A shocking experience!

In lab class today, we got to play with electricity and magnets!

One of the toys we played with was a thing that I'm sure has a name, used to charge up Leyden jars (which are a whole new type of awesome).  It was a contraption with two adjacent, parallel wheels mounted vertically, each embedded with magnets of opposite polarity.  You turn a crank, the magnets do their thing, a little brush collects the charge and funnels it into a Leyden jar.  Already neat (seriously, Leyden jars are mind-boggling.  You can store electricity in a piece of plastic.  Take it apart and it's fine.  Reassemble it, touch both metal parts at once, and shock!  It's like reassemble-able electricity.)

So, what we did, in the name of science and class unity, was get one of the jars really charged up.  Then we all - all twelve or so of us - held hands, other than the two people who held the jar.  The instant that the second hand touched the second part of the jar, we all collectively flinched or cried out, because you could feel a spasm of electricity going through your wrists/hands.  It was really ridiculously cool.