Fall is here and students around the country are gearing up for and settling into school. In the spirit of learning, we’re sharing 10 of the most interesting facts about electricity!
- If a person yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days, they would produce enough energy to heat one cup of coffee. You’d need a lot of coffee to yell for that long!
- A hurricane releases 50 trillion to 200 trillion watts of heat energy. That’s as much energy as a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. Woah.
- Lightning is not just for rainstorms. It has been seen in volcanic eruptions and forest fires too. Shocking, we know.
- Electric eels can produce strong electric shocks of around 500 volts for both self-defense and hunting. Talk about a super power!
- Benjamin Franklin didn’t discover electricity, but he did prove that lightning is a form of electrical energy. That’s cool too.
- At 3 p.m. on September 4, 1882, Edison threw the switch that would light up America’s first power plant in New York City, serving a square-mile area that included some important people including J.P. Morgan, the Stock Exchange, and the nation’s largest newspapers. He also invented more than 2,000 new things, including switches, fuses, sockets and meters. Show off.
- Inefficient appliances, drafty windows and doors, poor insulation and other fixable energy wasters cost U.S. consumers an estimated $300 billion a year.
- The first successful electric car was built in 1891 by American inventor William Morrison, a chemist who lived in Des Moines, Iowa.
- The world’s biggest light bulb is located in Edison, New Jersey. It’s 14 feet tall, weighs eight tons and sits on top of the Thomas Edison Memorial Tower.
- Natural gas is mostly made up of methane, which doesn’t have a detectable smell. Sulfur compounds have to be added to it to give it that distinctive smell. This is for safety reasons, helping you to smell a possible leak.
Your local Touchstone Energy Cooperatives know everything there is to know about powering your home, farm or business!