surely it's a French word (as in lieu) but when did we all decide to put a 'lef' in there instead? .. and why?
Was there some big national meeting that I missed where we all dedided to be different?
I have always been intriqued to know how electricity is made?
I have strange visions of people working in electricity plants peddling away on massive exercise bikes creating huge amounts of friction...
Oh and how do our voices get carried along all those telephone lines?
Pathetic what I don't know at my age!!
House music came from adding vocals to electro music and speeding it up in the mid 1980's. By electro music I mean stuff like Kraftwerk, or the tune to Gary Numan's 'cars' without the lyrics.
Alison, as I understand telephones, all sound is vibration; the early telephones transmitted a signal down the line that turned your speech into vibration and then at the other end, made granules in the earpiece vibrate in exactly the same way, replicating the sound. This is what they call analogue (in that the method of communicating is not an exact copy, but sort of a metaphor for the original method that you then translate back. Like the hands of a clock are analogue and the numbers themselves are digital.) They do it digitally now, and I've even less idea how that works.
Electricity is very tricky, but essentially electricity is a force based on charged particles. This force can be created in a number of ways - dipping frog's legs in brine was the earliest manifestation of it, it would make the frog's legs twitch after death. Then there was rubbing cats fur along discs of copper and zinc. It is just basically a chemical reaction in which electricity is produced as a by-product. Power station wise, either coal or gas or oil are burned to power the turning of a turbine, which is like a super-huge and super-efficient equivalent of the dynamo on your bike which makes the light work when you pedal.
I'm not sure it is that useful to know either of these things.
Telephones are simply a combination of a microphone and speaker and some form of connection to other 'phones. Analogue phones transmit a direct electrical analogue version of the original sound where as digital uses some form of encoding which is decoded by the receiver.
Electricity is a bit like sex - it draws couples together. Electrons love protons but are not interested in neutrons (protons and neutrons make up the nucleus of atoms). There are various methods of convincing electrons that there is better action elsewhere and the electrons drift off leaving a bunch of lonely protons.
Life being the way it is new electrons are quickly drawn to the lonely protons but the whole process results in a relative depletion of electrons in one place and a surplus in another. A measure of the loneliness of the protons (essentially their attractiveness as electrons love desperation) is voltage (Volts) and a guide to their number (how many lonely ones there are) is ’charge’ measure in amperes (Amps)
It’s easy to see batteries, dynamos and alternators etc. as pumps that draw electrons in at one end and pump them out of the other - connecting a pipe (a conductor) from the output back to the input allows the electrons to flow continually through the pipe. Essentially the power of the pump is in how many volts it can produce, that is the relative difference between the available number of electrons on each side.
Electrons are well trained and follow well defined rules which scientists and technicians utilise to make most of the devices we are all so reliant on - from phones, TV’s and computers to cookers, heaters and lights.
So next time you turn on your computer think of all the little electronic lovers that are being torn apart and the poor proton communities that end up either short of partners (negative) or with a surfeit (positive) pestering them for attention.
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