PART 1 unit1.ppt

* * We are so used to electric lights, radio, televisions, telephones and Internet that it is hard to imagine what life would be like without them [ 1 ]. In electricity’s absence, people grope about in flickering candlelight, cars hesitate in the streets because there are no traffic lights to guide them, and food spoils in silent refrigerators, to talk over long distance we are left with smoke signals and postcards. * * Many years ago, scientists had very vague ideas about electricity [ 2 ]. About 2,000 years ago, Wang Chong, a Chinese philosopher, discovered that if one rubbed a piece of amber with a piece of fur or wood, he could always produce electricity. Scientists say today that the amber had become charged with electricity. Until the 19th century, no one knew much more about this . * * As the times went on, many of them thought of it as a sort of fluid that flowed through wires as water flows through pipes, but they could not understand what made it flow. Many of them felt that electricity was made up of tiny particles of some kind, but trying to separate electricity into individual particles baffled them. * * Then, the great American scientist Millikan, in 1909, astounded the scientific world by actually weighing a single particle of electricity and calculating its electrical charge. This was probably one of the most delicate weighing jobs ever done by man[ 3 ], for a single electric particle weighs only about half of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a pound. The particle is much smaller than you can imagine. To make up a pound it would take more of those particles than there are drops of water in the Pacific Ocean. What is the weight of electric particle? * * They are no strangers to us, these electric particles, for we know them as electrons. Every single thing you have ever seen is made up of thousands of hundreds of atoms, and every atom contains one or more electrons. When large numbers of