Kevin Kwan writes:
> It funny that there is so much static electricity on those plastic sheets
> that often they'd be stuck to my sweater when I'd carry one of those 
> books.

	I Think they may have behaved like an electret.
Electrets are materials that permanently or relatively
permanently hold static charges. The act of heating the plastic
to make a copy plus then pulling it away from the master seems
to give them a charge that is huge and takes a long time to go
away if ever.

	I remember working at the Oklahoma Library for the Blind
in the early seventies and running that Thermoform machine to
duplicate books for students. The pages were so charged when
lifting them off the master that they would sometimes leep off
the stack because the page under it also had a huge charge and
since those charges were the same, they would repel one another
just like magnets.

	When we got through duplicating and collating a book, we
would put it on one of those punching machines that punched out
a neat column of slots down the extreme left edge of the page
in preparation for binding. All those little rectangular pieces
of  Thermoform confetty would stick like glue to just about any
surface due to their charge.

	I hate to say it, but I once filled someone's desk drawer
with those things to play a practical joke on them because you
couldn't just dump them out. They stuck to everything.

	By the way, if the word electret sounds familiar and
makes you think of microphones, that is their most common
practical use.

Electret  microphones have a charged piece of plastic
membrane as a diaphragm and do not need  a bias voltage to work.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group