HISTORY OF ELECTRICAL SCIENCE.
Electricity as a well-developed science
is not old. Those of us who have lived fifty
years have seen nearly all its development so far as
it has been applied to useful purposes, and those
who have lived over twenty-five years have seen the
major portion of its development.
Thales of Miletus, 600 B.C., discovered,
or at least described, the properties of amber when
rubbed, showing that it had the power to attract and
repel light substances, such as straws, dry leaves,
etc. And from the Greek word for amber elektron came
the name electricity, denoting this peculiar property.
Theophrastus and Pliny made the same observations;
the former about 321 B.C., and the latter about 70
A.D. It is also said that the ancients had observed
the effects of animal electricity, such as that of
the fish called the torpedo. Pliny and Aristotle
both speak of its power to paralyze the feet of men
and animals, and to first benumb the fish which it
then preyed upon. It is also recorded that a
freed-man of Tiberius was cured of the gout by the
shocks of the torpedo. It is further recorded
that Wolimer, the King of the Goths, was able to emit
sparks from his body.
Coming down to more modern times A.D.
1600 we find Dr. Gilbert, an Englishman,
taking up the investigation of the electrical properties
of various substances when submitted to friction,
and formulating them in the order of their importance.
In these experiments we have the beginnings of what
has since developed into a great science. He made
the discovery that when the air was dry he could soon
electrify the substances rubbed, but when it was damp
it took much longer and sometimes he failed altogether.
In 1705 Francis Hawksbee, an experimental philosopher,
discovered that mercury could be rendered luminous
by agitating it in an exhausted receiver. (It is a
question whether this phenomenon should not be classed
with that of phosphorescence rather than electricity.)
The number of investigators was so great that all
of them cannot be mentioned. It often happens
that those who do really most for a science are never
known to fame. A number of people will make small
contributions till the structure has by degrees assumed
large proportions, when finally some one comes along
and puts a gilded dome on it and the whole structure
takes his name. This is eminently true of many
of the more important developments in the science
and applications of electricity during the last twenty-five
or thirty years.
Following Hawksbee may be mentioned
Stephen Gray, Sir Isaac Newton, Dr. Wall, M. Dupay
and others. Dupay discovered the two conditions
of electrical excitation known now as positive and
negative conditions. In 1745 the Leyden jar was
invented. It takes its name from the city of
Leyden, where its use was first discovered. It
is a glass jar, coated inside and out with tin-foil.
The inside coating is connected with a brass knob
at the top, through which it can be charged with electricity.
The inner and outer coatings must not be continuous
but insulated from each other. The author’s
name is not known, but it is said that three different
persons invented it independently, to wit, a monk by
the name of Kleist, a man by the name of Cuneus,
and Professor Muschenbroeck of Leyden. This was
an important invention, as it was the forerunner of
our own Franklin’s discoveries and a necessary
part of his outfit with which he established the identity
of lightning and electricity. Every American
schoolboy has heard, from Fourth of July orations,
how “Franklin caught the forked lightning from
the clouds and tamed it and made it subservient to
the will of man.” How my boyish soul used
to be stirred to its depths by this oratorical display
of electrical fireworks!
Franklin had long entertained the
idea that the lightning of the clouds was identical
with what is called frictional electricity, and he
waited long for a church spire to be erected in his
adopted home, the Quaker City, in order that he might
make the test and settle the question. But the
Quakers did not believe in spires, and Franklin’s
patience had a limit.
Franklin had the theory that most
investigators had at that time, that electricity was
a fluid and that certain substances had the power to
hold it. There were two theories prevalent in
those days both fluid theories. One
theory was that there were two fluids, a positive and
a negative. Franklin held to the theory of a
single fluid, and that the phenomenon of electricity
was present only when the balance or natural amount
of electricity was disturbed. According to this
theory, a body charged with positive electricity had
an excessive amount, and, of course, some other body
somewhere else had less than nature had allotted to
it; hence it was charged with negative electricity.
A Leyden jar, for instance, having one of its coatings
(say the inside) charged with positive or + electricity,
the other coating will be charged with negative or
electricity. The former was only a name
for an amount above normal and the latter a name for
a shortage or lack of the normal amount.
As we have said, Franklin believed
in the identity of lightning and electricity, and
he waited long for an opportunity to demonstrate his
theory. He had the Leyden jar, and now all he
needed was to establish some suitable connection between
a thunder-cloud and the earth.
Previous to 1750 Franklin had written
a paper in which he showed the likeness between the
lightning spark and that of frictional electricity.
He showed that both sparks move in crooked lines as
we see it in a storm-cloud, that both strike the highest
or nearest points, that both inflame combustibles,
fuse metals, render needles magnetic and destroy animal
life. All this did not definitely establish their
identity in the mind of Franklin, and he waited long
for an opportunity, and finally, finding that no one
presented itself, he did what many men have had to
do in other matters; he made one.
In the month of June, 1752, tired
of waiting for a steeple to be erected, Franklin devised
a plan that was much better and probably saved the
experiment from failure; for the steeple would probably
not have been high enough. He constructed a kite
by making a cross of light cedar rods, fastening the
four ends to the four corners of a large silk handkerchief.
He fixed a loop to tie the kite string to and balanced
it with a tail, as boys do nowadays. He fixed
a pointed wire to the upper end of one of the cross
sticks for a lightning-rod, and then waited for a
thunder-storm. When it came, with the help of
his boy, he sent up the kite. He tied a loop
of silk ribbon on the end of the string next his hand as
silk was known to be an insulator or non-conductor and
having tied a key to the string he waited the result,
standing within a door to prevent the silk loop from
getting wet and thus destroying its insulating qualities.
The cloud had nearly passed and he feared his long
waited for experiment had failed, when he noticed the
loose fibers of the string standing out in every direction,
and saw that they were attracted by the approach of
his finger. The rain now wet the string and made
a better conductor of it. Soon he could draw sparks
with his knuckle from the key. He charged a Leyden
jar with this electrical current from the thunder-cloud,
and performed all the experiments with it that he
had done with ordinary electricity, thus establishing
the identity of the two and confirming beyond a doubt
what he had long before believed was true. In
after experiments Franklin found that sometimes the
electricity of the clouds was positive and at other
times negative. From this experiment Franklin
conceived the idea of erecting lightning-rods to protect
buildings, which are used to this day.
The news spread all over Europe, not
through the medium of electricity, however, but as
soon as sailing vessels and stage-coaches could carry
it. Many philosophers repeated the experiments
and at least one man sacrificed his life through his
interest in the new discovery. In 1753 Professor
Richman of St. Petersburg erected on his house a metal
rod which terminated in a Leyden jar in one of the
rooms. On the 31st of May he was attending a
meeting of the Academy of Sciences. He heard a
roll of thunder and hurried home to watch his apparatus.
He and one of the assistants were watching the apparatus
when a stroke of lightning came down the rod and leaped
to the professor’s head. He was standing
too near it and was instantly killed.
Passing over many names of men who
followed in the wake of Franklin we come to the next
era-making discovery, namely, that of galvanic electricity.
In the year 1790 an incident occurred in the household
of one Luigi Galvani, an Italian physician and anatomist,
that led to a new and important branch of electrical
science. Galvani’s wife was preparing some
frogs for soup, and having skinned them placed them
on a table near a newly charged electric machine.
A scalpel was on the table and had been in contact
with the machine. She accidentally touched one
of the frogs to the point of the scalpel, when, lo!
the frog kicked, and the kick of that dead frog changed
the whole face of electrical science. She called
her husband and he repeated the experiment, and also
appropriated the discovery as well, and he has had
the credit of it ever since, when really his wife
made the discovery. Galvani supposed it to be
animal electricity and clung to that theory the rest
of his life, making many experiments and publishing
their results; but the discovery led others to solve
the problem.
Alessandro Volta, a professor of natural
philosophy at Pavia, Italy, was, it must be said,
the founder of the science of galvanic or voltaic
electricity. Stimulated by the discovery of Galvani
he attributed the action of the frog’s muscles,
not to animal electricity, but to some chemical action
between the metals that touched it. To prove his
theory, he constructed a pile made of alternate layers
of zinc, copper, and a cloth or pasteboard saturated
in some saline solution. By repeating these trios copper,
zinc, and the saturated cloth he attained
a pile that would give a powerful shock. It is
called the Voltaic Pile.
I have a clear idea of the construction
of this form of pile, founded on experience.
It was my habit when a boy to make everything that
I found described, if it were possible. The bottom
of my mother’s wash-boiler was copper, and just
the thing to make the square plates of copper to match
the zinc ones, made from another piece of domestic
furniture used under the stove. I shocked my
mother twice first with the voltaic pile
that I had constructed, and again when she found out
where the metal plates came from. The sequel
to all this was but why dwell upon a painful
subject!
Galvanism and voltaic electricity
are the same. Volta was the first to construct
what is termed the galvanic battery. The unit
of electrical pressure or electromotive force is called
the volt, and takes its name from Volta, the great
founder of the science of galvanic or voltaic electricity.
From this pile constructed by Volta innumerable forms
of batteries have been devised. The evolution
of the galvanic battery in all its forms, from Volta
to the present day, would fill a large volume if all
were described.
The discoveries of Michael Faraday
(1791-1867), the distinguished English chemist and
physicist, led to another phase of the science that
has revolutionized modern life. Faraday made an
experiment that contains the germ of all forms of
the modern dynamo, which is a machine of comparatively
recent development. He found that by winding a
piece of insulated wire around a piece of soft iron
and bringing the two ends (of the wire) very close
together, and then placing the iron across the poles
of a permanent magnet and suddenly jerking it away,
a spark would pass between the two ends of the wire
that was wound around the piece of soft iron.
Here was an incipient dynamo-electric machine the
germ of that which plays such an important part in
our modern civilization.
Having brought our history down to
the present day, it would seem scarcely necessary
to recite that which everybody knows. It is well,
however, to call a halt once in a while and compare
our present conditions of civilization with those
of the past. Our world is filled with croakers
who are always sighing for the good old days.
But we can easily imagine that if they could go back
to those days their croaking would be still louder
than it is.
Before the advent of electricity many
things were impossible that are easy now. In
the old days the world was very, very large; now, thanks
to electricity, it is knocking at the door of every
man’s house. The lumbering stage-coach
that was formerly our limited express limited
to thirty or forty miles a day has been
supplanted by one that covers 1000 miles in the same
time, and this high rate of speed is made possible
only by the use of the electric telegraph.
In the old days all Europe could be
involved in a great war and the news of it would be
weeks in reaching our shores, but now the firing of
the first gun is heard at every fireside the world
over, almost before the smoke has cleared away.
Our planet is threaded with iron nerves that run over
mountains and under seas, whose trembling atoms, thrilled
with the electric fire, speak to us daily and hourly
of the great throbbing life of the whole civilized
world.
Electricity has given us a voice that
can be heard a thousand miles, and not only heard,
but recognized. It has given us a pen that will
write our autograph in New York, although we are still
in Chicago. It has given us the best light, both
from an optical and a sanitary standpoint, that the
world has ever seen. The old-fashioned, jogging
horse-car has been supplanted by the electric “trolley,”
and we no longer have our feelings harrowed with pity
for the poor old steeds that pulled those lumbering
coaches through the streets, with men and women crowded
in and hanging on to straps, while everybody trod
on every other body’s toes.
“In olden times we took a car
Drawn by a horse, if going far,
And felt that we were blest;
Now the conductor takes the fare
And puts a broomstick in the air
And lightning does the rest.
“In other days, along the street,
A glimmering lantern led the feet,
When on a midnight stroll;
But now we catch, when night is nigh,
A piece of lightning from the sky
And stick it on a pole.
“Time was when one must hold his
ear
Close to a whispering voice to hear,
Like deaf men nigh
and nigher;
But now from town to town he talks
And puts his nose into a box
And whispers through a wire.”
So jogs the old world along.
We sometimes think it is slow, but when we look back
a few years and see what has been accomplished it seems
to have had a marvelously rapid development.
Something like fifty years ago a professor
of physics in one of our colleges was giving his class
a course in electricity. The electric telegraph
was too little known at that time to cut much of a
figure in the classroom, so the stock experiments
were those made with the frictional electric machine
and the Leyden jar. One day the professor had,
in one hour’s time, taken his class through a
course of electricity, and at the end he said:
“Gentlemen, you were born too late to witness
the development of this great science.”
I often wonder if the good professor is ever allowed
to part the veil that separates us from the great
beyond and to look down upon this busy world of ours
in which electricity plays such an important part
in our every-day life; and if so, what he thinks of
that little speech he made to the boys fifty years
or more ago.
If we make an analysis of the history
of the science of electricity we shall see that it
has progressed in successive eras, shortening as they
approach our time. For a period of 2300 years,
from Thales to Franklin, but little or no progress
was made beyond the further development of the phenomena
of frictional electricity the most important
invention being that of the Leyden jar. From
Franklin to Volta was forty-eight years, and from
Volta to Faraday about thirty-two years. From
this time on the development was very rapid as compared
with the old days. Soon after Faraday, Morse,
Henry, Wheatstone, and others began experiments that
have grown, during fifty or sixty years, into a most
colossal system of electric telegraphs, telephones,
electric lights and electric railroads. In the
latter days marvel has succeeded marvel with such rapid
strides that the ink is scarcely dry from the description
of one before another crowds itself upon our attention.
Where it will all end no one knows, but that it has
ended no one believes. The human mind has become
so accustomed to these periodic revelations of the
marvelous that it must have the stimulus once in a
while or it suffers as the toper does when deprived
of his cups. The commercial instinct of the news-vender
is not slow to see the situation, and if the development
is too slow to suit the public demand his fertile
brain supplies the lack. So that every few days
we hear of some great discovery made by some one it
may be unknown to fame. It has served its purpose.
The public mind has had its mental toddy and has been
saved from a fit of intellectual delirium tremens
that it was in danger of from lack of its accustomed
stimulus.
Having given you a very limited outline
of the history of electricity, from ancient times
down to the present, we will endeavor now to give you
an elementary notion of the science as it stands to-day.
To the common mind the science is a blank page.
So little is known of it by the ordinary reader, who
is fairly intelligent in other matters, that to account
for anything that we do not understand it is only necessary
to say that it is an electrical phenomenon and he
accepts it. Electricity is a synonym for all
that we cannot understand. Inasmuch as magnetism
is so closely related to electricity in its uses as
related to every-day life, we will carry the two subjects
along together, as the one will to a large extent
help to explain the other. In our next chapter
we will look at the history of magnetism.