Landrew’s Take on Technology

In old cartoons, when someone had an idea a light bulb would turn on above his head.  In real life though, though, there is only one idea that can turn on a light bulb above your head and that idea is: “I want to turn on that light in the ceiling.”  This is because light bulbs don’t run on ideas.  They run on electricity!

Before electricity, there were only candles.  Candles were ok for light but they can’t do a lot of other stuff that electricity can do.  For example, you can’t charge your cell phone using a candle, and even if they never discovered electricity and instead made a way to charge cell phones using candles, you would get wax all over your cell phone.  Then you would have a fully charged cell phone but you wouldn’t want to use it because it’s all waxy and embarrassing.  So it’s obvious why people decided to use electricity instead, although candles are better Mother’s Day presents than electricity.

Now we’ve get electricity from the plugholes in our houses and apartments but it wasn’t always like this.  Before normal electricity that comes out of walls, there was only wild electricity coming out of clouds.  Wild electricity still exists and it’s called lightning.

You might be mad and thinking, “all this time I pay for electricity through the walls when there’s all this free electricity outside?”  Well before you call the electric company and say, “Cancel my service.  I’m going to use lightning from now on,” consider this: it’s pretty hard to get wild lightning.  For example, let’s say you see a lightning storm coming and you want a milk shake, so you put milk and ice cream in a blender and then put it outside, there’s no guarantee that the lightning is going to strike your blender in the right way to make a good shake.  It might strike it and melt everything, even the blender.  Or it might not strike it at all.  Or it might strike it just right but then a bear or a deer or something might take it.  So wild electricity is always risky.

In the olden times they had a special way to get wild electricity.  They would tie keys to kites and then fly them in front of the lightning.  This was to send a message like, “hey lightning, look.  I trust you enough to give you the keys to my house.  Why don’t you trust me and give me some of your electricity?”  That’s harder to do these days because people have more keys and it would be hard to keep track of which ones have been electrocuted.

Electricity powers everything, except for stuff powered by gas.  Gas and electricity are competitors in the market of stuff that makes other stuff turn on.  Gas can make cars go faster than electricity, but electricity doesn’t smell as weird as gas, and if you get a bit of electricity on your jeans people won’t think you’re a mechanic like they would with gas.

When the power goes out, we get to see what it was like for people before electricity.  It get’s really dark and quiet at night and you can’t flush the toilet so it get’s kind of gross, just like for people a long time ago.