from electricity. For example, in the past decade, scientists developed the laser, an electric appliance so powerful that it can vaporize a bulldozer 2000 yards away. Yet it is so precise that doctors can use it to perform delicate operations on the human eyeball (provided, of course, that they remember to reduce the power setting from "vaporize bulldozer" to "delicate").
So there. Quit fooling with the electrics on your 356 (or reading mindless drivel such as this) and go drive it.
