I have a GE alarm clock I have been using for so long I can't even remember when I got it. The "date code" on the bottom says 5205K. Not sure how to decipher that.
Duh. It's obviously from the Future. It's of of them Time-travel clockythingys. Don't be alarmed, nothing to get ticked off about unless the GE doesn't stand for General Electric. If it's some other GE you could end up hours somewhere.
1935 Singer Electric Sewing Machine
Without actually going deeply into electron orbitals, let's see where 'electrical' get's separated from its subset - 'electronics'.
Electricity, at its basic, is energy - a charge of electrons through matter - sort of electrons pushing each other - but in actuality a pulse that flows through the matter.
There is a lightbulb in some Firehouse in the States that has remained lit for over a hundred years. That's an
electrical phenomenon.
The electrons rush through the wire get to the part of the wire inside the bulb and heating the filament converts that charging energy into heat and light.
The rest pass on through the bulb and go back through the other end of the wire to the backodor or minus side or negative or tradesman's entrance of the 'Power Station' (which could be a battery or generator.)
From this Power Station (which sometimes can be mistaken for a Starbucks) fresh electrons are booted out from the Positive Front Door Customer Entrance well-decorated side back into the wire and back toward the bulb again - to keep the lightbulb lit.
Happy little electrons screaming '137! 137? 137!! OMG.' and other complex stuff like that rushing round and round (sort of - it's actually what they're
doing that's rushing around.)
A human makes the decision to send that electrical charge back and forth by putting a 'Switch' ON or OFF between the Starbucks Power Cell and the Lightbulb. The human has to activate the circuit, or shut it down manually by switching OFF or switching ON the mad charge of the electrons through the wire.
At this point the electrons are not really doing anything on their own - just charging back and forth in a current - either heating stuff or pushing stuff or pulling stuff. They do a lot of other weird stuff when the photo-electric effect and magnetism and electro-chemistry all come into play - but in the end it's all about basic Push/Pull force put into motion manually - the electrons are agnostic.
Electrons, though, are not just dumb animals running to and fro - they can actually do stuff on their own - without us throwing any switches to tell them to stop or go. They could turn the light OFF or ON on their own.
If they were told to do it.
That's when it becomes
electronics.
And not just stop and go, they can be made to dance, spread out, bunch up, get jammed, get hot, cool down - even blow themselves up. They can be made to do that to the machine they are running through. They can be made to stop and turn into information.
There's your first clue at the difference - electrons behaving as units of energy (electricity) versus electrons behaving as units of information (electronics). The Energy part is the electrical, the information part is the Electronic.
Let's go back to the electrons charging through the wire towards the lightbulb's filament and heating and lighting the filament and charging back to the Power Cell, around and around till someone puts the switch off. (Or something busts.)
Let's say we insert a small gizmo (another piece of matter unlike the wire) in the wire between the ON/OFF Switch and the Bulb. The electrons have to charge through this gizmo to get through to the pub. I mean, the bulb.
Now when the electrons hit the gizmo they start to behave strangely - 'WTF? Wut dis gizmo? Where bulb thingy?'
In fact, they might all slow down and get so heated up arguing about whether a bulb exists or not or whether it's actually a pub, that the current the bulb gets is adjusted and the lightbulb goes out - it goes off on its own.
The electrons made it happen because of their reaction to this gizmo you inserted.
The lightbulb will go on again as soon as the electrons trapped in the gizmo have cooled down and are let through once more. All this can happen in milliseconds.
Now we're playing with
electronics -
the dance of the electrons.
We're getting the electrons to provide not only energy but information, too.
So the more wires we add, and the more gizmos and lights we add we get an electronic device of lights blinking on and off on their own after we throw a main switch and let the whole bunch of electrons go charging through to do their dance according to the way we have set up these gizmos to regulate the current or flow of electricity.
We give these gizmos fancy names like resistor, condenser, capacitor, transistor . . . vacuum tube . . and so on - frightening names (obviously 'vacuum' and 'tube' both sound scary) to scare normal people away because playing around with electricity can be quite shocking. In fact, fatal.
Human bodies don't like their electrons getting all charged up. (Well, sometimes a wee drappee doesn't harm the human spirit.)
These gizmos in effect are switches - an intergrated circuit (that's a gizmo) may have millions of switches doing multiple things at once (and quite quickly, too.)
So we can insert these gizmos - ICs for instance - into our electrical lightbulb show and then we can even have multiple 'main' switches - a keyboard full of them - and we can then make all those lights dance as the electrons danced around these bits and pieces and come up on a screen like photons making some huge post. Like this one.
That's a big difference to the simple ON/OFF charge that we turned into some other energy, right?
Because now we took the energy and and twisted things around and made the electrons become information that can use information to conclude information that lead it to make an 'informed' decision as to whether to hop, skip or jump. Or go on or off.
In this way a flashlight that just goes on and off when you turn it on and off is an
electrical item - it works off the electrical charge of the battery.
But a flashlight that beeps, when its batteries are low, is
electronic - that's electrons hitting a gizmo circuit in a certain way and calling out to you with a different type of behaviour - basically the electrons are communicating that it's time to change the batteries.
In this way - the electric sewing machine that came to your mind when we were plumbing for Old World Electronics is only
electrical - converting electricity into the motions inside the machine (electro-mechanical.)
But, if it had a circuit in it that timed two hours of use and then activated a recording that said 'So? So? Working hard, eh? I'm overheating. Can't you see the bright red blinking light?' and it shuts down by itself - then the machine would be considered an
electronic device - it works not only on a flow of energy back and forth but also on an exchange of electronic (there's those electrons again) information.
Electricity works. Electronics informs. We put both together and get a Hal 9000. That tries to kill us.
Which reminds me - while we in here look back in time - and consider the electronics of the past and their status in today's world - if we go back and look at some
people from the past -
they looked into the future and told us back then what we were going to have today - in
2001 Space Odyssey there are many items like this - futuristic items in a film about the Future and they are everyday objects to us now - including a couple of 'iPads' on a table as the scientists are talking around it.
Gizmos?
Here's a demonstration of pulling those gizmos out when the electrons get naughty and one needs to divert the dervish that
is electricity and which lives through the dance of the electrons:
👍
