Facts and figures about electricity
- Electricity travels at the speed of light, about 300,000 kilometers per second.
- A spark of static electricity can contain up to 3000 volts.
- The average taser (electric shock) has a power of 50,000 volts.
- Lightning can carry up to three million (3,000,000) volts (and lasts less than one second).
Daily electricity
- The first four common household items powered by electricity were the sewing machine, the fan, the kettle and the toaster.
- LED bulbs consume about one-sixth of the electricity compared to conventional bulbs and last about 40 times longer.
- A typical microwave uses more electricity to power the digital clock on it than it does to heat food.
- Appliances also use electricity when they are off.
- The average desktop computer idles at 80 watts, while a laptop idles at 20 watts. The Sony PlayStation 3 uses about 200 watts in both active and standby mode.
Electricity in nature
- The electricity causes the muscle cells in your heart to contract, essentially making it beat.
- An electrocardiogram (ECG) measures the electricity passing through the heart. When a healthy person’s heart beats, the EKG machine displays a line moving across the screen in regular spikes (like you’ve seen in hundreds of movies and TV shows).
- In some species of fish from the Amazon River, certain muscle cells have evolved over millions of years into cells called electrocytes, which they use for echolocation, that is, to detect obstacles and other animals in the dark.
- Echidnas and platypuses use electrical impulses emitted by their prey to find food. The platypus has almost 40,000 electricity sensors – or electroreceptors.
- An electric eel can deliver a shock of 600 volts when hunting or self-defense.
Curious about electricity
- Albertville, France (host city of the 1992 Winter Olympics) is generating electricity from cheese! Since whey is not needed to make Beaufort cheese, bacteria are added to the whey, turning it into biogas. This gas is then fed through an engine that heats water to produce electricity.
- Electricity was introduced to Ethiopia in 1896 after Emperor Menelik II ordered two newly invented electric chairs as a form of humane death penalty and realized that they would not work in his country without electricity.
- Someone tried to do the math, and we’ll take their word for it: you’d need about 648 AA batteries to power a person for a day (based on 1 calorie = 4.2 joules)!