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 you 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 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 bloodstream and collect in your finger, where they form a spark that leaps to your friends filling, then traveling back down to his feet and back into the carpet, thus completing the circuit.
AMAZING ELECTRICAL 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 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 lightening storm and received a serious electric shock. This proved that lightening was powered by the same force as carpets, but 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. 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 phonogram, 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 electric circuit: The electric company sends electricity through a wire to a customers house then immediately gets the electricity back through another wire, then (this is the best part) sends it right back to the customer again.
Today, thanks to men like Edison and Franklin, 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 the power settings from "Bulldozer" to "Eyeball".