Detach plug from iron as well as from socket if you want your home intact 382 She has prepared the way for a nice little fire 383 CHEATING THE JUNK-PILE Cheating The Junk-Pile CHAPTER I INTRODUCING YOU TO ELECTRICITY What’s a watt? This is not a comic opera refrain, but a question asked so many times that it is typical of the lack of knowledge people have to-day of the force which they are using constantly in their own homes and others. We have lived to see women go to automobile schools and learn the working of the car which is theirs to drive. But as yet there seems to be no course even in the domestic science school which gives the household engineer an inkling of what is to be her mechanical field in the realm of electricity or ordinary mechanical construction. We hope this will come. For have you ever stopped to think that the housekeeper to-day presides over an extensive electric installation? Even if she has but a telephone and an electric bell in the house, there is much that happens that ought to be familiar to her. But people to-day have much more than these few things; they have at least three or four of the following: ironing machine, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, telephone, warming pad, electric lights, toaster, electric piano, sewing machine, curling iron, electric range, electric iron, etc., yet the underlying principles and vocabulary are still as Sanskrit to the majority of users. This article is but to make simple and comfortable electric terminologies and we will use this for an excuse to get at a few electrical misusages. It is to make electricity familiar rather than a stranger to the user. Nobody knows what electricity is, so fortunately, we don’t have to stop and define it. All that we know is that it acts in certain definite ways. We get electricity from the battery and from the generator (dynamo). The battery consists of celled containers which come under the heads of dry and wet batteries in so far as they contain liquid or solid (wet) ingredients, through which the electricity is generated and passed out by means of wires. In short the battery produces electricity by means of chemicals. The primary battery produces electricity and the storage battery stores it in the form of chemical energy. It is useless for purveying very much electrical power as there never can be enough pressure (voltage) to send along the electricity to do big jobs, unless hundreds of cells connected in a certain way were used, which would be a foolish waste of material and time, etc.