Electricity FAQ
Have you ever wondered why shoes hanging on a power line don’t get fried? Or whether electric eels really create electricity? Now you can get answers to these and all your electricity-related questions.
Shoes hanging on a power line don’t get burned for the same reason that birds standing on a power line don’t get shocked: they don’t give electricity a path to the ground, so electricity stays in the line and does not go through them. But if the shoes were to touch a power line and a power pole at the same time, they would provide a path to the ground and would get blasted with electric current. It wouldn’t be pretty!
By the way, if you ever see someone throwing shoes up onto a line, tell them to stop! The shoes can damage the power line, or someone trying to get the shoes down could be seriously shocked or even killed.
One lightning strike can carry between 100 million and 1 billion volts. (100 million volts is the equivalent of 8 million car batteries.)