Fact

Electricity travels at the speed of light more than 186,000 miles per second!

If you had a light bulb on the moon connected to a switch in your bedroom, it would take only 1.26 seconds for that bulb to light up, 238,857 miles away.

If you traveled as fast as electricity, (about 300,000 kilometers = 186,411.358 miles per second the speed of light), you could go around the world 8 times in the time it takes to turn on a light switch.

A spark of static electricity can measure up to three thousand (3,000) volts.

A bolt of lightning can measure up to three million (3,000,000) volts and it lasts less than one second!

Thomas Edison didn't invent the first light bulb but he did invent one that stayed lit for more than a few seconds. Thomas Edison invented more than 2,000 new products, including almost everything needed for us to use electricity in our homes: switches, fuses, sockets and meters.

Ben Franklin didn't discover electricity but he did prove that lightning is a form of electrical energy.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, electricity consumption will increase by 51 percent from 2002 to 2025.

The first power plant owned by Thomas Edison opened in New York City in 1882.

The first central power plant ? Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan, built by Thomas Edison began generating electricity on September 4, 1882. Pearl Street had one generator and it produced power for 800 electric light bulbs. Within 14 months, Pearl Street Station had 508 subscribers and 12,732 bulbs.  Since the first power plant lit up 800 light bulbs in 1882, the electric utility industry has grown to generate over 2.5 million gigawatt-hours annually, the equivalent of lighting 4.8 billion 60-watt light bulbs for a year.

The size of a typical American home has increased from 1100 to 1800 square feet over the past ten years.

AMAZING ELECTRONIC FACT: If you scuffed your feet long enough without touching anything, you would build up so many electrons that your finger would explode!  But this is nothing to worry about, unless you have carpeting.

The electrons travel through your bloodstream and collect in your finger, where they form a spark that leaps to your friend's filling, then travels down to his feet and back into the carpet, thus completing the circuit.

In the past decade scientists developed the laser, an electronic appliance that emits a beam of light so powerful that it can vaporize a bulldozer 2,000 yards away, yet so precise that doctors can use it to perform delicate operations on the human eyeball, provided they remember to change the power setting from "VAPORIZE BULLDOZER" to "DELICATE."