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+Project Gutenberg's Steam Steel and Electricity, by James W. Steele
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Steam Steel and Electricity
+
+Author: James W. Steele
+
+Posting Date: March 26, 2014 [EBook #7886]
+Release Date: April, 2005
+First Posted: May 30, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STEAM STEEL AND ELECTRICITY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Tonya Allen and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+STEAM STEEL AND ELECTRICITY
+
+By
+
+JAMES W. STEELE
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+THE STORY OF STEAM.
+
+    What Steam is.--Steam in Nature.--The Engine in its earlier
+    forms.--Gradual explosion.--The Hero engine.--The Temple-door
+    machine.--Ideas of the Middle Ages.--Beginnings of the modern
+    engine.--Branca's engine.--Savery's engine.--The Papin engine
+    using cylinder and piston.--Watt's improvements upon the
+    Newcomen idea.--The crank movement.--The first use of steam
+    expansively.--The "Governor."--First engine by an American
+    Inventor.--Its effect upon progress in the United
+    States.--Simplicity and cheapness of the modern engine.--Actual
+    construction of the modern engine.--Valves, piston, etc., with
+    diagrams.
+
+THE AGE OF STEEL.
+
+    The various "Ages" in civilization.--Ancient knowledge of the
+    metals.--The invention and use of Bronze.--What Steel is.--The
+    "Lost Arts."--Metallurgy and chemistry.--Oriental Steel.--Modern
+    definition of Steel.--Invention of Cast Steel.--First iron-ore
+    discoveries in America.--First American Iron-works.--Early
+    methods without steam.--First American casting.--Effect of iron
+    industry upon independence.--Water-power.--The trip-hammer.--The
+    steam-hammer of Nasmyth.--Machine-tools and their
+    effects.--First rolling-mill.--Product of the iron industry in
+    1840-50.--The modern nail, and how it came.--Effect of iron upon
+    architecture.--The "Sky-Scraper."--Gas as fuel in iron
+    manufactures.--The Steel of the present.--The invention of
+    Kelley.--The Bessemer process.--The "Converter."--Present
+    product of Steel.--The Steel-mill.
+
+THE STORY OF ELECTRICITY.
+
+    The oldest and the youngest of the sciences.--Origin of the
+    name.--Ancient ideas of Electricity.--Later experiments.--Crude
+    notions and wrong conclusions.--First Electric
+    Machine.--Frictional Electricity.--The Leyden Jar.--Extreme
+    ideas and Fakerism.--Franklin, his new ideas and their
+    reception.--Franklin's Kite.--The Man Franklin.--Experiments
+    after Franklin, leading to our present modern uses.--Galvani and
+    his discovery.--Volta, and the first "Battery."--How a battery
+    acts.--The laws of Electricity, and how they were
+    discovered.--Induction, and its discoverer.--The line at which
+    modern Electricity begins.--Magnetism and Electricity.--The
+    Electro-Magnet.--The Molecular theory.--Faraday, and his Law of
+    Magnetic Force.
+
+MODERN ELECTRICITY.
+
+    CHAPTER I. The Four great qualities of Electricity which make
+    its modern uses possible.--The universal wire.--Conductors and
+    non conductors.--Electricity an exception in the ordinary Laws
+    of Nature.--A dual nature: "Positive" and "Negative."--All
+    modern uses come under the law of Induction.--Some of the laws
+    of this induction.--Magnets and Magnetism.--Relationship between
+    the two.--Magnetic "poles."--Practical explanation of the action
+    of induction.--The Induction Coil.--Dynamic and Static
+    Electricity.--The Electric Telegraph.--First attempts.--Morse,
+    and his beginnings.--The first Telegraph Line.--Vail, and the
+    invention of the dot-and-dash alphabet.--The old instruments and
+    the new.--The final simplicity of the telegraph.
+
+    CHAPTER II. The Ocean Cable.--Differences between land lines and
+    cables.--The story of the first cable.--Field and his final
+    success.--The Telephone.--Early attempts.--Description of Bell's
+    invention.--The Telautograph.--Early attempts and the idea upon
+    which they were based.--Description of Gray's invention.--How a
+    Telautograph may be made mechanically.
+
+    CHAPTER III. The Electric Light.--Causes of heat and light in
+    the conductor of a current.--The first Electric Light.--The Arc
+    Light, and how constructed.--The Incandescent.--The
+    Dynamo.--Date of the invention.--Successive steps.--Faraday the
+    discoverer of its principle.--Pix�'s
+    machine.--Pacinatti.--Wilde.--Siemens' and Wheatstone.--The
+    Motor.--How the Dynamo and Motor came to be coupled.--Review of
+    first attempts.--Kidder's battery.--Page's machine.--Electric
+    Railroads.--Electrolysis.--General facts.--Electrical
+    Measurements.--"Death Current."--Instruments of
+    Measurement.--Electricity as an Industry.--Medical
+    Electricity.--Incomplete possibilities.--What the "Storage
+    Battery" is.
+
+    CHAPTER IV. Electrical Invention in the United States.--Review
+    of the careers of Franklin, Morse, Field, Edison and
+    others.--Some of the surprising applications of
+    Electricity.--The Range-Finder.--Cooking and heating by
+    Electricity.
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF STEAM
+
+
+That which was utterly unknown to the most splendid civilizations of the
+past is in our time the chief power of civilization, daily engaged in
+making that history of a new era that is yet to be written in words. It
+has been demonstrated long since that men's lives are to be influenced
+not by theory, or belief, or argument and reason, so much as by that
+course of daily life which is not attempted to be governed by argument
+and reason, but by great physical facts like steam, electricity and
+machinery in their present applications.
+
+The greatest of these facts of the present civilization are expressed in
+the phrase, Steam and Steel. The theme is stupendous. Only the most
+prominent of its facts can be given in small space, and those only in
+outline. The subject is also old, yet to every boy it must be told
+again, and the most ordinary intelligence must have some desire to know
+the secrets, if such they are, of that which is unquestionably the
+greatest force that ever yielded to the audacity of humanity. It is now
+of little avail to know that all the records that men revere, all the
+great epics of the world, were written in the absence of the
+characteristic forces of modern life. A thousand generations had lived
+and died, an immense volume of history had been enacted, the heroes of
+all the ages, and almost those of our own time, had fulfilled their
+destinies and passed away, before it came about that a mere physical
+fact should fill a larger place in our lives than all examples, and that
+the evanescent vapor which we call steam should change daily, and
+effectively, the courses and modes of human action, and erect life upon
+another plane.
+
+It may seem not a little absurd to inquire now "what is steam?"
+Everybody knows the answer. The non-technical reader knows that it is
+that vapor which, for instance, pervades the kitchen, which issues from
+every cooking vessel and waste-pipe, and is always white and visible,
+and moist and warm. We may best understand an answer to the question,
+perhaps, by remembering that steam is one of the three natural
+conditions of water: ice, fluid water, and steam. One or the other of
+these conditions always exists, and always under two others: pressure
+and heat. When the air around water reaches the temperature of
+thirty-two degrees by the scale of Fahrenheit, or � or zero by the
+Centigrade scale, and is exposed to this temperature for a time, it
+becomes ice. At two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit it becomes
+steam. Between these two temperatures it is water. But the change to
+steam which is so rapid and visible at the temperature above mentioned
+is taking place slowly all the time when water, in any situation, is
+exposed to the air. As the temperature rises the change becomes more
+rapid. The steam-making of the arts is merely that of all nature,
+hastened artificially and intentionally.
+
+The element of pressure, mentioned above, enters into the proposition
+because water boils at a lower temperature, with less heat, when the
+weight of the atmosphere is less than normal, as it is at great
+elevations, and on days when, as we now express it, there is a low
+barometer. Long before any cook could explain the fact it was known that
+the water boiling quickly was a sign of storm. It has often been found
+by camping-parties on mountains that in an attempt to boil potatoes in a
+pot the water would all "boil away," and leave the vegetables uncooked.
+The heat required to evaporate it at the elevation was less than that
+required to cook in boiling water. It is one of the instances where the
+problems of nature intrude themselves prominently into the affairs of
+common life without previous notice.
+
+This universal evaporation, under varying circumstances, is probably the
+most important agency in nature, and the most continuous and potent.
+There was only so much water to begin with. There will never be any less
+or any more. The saltness of the sea never varies, because the loss by
+evaporation and the new supply through condensation of the
+steam--rain--necessarily remain balanced by law forever. The surface of
+our world is water in the proportion of three to one. The extent of
+nature's steam-making, silent, and mostly invisible, is immeasurable and
+remains an undetermined quantity. The three forms of water combine and
+work together as though through intentional partnership, and have, thus
+combined, already changed the entire land surface of the world from what
+it was to what it is, and working ceaselessly through endless cycles
+will change it yet more. The exhalations that are steam become the water
+in a rock-cleft. It changes to ice with a force almost beyond
+measurement in the orderly arrangement of its crystals in compliance
+with an immutable law for such arrangement, and rends the rock. The
+process goes on. There is no high mountain in any land where water will
+not freeze. The water of rain and snow carries away the powdered remains
+from year to year, and from age to age. The comminuted ruins of
+mountains have made the plains and filled up and choked the mouth of the
+Mississippi. The soil that once lay hundreds of miles away has made the
+delta of every river that flows into the sea. The endless and resistless
+process goes on without ceasing, a force that is never expended, and but
+once interrupted within the knowledge of men, then covered a large area
+of the world with a sea of ice that buried for ages every living thing.
+
+The common idea of the steam that we make by boiling water is that it is
+all water, composed of that and nothing else, and this conception is
+gathered from apparent fact. Yet it is not entirely true. Steam is an
+invisible vapor in every boiler, and does not become what we know by
+sight as steam until it has become partly cooled. As actual steam
+uncooled, it is a gas, obeying all the laws of the permanent gases. The
+creature of temperature and pressure, it changes from this gaseous form
+when their conditions are removed, and in the change becomes visible to
+us. Its elasticity, its power of yielding to compression, are enormous,
+and it gives back this elasticity of compression with almost
+inconceivable readiness and swiftness. To the eye, in watching the
+gliding and noiseless movements of one of the great modern engines, the
+power of which one has only a vague and inadequate conception seems not
+only inexplicable, but gentle. The ponderous iron pieces seem to weigh
+nothing. There is a feeling that one might hinder the movement as he
+would that of a watch. There is an inability to realize the fact that
+one of the mightiest forces of nature is there embodied in an easy,
+gliding, noiseless impulse. Yet it is one that would push aside massy
+tons of dead weight, that would almost unimpeded crush a hole through
+the enclosing wall, that whirls upon the rails the drivers of a
+locomotive weighing sixty tons as though there were no weight above
+them, no bite upon the rails. There is an enormous concentration of
+force somewhere; of a force which perhaps no man can fairly estimate;
+and it is under the thin shell we call a boiler. Were it not elastic it
+could not be so imprisoned, and when it rebels, when this thin shell is
+torn like paper, there is a havoc by which we may at last inadequately
+measure the power of steam.
+
+We have in modern times applied the word "engine" almost exclusively to
+the machine which is moved by the pressure of steam. Yet we might go
+further, since one of the first examples of a pressure engine, older
+than the steam machine by nearly four hundred years, is the gun. Reduced
+to its principle this is an engine whose operation depends upon the
+expansion of gas in a cylinder, the piston being a projectile. The same
+principle applies in all the machines we know as "engines." An
+air-engine works through the expansion of air in a cylinder by heat. A
+gas-engine, now of common use, by the expansion, which is explosion,
+caused by burning a mixture of coal-gas and air, and the steam-engine,
+the universal power generator of modern life, works by the expansion of
+the vapor of water as it is generated by heat. Steam may be considered a
+species of _gradual_ explosion applied to the uses of industry. It
+often becomes a real one, complying with all the conditions, and as
+destructive as dynamite.
+
+It cannot be certainly known how long men have experimented with the
+expansive force of steam. The first feeble attempt to purloin the power
+of the geyser was probably by Hero, of Alexandria, about a hundred and
+thirty years before Christ. His machine was also the first known
+illustration of what is now called the "turbine" principle; the
+principle of _reaction_ in mechanics. [Footnote: This principle is
+often a puzzle to students. There is an old story of the man who put a
+bellows in his boat to make wind against the sail, and the wind did not
+affect the sail, but the boat went backward in an opposite direction
+from the nozzle of the bellows. There is probably no better illustration
+of reaction than the "kick" of a gun, which most persons know about. The
+recoil of a six-pound field piece is usually from six to twelve feet. It
+can be understood by supposing a gun to be loaded with powder and an
+iron rod longer than the barrel to be left on the charge. If the outer
+end of this rod were then placed against a tree, and the gun were fired,
+it is manifest that the gun would become the projectile, and be fired
+off of the rod backward or burst. In ordinary cases the air in the bore,
+and immediately outside of the muzzle, acts comparatively, and in a
+measure, as the supposed rod against the tree would. It gives way, and
+is elastic, but not as quickly as the force of the explosion acts, and
+the gun is pushed backwards. It is the turbine principle, running into
+hundreds of uses in mechanics.] He made a closed vessel from whose
+opposite sides radiated two hollow arms with holes in their sides, the
+holes being on opposite sides of the tubes from each other. This vessel
+he mounted on an upright spindle, and put water in it and heated the
+water. The steam issuing from the holes in the arms drove them backward.
+The principle of the action of Hero's machine has been accepted for two
+thousand years, though never in a steam-engine. It exists under all
+circumstances similar to his. In water, in the turbine wheel, it has
+been made most efficacious. The power applied now for the harnessing of
+Niagara for the purpose of sending electric currents hundreds of miles
+is the turbine wheel.
+
+[Illustration: THE SUPPOSED HERO ENGINE.]
+
+Hero appears to the popular imagination as the greatest inventor of the
+past. Every school boy knows him. Archimedes, the Greek, was the
+greater, and a hundred and fifty years the earlier, and was the author
+of the significance of the word "Eureka," as we use it now. But Hero was
+the pioneer in steam. He made the first steam-engine, and is immortal
+through a toy.
+
+The first _practical_ device in which expansion was used seems to
+have been for the exploiting of an ecclesiastical trick intended to
+impress the populace. There is a saying by an antique wit that no two
+priests or augurs could ever meet and look at each other without a
+knowing wink of recognition. Hero is said to have been the author of
+this contrivance also. The temple doors would open by themselves when
+the fire burned on the altar, and would close again when that fire was
+extinguished, and the worshippers would think it a miracle. It is
+interesting because it contained the principle upon which was afterwards
+attempted to be made the first working low-pressure or atmospheric
+steam-engine. Yet it was not steam, but air, that was used. A hollow
+altar containing air was heated by the fire being kindled upon it. The
+air expanded and passed through a pipe into a vessel below containing
+water. It pressed the water out through another pipe into a bucket
+which, being thereby made heavier, pulled open the temple doors. When
+the fire went out again there was a partial vacuum in the vessel that
+had held the water at first, and the water was sucked back through the
+pipe out of the bucket. That became lighter again and allowed the doors
+to close with a counter-weight. All that was then necessary to convince
+the populace of the genuineness of the seeming miracle was to keep them
+from understanding it. The machinery was under the floor. There have
+been thousands of miracles since then performed by natural agencies, and
+there have passed many ages since Hero's machine during which not to
+understand a thing was to believe it to be supernatural.
+
+[Illustration: THE TEMPLE-DOOR TRICK.]
+
+From the time of Hero until the seventeenth century there is no record
+of any attempt being made to utilize steam-pressure for a practical
+purpose. The fact seems strange only because steam-power is so prominent
+a fact with ourselves. The ages that intervened were, as a whole, times
+of the densest superstition. The human mind was active, but it was
+entirely occupied with miracle and semi-miracle; in astrology, magic and
+alchemy; in trying to find the key to the supernatural. Every thinker,
+every educated man, every man who knew more than the rest, was bent upon
+finding this key for himself, so that he might use it for his own
+advantage. During all those ages there was no idea of the natural
+sciences. The key they lacked, and never found, that would have opened
+all, is the fact that in the realm of science and experiment there is no
+supernatural, and only eternal law; that cause produces its effect
+invariably. Even Kepler, the discoverer of the three great laws that
+stand as the foundation of the Copernican system of the universe, was in
+his investigations under the influence of astrological and cabalistic
+superstitions. [Footnote: Kepler, a German, lived between 1571 and 1630.
+His life was full of vicissitudes, in the midst of which he performed an
+astonishing Even the science of amount of intellectual labor, with
+lasting results. He was the personal friend of Galileo and Tycho Brahe,
+and his life may be said to have been spent in finding the abstract
+intelligible reason for the actual disposition of the solar system, in
+which physical cause should take the place of arbitrary hypothesis. He
+did this.] medicine was, during those ages, a magical art, and the idea
+of cure by medicine, that drugs actually _cure_, is existent to
+this day as a remnant of the Middle Ages. A man's death-offense might be
+that he knew more than he could make others understand about the then
+secrets of nature. Yet he himself might believe more or less in magic.
+No one was untouched; all intellect was more or less enslaved.
+
+And when experiments at last began to be made in the mechanisms by which
+steam might be utilized they were such as boys now make for amusement;
+such as throwing a steam-jet against the vanes of a paddle-wheel. Such
+was Branca's engine, made nine years after the landing of our
+forefathers at Plymouth, and thought worthy of a description and record.
+The next attempt was much more practical, but cannot be accurately
+assigned. It consisted of two chambers, from each of which alternately
+water was forced by steam, and which were filled again by cooling off
+and the forming of a vacuum where the steam had been. One chamber worked
+while the other cooled. It was an immense advance in the direction of
+utility.
+
+About 1698, we begin to encounter the names that are familiar to us in
+connection with the history of the steam-engine. In that year Thomas
+Savery obtained a patent for raising water by steam. His was a
+modification of the idea described above. The boilers used would be of
+no value now, nevertheless the machine came into considerable use, and
+the world that learned so gradually became possessed with the idea that
+there was a utility in the pressure of steam. Savery's engine is said to
+have grown out of the accident of his throwing a flask containing a
+little wine on the fire at a tavern. Concluding immediately afterwards
+that he wanted it, he snatched it off of the fender and plunged it into
+a basin of water to cool it. The steam inside instantly condensing, the
+water rushed in and filled it as it cooled.
+
+We now come to the beginning of the steam engine as we understand the
+term; the machine that involves the use of the cylinder and piston.
+These two features had been used in pumps long before, the atmospheric
+pump being one of the oldest of modern machines. The vacuum was known
+and utilized long before the cause of it was known. [Footnote: The
+discoverer was an Italian, Torricelli, about 1643. Gallileo, his tutor
+and friend, did not know why water would not rise in a tube more than
+thirty-three feet. No one knew of the _weight of the atmosphere_,
+so late as the early days of this republic. Many did not believe the
+theory long after that time. Torricelli, by his experiments, demonstrated
+the fact and invented the mercurial barometer, long known as the
+"Torricellian Tube." This last instrument led to another discovery; that
+the weight of the atmosphere varied from time to time in the same
+locality, and that storms and weather changes were indicated by a rising
+and falling of the column of mercury in the tube of the
+siphon-barometer. That which we call the "weather-bureau," organized by
+General Albert J. Myer, United States Army, in 1870, and growing out of
+the army signal service, of which he was chief, makes its "forecasts" by
+the use of the telegraph and the barometer. The "low pressure area"
+follows a path, which means a change of weather on that path. Notices by
+telegraph define the route, and the coming storm is not foretold, but
+_foreknown;_ not prophesied, but _ascertained._ If we have
+been led from the crude pump of Gallileo's time directly to the weather
+bureau of the present with its invaluable signals to sailors and
+convenience to everybody, it is no more than is continually to be traced
+even to the beginning of the wonderful school of modern science.]
+
+But in the beginning it was not proposed to use steam in connection with
+the cylinder and piston which now really constitutes the steam-engine.
+Reverting again to the example of the gun, it was suggested to push a
+piston forward in a tube by the explosion of gunpowder behind it, or to
+repeat the Savery experiment with powder instead of steam. These ideas
+were those of about 1678-1685. The very earliest cylinder and piston
+engine was suggested by Denis Papin in 1690. These early inventors only
+went a portion of the way, and almost the entire idea of the
+steam-engine is of much later date. Mankind had then a singular gift of
+beginning at the wrong end. Every inventor now uses facts that seem to
+him to have been always known, and that are his by a kind of intuition.
+But they were all acquired by the tedious experience of a past that is
+distinguished by a few great names whose owners knew in their time
+perhaps one-tenth part as much as the modern inventor does, who is
+unconsciously using the facts learned by old experience. But the others
+began at the beginning.
+
+[Illustration: EARLY NEWCOMEN PUMPING ENGINE. STEAM-COCK, COLD WATER
+COCK AND WASTE-SPIGOT ALL WORKED BY HAND.]
+
+In 1711, almost a hundred years after the arrival at Jamestown and
+Plymouth of the fathers of our present civilization, the steam-engine
+that is called Newcomen's began to be used for the pumping of water out
+of mines. This engine, slightly modified, and especially by the boy who
+invented the automatic cut-off for the steam valves, was a most rude and
+clumsy machine measured by our ideas. There appears to have been
+scarcely a single feature of it that is now visible in a modern engine.
+The cylinder was always vertical. It had the upper end open, and was a
+round iron vessel in which a plunger moved up and down. Steam was let in
+below this plunger, and the walking-beam with which it was connected by
+a rod had that end of it raised. When raised the steam was cut off, and
+all that was then under the piston was condensed by a jet of cold water.
+The outside air-pressure then acted upon it and pushed it down again. In
+this down-stroke by air-pressure the work was done. The far end of the
+walking-beam was even counter-weighted to help the steam-pressure. The
+elastic force of compressed steam was not depended upon, was hardly even
+known, in this first working and practical engine of the world. Every
+engine of that time was an experimental structure by itself. The boiler,
+as we use it, was unknown. Often it was square, stayed and braced
+against pressure in a most complicated way. Yet the Newcomen engine held
+its place for about seventy-five years; a very long time in our
+conception, and in view of the vast possibilities that we now know were
+before the science. [Footnote: As late as 1880, the steam-engine
+illustrated and described in the "natural philosophy" text books was
+still the Newcomen, or Newcomen-Watt engine, and this while that engine
+was almost unknown in ordinary circumstances, and double-acting
+high-pressure engines were in operation everywhere. This last, without
+which not much could be done that is now done, was evidently for a long
+time after it came into use regarded as a dangerous and unphilosophical
+experiment, hardly scientific, and not destined to be permanently
+adopted.]
+
+In the year 1760, James Watt, who was by occupation what is now known as
+a model-maker, and who lived in Glasgow, was called upon to repair a
+model of a Newcomen engine belonging to the university. While thus
+engaged he was impressed with the great waste of steam, or of time and
+fuel, which is the same thing, involved in the alternate heating and
+cooling of Newcomen's cylinder. To him occurred the idea of keeping the
+cylinder as hot as the steam used in it. Watt was therefore the inventor
+of the first of those economies now regarded as absolute requirements in
+construction. He made the first "steam-jacket," and was, as well, the
+author of the idea of covering the cylinder with a coat of wood, or
+other non-conductor. He contrived a second chamber, outside of the
+cylinder, where the then indispensable condensation should take place.
+Then he gave this cylinder for the first time two heads, and let out the
+piston-rod through a hole in the upper head, with packing. He used steam
+on the upper side of the piston as well as the lower, and it will be
+seen that he came very near to making the modern engine.
+
+Yet he did not make it. He was still unable to dispense with the
+condensing and vacuum and air-pressure ideas. Acting for the first time
+in the line of real efficiency, he failed to go far enough to attain it.
+He made a double-acting engine by the addition of many new parts; he
+even attained the point of applying his idea to the production of
+circular motion. But he merely doubled the Newcomen idea. His engine
+became the Newcomen-Watt. He had a condensing chamber at each end of the
+stroke and could therefore command a reciprocating movement. The
+walking-beam was retained, not for the purpose for which it is often
+used now, but because it was indispensable to his semi-atmospheric
+engine.
+
+[Illustration: THE PERFECTED NEWCOMEN-WATT ENGINE.]
+
+It may seem almost absurd that the universal crank-movement of an engine
+was ever the subject of a patent. Yet such was the case. A man named
+Pickard anticipated Watt, and the latter then applied to his engines the
+"sun-and-planet" movement, instead of the crank, until the patent on the
+latter expired. The steam-engine marks the beginning of a long series of
+troubles in the claims of patentees.
+
+In 1782 came Watt's last steam invention, an engine that used steam
+_expansively_. This was an immense stride. He was also at the same
+time the inventor of the "throttle," or choke valve, by which he
+regulated the supply of steam to the piston. It seems a strange thing
+that up to this time, about 1767, an engine in actual use was started by
+getting up steam enough to make it go, and waiting for it to begin, and
+stopped by putting out the fire.
+
+Then he invented the "governor," a contrivance that has scarcely changed
+in form, and not at all in action, since it was first used, and is one
+of the few instances of a machine perfect in the beginning. Two balls
+hang on two rods on each side of an upright shaft, to which the rods are
+hinged. The shaft is rotated by the engine, and the faster it turns the
+more the two balls stand out from it. The slower it turns the more they
+hang down toward it. Any one can illustrate this by whirling in his
+hands a half-open umbrella. There is a connection between the movement
+of these balls and the throttle; as they swing out more they close it,
+as they fall closer to the shaft they open it. The engine will therefore
+regulate its own speed with reference to the work it has to do from
+moment to moment.
+
+[Illustration: THE GOVERNOR.]
+
+Through all these changes the original idea remained of a vacuum at the
+end of every stroke, of indispensable assistance from atmospheric
+pressure, of a careful use of the direct expansive power of steam, and
+of the avoidance of the high pressures and the actual power of which
+steam is now known to be safely capable. [Footnote: In a reputable
+school "philosophy" printed in 1880, thus: "In some engines" (describing
+the modern high-pressure engine, universal in most land service) "the
+apparatus for condensing steam alternately above and below the piston is
+dispensed with, and the steam, after it has moved the piston from one
+end of the cylinder to the other, is allowed to escape, by the opening
+of a valve, directly into the air. To accomplish this it is evident that
+the steam must have an elastic force greater than the pressure of the
+air, _or it could not expand and drive out the waste steam on the
+other side of the piston, in opposition to the pressure of the air_."
+According to this teaching, which the young student is expected to
+understand and to entirely believe, a pressure of steam of, say eighty
+to a hundred and twenty pounds to the inch on one side of the piston is
+accompanied by an absolute vacuum there, which permits the pressure of
+the outside air to exert itself against the opposite side of the piston
+through the open port at the other end of the cylinder. That is, a state
+of things which would exist if the steam behind the piston _were
+suddenly condensed_, exists anyway. If it be true the facts should be
+more generally known; if not, most of the school "philosophies" need
+reviewing.] Then an almost unknown American came upon the scene. In
+English hands the story at once passes from this point to the
+experiments of Trevethick and George Stevenson with steam as applied to
+railway locomotion. But as Watt left it and Trevethick found it, the
+steam engine could never have been applied to locomotion. It was slow,
+ponderous, complicated and scientific, worked at low pressures, and Watt
+and his contemporaries would have run away in affright from the
+innovation that came in between them and the first attempts of the
+pioneers of the locomotive. This innovation was that of Evans, the
+American, of whom further presently.
+
+The first steam-engine ever built in the United States was probably of
+the Watt pattern, in 1773. In 1776, the year of beginning for ourselves,
+there were only two engines of any kind in the colonies; one at Passaic,
+N. J., the other at Philadelphia. We were full of the idea of the
+independence we had won soon afterwards, but in material respects we had
+all before us.
+
+In 1787, Oliver Evans introduced improvements in grain mills, and was
+generally efficient as one of the beginners in the field of American
+invention. Soon afterwards he is known to have made a steam-engine which
+was the first high-pressure double-acting engine ever made. The engine
+that used steam at each end of the cylinder with a vacuum and a
+condenser, was in this first instance, so far as any record can be
+found, supplanted by the engine of to-day. The reason of the delay it is
+difficult to account for on any other grounds than lack of boldness, for
+unquestionably the early experimenters knew that such an engine could be
+made. They were afraid of the power they had evoked. Such a machine may
+have seemed to them a willful toying with disaster. Their efforts were
+bent during many years toward rendering a treacherous giant useful, yet
+entirely harmless. Their boilers, greatly improved over those I have
+mentioned, never were such as were afterwards made to suit the high
+pressures required by the audacity of Hopkins. This audacity was the
+mother of the locomotive, and of that engine which almost from that date
+has been used for nearly every purpose of our modern life that requires
+power. The American innovation may have passed unnoticed at the time,
+but intentionally or otherwise it was imitated as a preliminary to all
+modern engines. Nearly a century passed between the making of the first
+practical engine and that one which now stands as the type of many
+thousands. But now every little saw-mill in the American woods could
+have, and finally did have, its little cheap, unscientific, powerful and
+non-vacuum engine, set up and worked without experience, and maintained
+in working order by an unskilled laborer. A thousand uses for steam grew
+out of this experiment of a Yankee who knew no better than to tempt fate
+with a high-pressure and speed and recklessness that has now become
+almost universal.
+
+There was with Watt and his contemporaries apparently a fondness for
+cost and complications. Most likely the finished Watt engine was a
+handsome and stately machine, imposing in its deliberate movements.
+There is apparently nothing simpler than the placing of the head of the
+piston-rod between two guide-pieces to keep it in line and give it
+bearing. Yet we have only to turn back a few years and see the elaborate
+and beautiful geometrical diagram contrived by Watt to produce the same
+simple effect, and known as a "parallel motion." It kept its place until
+the walking-beam was cast away, and the American horizontal engine came
+into almost universal use.
+
+The object of this chapter so far has been to present an idea of
+beginnings; of the evolution of the universal and indispensable machine
+of civilization. The steam-engine has given a new impetus to industry,
+and in a sense an added meaning to life. It has made possible most that
+was ever dreamed of material greatness. It has altered the destiny of
+this nation, and other nations, made greatness out of crude beginnings,
+wealth out of poverty, prosperity upon thousands of square miles of
+uninhabitable wilderness. It was the chiefest instrumentality in the
+widening of civilization, the bringing together of alien peoples, the
+dissemination of ideas. Electricity may carry the idea; steam carries
+the man with the idea. The crude misconceptions of old times existed
+naturally before its time, and have largely vanished since it came.
+Marco Polo and Mandeville and their kind are no longer possibilities.
+Applied to transportation, locomotion alone, its effects have been
+revolutionary. Applied to common life in its minute ramifications these
+effects could not have been believed or foretold, and are incredible.
+The thought might be followed indefinitely, and it is almost impossible
+to compare the world as we know it with the world of our immediate
+ancestors. Only by means of contrasts, startling in their details, can
+we arrive at an adequate estimate, even as a moral farce, of the power
+of steam as embodied in the modern engine in a thousand forms.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Perhaps it might be well to attempt to convey, for the benefit of the
+youngest reader, an idea of the actual working of the machine we call a
+steam-engine. There are hundreds of forms, and yet they are all alike
+in essentials. To know the principle of one is to know that of all.
+There is probably not an engine in the world in effective common
+use--the odd and unusual rotary and other forms never having been
+practical engines--that is not constructed upon the plan of the cylinder
+and piston. These two parts make the engine. If they are understood only
+differences in construction and detail remain.
+
+Imagine a short tube into which you have inserted a pellet, or wad of
+any kind, so that it fits tolerably, yet moves easily back and forth in
+the bore of the tube. If this pellet or wad is at one end of the tube
+you may, by inserting that end in your mouth and putting air-pressure
+upon it, make it slide to the other end. You do not touch it with
+anything; you may push it back and forth with your breath as many times
+as you wish, not by blowing against it, so to speak, but by producing an
+actual air-pressure upon it which is confined by the sides of the tube
+and cannot go elsewhere. The only pressure necessary is enough to move
+the pellet.
+
+Now, if you push this little pellet one way by the air-pressure from
+your mouth, and then, instead of reversing the tube in the mouth and
+pushing it back again in the same way, reverse the process and suck the
+air out from behind it, it comes back by the pressure of the outside
+atmosphere. This was the way the first steam engines worked. Their only
+purpose was to get the piston lifted, and air-pressure did all the
+actual work.
+
+If you turn the tube, and put an air-pressure first at one end and then
+at the other, and pay no attention to vacuum or atmospheric pressure,
+you will have the principle of the later modern, almost universal,
+high-pressure, double-acting steam-engine.
+
+But now you must imagine that the tube is fixed immovably, and that the
+air-pressure is constant in a pipe leading to the tube, and yet must be
+admitted first to one end of the tube and then to the other alternately,
+in order to push the pellet back and forth in it. It seems simple.
+Perhaps the young reader can find a way to do it, but it required about
+a hundred years for ingenious men to find out how to do precisely the
+same thing automatically. It involves the steam-chest and the
+slide-valve, and all other kinds of steam valves that have been
+invented, including the Corliss cut-off, and all others that are akin to
+it in object and action.
+
+But now imagine the tube closed at each end to begin with, and the
+little moving pellet, or plunger, on the inside. To get the air into
+both ends of the tube alternately, and to use its pressure on each side
+of the pellet, we will suppose that the air-pipe is forked, and that one
+end of each fork is inserted into the side of the tube near the end,
+like the figure below, and imagine also that you have put a finger over
+each end of the tube.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 1]
+
+We are now getting the air-pressure through the pipe in both ends of the
+tube alike, and do not move the pellet either way. To make it move we
+must do something more, and open one end of the tube, and close that
+fork of the air-pipe, and thus get all the pressure on one side of the
+pellet. Remove one finger from the end of the tube, and pinch the fork
+of the air-tube that is on that side. The pellet will now move toward
+that end of the tube which is open. Reverse the process, and it can be
+pushed back again with air-pressure to the other end, and so on
+indefinitely.
+
+Let us improve the process. We will close each end of the tube
+permanently, and insert four cocks in the tube and forked pipe.
+
+We have here two tubes inserted at each end of the large tube, and in
+each of these is a cock. We have each cock connected by a rod to the
+lever set on a pin in the middle of the tube. We must have these cocks
+so arranged that when the lever is moved (say) to the right, A. is
+opened and B. is closed, and D. is opened and C. is closed. Now if the
+air-pressure is constant through the forked air-tube, and the cock E. is
+open, if the top of the lever is moved to the right, the pellet will be
+pushed to the left in the large tube. If the lever is moved to the left,
+and the two cocks that were open are closed, and the two that were
+closed are opened again, the pellet will be sent back to the other end
+of the tube. This movement of the pellet in the tube will occur as often
+as the lever is moved and there is any air-pressure in the forked tube.
+There is a _supply_-cock, opened and an _escape_-cock closed,
+and an escape-cock _opened_ and a supply-cock _closed_, at
+each end of the tube, _every time the lever is moved_.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 2]
+
+We are using air instead of steam, and the movement of these four cocks
+all at the same time, and the result of moving them, is precisely that
+of the slide-valve of a steam-engine. The diagrams of this slide-valve
+would be difficult to understand. The action of the cocks can be more
+readily understood, and the result, and even much of the action, is
+precisely the same.
+
+But to make the arrangement entirely efficient we must go a little
+further into the construction of a steam-engine. The pellet in the tube
+has no connection with the outside, and we can get nothing from it. So
+we give it a stem, thus: and when we do so we change it into a piston
+and its rod. Where it passes through the stopper at the end of the tube
+it must pass air- (or steam-) tight. Then as we push the piston back and
+forth we have a movement that we can attach to machinery at the end of
+the rod, and get a result from. We also move the cocks, or valves,
+automatically by the movement of the rod.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 3]
+
+Turning now to Fig. 3 again let us imagine a connection made between the
+rod and the end of the lever in Fig. 2. Now put on the air (or steam)
+pressure, and when the piston has reached the right-hand end of the tube
+it automatically, by its connections, closes B. and opens A., and opens
+D. and closes C. The pellet will be pushed back in the tube and go to
+the other end of it, through the pressure coming against the piston
+through the part of the air tube where the cock D. is open. It reaches
+the left-hand end of the tube, and we must imagine that when it gets
+there it, in the same manner and by the proper connections, closes D.,
+opens C., closes A. and opens B. If these mechanical movements are
+completed it must be plain that so long as the air (or steam) pressure
+is continued in the forked pipe the piston will automatically cut off
+its supply and open its escape at each alternate end, and move back and
+forth. Any boy can see how a backward and forward movement may be made
+to give motion to a crank. All other details in an engine are questions
+of convenience in construction, and not questions of principle or manner
+of action.
+
+Of older readers, I might request the supposition that, in Fig. 2, only
+the valves A. and B. were automatically and invariably opened and closed
+by the action of the piston-rod of Fig. 3, and that C. and D. were
+controlled solely by the governor, before mentioned, which we will
+suppose to be located at E. Then the escape of the steam ahead of the
+piston must always come at the same time with reference to the stroke,
+but the supply will depend upon the requirements of each individual
+stroke, and the work it has to do, and afford to the piston a greater or
+less push, as the emergencies of that particular instant may require.
+This arrangement would be one of regularity of movement and of economy
+in the use of steam. That which is needed is supplied, and no more. This
+is the principle and the object of the Corliss cut-off, and of all
+others similar to it in purpose. Their principle is that _only the
+escape is automatically controlled by the movements of the
+piston-rod_, occurring always at the same time with reference to the
+stroke, while _the supply is under control of the movement of the
+governor_, and regulated according to the emergencies of the
+movement. The governor, in any of its forms, as ordinarily applied,
+performs only half of this function. It regulates the general supply of
+steam to the cylinder, but the supply-valve continues to be opened,
+always to full width, and always at the same moment with reference to
+the stroke. With the two separate sets of automatic machinery required
+by engines of the Corliss type, the piston does not always receive its
+steam at the beginning of the stroke, and the supply may be cut off
+partially or entirely at any point in its passage along the cylinder, as
+the work to be done requires. The economic value of such an arrangement
+is manifest. No attempt is made here to explain by means of elaborate
+diagrams. It is believed that if the reason of things, and the principle
+of action, is clear, the particulars may be easily studied by any reader
+who is disposed to master mechanical details.
+
+
+
+
+THE AGE OF STEEL
+
+
+In very recent times the processes of civilization have had a strong and
+almost unnoted tendency toward the increased use of the _best_.
+Thus, most that iron once was, in use and practice, steel now is. This
+use, growing daily, widens the scope that must be taken in discussing
+the features of an Age of Steel. One name has largely supplanted the
+other. In effect iron has become steel. Had this chapter been written
+twenty, or perhaps ten, years earlier, it should have been more
+appropriately entitled the Age of Iron. A separation of the two great
+metals in general description would be merely technical, and I shall
+treat the subject very much as though, in accordance with the practical
+facts of the case, the two metals constituted one general subject, one
+of them gradually supplanting the other in most of the fields of
+industry where iron only was formerly used.
+
+The greatest progresses of the race are almost always unappreciated at
+the time, and are certainly undervalued, except by contrast and
+comparison. We must continually turn backward to see how far we have
+gone. An individual who is born into a certain condition thinks it as
+hard as any other until by experience and comparison he discovers what
+his times might have been. As for us, in the year 1894, we are not
+compelled to look backward very far to observe a striking contrast.
+
+[Illustration: IN OLD TIMES. PRYING OUT A "BLOOM."]
+
+All the wealth of today is built upon the forests and prairies and
+swamps of yesterday, and we must take a wider and more comprehensive
+glance backward if we should wish to institute those comparisons which
+make contrasts startling.
+
+We are accustomed to read and to hear of the "Age" of this or that.
+There was a "Stone" Age, beginning with the tribes to whom it came
+before the beginnings of their history, or even of tradition, and if we
+look far backward we may contrast our own time with the times of men who
+knew no metals. They were men. They lived and hoped and died as we do,
+even in what is now our own country. Often they were not even
+barbarians. They builded houses and forts, and dug drains and built
+aqueducts, and tilled the soil. They knew the value of those things we
+most value now, home and country; and they organized armies, and fought
+battles, and died for an idea, as we do. Yet all the time, a time ages
+long, the utmost help they had found for the bare and unaided hand was
+the serrated edge of a splintered flint, or the chance-found fragment
+beside a stream that nature, in a thousand or a million years of
+polishing, had shaped into the rude semblance of a hammer or a pestle.
+All men have in their time burned and scraped and fashioned all they
+needed with an astonishing faculty of making it answer their needs. They
+once almost occupied the world. Such were those who, so far as we know,
+were once the exclusive owners of this continent. They were an
+agricultural, industrious and home-loving people. [Footnote: The Mound
+Builders and Cave Dwellers. They knew only lead and copper.]
+
+Then came, with a strange leaving out of the plentiful and easily worked
+metals which are the subject of this chapter, the great Age of Bronze.
+This next stage of progress after stone was marked by a skillful alloy,
+requiring even now some scientific knowledge in its compounding of
+copper and tin. A thousand theories have been brought forward to account
+for this hiatus in the natural stages of human progress, the truth
+probably being that both tin and copper are more fusible than iron-ores,
+and that both are found as natural metals. Some accident such as
+accounts for the first glass, [Footnote: The story is told by Pliny.
+Some sailors, landing on the eastern coast of Spain, supported their
+cooking utensils on the sand with stones, and built a fire under them.
+When they had finished their meal, glass was found to have been made
+from the niter and sea-sand by the heat of their fire. The same thing
+has been done, by accident, in more recent times, and may have been done
+before the incident recounted. It is also done by the lightning striking
+into sand and making those peculiar glass tubes known as
+_Fulmenites_, found in museums and not very uncommon.] some
+camp-fire unintended fusion, produced the alloy that became the metal of
+all the arms and arts, and so remained for uncounted centuries. In this
+connection it is declared that the Age of Bronze knew something that we
+cannot discover; the art of tempering the alloy so that it would bear an
+edge like fine steel. If this be true and we could do it, we should by
+choice supplant the subject of this chapter for a thousand uses. As the
+matter stands, and in our ignorance of a supposed ancient secret, the
+tempering of bronze has an effect precisely opposite to that which the
+process has upon steel.
+
+Nevertheless, the old Age of Bronze had its vicissitudes. Those men knew
+nothing that we consider knowledge now. It was a time when some of the
+most splendid temples, palaces and pyramids were constructed, and these
+now lie ruined yet indestructible in the nooks and corners of a desert
+world. Perhaps the hard rock was chiselled with tools of tempered
+copper. The fact is of little importance now since the object of the art
+is almost unknown, and the scattered capitals and columns of Baalbeck
+are like monuments without inscriptions; the commemorating memorials of
+a memory unknown. The Age of Bronze and all other ages that have
+preceded ours lacked the great essentials that insure perpetuity. The
+Age of Steel, that came last, that is ours now; a degenerate time by all
+ancient standards; has for its crowning triumph a single machine which
+is alone enough to satisfy the union of two names that are to us what
+Caster and Pollux were to the bronze-armed Roman legions of the heroic
+time--the modern power printing-press.
+
+It may be well to ask and answer the question that at the first view may
+seem to the reader almost absurd. What is steel? The answer must, in the
+majority of instances, be given in accordance with the common
+conception; which is that it is not iron, yet very like it. The old
+classification of the metal, even familiarly known, needs now to be
+supplemented, since it does not describe the modern cast and malleable
+compounds of iron, carbon and metalloids used for structural purposes,
+and constituting at least three-fourths of the metal now made under the
+name of steel. The old term, steel, meant the cast, but malleable,
+product of iron, containing as much carbon as would cause the metal to
+harden when heated to redness and quenched in water. It must also be
+included in the definition that the product must be as free as possible
+from all admixtures except the requisite amount of carbon. This is
+"tool" steel. [Footnote: It must not be understood that tool steel was
+always a cast metal. In manufacturing, iron bars were laid together in
+a box or retort, together with powdered charcoal, and heated to a
+certain degree for a certain time. The carbon from the charcoal was
+absorbed by the iron, and from the blistered appearance of the bars when
+taken out this product was, and is known as "blister" steel.]
+
+And here occurs a strange thing. A skill in chemistry, the successor of
+alchemy, is the educational product of the highest form of civilization.
+
+[Illustration: ANCIENT SMELTING. A RUDE WALL ENCLOSING ALTERNATE LAYERS
+OF IRON ORE AND CHARCOAL.]
+
+Metallurgy is the highest and most difficult branch of chemistry. Steel
+is the best result of metallurgy. Yet steel is one of the oldest
+products of the race, and in lands that have been asleep since written
+history began. Wendell Phillips in a lecture upon "The Lost
+Arts,"--celebrated at the date of its delivery, but now obsolete because
+not touching upon advances made in science since Phillips's day,--states
+that the first needle ever made in England, in the time of Henry VIII,
+was made by a Negro, and that when he died the art died with him. They
+did not know how to prepare the steel or how to make the needle. He adds
+that some of the earliest travelers in Africa found a tribe in the
+interior who gave them better razors than the explorers had. Oriental
+steel has been celebrated for ages as an inimitable product. It is
+certainly true that by the simple processes of semi-barbarism the finest
+tool-steel has been manufactured, perhaps from the days of Tubal Cain
+downward. The keenness of edge, the temper whose secret is now unknown,
+the marvelous elasticity of the tools of ancient Damascus, are familiar
+by repute to every reader and have been celebrated for thousands of
+years. The swords and daggers made in central Asia two thousand years
+ago were more remarkable than any similar product of the present for
+elaborate and beautiful finish as well as for a cutting quality and a
+tenacity of edge unknown to modern days. All the tests and experiments
+of a modern government arsenal, with all the technical knowledge of
+modern times, do not produce such tool-steel. It is also alleged that
+the ancient weapons did not rust as ours do, and that the oldest are
+bright to this day. The steel tools and arms that are made in the
+strange country of India do not rust there, while in the same climate
+ours are eaten away. Besides the secret of tempering bronze, it would
+seem that among the lost arts [Footnote: Modern science dates from three
+discoveries. That of Copernicus, the effect of which was to separate
+scientific astronomy, the astronomy of natural law and defined cause,
+from astrology, or the astronomy of assertion and tradition. That of
+Torricelli and Paschal of the actual and measurable weight of the
+atmosphere, which was the beginning for us of the science of physics,
+and that of Lavoisier who suspected, and Priestly who demonstrated,
+oxygen and destroyed the last vestiges of the theory of alchemy. Stahl
+was the last of these, and Lavoisier the first of the new school in that
+which I have stated is the highest development of modern science,
+chemistry. In all these departments we have no adequate reason to assert
+that we are not ourselves mere students. Some of the functions of
+oxygen, and the simplest, were unknown within five years before the date
+of these chapters.]--a subject that it is easy to make too much
+of--there was a chemical ingredient or proportion in steel that we now
+know nothing of. The old lands of sameness and slumber have kept their
+secrets.
+
+The definition of the word "steel" has been the subject of a scientific
+quarrel on account of new processes. The grand distinguishing trait of
+steel, to which it owes all the qualities that make it valuable for the
+uses to which no other metal can be put, is _homogeneity due to
+fusion_. Wrought iron, while having similar chemical qualities, and
+often as much carbon, is _laminated in structure_. Structural
+qualities are largely increasing in importance, and as the structural
+compounds came gradually to be produced more and more by the casting
+processes; as they ceased to be laminated in structure and became
+homogeneous, they were called by the name of steel. The name has been
+based upon the structure of the material rather than upon its chemical
+ingredients as heretofore. There is now a disposition to call all
+compounds of iron that are crystalline in structure, made homogeneous by
+casting, by the general name of steel, and to distinguish all those
+whose structural quality is due to welding by the name of iron.
+[Footnote: It should be understood that the shapes of structural and
+other forms of what we now call steel are given by rolling the ingot
+after casting, and that the crystalline composition of the metal
+remains.] This is an outline of the controversy about the differences
+which should be expressed by a name, between tool steel and structural
+steel. In tool steel there is an almost infinite variety as to quality.
+The best is a high product of practical science, and how to make the
+best seems now, as hinted above, a lost art. It has, besides, a great
+variety. These varieties are only produced after thousands of
+experiments directed to finding out what ingredients and processes make
+toward the desired result. These processes, were they all known outside
+the manufactories of certain specialists, would little interest the
+general reader. All machinists know of certain brands of tool steel
+which they prefer. Tool steel is made especially for certain purposes;
+as for razors and surgical instruments, for saws, for files, for
+springs, for cutting tools generally. In these there may be little
+actual difference of quality or manufacture. The tempering of steel
+after it has been forged into shape is a specialty, almost a natural
+gift. The manufacture of tool steel, is, as stated, one of the most
+technical of the arts, and one of the most complicated of the
+applications of long experience and experiment.
+
+Cast steel was first made in 1770 by Huntsman, who for the first time
+melted the "blistered" steel, which until that time had been the tool
+steel of commerce, in a crucible. Since that time the process of melting
+wrought iron has become practical and cheap, and results in
+_crystalline_, instead of a laminated structure for all steels. The
+definition of steel now is that it is _a compound of iron which has
+been cast from a fluid state into a malleable mass._
+
+The ordinary test applied to distinguish wrought iron from steel is to
+ascertain whether the metal hardens with heating and suddenly cooling in
+cold water, becoming again softened on reheating and cooling slowly. If
+it does this it is steel of some quality, good or bad; if not, it is
+iron.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first mention of iron-ore in America is by Thomas Harriot, an
+English writer of the time of Raleigh's first colonies. He wrote a
+history of the settlement on Roanoke Island, in which he says: "In two
+places in the countrey specially, one about foure score and the other
+six score miles from the port or place where wee dwelt, wee founde neere
+the water side the ground to be rockie, which by the triall of a
+minerall man, was found to hold iron richly. It is founde in manie
+places in the countrey else." Harriot speaks further of "the small
+charge for the labour and feeding of men; the infinite store of wood;
+the want of wood and the deerness thereof in England." It was before the
+day of coal and coke, or of any of the processes known now. The iron
+mines of Roanoke Island were never heard of again.
+
+Iron-ore in the colonies is again heard of in the history of Jamestown,
+in 1607. A ship sailed from there in 1608 freighted with "iron-ore,
+sassafras, cedar posts and walnut boards." Seventeen tons of iron were
+made from this ore, and sold for four pounds per ton. This was the first
+iron ever made from American ores. The first iron-works ever erected in
+this country were, of course almost, burned by the Indians, in 1622, and
+in connection three hundred persons were killed.
+
+[Illustration: EARLY SMELTING IN AMERICA.]
+
+Fire and blood was the end of the beginning of many American industries.
+Ore was plentiful, wood was superabundant, methods were crude. They
+could easily excel the Virginia colonists in making iron in Persia and
+India at the same date. The orientals had certain processes, descended
+to them from remote times, discovered and practiced by the first
+metal-workers that ever lived. The difference in the situation now is
+that here the situation and methods have so changed that the story is
+almost incredible. There, they remain as always. The first instance of
+iron-smelting in America is a text from which might be taken the entire
+vast sermon of modern industrial civilization.
+
+The orientals lacked the steam-engine. So did we in America. The blast
+was impossible everywhere except by hand, and contrivances for this
+purpose are of very great antiquity. The bellows was used in Egypt three
+thousand years ago. It may be that the very first thought by primitive
+man was of how to smelt the metals he wanted so much and needed so
+badly. His efforts to procure a means of making his fire burn under his
+little dump of ore led him first into the science which has attained a
+new importance in very recent times, pneumatics. The first American
+furnaces were blown by the ordinary leather bellows, or by a contrivance
+they had which was called a "blowing tub," or by a very ancient machine
+known as a _"trompe"_ in which water running through a wooden pipe
+was very ingeniously made to furnish air to a furnace. It is when the
+means are small that ingenuity is actually shown. If the later man is
+deprived of the use of the latest machinery he will decline to undertake
+an enterprise where it is required. The same man in the woods, with
+absolute necessity for his companion, will show an astonishing capacity
+for persevering invention, and will live, and succeed.
+
+[Illustration: WATER-POWER BLOWING TUB.]
+
+In the lack of steam they learned, as stated, to use water-power for
+making the blast. The "blowing-tub" was such a contrivance. It was built
+of wood, and the air-boxes were square. There were two of these, with
+square pistons and a walking-beam between them. A third box held the air
+under a weighted piston and fed it to the furnace. Some of these were
+still in effective use as late as 1873. They were still used long after
+steam came. The entire machine might be called, correctly, a very large
+piston-bellows. A smaller machine with a single barrel may be found now,
+reduced, in the hands of men who clean the interior of pianos, and tune
+them.
+
+The first iron works built in the present United States that were
+commercially successful, were established in Massachusetts, in the town
+of Saugus, a few miles from Boston. The company had a monopoly of
+manufacture under grant for ten years. [Footnote: Some quaint records
+exist of the incidents of manufacturing in those times.
+
+In 1728, Samuel Higley and Joseph Dewey, of Connecticut, represented to
+the Legislature that Higley had, "with great pains and cost, found out
+and obtained a curious art by which to convert, change, or transmute,
+common iron into good steel sufficient for any use, and was the first
+that ever performed such an operation in America." A certificate, signed
+by Timothy Phelps and John Drake, blacksmiths, states that, in June,
+1725, Mr. Higley obtained from the subscribers several pieces of iron,
+so shaped that they could be known again, and that a few days later "he
+brought the same pieces which we let him have, and we proved them and
+found them good steel, which was the first steel that ever was made in
+this country, that we ever saw or heard of." But this remarkable
+transmuting process was not heard of again unless it be the process of
+"case-hardening," re-invented some years ago, and known now to mechanics
+as a recipe.
+
+The smallness of things may be inferred from the fact that, in 1740, the
+Connecticut Legislature granted to Messrs. Fitch, Walker & Wyllys "the
+sole privilege of making steel for the term of fifteen years, upon this
+condition that they should, in the space of two years, make half a ton
+of steel." Even this condition was not complied with and the term was
+extended.] They began in 1643, twenty-three years after the landing,
+which is one of the evidences of the anxiety of those troublesome people
+to be independent, and of how well men knew, even in those early times,
+how much the production of iron at home has to do with that
+independence. This new industry was, at all times, controlled and
+regulated by law.
+
+The very first hollow-ware casting made in America is said to be still
+in existence. It was a little kettle holding less than a quart.
+
+[Illustration: THE FIRST CASTING MADE IN AMERICA.]
+
+The beginnings of the iron industry in America were none too early.
+There came a need for them very soon after they had extended into other
+parts of New England, and into New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and
+Maryland. In 1775, there were a large number of small furnaces and
+foundries. But coal and iron, the two earth-born servants of national
+progress which are now always twins, were not then coupled. The first of
+them was out of consideration. The early iron men looked for water-falls
+instead, and for the wood of the primeval forest. [Footnote: It is now
+easy to learn that a coal-mine may be a more valuable possession than a
+gold-mine, and that iron is better as an industry than silver. There are
+mountains of iron in Mexico, but no coal, and silver-mines so rich that
+silver, smelted with expensive wood fuel, is the staple product of the
+country. Yet the people are among the poorest in Christendom. There is a
+ceaseless iron-famine, so that the chiefest form of railway robbery is
+the stealing of the links and pins from trains. There are almost no
+metal industries. A barbaric agriculture prevails for the want of
+material for the making of tools. The actual means of progress are not
+at hand, notwithstanding the product of silver, which goes by weight as
+a commodity to purchase most that the country needs.] They became very
+necessary to the country in 1755--when the "French" war came, and they
+then began the making of the shot and guns used in that struggle, and
+became accustomed to the manufacture in time for the Revolution. Looking
+back for causes conducive to momentous results, we may here find one not
+usually considered in the histories. But for the advancement of the iron
+industry in America, great for the time and circumstances, independence
+could not have been won, and even the _feeling_ and desire of
+independence would have been indefinitely delayed.
+
+The industry was slow, painful, and uncertain, only because the mechanic
+arts were pursued only to an extent possible with the skill and muscular
+energy of men. There were none of the wonderful automatic mechanisms
+that we know as machine-tools. There was only the almost unaided human
+arm with which to subdue the boundless savagery of a continent, and win
+independence and form a nation besides. The demand for huge masses of
+the most essential of the factors of civilization has grown since,
+because the ironclad and the big gun have come, and those inadequate
+forces and crude methods supplied for a time the demand that was small
+and imperative. The largest mass made then, and frequently spoken of in
+colonial records, was a piece called a "sow;" spelled then "sowe." It
+was a long, triangular mass, cast by being run into a trench made in
+sand. [Footnote: When, later, little side-trenches were made beside the
+first, with little channels to carry the metal into them, the smaller
+castings were naturally called "pigges." Hence our "pig-iron."]
+
+[Illustration: MAKING A TRENCH TO CAST A "SOWE."]
+
+Those were the palmy days of the "trip hammer." Nasmyth was not born
+until 1808, and no machine inventor had yet come upon the scene. The
+steam-hammer that bears his name, which means a ponderous and powerful
+machine in which the hammer is lifted by the direct action of steam in a
+piston, the lower end of whose rod is the hammer-head, has done more for
+the development of the iron industry than any other mechanical
+invention. It was not actually used until 1842, or '43. It finally, with
+many improvements in detail, grew into a monster, the hammer-head, or
+"tup," being a mass of many tons. And they of modern times were not
+content merely to let this great mass fall. They let in steam above the
+piston, and jammed it down upon the mass of glowing metal, with a shock
+that jars the earth. The strange thing about this Titanic machine is
+that it can crack an egg, or flatten out a ton or more of glowing iron.
+Hundreds of the forgings of later times, such as the wrought iron or
+steel frames of locomotives, and the shafts of steamers, and the forged
+modern guns, could not be made by forging without this steam hammer.
+
+[Illustration: THE STEAM HAMMER.]
+
+Then slowly came the period of all kinds of "machine tools." During the
+period briefly described above they could not make sheet metal. The
+rolling mill must have come, not only before the modern steam-boiler,
+but even before the modern plow could be made. Can the reader imagine a
+time in the United States when sheet metal could not be rolled, and even
+tin plates were not known? If so, he can instantly transport himself to
+the times of the wooden "trencher," and the "pewter" mug and pitcher, to
+the days when iron rails for tramways were unknown, and when even the
+"strap-iron," always necessary, was rudely and slowly hammered out on an
+anvil. [Footnote: About 1720, nails were the most needed of all the
+articles of a new country. Farmers made them for themselves, at home.
+The secret of how to roll out a sheet and split it into nail-rods was
+stolen from the one shop that knew how, at Milton, Mass., to give to
+another at Mlddleboro. The thief had the Biblical name of Hashay H.
+Thomas. He stole the secret while the hands of the Milton mill were gone
+to dinner, and served his country and broke up a small monopoly in so
+doing.]
+
+Shears came with the "rolls;" vast engines of gigantic biting capacity,
+that cut sheets of iron as a lady's scissors cut paper. This cut the
+squares of metal used for boiler plates, and the steam-engine having
+come, was turned to the manufacture of materials for its own
+construction. Others were able to bite off great bars.
+
+The first mill in which iron was rolled in America, was built in 1817
+near Connellsville, in Fayette county, Penn. Until 1844, the rolling
+mills of this country produced little more than bar-iron, hoops, and
+plates. All the early attempts at railroads used the "strap" rail;
+unless cast "fish-bellies" were used; which was flat bar-iron provided
+with counter sunk holes, in which to drive nails for holding the iron to
+long stringers of wood laid upon ties. When actual rail-making for
+railroads began, the rolling mill raised its powers to meet the
+emergency. The "T" rail, universally now used, was invented by Robert
+Stevens, president and chief engineer of the Camden and Amboy railroad,
+and the first of them were laid as track for that road in 1832. From
+this time until 1850, rolling mills for making "U" and "T" rails rapidly
+increased in number, but in that year all but two had ceased to be
+operated because of foreign competition.
+
+[Illustration: SHEARS FOR CUTTING BAR-IRON.]
+
+During some five years previous to this writing a revolution has taken
+place in the construction of buildings which has resulted in what is
+known as the "sky-scraper." This was, in many respects, the most
+startling innovation of times that are startling in most other respects,
+and was begun in that metropolis of surprises and successes, the city of
+Chicago. This innovation was really such in the matter of using steel in
+the entire framing of a commercial building, but it was not the first
+use of metal as a building material. The first iron beams used in
+buildings were made in 1854, in a rolling mill at Trenton, N. J., and
+were used in the construction of the Cooper Institute, and the building
+of Harper & Brothers. For these special rolls, of a special invention,
+were made. These have now become obsolete, and a new arrangement is used
+for what are known as "structural shapes."
+
+[Illustration: HYDRAULIC SHEARS. THE KNIFE HAS A PRESSURE OF 3,000 TONS,
+CLIPPING PIECES OF IRON TWO BY FOUR FEET.]
+
+I have spoken of the use of wood-fuel in the early stages of iron
+manufacture in this country, followed by the adoption exclusively of
+coal and its products. Then, many years later, came the departure from
+this in the use of gas for fuel. The first use of this kind is said to
+date as far back as the eighth century, and modifications of the idea
+had been put in practice in this country, in which gas was first made
+from coal and then used as fuel. Then came "natural gas." This product
+has been known for many centuries. It was the "eternal" fuel of the
+Persian fire-worshippers, and has been used as fuel in China for ages.
+Its earliest use in this country was in 1827, when it was made to light
+the village of Fredonia, N. Y. Probably its first use for manufacturing
+purposes was by a man named Tompkins, who used it to heat salt-kettles
+in the Kenawha valley in 1842. Its next use for manufacturing purposes
+was made in a rolling mill in Armstrong county, Penn., in 1874,
+forty-seven years after it had been used at Fredonia, and twenty-nine
+years after it had been used to boil salt.
+
+Now the use of natural gas as manufacturing fuel is universal, not alone
+over the spot where the gas is found, but in localities hundreds of
+miles away. It is one of the strangest developments of modern scientific
+ingenuity. That enormous battery of boilers, which was one of the most
+imposing spectacles of the Columbian Exhibition of 1893, whose roar was
+like that of Niagara, was fed by invisible fuel that came silently in
+pipes from a state outside of that where the great fair was held. We are
+left to the conclusion that the making of the coal into gas at the mine,
+and the shipping of it to the place of consumption through pipes, is
+more certain of realization than were a hundred of the early problems of
+American progress that have now been successful for so long that the
+date of their beginning is almost forgotten.
+
+THE STEEL OF THE PRESENT.--The story of steel has now almost been told,
+in that general outline which is all that is possible without an
+extensive detail not interesting to the general reader. In it is
+included, of necessity, a resum� of the progress, from the earliest
+times in this country, of the great industry which is more indicative
+than any other of the material growth of a nation. I now come to that
+time when steel began to take the place that iron had always held in
+structural work of every class. The differences between this structural
+steel and that which men have known by the name exclusively from remote
+ages, I have so far indicated only by reference to the well-known
+qualities of the latter. It now remains to describe the first.
+
+In 1846 an American named William Kelley was the owner of an iron-works
+at Eddyville, Ky. It was an early era in American manufactures of all
+kinds, and the district was isolated, the town not having five hundred
+inhabitants, and the best mechanical appliances were remote.
+
+In 1847, Kelley began, without suggestion or knowledge of any
+experiments going on elsewhere, to experiment in the processes now known
+as the "Bessemer," for the converting of iron into steel. To him
+occurred, as it now appears first, the idea that in the refining process
+fuel would be unnecessary after the iron was melted if _powerful
+blasts of air were forced into the fluid metal_. This is the basic
+principle of the Bessemer process. The theory was that the heat
+generated by the union of the oxygen of the air with the carbon of the
+metal, would accomplish the refining. Kelley was trying to produce
+malleable iron in a new, rapid and effective way. It was merely an
+economy in manufacture he was endeavoring to attain.
+
+To this end he made a furnace into which passed an air-blast pipe,
+through which a stream of air was forced into the mass of melted metal.
+He produced refined iron. Following this he made what is now called a
+"converter," in which he could refine fifteen hundred pounds of metal in
+five minutes, effecting a great saving in time and fuel, and in his
+little establishment the old processes were thenceforth dispensed with.
+It was locally known as "Kelley's air-boiling process." It proved
+finally to be the most important, in large results, ever conceived in
+metallurgy. I refer to it hurriedly, and do not attempt to follow the
+inventor's own description of his constructions and experiments. When he
+heard that others in England were following the same line of experiment,
+he applied for a patent. He was decided to be the first inventor of the
+process, and a patent was granted him over Bessemer, who was a few days
+before him. There is no question that others were more skillful, and
+with better opportunities and scientific associations, in carrying out
+the final details, mechanical and chemical, which have completed the
+Kelley process for present commercial uses. Neither is there any
+question that this back-woods iron-making American was the first to
+refine iron by passing through it, while fluid, a stream of air, which
+is the process of making that steel which is not tool steel, and yet is
+steel, the now almost universal material for the making of structures;
+the material of the Ferris wheel, the wonderful palaces of the Columbian
+exposition, the sky-scrapers of Chicago, the rails, the tacks,
+[Footnote: In the history of Rhode Island, by Arnold, it is claimed that
+the first cold cut nails in the world were made by Jeremiah Wilkinson,
+in 1777. The process was to cut them from an old chest-lock with a pair
+of shears, and head them in a smith's vise. Then small nails were cut
+from old Spanish hoops, and headed in a vise by hand. Needles and pins
+were made by the same person from wire drawn by himself. Supposing this
+to be the beginning of the cut-nail idea, _the machine for making
+them_ would still remain the actual and practical invention, since it
+would mark the beginning of the industry as such. The importance of the
+latter event may be measured by the fact that about the end of the last
+century there began a strong demand. In the homely farm-houses, or the
+little contracted shops of New England villages, the descendants of the
+Pilgrims toiled providently, through the long winter months, at beating
+into shape the little nails which play so useful a part in modern
+industry. A small anvil served to beat the wire or strip of iron into
+shape and point it; a vise worked by the foot clutched it between jaws
+furnished with a gauge to regulate the length, leaving a certain portion
+projecting, which, when beaten flat by a hammer, formed the head. This
+was industry, but not manufacture, for in 1890 the manufacturers of this
+country produced over _eight hundred million pounds_ of iron,
+steel, and wire nails, representing a consumption of this absolutely
+indispensable manufacture for that year, at the rate of over _twelve
+pounds_ for each individual inhabitant of the United States.] the
+fence-wire, the sheet-metal, the rails of the steam-railroads and the
+street-lines, the thousand things that cannot be thought of without a
+list, and which is a material that is furnished more cheaply than the
+old iron articles were for the same purposes.
+
+[Illustration: SECTIONAL VIEW OF A BESSEMER "CONVERTER."]
+
+The technical detail of steel-making is exceedingly interesting to
+students of applied science, but it _is_ detail, the key to which
+is in the process mentioned; the forcing of a stream of air through a
+molten mass of iron. The "converter" is a huge pitcher-shaped vessel,
+hung upon trunnions so as to be tilted, and it is usual to admit through
+these trunnions, by means of a continuing pipe, the stream of air. The
+converters may contain ten tons or more of liquid metal at one time,
+which mass is converted from iron into steel at one operation.
+
+Forty-five years ago, or less, works that could turn out fifty tons of
+iron in a day were very large. Now there are many that make _five
+hundred tons_ of steel in the same time. Then, nearly all the work
+was done by hand, and men in large numbers handled the details of all
+processes. Now it would be impossible for human hands and strength to do
+the work. The steel-mill is, indeed, the most colossal combination of
+Steam and Steel. There are tireless arms, moved by steam, insensible
+alike to monstrous strains and white heat, which seize the vast ingots
+and carry them to and fro, handling with incredible celerity the masses
+that were unknown to man before the invention of the Bessemer process.
+And all these operations are directed and controlled by a man who stands
+in one place, strangely yet not inappropriately named a "pulpit," by
+means of the hand-gear that gives them all to him like toys.
+
+No one who has seen a steel-mill in operation, can go away and really
+write a description of it; no artist or camera has ever made its
+portrait, yet it is the most impressive scene of the modern, the
+industrial, world. There is a "fervent heat," surpassing in its
+impressions all the descriptions of the Bible, and which destroys all
+doubt of fire with capacity to burn a world and "roll the heavens
+together as a scroll." There is a clang and clatter accompanying a
+marvelous order. There are clouds of steam. There are displays of sparks
+and glow surpassing all the pyrotechnics of art. Monstrous throats gasp
+for a draught of white-hot metal and take it at a gulp. Glowing masses
+are trundled to and fro. There are mountains of ore, disappearing in a
+night, and ever renewed. There is a railway system, and the huge masses
+are conveyed from place to place by locomotive engines. There is a water
+system that would supply a town. There may be miles of underground pipes
+bringing gas for fuel. Amid these scenes flit strong men, naked to the
+waist, unharmed in the red pandemonium, guiding every process,
+superintending every result; like other men, yet leading a life so
+strange that it is apparently impossible. The glowing rivers they
+escape; corruscating showers of flying white-hot metal do not fall upon
+them; the leaping, roaring, hungry, annihilating flames do not touch
+them; the gurgling streams of melted steel are their familiar
+playthings; yet they are but men.
+
+The "rolling" of these slabs and ingots into rails is a following
+operation still. The continuous rail is often more than a hundred feet
+in length, which is cut into three or four rails of thirty feet each,
+and it goes through every operation that makes it a "T" rail weighing
+ninety pounds to the yard with the single first heat. There are trains
+of rolls that will take in a piece of white-hot metal weighing six tons,
+and send it out in a long sheet three thirty-seconds of an inch thick
+and nearly ten feet wide. The first steel rails made in this country
+were made by the Chicago Rolling Mill Company, in May, 1865. Only six
+rails were then made, and these were laid in the tracks of the Chicago
+and North Western Railroad. It is said they lasted over ten years. The
+first nails, or tacks, were made of steel at Bridgewater, Mass., at
+about the same date.
+
+[Illustration: ROLLING INGOTS.]
+
+Some thirty years ago there were but two Bessemer converters in the
+United States, and the manufacture of steel did not reach then five
+hundred tons per annum. In 1890 the product was more than five million
+tons.
+
+In 1872 the price of steel was one hundred and eighty-six dollars per
+gross ton. It can be purchased now at varying prices less than thirty
+dollars per ton. The consumption of seventy millions of people is so
+great that it is difficult to imagine how so enormous a mass of almost
+imperishable material can be absorbed, and the latest figures show a
+consumption greatly in excess of those mentioned as the sum of
+manufactures.
+
+We turn again for the comparison without which all figures are valueless
+to the good year 1643, when the "General court" passed a resolve
+commending the great progress made in the manufacture of iron which they
+had licensed two years before, and granted the company still further
+privileges and immunities upon condition that it should furnish the
+people "with barre iron of all sorts for their use at not exceedynge
+twenty pounds per ton." We recall the first little piece of hollow ware
+made in America. We remember how old the old world is said to be and how
+long the tribes of men have plodded upon it, and then the picture
+appears of the progress that has grown almost under our eyes. The real
+Age of Steel began in 1865. It is not yet thirty years old. By
+comparison we are impressed with the fact that the real history of the
+metal is compressed into less than half an ordinary lifetime.
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF ELECTRICITY
+
+
+[Illustration: ERIPUIT CAELO FULMEN, SCEPTRUMQUE TYRANNIS.]
+
+There is a sense in which electricity may be said to be the youngest of
+the sciences. Its modern development has been startling. Its phenomena
+appear on every hand. It is almost literally true that the lighting has
+become the servant of man.
+
+But it is also the oldest among modern sciences. Its manifestations have
+been studied for centuries. So old is its story that it has some of the
+interest of a mediaeval romance; a romance that is true. Steam is gross,
+material, understandable, noisy. Its action is entirely comprehensible.
+The explosives, gunpowder, begriming the nations in all the wars since
+1350, nitroglycerine, oxygen and hydrogen in all the forms of their
+combination, seem to be gross and material, the natural, though
+ferocious, servants of mankind. But electricity floats ethereal, apart,
+a subtle essence, shining in the changing splendors of the aurora yet
+existent in the very paper upon which one writes; mysteriously
+everywhere; silent, unseen, odorless, untouchable, a power capable of
+exemplifying the highest majesty of universal nature, or of lighting the
+faint glow of the fragile insect that flies in the twilight of a summer
+night. Obedient as it has now been made by the ingenuity of modern man,
+docile as it may seem, obeying known laws that were discovered, not
+made, it yet remains shadowy, mysterious, impalpable, intangible,
+dangerous. It is its own avenger of the daring ingenuity that has
+controlled it. Touch it, and you die.
+
+Electricity was as existent when the splendid scenes described in
+Genesis were enacted before the poet's eye as it is now, and was
+entirely the same. Its very name is old. Before there were men there
+were trees. Some of these exuded gum, as trees do now, and this gum
+found a final resting place in the sea, either by being carried thither
+by the currents of the streams beside which those trees grew, or by the
+land on which they stood being submerged in some of the ancient changes
+and convulsions to which the world has been frequently subject. In the
+lapse of ages this gum, being indestructible in water, became a fossil
+beneath the waves, and being in later times cast up by storms on the
+shores of the Baltic and other seas, was found and gathered by men, and
+being beautiful, finally came to be cut into various forms and used as
+jewelry. One has but to examine his pipe-stem, or a string of yellow
+beads, to know it even now. It is amber. The ancient Greeks knew and
+used it as we do, and without any reference to what we now call
+"electricity" their name for it was ELEKTRON. The earliest mention of it
+is by Homer, a poet whose personality is so hidden in the mists of far
+antiquity that his actual existence as a single person has been doubted,
+and he mentions it in connection with a necklace made of it.
+
+But very early in human history, at least six hundred years before
+Christ, this elektron had been found to possess a peculiar property that
+was imagined to belong to it alone. It mysteriously attracted light
+bodies to it after it had been rubbed. Thales, the Franklin of his
+remote time, was the man who is said to have discovered this peculiar
+and mysterious quality of the yellow gum, and if it be true, to him must
+be conceded the unwitting discovery of electricity. It was the first
+step in a science that usurps all the prerogatives of the ancient gods.
+He recorded his discovery, and was impressed with awe by it, and
+accounted for the phenomenon he had observed by ascribing to the dull
+fossil a living soul. That is the unconscious impression still, after
+twenty-five hundred years have passed since Thales died; that hidden in
+the heart of electrical phenomena there is a weird sentience; what a
+Greek would consider something divine and immortal apart from matter.
+But neither Thales, nor Theophrastus, nor Pliny the elder, nor any
+ancient, could conceive of a fact but dimly guessed until the day of
+Franklin; that this secret of the silent amber was also that of the
+thunder-cloud, that the essence that drew to it a floating filament is
+also that which rends an oak, that had splintered their temples and
+statues, and had not spared even the image of Jupiter Tonans himself.
+The spectral lights which hung upon the masts of the ancient galleys of
+the Mediterranean were named Castor and Pollux, not electricity.
+Absolutely no discovery was made, though the religion of ancient Etruria
+was chiefly the worship of a spirit by them seen, but unknown; to us
+electrical science; a science chained, yet really unknown and still
+feared though chained. It is the story of this servitude only that is
+capable of being told, and the first weak bands were a hundred and
+forty-six years in forging; from the Englishman Gilbert's "_De
+Magnete_," to Franklin's Kite.
+
+During all this time, and to a great degree long after, electricity was
+a scientific toy. Experiences in the sparkling of the fur of cats, the
+knowledge that there were fishes that possessed a mysterious paralyzing
+power, and various common phenomena all attributable to some unknown
+common cause, did not greatly increase the sum of actual knowledge of
+the subject. There was no divination of what the future would bring, and
+not the least conception of actual and impending possibilities. When,
+finally, the greatest thinkers of their times began to investigate; when
+Boyle began to experiment, and even the transcendent genius of Newton
+stooped to enquiry; from the days of those giants down to those of the
+American provincial postmaster, Benjamin Franklin, a period of some
+seventy years, almost all the knowledge obtained was only useful in
+indicating how to experiment still further. So small was the knowledge,
+so aimless the long experimenting, that the discovery that not amber
+only, but other substances as well, possessed the electric quality when
+rubbed, was a notable advance in knowledge. Later, in 1792, it was found
+by Gray that certain substances possessed the power of carrying;
+"conducting" as we now term it; the mysterious fluid from one substance
+to another; from place to place. This discovery constituted an actual
+epoch in the history of the science, and justly, since this small
+beginning with a wet string and a cylinder of glass or a globe of
+sulphur was the first unwitting illustration of the net-work of wires
+now hanging all over the world. The next step was to find that all
+substances were not alike in a power to conduct a current; _i.e._,
+that there were "conductors" and "non-conductors," and all varying
+grades and powers between. The next discovery was that there were, as
+was then imagined, several kinds of electricity. This conclusion was
+incorrect, and its use was to lead at last to the discovery, by
+Franklin, that the many kinds were but two, and even these not kinds,
+but qualities, present always in the unchanging essence that is
+everywhere, and which are known to us now by the names that Franklin
+gave them; the _positive_ and _negative_ currents; one always
+present with the other, and in every phenomenon known to electrical
+science.
+
+Probably the first machine ever contrived for producing an electric
+current was made by a monk, a Scotch Benedictine named Gordon who lived
+at Erfurt, in Saxony. I shall have occasion, hereafter, to describe
+other machines for the same purpose, and this first contrivance is of
+interest by comparison. It was a cylinder of glass about eight inches
+long, with a wooden shaft in the center, the ends of which were passed
+through holes in side-pieces, and it is said to have been operated by
+winding a string around the shaft and drawing the ends of the string
+back and forth alternately.
+
+[Illustration: THE FIRST ELECTRICAL MACHINE.]
+
+The Franklinic machine, the modern glass disc fitted with combs,
+rubbers, bands and cranks, is nothing more in principle or manner of
+action than the first crude arrangement of the monk of Erfurt.
+
+All these experiments, and all that for many years followed, were made
+in electricity produced by friction; by rubbing some body like glass,
+sulphur or rosin. Many men took part in producing effects that were
+almost meaningless to them--the preliminaries to final results for us.
+Improved electrical machines were made, all seeming childish and
+inadequate now, and all wonderful in their day. There is a long list of
+immortal names connected with the slow development of the science, and
+among their experiments the seventeenth century passed away. Dufaye and
+the Abbe Nollet worked together about 1730, and mutually surprised each
+other daily. Guericke, better known as the inventor of the air-pump,
+made a sulphur-ball machine, often claimed to have been the first.
+Hawkesbee constructed a glass machine that was an improvement over that
+of Guericke. Stephen Gray unfolded the leading principles of the
+science, but without any understanding of their results as we now
+understand them. The next advance was made in finding a way to hold some
+of the electricity when gathered, and the toy which we know as the
+Leyden Jar surprised the scientific world. Its inventor, Professor
+Muschenbrock, wrote an account of it to R�aumur, and lacks language to
+express the terror into which his own experiments had thrown him. He had
+unwittingly accumulated, and had accidentally discharged, and had, for
+the first time in human experience, felt something of the shock the
+modern lineman dreads because it means death. He had toiled until he
+held the baleful genie in a glass vessel partially filled with water,
+and the sprite could not be seen. Accidentally he made a connection
+between the two surfaces of the jar, and declared that he did not
+recover from the experience for two days, and that nothing could induce
+him to repeat it. He had been touched by the lightning, and had not
+known it. [Footnote: The Leyden Jar has little place in the usefulness
+of modern electricity, and has no relationship with the modern so-called
+"Storage" Battery.]
+
+Then began the fakerism which attached itself to the science of
+electricity, and that has only measurably abandoned it in very late
+times. Itinerant electricians began to infest the cities of Europe,
+claiming medicinal and almost supernatural virtues for the mysterious
+shock of the Leyden Vial, and showing to gaping multitudes the quick and
+flashing blue spark which was, though no man knew it then, a miniature
+imitation of the bolt of heaven. That fact, verging as closely upon the
+sublimest power of nature as a man may venture to and live, was not even
+suspected until Franklin had invented a battery of such jars, and had
+performed hundreds of experiments therewith that finally established in
+his acute, though prosaic, mind the identity of his puny spark with that
+terrific flash that, until that time, had been regarded by all mankind
+as a direct and intentional expression of the power of Almighty God.
+
+Thus Franklin came into the field. He was an investigator who brought to
+his aid a singular capacity possessed by the very few; the capacity for
+an unbiased looking for the hidden reasons of things. There was no field
+too sacred or too old for his prying investigations and his private
+conclusions. He was, as much as any man ever is, an original thinker. He
+knew of all the electrical experiments of others, and they produced in
+his mind conclusions distinctly his own. He was, upon topics pertaining
+to the field of reason, experience and common sense, the clearest and
+most vigorous writer of his time save one, and such conclusions as he
+arrived at he knew how to promulgate and explain. All that Franklin
+discovered would but add to the tedium of the subject of electricity
+now, but from his time definitely dates the knowledge that of
+electricity, in all its developments, there is really but one kind,
+though for convenience sake we may commonly speak of two, or even more.
+He first gave the names by which they are still known to the two
+qualities of one current; a name of convenience only. He knew first a
+fact that still puzzles inquiry, and is still largely unknown--that
+electricity is not _created_, produced, manufactured, by any human
+means, and that all we may do, then or now, is to gather it from its
+measureless diffusion in the air, the world, or the spaces of the wide
+creation, and that, like "heat" and "cold," it is a relative term. He
+demonstrated that any body which has electricity gives it to any other
+body that has at the moment less. Before he had actually tried that
+celebrated experiment which is alone sufficient to give him place among
+the immortals, he had declared the theory upon which he made it to be
+true, and by reasoning, in an age that but dimly understood the force
+and conditions of inductive reason, had proved that lightning is but an
+electric spark. It seems hardly necessary to add that his theories were
+ridiculed by the most intelligent scientists of his time, and scoffed at
+even by the countrymen of Newton and Davy, the members of the Royal
+Society of England. Franklin was a provincial American, and had, in
+other fields than electricity, troubled the British placidity.
+
+[Illustration: B. FRANKLIN]
+
+Only one of these, a man named Collinson, saw any value in these
+researches of the provincial in the wilds of America. He published
+Franklin's letters to him. Buffon read them, and persuaded a friend to
+translate them into French. They were translated afterwards into many
+languages, and when in his isolation he did not even know it, the
+obscure printer, the country postmaster who kept his official accounts
+with his own hands, was the bearer of a famous name. He was assailed by
+the Nollet previously mentioned, and by a party of French philosophers,
+yet there arose, in his absence and without his knowledge, a party who
+called themselves distinctively "Franklinists."
+
+Then came the personal test of the truth of these theories that had been
+promulgated over Europe in the name of the unknown American. He was then
+forty-five years old, successful in his walk and well-known in his
+immediate locality, but by no means as prominent or famous among his
+neighbors as he was in Europe. He was not so fertile in resources as to
+be in any sense inspired, and had privately waited for the finishing of
+a certain spire in the little town of Philadelphia so that he might use
+it to get nearer to the clouds to demonstrate his theory of lightning.
+It was in June, 1752, that this great exemplar of the genius of
+common-sense descended to the trial of the experiment that was the
+simplest and the most ordinary and the most sublime; the commonest in
+conception and means yet the most famous in results; ever tried by man.
+He had grown impatient of delay in the matter of the spire, and hastily,
+as by a sudden thought, made a kite. It was merely a silk handkerchief
+whose four corners were attached to the points of two crossed sticks. It
+was only the idea that was great; the means were infantile. A thunder
+shower came over, and in an interval between sprinklings he took with
+him his son, and went by back ways and alleys to a shed in an open
+field. The two raised the kite as boys did then and do now, and stood
+within the shelter. There was a hempen string, and on this, next his
+hand, he had tied a bit of ribbon and an ordinary iron key. A cloud
+passed over without any indications of anything whatever. But it began
+to rain, and as the string became wet he noticed that the loose
+filaments were standing out from it, as he had often seen them do in his
+experiments with the electrical machine. He drew a spark from the key
+with his finger, and finally charged a Leyden jar from this key, and
+performed all the then known proof-experiments with the lightning drawn
+from heaven.
+
+It is manifest that the slightest indication of the presence of the
+current in the string was sufficient to have demonstrated the fact which
+Franklin sought to fix. But it would have been insufficient to the
+general mind. The demonstration required was absolute. Even among
+scientists of the first class less was then known about electricity and
+its phenomena, and the causes of them, than now is known by every child
+who has gone to school. No estimate of the boldness and value of
+Franklin's renowned experiment can be made without a full appreciation
+of his times and surroundings. He demonstrated that which was undreamed
+before, and is undoubted now. The wonders of one age have been the toys
+and tools of the next through the entire history of mankind. The meaning
+of the demonstration was deep; its results were lasting The
+experimenters thereafter worked with a knowledge that their
+investigations must, in a sense, include the universe. Perhaps the
+obscure man who had toyed with the lightnings himself but vaguely
+understood the real meaning of his temerity. For he had, as usual, an
+intensely practical purpose in view. He wished to find a way of "drawing
+from the heavens their lightnings, and conducting them harmless to the
+earth." He was the first inventor of a practical machine, for a useful
+purpose, with which electricity had to do. That machine was the
+lightning-rod. Whatever its purpose, mankind will not forget the simple
+greatness of the act. At this writing the statue of Franklin stands
+looking upward at the sky, a key in his extended hand, in the portico of
+a palace which contains the completest and most beautiful display of
+electrical appliances that was ever brought together, at the dawn of
+that Age of Electricity which will be noon with us within one decade.
+The science and art of the civilized world are gathered about him, and
+on the frieze above his head shines, in gold letters, that sentence
+which is a poem in a single line. "ERIPUIT CAELO FULMEN, SCEPTRUMQUE
+TYRANNIS." [Footnote: "He snatched the lightning from heaven, and the
+sceptre from tyrants."]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE MAN FRANKLIN.--Benjamin Franklin was born at Boston, Mass., Jan.
+17th, 1706. His father was a chandler, a trade not now known by that
+term, meaning a maker of soaps and candles. Benjamin was the fifteenth
+of a family of seventeen children. He was so much of the same material
+with other boys that it was his notion to go to sea, and to keep him
+from doing so he was apprenticed to his brother, who was a printer. To
+be apprenticed then was to be absolutely indentured; to belong to the
+master for a term of years. Strangely enough, the boy who wanted to be a
+sailor was a reader and student, captivated by the style of the
+_Spectator_, a model he assiduously cultivated in his own extensive
+writings afterwards. He was not assisted in his studies, and all he ever
+knew of mathematics he taught himself. Being addicted to literature by
+natural proclivity he inserted his own articles in his brother's
+newspaper, and these being very favorably commented upon by the local
+public, or at least noticed and talked about, his authorship of them was
+discovered, and this led to a quarrel between the two brothers.
+Nevertheless, when James, the elder brother, was imprisoned for alleged
+seditious articles printed by him, the paper was for a time issued in
+young Benjamin's name. But the quarrel continued, the boy was imposed
+upon by his master, and brother, as naturally as might have been
+expected under the circumstances of the younger having the monopoly of
+all the intellectual ability that existed between the two, and in 1723,
+being then only seventeen, he broke his indentures, a heinous offense in
+those times, and ran away, first to New York and then to Philadelphia,
+where he found employment as a journeyman printer. He had attained a
+skill in the business not usual at the time.
+
+The boy had, up to this time, read everything that came into his hands.
+A book of any kind had a charm for him. His father observing this had
+intended him for the ministry, that being the natural drift of a pious
+father's mind in the time of Franklin's youth, when he discovered any
+inclination to books on the part of a son. But, later, he would neglect
+the devotions of the Sabbath if he had found a book, notwithstanding the
+piety of his family. Sometimes he distressed them further by neglecting
+his meals, or sitting up at night, for the same reason. There is no
+question that young Franklin was a member of that extensive fraternity
+now known as "cranks." [Footnote: Most people, then and now, can point
+to people of their acquaintance whom they hold in regard as originals or
+eccentrics. It is a somewhat dubious title for respect, even with us who
+are reckoned so eccentric a nation. And yet all the great inventions
+which have done so much for civilization have been discovered by
+eccentrics--that is, by men who stepped out of the common groove; who
+differed more or less from other men in their habits and ideals.] He
+read a book advocating exclusive subsistence upon a vegetable diet and
+immediately adopted the idea, remaining a disciple of vegetarianism for
+several years. But there is another reason hinted. He saved money by the
+vegetable scheme, and when his printer's lunch had consisted of
+"biscuits (crackers) and water" for some days, he had saved money enough
+to buy a new book.
+
+This young printer, who, at school, in the little time he attended one,
+had "failed entirely in mathematics," could assimilate "Locke on the
+Understanding," and appreciate a translation of the Memorabilia of
+Xenophon. Even after his study of this latter book he had a fondness for
+the calm reasoning of Socrates, and wished to imitate him in his manner
+of reasoning and moralizing. There is no question but that the great
+heathen had his influence across the abyss of time upon the mind of a
+young American destined also to fill, in many respects, the foremost
+place in his country's history. There was one, at least, who had no
+premonition of this. His brother chastised him before he had been
+imprisoned, and after he had begun to attract attention as a writer in
+one of the only two newspapers then printed in America, and beat him
+again after he was released, having meantime been vigorously defended by
+his apprentice editorially while he languished. To have beaten Benjamin
+Franklin with a stick, when he was seventeen years old, seems an absurd
+anti-climax in American history. But it is true, and when the young man
+ran away there was still another odd episode in a great career.
+
+Upon his first arrival in Philadelphia as a runaway apprentice, with one
+piece of money in his pocket, occurs the one gleam of romance in
+Franklin's seemingly Socratic life. He says he walked in Market Street
+with a baker's loaf under each arm, with all his shirts and stockings
+bulging in his pockets, and eating a third piece of bread as he walked,
+and this on a Sunday morning. Under these circumstances he met his
+future wife, and he seems to have remembered her when next he met her,
+and to have been unusually prepossessed with her, because on the first
+occasion she had laughed at him going by. He was one of those whose
+sense of humor bears them through many difficulties, and who are even
+attracted by that sense in others. He was, at this period, absurd
+without question. Having eaten all the bread he could, and bestowed the
+remainder upon another voyager, he drank out of the Delaware and went to
+church; that is, he sat down upon a bench in a Quaker meeting-house and
+went to sleep, and was admonished thence by one of the brethren at the
+end of the service.
+
+Franklin had, in the time of his youth, the usual experiences in
+business. He made a journey to London upon promises of great advancement
+in business, and was entirely disappointed, and worked at his trade in
+London. Afterwards, during the return voyage to America, he kept a
+journal, and wrote those celebrated maxims for his own guidance that are
+so often quoted. The first of these is the gem of the collection: "I
+resolve to be extremely frugal for some time, until I pay what I owe." A
+second resolve is scarcely less deserving of imitation, for it declares
+it to be his intention "to speak all the good I know of everybody." It
+must be observed that Franklin was afterwards the great maximist of his
+age, and that his life was devoted to the acquisition of worldly wisdom.
+In his body of philosophy there is included no word of confidence in the
+condemnation of offenses by the act or virtue of another, no promise of,
+or reference to, the rewards of futurity.
+
+When about twenty-one years of age, we find this old young man tired of
+a drifting life and many projects, and desiring to adopt some occupation
+permanently. He had courted the girl who had laughed at him, and then
+gone to England and forgotten her. She had meantime married another man,
+and was now a widow. In 1730 he married her. Meantime, entering into the
+printing business on his own account, he often trundled his paper along
+the streets in a wheelbarrow, and was intensely occupied with his
+affairs. His acquisitive mind was never idle, and in 1732 he began the
+publication of the celebrated "Poor Richard's Almanac." This was among
+the most successful of all American publications, was continued for
+twenty-five years, and in the last issue, in 1757, he collected the
+principal matter of all preceding numbers, and the issue was extensively
+republished in Great Britain, was translated into several foreign
+languages, and had a world-wide circulation. He was also the publisher
+of a newspaper, _The Pennsylvania Gazette_, which was successful
+and brought him into high consideration as a leader of public opinion in
+times which were beginning to be troubled by the questions that finally
+brought about a separation from the mother country.
+
+Time and space would fail in anything like a detailed account of the
+life of this remarkable man. His only son, the boy who was with him at
+the flying of the kite, was an illegitimate child, and it is a
+remarkable instance of unlikeness that this only son became a royalist
+governor of New Jersey, was never an American in feeling, and removed to
+England and died there. The sum of Franklin's life is that he was a
+statesman, a financier of remarkable ability, a skillful diplomat, a
+law-maker, a powerful and felicitous writer though without imagination
+or the literary instinct, and a controversialist who seldom, if ever,
+met his equal. He was always a printer, and at no period of his great
+career did he lose his affection for the useful arts and common
+interests of mankind. He is the founder of the American Philosophical
+Society, and of a college which grew into the present University of
+Pennsylvania. To him is due the origin of a great hospital which is
+still doing beneficent work. He raised, and caused to be disciplined,
+ten thousand men for the defense of the country. He was a successful
+publisher of the literature of the common people, yet a literature that
+was renowned. He could turn his attention to the improvement of
+chimneys, and invented a stove still in use, and still bearing his name
+as the author of its principle. [Footnote: The stove was not used in
+Franklin's time to any extent. The "Franklin Stove" was a fireplace so
+far as the advantages were concerned, such as ventilation and the
+pleasure of an open fire. But it also radiated heat from the back and
+sides as well as the front, and was intended to sit further out into a
+room; to be both fireplace and stove.] He organized the postal system of
+the United States before the Union existed. He was a signer of the
+Declaration of Independence. He sailed as commissioner to France at the
+age of seventy-one, and gave all his money to his country on the eve of
+his departure, yet died wealthy for his time. Serene, even-tempered,
+philosophical, he was yet far-seeing, care-taking, sagacious, and
+intensely industrious. He acquired a knowledge of the Italian and
+Spanish languages, and was a proficient French speaker and writer. He
+possessed, in an extraordinary degree, the power of gaining the regard,
+even the affection, of his fellow-men. He was even a competent musician,
+mastering every subject to which his attention was turned; and
+province-born and reared in the business of melting tallow and setting
+types, without collegiate education, he shone in association with the
+men and women who had place in the most brilliant epoch of French
+intellectual history. At fourscore years he performed the work that
+would have exhausted a man of forty, and at the same time wrote, for
+mere amusement, sketches such as the "Dialogue between Franklin and the
+Gout," and added, with the cool philosophy of all his life still
+lingering about his closing hours: "When I consider how many terrible
+diseases the human body is liable to, I think myself well off that I
+have only three incurable ones, the gout, the stone, and old age."
+
+[Illustration: THE FRANKLIN STOVE.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Franklin, electrical experiments went on with varying results,
+confined within what now seems to have been a very narrow field, until
+1790. The great facts outside of the startling disclosure made by
+Franklin's experiments remained unknown. It was another forty years of
+amused and interested playing with a scientific toy. But in that year
+the key to the _utility_ of electricity was found by one Galvani.
+He was not an electrician at all, but a professor of anatomy in the
+university of Bologna. It may be mentioned in passing that he never knew
+the weight or purport of his own discovery, and died supposing and
+insisting that the electric fluid he fancied he had discovered had its
+origin in the animal tissues. Misapprehending all, he was yet
+unconsciously the first experimenter in what we, for convenience,
+designate _dynamic_ electricity. He knew only of _animal_
+electricity, and called it by that name; a misnomer and a mistake of
+fact, and the cause of an early scientific quarrel the promoting of
+which was the actual reason of the advance that was made in the science
+following his accidental and enormously important discovery.
+
+There are many stories of the details of the ordinarily entirely
+unimportant circumstances that led to _Galvanism_ and the
+_Galvanic Battery_. Volta actually made this battery, then known as
+the Voltaic Pile, but he made it because of Galvani's discovery. The
+reader is requested to bear these names in mind; Galvani and Volta. They
+have a unique claim upon us. With others that will follow, they have
+descended to all posterity in the immortal nomenclature of the science
+of electricity. It is through the accidental discovery of the plodding
+demonstrator of anatomy in a medical college, a man who died at last in
+poverty and in ignorance of the meaning of his own work, that we have
+now the vast web of telegraph and telephone wires that hangs above the
+paths of men in every civilized country, and the cables that lie in the
+ooze of the oceans from continent to continent. His discovery was the
+result of one of the commonest incidents of domestic life. Variously
+described by various writers, the actual circumstance seems reducible to
+this.
+
+In Galvani's kitchen there was an iron railing, and immediately above
+the railing some copper hooks, used for the purpose of hanging thereon
+uncooked meats. His wife was an invalid, and wishing to tempt her
+appetite he had prepared a frog by skinning it, and had hung it upon one
+of the copper hooks. The only use intended to be asked of this renowned
+batrachian was the making of a little broth. Another part of the skinned
+anatomy touched the iron rail below, and the anatomist observed that
+this casual contact produced a convulsive twitching of the dead
+reptile's legs. He groped about this fact for many years. He fancied he
+had discovered the principle of life. He made the phenomenon to hang
+upon the facts clustering about his own profession, familiar to him, and
+about which it was natural for him to think. He promulgated theories
+about it that are all now absurd, however tenable then. His was an
+instance of how the fatuities of men in all the fields of science, faith
+or morals, have often led to results as extraordinary as they have been
+unexpected. That he died in poverty in 1798 is a mere human fact. That
+in this life he never knew is merely another. It is but a part of that
+sadness that, through life, and, indeed, through all history, hangs over
+the earthly limitations of the immortal mind.
+
+Volta, his contemporary and countryman, finally solved the problem as to
+the reason why. and made that "Voltaic Pile" which came to be our modern
+"battery." Acting upon the hint given by Galvani's accident, this pile
+was made of thin sheets of metal, say of copper and zinc, laid in series
+one above the other, with a piece of cloth wet with dilute acid
+interposed between each sheet and the next. The sheets were connected at
+the edges in pairs, a sheet of zinc to a sheet of copper, and the pile
+began with a sheet of one metal and ended with one of the other. It is
+to be noted that a single pair would have produced the same result as a
+hundred pairs, only more feebly. A single large pair is, indeed, the
+modern electric battery of one cell. The beginning and the ending sheets
+of the Voltaic pile were connected by a wire, through which the current
+passed. We, in our commonest industrial battery, use the two pieces of
+metal with the fluid between. The metals are usually copper and zinc,
+and the fluid is water in which is dissolved sulphate of copper. The
+wire connection we make hundreds of miles long, and over this wire
+passes the current. If we part this wire the current ceases. If we join
+it again we instantly renew it. There are many forms of this battery.
+The two metals, the _electrodes_, are not necessarily zinc and
+copper and no others. The acidulated fluid is not invariably water with
+sulphate of copper dissolved in it. Yet in all modifications the same
+thing is done in essentially the same way, and the Voltaic pile, and a
+little back of that Galvani's frog, is the secret of the telegraph, the
+telephone, the telautograph, the cable message. In the case of Galvani's
+frog, the fluids of the recently killed body furnished the liquid
+containing the acid, the copper hook and the iron railing furnished the
+dissimilar metals, and the nerves and muscles of the frog's body,
+connecting the two metals, furnished the wire. They were as good as
+Franklin's wet string was. The effect of the passage of a current of
+electricity through a muscle is to cause it to spasmodically contract,
+as everyone knows who has held the metallic handles of an ordinary small
+battery. Many years passed before the mystery that has long been plain
+was solved by acute minds. Galvani thought he saw the electric quality
+_in the tissues of the_ frog. Volta came to see them as produced
+_by chemical action upon two dissimilar metals_. The first could
+not maintain his theories against facts that became apparent in the
+course of the investigations of several years, yet he asserted them with
+all the pertinacious conservatism of his profession, which it has
+required ages to wear away, and died poor and unhonored. The other
+became a nobleman and a senator, and wore medals and honors. It is a
+world in which success alone is seen, and in which it may be truthfully
+said that the contortions of an eviscerated and unconscious frog upon a
+casual hook were the not very remote cause of the greatest advancements
+and discoveries of modern civilization.
+
+Yet the mystery is not yet entirely explained. In the study of
+electricity we are accustomed to accept demonstrated facts as we find
+them. When it is asked _how_ a battery acts, what produces the
+mysterious current, the only answer that can now be given is that it is
+_by the conversion of the energy of chemical affinity into the energy
+of electrical vibrations_. Many mixtures produce heat. The
+explanation can be no clearer than that for electricity. Electricity and
+heat are both _forms of energy_, and, indeed, are so similar that
+one is almost synonymous with the other. The enquiry into the original
+sources of energy, latent but present always, will, when finally
+answered, give us an insight into mysteries that we can only now infer
+are reserved for that hereafter, here or elsewhere, which it is part of
+our nature to believe in and hope for. The theory of electrical
+vibrations is explained elsewhere as the only tenable one by which to
+account for electrical action. One may also ask how fire burns, or,
+rather, why a burning produces what we call "heat," and the actual
+question cannot be answered. The action of fire in consuming fuel, and
+the action of chemicals in consuming metals, are similar actions. They
+each result in the production of a new form of energy, and of energy in
+the form of vibrations. In the action of fire the vibrations are
+irregular and spasmodic; in electricity they are controlled by a certain
+rhythm or regularity. Between heat and electricity there is apparently
+only this difference, and they are so similar, and one is so readily
+converted into the other, that it is a current scientific theory that
+one is only a modified form of the other. Many acute minds have
+reflected upon the problem of how to convert the latent energy of coal
+into the energy of electricity without the interposition of the steam
+engine and machinery. There apparently exist reasons why the problem
+will never be solved. There is no intelligence equal to answering the
+question as to precisely where the heat came from, or how it came, that
+instantly results upon the striking of a common match. It was
+_evolved_ through friction. The means were necessary. Friction, or
+its precise equivalent in energy, must occur. The result is as strange,
+and in the same manner strange, as any of the phenomena of electricity.
+Precisely here, in the beginning of the study of these phenomena, the
+student should be warned that an attitude of wonder or of awe is not one
+of enquiry. The demonstrations of electricity are startling chiefly for
+three reasons: newness, silence, and inconceivable rapidity of action.
+Let one hold a wire in one's hand six or eight inches from the end, and
+then insert that end into the flame of a gas-jet. It is as old as human
+experience that that part of the wire which is not in the flame finally
+grows hot, and burns one's fingers. A change has taken place in the
+molecules of the wire that is not visible, is noiseless, and that has
+_traveled along the wire_. It excites neither wonder nor remark. No
+one asks the reason why. Yet it cannot be explained except by some
+theory more or less tenable, and the phenomenon, in kind though not in
+degree, is as unaccountable as anything in the magic of electricity. In
+a true sense there is, nothing supernatural, or even wonderful, in all
+the vast universe of law. If we would learn the facts in regard to
+anything, it must be after we have passed the stage of wonder or of
+reverence in respect to it. That which was the "Voice of God"--as truly,
+in a sense, it was and is--until Franklin's day, has since been a
+concussion of the air, an echo among the clouds, the passage of an
+electric discharge. It is the first lesson for all those who would
+understand.
+
+The time had now come when that which had seemed a lawless wonder should
+have its laws investigated, formulated and explained. A man named
+Coulomb, a Frenchman, is the author of a system of measurements of the
+electric current, and he it was who discovered that the action of
+electricity varies, not with the distance, but, like gravity, _in the
+inverse ratio of the square of the distance_. Coulomb was the maker
+of the first instrument for measuring a current, which was known as the
+_torsion balance_. The results of his practical investigations made
+easier the practical application of electrical power as we now use it,
+though he foresaw nothing of that application; and the engineer of
+to-day applies his laws, and those of his fellow scientists, as those
+which do not fail. Volta was one of these, and he also furnished, as
+will hereafter be seen, a name for one of the units of electrical
+measurement.
+
+Both Galvani and Volta passed into shadow, when, in 1820, Professor H.
+C. Oersted, of Copenhagen, discovered the law upon which were afterwards
+slowly built the electrical appliances of modern life. It was the great
+principle of INDUCTION. The student of electricity may begin here if he
+desires to study only results, and is not interested in effects, causes,
+and the pains and toils which led to those results. The term may seem
+obscure, and is, doubtless, as a name, the result of a sudden idea; but
+upon induction and its laws the simplest as well as the most complicated
+of our modern electrical appliances depend for a reason for action. Its
+discovery set Amp�re to work. They had all imagined previously that
+there was some connection between electricity and magnetism, and it was
+this idea that instigated the investigations of Ampere. It was imagined
+that the phenomena of electricity were to be explained by magnetism.
+This was not untrue, but it was only a part of the truth. Ampere proved
+that _magnetism could also readily be produced by a current of
+electricity_. From this idea, practically carried out, grew the
+ELECTRO MAGNET, and to Amp�re we are indebted for the actual discovery
+of the elementary principles of what we now call electrodynamics, or
+dynamic electricity, [Footnote: In all science there is a continual
+going back to the past for a means of expression for things whose
+application is most modern. _Dynamic_; DYNAMO, is the Greek word
+for power; to be able. Once established, these names are seldom
+abandoned. There is no more reason for calling our electrical
+power-producing machine a "Dynamo" than there would be in so designating
+a steam engine or a water-wheel. But, a term of general significance if
+used at all, it has come to be the special designation of that one
+machine. It is brief, easily said, and to the point, but is in no way
+necessarily connected with _electrical_ power distinctively.] in
+which are included the Dynamo, and its twin and indispensable, the
+Motor. Amp�re is also the author of the _molecular theory_, by
+which alone, with our present knowledge, can the action of electricity
+be explained in connection with the iron core which is made a magnet by
+the current, and left again a mere piece of iron when the current is
+interrupted. Ten years later Faraday explained and applied the laws of
+Induction, basing them upon the demonstrations of Amp�re. The use of a
+core of soft iron, magnetized by the passage of a current through a
+helix of wire wrapping it as the thread does a spool, is the
+indispensable feature, in some form meaning the same thing, with the
+same results, in all machines that are given movement to by an electric
+current. This is the electro-magnet. It is made a magnet not by actual
+contact, or by being made the conductor of a current, but by being
+placed in the "electrical field" and temporarily magnetized by
+induction.
+
+Faraday began his brilliant series of experiments in 1831. To express
+briefly the laws of action under which he worked, he wrote the
+celebrated statement of the Law of Magnetic Force. He proved that the
+current developed by induction is the same in all its qualities with
+other currents, and, indeed, demonstrated Franklin's theory that all
+electricity is the same; that, as to _kind_, there is but one. All
+electrical action is now viewed from the Faradic position.
+
+The story of electricity, as men studied it in the primary school of the
+science, ends where Faraday began. Under the immutable laws he
+discovered and formulated we now enter the field of result, of action,
+of commercial interest and value. We might better say the field of
+usefulness, since commercial value is but another expression for
+usefulness. A revolution has been wrought in all the ways and thoughts
+of men since a date which a man less than sixty years old can recall.
+The laws under which the miracle has been wrought existed from all
+eternity. They were discovered but yesterday. Progress, the destiny of
+man, has kept pace in other fields. We live our time in our predestined
+day, learning and knowing, like grown-up children, what we may. In a
+future whose distance we may not even guess, the children of men shall
+reap the full fruition of the prophesy that has grown old in waiting,
+and "shall be as gods, knowing good from evil."
+
+
+
+
+MODERN ELECTRICITY
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+Electricity, in all its visible exhibitions, has certain unvarying
+qualities. Some of these have been mentioned in the preceding chapter.
+Others will appear in what is now to follow. These qualities or habits,
+invariable and unchangeable, are, briefly:
+
+(1) It has the unique power of drawing, "attracting" other objects at a
+distance.
+
+(2) For all human uses it is instantaneous in action, through a
+conductor, at any distance. A current might be sent around the world
+while the clock ticked twice.
+
+(3) It has the power of decomposing chemicals (Electrolysis), and it
+should be remembered that even water is a chemical, and that substances
+composed of one pure organic material are very rare.
+
+(4) It is readily convertible into heat in a wire or other conductor.
+
+These four qualities render its modern uses possible, and should be
+remembered in connection with what is presently to be explained.
+
+These uses are, in application, the most startling in the entire history
+of civilization. They have come about, and their applications have been
+made effective, within twenty years, and largely within ten. This
+subtlest and most elusive essence in nature, not even now entirely
+understood, is a part of common life. Some years ago we began to spell
+our thoughts to our fellow-men across land and sea with dots and dashes.
+Within the memory of the present high school boy we began to talk with
+each other across the miles. Now there is no reason why we shall not
+begin to write to each other letters of which the originals shall never
+leave our hands, yet which shall stand written in a distant place in our
+own characters, indisputably signed by us with our own names. We
+apparently produce out of nothing but the whirling of a huge bobbin of
+wire any power we may wish, and send it over a thin wire to where we
+wish to use it, though every adult can remember when the difficulty of
+distance, in the propelling of machinery, was thought to have been
+solved to the satisfaction of every reasonable man by the making of wire
+cables that would transmit power between grooved wheels a distance of
+some hundreds of feet. We turn night into day with the glow of lamps
+that burn without flame, and almost without heat, whose mysterious glow
+is fed from some distant place, that hang in clusters, banners, letters,
+in city streets, and that glow like new stars along the treeless prairie
+horizon where thirty years ago even the beginnings of civilization were
+unknown. Yet the mysterious agent has not changed. It is as it was when
+creation began to shape itself out of chaos and the abyss. Men have
+changed in their ability to reason, to deduce, to discover, and to
+construct. To know has become a part of the sum of life; to understand
+or to abandon is the rule. When the ages of tradition, of assertion
+without the necessity for proof, of content with all that was and was
+right or true because it was a standard fixed, went by, the age not
+necessarily of steam, or of steel, or of electricity, but the age of
+thought, came in. Some of the results of this thought, in one of the
+most prominent of its departments, I shall attempt to describe.
+
+A wire is the usual concomitant in all electrical phenomena. It is
+almost the universally used conductor of the current. In most cases it
+is of copper, as pure as it can be made in the ordinary course of
+manufacture. There are other metals that conduct an electrical current
+even better than copper does, but they happen to be expensive ones, such
+as silver. The usual telegraph-line is efficient with only iron wire.
+
+We habitually use the words "conductor" and "conduct" in reference to
+the electric current. A definition of that common term may be useful. It
+is a relative one. _A conductor is any substance whose atoms, or
+molecules, have the power of conveying to each other quickly their
+electricities_. Before the common use of electricity we were
+accustomed to commonly speak of conductors of heat; good, or poor. The
+same meaning is intended in speaking of conductors of electricity.
+_Non-conductors are those whose molecules only acquire this power
+under great pressure_. Electricity always takes the _easiest_
+road, not necessarily the shortest. This is the path that electricians
+call that of "least resistance." There are no absolutely perfect
+conductors, and there are no substances that may be called absolutely
+non-conductors. A non-conductor is simply a reluctant, an excessively
+slow, conductor. In all electrical operations we look first for these
+two essentials: a good conductor and a good non-conductor. We want the
+latter as supports and attachments for the first. If we undertake to
+convey water in a pipe we do not wish the pipe to leak. In conveying
+electricity upon a wire we have a little leak wherever we allow any
+other conductor to come too near, or to touch, the wire carrying the
+current. These little electrical leaks constantly exist. All nature is
+in a conspiracy to take it wherever it can find it, and from everything
+which at the moment has more than some other has, or more than its share
+with reference to the air and the world, of the mysterious essence that
+is in varying quantities everywhere. Glass is the usual non-conductor in
+daily use. A glance at the telegraph poles will explain all that has
+just been said. Water in large quantity or widely diffused is a fair
+conductor. Therefore, the glass insulators on the telegraph-poles are
+cup-shaped usually on the under side where the pin that holds them is
+inserted, so that the rain may not actually wet this pin, and thus make
+a water-connection between the wire, glass, pin, pole and ground.
+
+We are accustomed to things that are subject to the law of gravity.
+Water will run through a pipe that slants downward. It will pass through
+a pipe that slants upward only by being pushed. But electricity, in its
+far journeys over wires, is not subject to gravity. It goes
+indifferently in any direction, asking only a conductor to carry it.
+There is also a trait called _inertia_; that property of all matter
+by which it tends when at rest to remain so, and when in motion to
+continue in motion, which we meet at every step we take in the material
+world. Electricity is again an exception. It knows neither gravity, nor
+inertia, nor material volume, nor space. It cannot be contained or
+weighed. Nothing holds it in any ordinary sense. It is difficult to
+express in words the peculiar qualities that caused the early
+experimenters to believe it had a soul. It is never idle, and in its
+ceaseless journeyings it makes choice of its path by a conclusion that
+is unerring and instantaneous.
+
+We find that it is the constant endeavor of electricity to _equalize
+its quantities and its two qualities, in all substances that are near it
+that are capable of containing it_. To this end, seemingly by
+definite intention, it is found on the outsides of things containing it.
+It gathers on the surfaces of all conductors. If there are knobs or
+points it will be found in them, ready to leap off. When any electrified
+body is approached by a conductor, the fluid will gather on the side
+where the approach is made. If in any conductor the current is weak,
+very little of it, if any, will go off into the conductor before actual
+contact is made. If it is strong, it will often leap across the space
+with a spark. One body may be charged with positive, and another with
+negative, electricity. There is then a disposition to equalize that
+cannot be easily repressed. The positive and the negative will assume
+their dual functions, their existence together, in spite of obstacles.
+So as to quantity. That which has most cannot be restrained from
+imparting to that which has less. The demonstration of these facts
+belongs to the field of experimental, or laboratory, electricity. The
+most common of the visible experiments is on a vast scale. It is the
+thunder-storm. Mother Earth is the great depository of the fluid. The
+heavy clouds, as they gather, are likewise full. Across the space that
+lies between the exchange takes place--the lightning-flash.
+
+In the preceding chapter I have hastily alluded to the phenomenon known
+as the key to electricity as a utilitarian science; a means of material
+usefulness. These uses are all made possible under the laws of what we
+term INDUCTION. To comprehend this remarkable feature of electric
+action, it must first be understood that all electrical phenomena occur
+in what has been termed an "_Electrical Field_" This field may be
+illustrated simply. A wire through which a current is passing _is
+always surrounded by a region of attractive force_. It is
+scientifically imagined to exist in the form of rings around the wire.
+In this field lie what are termed "lines of force." The law as stated is
+that the lines in which the magnetism produced by electricity acts
+_are always at right angles with the direction in which the current is
+passing_. Let us put this in ordinary phrase, and say that in a wire
+through which a current is passing there is a magnetic attraction, and
+that the "pull" is always _straight toward the wire_. This
+magnetism in a wire, when it is doubled up and multiplied sufficiently,
+has strong powers of attraction. This multiplying is accomplished by
+winding the wire into a compact coil and passing a current through it.
+If one should wind insulated wire around a core, or cylinder, and should
+then pull out the cylinder and attach the two ends of the wire to the
+opposite poles of a battery, when the current passed through the coil
+the hollow interior of it would be a strong magnetic field. The air
+inside might be said to be a magnet, though if there were no air there,
+and the coil were under the exhausted receiver of an air-pump, the
+effect would be the same, and the _vacuum_ would be magnetized. A
+piece of iron inserted where the core was, would instantly become a
+magnet, and when the insulated wire is wound around a soft iron core,
+and the core is left in place, we have at once what is known as an
+_Electro-Magnet_.
+
+The wire windings of an electro-magnet are always insulated; wound with
+a non-conductor, like silk or cotton; so that the coils may not touch
+each other in the winding and thus permit the current to run off through
+contact by the easiest way, and cut across and leave most of the coil
+without a current. For it may as well be stated now that no matter how
+good a conductor a wire may be, two qualities of it cause what is called
+"_resistance_"--the current does not pass so easily. These two
+qualities are _thinness_ and _length_. The current will not
+traverse all the length of a long coil if it can pass straight through
+the same mass, and it is made to go the long way _by keeping the wires
+from touching each other_--preventing "contact," and lessening the
+opportunity to jump off which electricity is always looking for.
+
+When this coil is wound in layers, like the thread upon a spool, it
+increases the intensity of the magnetism in the core by as many times as
+there are coils, up to a certain point. If the core is merely soft iron,
+and not steel, it becomes magnetized instantly, as stated, and will draw
+another piece of iron to it with a snap, and hold it there as long as
+there is a current passing through the coil. But as instantly, when the
+current is stopped, this soft iron core ceases to be a magnet, and
+becomes as it was before--an inert and ordinary piece of iron. What has
+just been described is always, in some form, one of the indispensable
+parts of the electromagnetic machines used in industrial electricity,
+and in all of them except the appliances of electric lighting, and even
+in that case it is indispensable in producing the current which consumes
+the points of the carbon, or heats the filament to a white glow. The
+current may traverse the wire for a hundred miles to reach this little
+coil. But, instantly, at a touch a hundred miles away that forms a
+contact, there is a continuous "circuit;" the core becomes a magnet, and
+the piece of iron near it is drawn suddenly to it. Remove the distant
+finger from the button, the contact is broken, and the piece of iron
+immediately falls away again. It is the wonder of _the production of
+instant movement at any distance, without any movement of any connecting
+part_. It is a mysterious and incredible transmission of force not
+included among human possibilities forty years ago. It is now common,
+old, familiar. Conceive of its possibilities, of its annihilation of
+time and space, of its distant control, and of that which it is made to
+mean and represent in the spelled-out words of language, and it still
+remains one of the wonders of the world: the Electric Telegraph.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+MAGNETS AND MAGNETISM.--Having described a magnet that is made and
+unmade at will, it may be appropriate to describe magnets generally. The
+ordinary, permanent magnet, natural or artificial, has little place in
+the arts. It cannot be controlled. In common phrase, it cannot be made
+to "let go" at will. The greatest value of magnetism, as connected with
+electricity, consists in the fact of the intimate relationship of the
+two. A magnet may be made at will with the electric current, as
+described above. A little later we shall see how the process may be
+reversed, and the magnet be made to produce the most powerful current
+known, and yet owe its magnetism to the same current.
+
+The word _Magnet_ comes from the country of _Magnesia_, where
+"loadstone" (magnetic iron ore) seems first to have been found. The
+artificial magnet, as made and used in early experiments and still
+common as a toy or as a piece in some electrical appliances, is a piece
+of fine steel, of hard temper, which has been magnetized, usually by
+having had a current passed through or around it, and sometimes by
+contact with another magnet. For the singular property of a magnet is
+that it may continually impart its quality, yet never lose any of its
+own. Steel alone, of all the metals, has the decided quality of
+retaining its property of being a magnet. A "bar" magnet is a straight
+piece of steel magnetized. A "horseshoe" magnet is a bar magnet bent
+into the form of the letter "U."
+
+Every magnet has two "poles"--the positive, or North pole, and the
+negative, or South pole. If any magnet, of any size, and having as one
+piece two poles only, be cut into two, or a hundred pieces, each
+separate piece will be like the original magnet and have its two poles.
+The law is arbitrary and invariable under all circumstances, and is a
+law of nature, as unexplainable and as invariable as any in that
+mysterious code. All bar magnets, when suspended by their centers, turn
+their ends to the North and South, a familiar example of this being the
+ordinary compass. But in magnetism, _like repels like_. The world
+is a huge magnet. The pole of the magnet which points to the North is
+not the North pole of the needle as we regard it, but the opposite, the
+South.
+
+No one can explain precisely why iron, the purer and softer the better,
+becomes a powerful and effective magnet under the influence of the
+current, and instantly loses that character when the current ceases, and
+why steel, the purer and harder the better, at first rejects the
+influence, and comes slowly under it, but afterwards retains it
+permanently. Iron and steel are the magnetic metals, but there is a
+considerable list of metals not magnetic that are better than they as
+_conductors_ of the electric current. In a certain sense they are
+also the electric metals. A Dynamo, or Motor, made of brass or copper
+entirely would be impossible. All the phenomena of combined magnetism
+and electricity, all that goes to make up the field of industrial
+electric action, would be impossible without the indispensable of
+ordinary iron, and for the sole reason that it possesses the peculiar
+qualities, the affinities, described.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is now an understanding of the electro-magnet, with some idea of
+the part it may be made to play in the movement of pieces, parts, and
+machines in which it is an essential. It has been explained how soft
+iron becomes a magnet, not necessarily by any actual contact with any
+other magnet, or by touching or rubbing, but by being placed in an
+electric field. It acquired its magnetism by induction; by _drawing
+in_ (since that is the meaning of the term) the electricity that was
+around it. But induction has a still wider field, and other
+characteristics than this alone. Some distinct idea of these may be
+obtained by supposing a simple case, in which I shall ask the reader to
+follow me.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM THEORY OF INDUCTION]
+
+Let us imagine a wire to be stretched horizontally for a little space,
+and its two ends to be attached to the two poles of an ordinary battery
+so that a current may pass through it. Another wire is stretched beside
+the first, not touching it, and not connected with any source of
+electricity. Now, if a current is passed through the first wire a
+current will also show in the second wire, passing in an _opposite
+direction_ from the first wire's current. But this current in the
+second wire does not continue. It is a momentary impulse, existing only
+at the moment of the first passing of the current through the wire
+attached to the poles of the battery. After this first instantaneous
+throb there is nothing more. But now cut off the current in the first
+wire, and the second wire will show another impulse, this time in the
+_same direction_ with the current in the first wire. Then it is all
+over again, and there is nothing more. The first of these wires and
+currents, the one attached to the battery poles, is called the
+_Primary_. The second unattached wire, with its impulses, is called
+the _Secondary_.
+
+Let us now imagine the primary to be attached to the battery-poles
+permanently. We will not make or break the circuit, and we can still
+produce currents, "impulses," in the secondary. Let us imagine the
+primary to be brought nearer to the secondary, and again moved away from
+it, the current passing all the time through it. Every time it is moved
+nearer, an impulse will be generated in the secondary which will be
+opposite in direction to the current in the primary. Every time it is
+moved away again, an impulse in the secondary will be in the same
+direction as the primary current. So long, as before, as the primary
+wire is quiet, there will be no secondary current at all.
+
+There is still a third effect. If the current in the primary be
+_increased or diminished_ we shall have impulses in the secondary.
+
+This is a supposed case, to render the facts, the laws of induction,
+clear to the understanding. The experiment might actually be performed
+if an instrument sufficiently delicate were attached to the terminals of
+the secondary to make the impulses visible. The following facts are
+deduced from it in regard to all induced currents. They are the primary
+laws of induction:--
+
+A current which begins, which approaches, or which increases in strength
+in the primary, induces, with these movements or conditions, a momentary
+current in the _opposite direction_ in the secondary.
+
+A current which stops, which retires, or which decreases in strength in
+the primary, induces a momentary current _in the same direction_
+with the current in the primary.
+
+To make the results of induction effective in practice, we must have
+great length of wire, and to this end, as in the case of the
+electro-magnet, we will adopt the spool form. We will suppose two wires,
+insulated so as to keep them from actually touching, held together side
+by side, and wound upon a core in several layers. There will then be two
+wires in the coil, and the opposite ends of one of these wires we will
+attach to the poles of a battery, and send a current through the coil.
+This would then be the primary, and the other would be the secondary, as
+described above. But, since the power and efficiency of an induced
+current depends upon the length of the secondary wire that is exposed to
+the influence of the current carried by the primary, we fix two separate
+coils, one small enough to slip inside of the other. This smaller, inner
+coil is made with coarser wire than the outer, and the latter has an
+immense length of finer wire. The current is passed through the smaller,
+inside coil, and each time that it is stopped, or started, there will be
+an impulse, and a very strong one, through the outer--the secondary
+coil. Leave the current uninterrupted, and move the outer coil, or the
+inner one, back and forth, and the same series of strong impulses will
+be observed in the coil that has no connection with any source of
+electricity.
+
+What I have just described as an illustration of the laws governing the
+production of induced currents, is, in fact, what is known as the
+_Induction Coil_. In the old times of a quarter of a century ago it
+was extensively used as an illustrator of the power of the electric
+current. Sometimes the outer coil contained fifty miles of wire, and the
+spark, a close imitation of a flash of lightning, would pass between the
+terminals of the secondary coil held apart for a distance of several
+feet, and would pierce sheets of plate glass three inches thick. Before
+the days of practical electric lighting the induction-coil was used for
+the simultaneous lighting of the gas-jets in public buildings, and is
+still so used to a limited extent. Its description is introduced here as
+an illustration of the laws of induction which the reader will find
+applied hereafter in newer and more effective ways. The commonest
+instance now of the use of the induction-coil is in the very frequent
+small machine known as a medical battery. There must be a means of
+making and breaking the current (the circuit) as described above. This,
+in the medical battery, is automatic, and it is that which produces the
+familiar buzzing sound. The mechanism is easily understood upon
+examination.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At some risk of tediousness with those who have already made an
+examination of elementary electricity, I have now endeavored to convey
+to the reader a clear idea of (1), what electricity is, so far as known.
+(2) Of how the current is conducted, and its influence in the field
+surrounding the conductor. (3) The nature of the induced current, and
+the manner in which it is produced. The sum of the information so far
+may be stated in other words to be how to make an electromagnet, and how
+to produce an induced current. Such information has an end in view. A
+knowledge of these two items, an understanding of the details, will be
+found, collectively or separately, to underlie an understanding of all
+the machines and appliances of modern electricity, and in all
+probability, of all those that are yet to come.
+
+But in the prominent field of electric lighting (to which presently we
+shall come), there is still another principle involved, and this
+requires some explanation (as well given here as elsewhere) of the
+current theory as to what electricity is. [Footnote: There are several
+"schools" among scientists, those who pursue pure science, irrespective
+of practical applications, and who are rather disposed to narrow the
+term to include that field alone, that are divided among themselves upon
+the question of what electricity is. The "Substantialists" believe that
+it is a kind of matter. Others deny that, and insist that it is a "form
+of Energy," on which point there can be no serious question. Still
+others reject both these views. Tesla has said that "nothing stands in
+the way of our calling electricity 'ether associated with matter, or
+bound ether.'" Professor Lodge says it is "a form, or rather a mode of
+manifestation, of the ether" The question is still in dispute whether we
+have only one electricity or two opposite electricities. The great field
+of chemistry enters into the discussion as perhaps having the solution
+of the question within its possibilities. The practical electrician acts
+upon facts which he knows are true without knowing their cause;
+empirically; and so far adheres to the molecular hypothesis. The
+demonstrations and experiments of Tesla so far produce only new
+theories, or demonstrate the fallacies of the old, but give us nothing
+absolute. Nevertheless, under his investigations, the possibilities of
+the near future are widely extended. By means of currents alternating
+with very high frequency, he has succeeded in passing by induction,
+through the glass of 1 lamp, energy sufficient to keep a filament in a
+state of incandescence _without the use of any connecting wires_.
+He has even lighted a room by producing in it such a condition that an
+illuminating appliance may be placed anywhere and lighted without being
+electrically connected with anything. He has produced the required
+condition by creating in the room a powerful electrostatic field
+alternating very rapidly. He suspends two sheets of metal, each
+connected with one of the terminals of the coil. If an exhausted tube is
+carried anywhere between these sheets, or placed anywhere, it remains
+always luminous.
+
+Something of the unquestionable possibilities are shown in the following
+quotation from _Nature_, as expressed in a lecture by Prof. Crookes
+upon the implied results of Tesla's experiments.
+
+The extent to which this method of illumination may be practically
+available, experiments alone can decide. In any case, our insight into
+the possibilities of static electricity has been extended, and the
+ordinary electric machine will cease to be regarded as a mere toy.
+
+Alternating currents have, at the best, a rather doubtful reputation.
+But it follows from Tesla's researches that, is the rapidity of the
+alternation increases, they become not more dangerous but less so. It
+further appears that a true flame can now be produced without chemical
+aid--a flame which yields light and heat without the consumption of
+material and without any chemical process. To this end we require
+improved methods for producing excessively frequent alternations and
+enormous potentials. Shall we be able to obtain these by tapping the
+ether? If so, we may view the prospective exhaustion of our coal-fields
+with indifference; we shall at once solve the smoke question, and thus
+dissolve all possible coal rings.
+
+Electricity seems destined to annex the whole field, not merely of
+optics, but probably also of thermotics.
+
+Rays of light will not pass through a wall, nor, as we know only too
+well, through a dense fog. But electrical rays of a foot or two
+wave-length, of which we have spoken, will easily pierce such mediums,
+which for them will be transparent.
+
+Another tempting field for research, scarcely yet attacked by pioneers,
+awaits exploration. I allude to the mutual action of electricity and
+life. No sound man of science indorses the assertion that "electricity
+is life." nor can we even venture to speak of life as one of the
+varieties or manifestations of energy. Nevertheless, electricity has an
+important influence upon vital phenomena, and is in turn set in action
+by the living being--animal or vegetable. We have electric fishes--one
+of them the prototype of the torpedo of modern warfare. There is the
+electric slug which used to be met with in gardens and roads about
+Hoinsey Rise; there is also an electric centipede. In the study of such
+facts and such relations the scientific electrician has before him an
+almost infinite field of inquiry.
+
+The slower vibrations to which I have referred reveal the bewildering
+possibility of telegraphy without wires, posts, cables, or any of our
+present costly appliances. It is vain to attempt to picture the marvels
+of the future. Progress, as Dean Swift observed, may be "too fast for
+endurance."] As to this, all we may be said to know, as has been
+remarked, is that it is one of the _forms of energy_, and its
+manifestations are in the form of _motion_ of the minute and
+invisible atoms of which it is composed. This movement is
+instantaneously communicated along the length of a conductor. There
+must, of course, be an end to this process in theory, because all the
+molecules once moved must return to rest, or to a former condition,
+before being moved again. Therefore it is necessary to add that when
+the motion of the last molecule has been absorbed by some apparatus
+for applying it to utility, the last particles, atoms, molecules, are
+restored to rest, and may again receive motion from infringing particles,
+and this transmission of energy along a conductor is
+continuous--continually absorbed and repeated. This is _dynamic_
+electricity; not differing in kind, in essence, from any other, but only
+in application.
+
+If the conductor is entirely insulated, so that no molecular movements
+can be communicated by it to contiguous bodies, all its particles become
+energized, and remain so as long as the conductor is attached to a
+source of electricity. In such a case an additional charge is required
+only when some of the original charge is taken away, escapes. This is
+_Static_ electricity; the same as the other, but in theory
+differing in application.
+
+The molecular theory is, unquestionably, tenable under present
+conditions. It is that to which science has attained in its inquiries to
+the present date. The electric light is scarcely explainable upon any
+other hypothesis. The remaining conclusions may be left in abeyance, and
+without argument.
+
+Science began with static electricity, so called, because its sources
+were more readily and easily discovered in the course of scientific
+accidents, as in the original discovery of the property of rubbed amber,
+etc., and the long course of investigations that were suggested by that
+antique, accidental discovery. What we know as the dynamic branch of the
+subject was created by the investigations of Faraday; induction was its
+mother. It is the practically important branch, but its investigation
+required the invention of machinery to perform its necessary operations.
+Between the two branches the sole difference--a difference that may be
+said not actually to exist--is in _quantity and pressure_.
+
+To the department of static electricity all those industrial appliances
+first known belong, as the telegraph, electro-plating, etc. I shall
+first consider this class of appliances and machines. The most important
+of the class is
+
+[Illustration]
+
+THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH.--The word is Greek, meaning, literally, "to
+write from a distance." But long since, and before Morse's invention, it
+had come to mean the giving of any information, by any means, from afar.
+The existence of telegraphs, not electric, is as old as the need of
+them. The idea of quickness, speedy delivery, is involved. If time is
+not an object, men may go or send. The means used in telegraphing, in
+ancient and modern times, have been sound and sight. Anything that can
+be expressed so as to be read at a distance, and that conveys a meaning,
+is a telegram. [Footnote: This word is of American coinage, and first
+appeared in the _Albany Evening Journal_, in 1852. It avoids the
+use of two words, as "Telegraphic Message," or "Telegraphic Dispatch,"
+and the ungrammatical use of "Telegraph," for a message by telegraph.
+The new word was at once adopted.] Our plains Indians used columns of
+smoke, or fires, and are the actual inventors of the _heliograph_,
+now so called, though formerly meaning the making of a picture by the
+aid of the sun--photography. The vessels of a squadron at sea have long
+used telegraphic signals. Some of the celebrated sentences of our
+history have been written by visual signals, such as "Hold the fort, for
+I am coming," "Don't give up the ship," etc. Order of showing,
+positions, and colors are arbitrarily made to mean certain words. The
+sinking of the "_Victoria_" in 1893, was brought about by the
+orders conveyed by marine signals. Bells and guns signal by sound. So
+does the modern electric telegraph, contrary to original design. It is
+all telegraphy, but it all required an agreed and very limited code, and
+comparative nearness. None of the means in ancient use were available
+for the multifarious uses of modern commerce.
+
+As soon as it was known that electricity could be sent long distances
+over wires, human genius began to contrive a way of using it as a means
+of conveying definite intelligence. The first idea of the kind was
+attempted to be put into effect in 1774. This was, however, before the
+discovery of the electro-magnet (about 1800), or even the Galvanic
+battery, and it was seriously proposed to have as many wires as there
+were letters; each wire to have a frictional battery for generating
+electricity at one end of the circuit, and a pith-ball electroscope at
+the other. The modern reader may smile at the idea of the hurried sender
+of a message taking a piece of cat-skin, or his silk handkerchief, and
+rubbing up the successive letter-balls of glass or sulphur until he had
+spelled out his telegram. Later a man named Dyer, of New York, invented
+a system of sending messages by a single wire, and of causing a record
+to be made at the receiving office by means of a point passing over
+litmus paper, which the current was to mark by chemical action, the
+paper passing over a roller or drum during the operation. The battery
+for this arrangement was also frictional. They knew of no other. Then
+came the deflected-needle telegraph, first suggested by Amp�re, and a
+few such lines were constructed, and to some extent operated. In one of
+the original telegraph lines the wires were bound in hemp and laid in
+pipes on the surface of the ground. The expedient of poles and
+atmospheric insulation was not thought of until it was adopted as a last
+resort during the construction of Morse's first line between Washington
+and Baltimore.
+
+In the year 1832, an American named Samuel F. B. Morse was making a
+voyage home from Havre to New York in the sailing packet _Sully_.
+He was an educated man, a graduate of Yale, and an artist, being the
+holder of a gold medal awarded him for his first work in sculpture, and
+no want of success drove him to other fields. But during this tedious
+voyage of the old times in a sailing vessel he seems to have conceived
+the idea which thenceforth occupied his life. It was the beginning of
+the present Electric Telegraph. During this same voyage he embodied his
+notions in some drawings, and they were the beginnings of vicissitudes
+among the most long-continued and trying for which life affords any
+opportunity. He abandoned his studies. He paid attention to no other
+interest. He passed years in silent and lonesome endeavors that seemed
+to all others useless. He subjected himself to the reproaches of all his
+friends, lost the confidence of business men, gained the reputation of
+being a monomaniac, and was finally given over to the following of
+devices deemed the most useless and unpromising that up to that time had
+occupied the mind of any man.
+
+The rank and file of humanity had no definite idea of the plan, or of
+the results that would follow if it were successful. In reality no one
+cared. It was Morse's enterprise exclusively--a crank's fad alone. There
+has been no period in the history of society when the public, as a body,
+was interested in any great change in the systems to which it was
+accustomed. There is always enmity against an improver. In reality, the
+question of how much money Morse should make by inventing the electric
+telegraph was the question of least importance. Yet it was regarded as
+the only one. He is dead. His profits have gone into the mass, his
+honors have become international. The patents have long expired. The
+public, the entire world, are long since the beneficiaries, and the
+benefits continue to be inconceivably vast. Nothing in all history
+exceeds in moral importance the invention of the telegraph except the
+invention of printing with movable types.
+
+[Illustration: AN ELECTRO-MAGNET OF MORSE'S TIME.]
+
+After eight years of waiting, and the repeated instruction of the entire
+Congress of the United States in the art of telegraphy, that body was
+finally induced to make an appropriation of thirty thousand dollars to
+be expended in the construction of an experimental line between
+Washington and Baltimore. And now begins the actual strangeness of the
+story of the Telegraph. After many years of toil, Morse still had
+learned nothing of the efficient construction of an electro-magnet. The
+magnet which he attempted to use unchanged was after the pattern of the
+first one ever made--a bent U-shaped bar, around which were a few turns
+of wire not insulated. The bar was varnished for insulation, and the
+turns of wire were so few that they did not touch each other. The
+apparatus would not work at a distance of more than a few feet, and not
+invariably then. Professor Leonard D. Gale suggested the cause of the
+difficulty as being in the sparseness of the coils of wire on the magnet
+and the use of a single-cell battery. He furnished an electro-magnet and
+battery out of his own belongings, with which the efficiency of the
+contrivance was greatly increased. The only insulated wire then known
+was bonnet-wire, used by milliners for shaping the immense flaring
+bonnets worn by our grandmothers, and when it finally came to
+constructing the instruments of the first telegraphic system the entire
+stock of New York was exhausted. The immense stocks of electrical
+supplies now available for all purposes was then, and for many years
+afterwards, unknown. Previous to the investigations of Professor Henry,
+in 1830, only the theory of causing a core of soft iron to become a
+magnet was known, and the actual magnet, as we make it, had not been
+made. Morse, in his beginnings, had not money enough to employ a
+competent mechanic, and was himself possessed of but scant mechanical
+skill or knowledge of mechanical results. Persistency was the quality by
+which he succeeded.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF MORSE'S INSTRUMENT, 1830, WITH ITS WRITING.]
+
+The battery used first by Morse, as stated, was a single cell. The one
+made later by his partner, Alfred Vail, the real author of all the
+workable features of the Morse telegraph, and of every feature which
+identifies it with the telegraph of the present, was a rectangular
+wooden box divided into eight compartments, and coated inside with
+beeswax so that it might resist the action of acids. The telegraphic
+instrument as made by Morse was a rectangular frame of wood, now in the
+cabinet of the Western Union Telegraph Company, at New York, which was
+intended to be clamped to the edge of a table when in use. He knew
+nothing of the splendid invention since known as the "Morse Alphabet,"
+and the spelling of words in a telegram was not intended by him. His
+complicated system, as described in his caveat filed by him in 1837,
+consisted in a system of signs, by which numbers, and consequently words
+and sentences, were to be indicated. There was then a set of type
+arranged to regulate and communicate the signs, and rules in which to
+set this type. There was a means for regulating the movement forward of
+the rule containing the types. This was a crank to be turned by the
+hand. The marking or writing apparatus at the receiving instrument was a
+pendulum arranged to be swung _across_ the slip of paper, as it was
+unwound from the drum, making a zig-zag mark the points of which were to
+be counted, a certain number of points meaning a certain numeral, which
+numeral meant a word. A separate type was used to represent each
+numeral, having a corresponding number of projections or teeth. A
+telegraphic dictionary was necessary, and one was at great pains
+prepared by Morse. His process was, therefore, to translate the message
+to be sent into the numerals corresponding to the words used, to set the
+types corresponding to those numerals in the rule, and then to pass the
+rule through the appliance arranged for the purpose in connection with
+the electric current. The receiver must then translate the message by
+reference to the telegraphic dictionary, and write out the words for the
+person to whom the message was sent. This was all changed by Vail, who
+invented the "dot-and-dash" alphabet, and modified the mechanical action
+of the instrument necessary for its use. The arrangement of a steel
+embossing-point working upon a grooved roller--a radical difference--was
+a portion of this change. The invention of the axial magnet, also
+Vail's, was another. Morse had regarded a mechanical arrangement for
+transmitting signals as necessary. Vail, in the practice of the first
+line, grew accustomed to sending messages by dipping the end of the wire
+in the mercury cup,--the beginning of the present transmitting
+instrument, which is also his invention--and Morse's "port-rule," types,
+and other complicated arrangements, went into the scrap-heap.
+
+[Illustration: MODERN TRANSMITTER.]
+
+Yet there were some strange things still left. The receiving relay
+weighed 185 pounds. An equally efficient modern one need not weigh more
+than half a pound. Morse had intended to make a _recording_
+telegraph distinctively; it was to his mind its chiefest value. Almost
+in the beginning it ceased to be such, and the recording portion of the
+instrument has for many years been unknown in a telegraph office, being
+replaced by the "sounder." This was also the invention of Vail. The more
+expert of the operators of the first line discovered that it was
+possible to read the signals _by the sound_ made by the armature
+lever. In vain did the managers prohibit it as unauthorized. The
+practice was still carried on wherever it could be without detection.
+Morse was uncompromising in his opposition to the innovation. The
+wonderful alphabet of the telegraph, the most valuable of the separate
+inventions that make up the system, was not his conception. The
+invention of this alphabetical code, based on the elements of time and
+space, has never met with the appreciation it has deserved. It has been
+found applicable everywhere. Flashes of light, the raising and lowering
+of a flag, the tapping of a finger, the long and short blasts of a steam
+whistle, spell out the words of the English language as readily as does
+the sounder in a telegraph-office. It may be interpreted by sight,
+touch, taste, hearing. With a wire, a battery and Vail's alphabet,
+telegraphy is entirely possible without any other appliances.
+
+[Illustration: MODERN "SOUNDER."]
+
+A brief sketch of the difficulties attending the making of the first
+practical telegraph line will be interesting as showing how much and how
+little men knew of practical electricity in 1843. [Footnote: There was
+no possibility of their knowing more, notwithstanding that, viewed from
+the present, their inexperienced struggles seem almost pathetic. So,
+also, do the ideas of Galvani and the experiments and conclusions of all
+except Franklin, until we come to Faraday. It is one of the features of
+the time in which we live that, regardless of age, we are all scholars
+of a new school in which mere diligence and behavior are not rewarded,
+and in which it is somewhat imperative that we should keep up with our
+class in an understanding of _what are now the facts of daily
+life_, wonders though they were in the days of our youth.] To begin
+with, it was a "metallic circuit;" that is, two wires were to be used
+instead of one wire and a "ground connection." They knew nothing of this
+last. Vail discovered and used it before the line was finished. The two
+wires, insulated, were inclosed in a pipe, lead presumably, and the pipe
+was placed in the ground. Ezra Cornell, afterwards the founder of
+Cornell University, had been engaged in the manufacture and sale of a
+patent plow, and undertook to make a pipe-laying machine for this new
+telegraph line. After the work had been begun Vail tested and united the
+conductors as each section was laid. When ten miles were laid the
+insulation, which had been growing weaker, failed altogether. There was
+no current. Probably every schoolboy now knows what the trouble was. The
+earth had stolen the current and absorbed it. The modern boy would
+simply remark "Induction," and turn his attention to some efficient
+remedy. Then, there was consternation. Cornell dexterously managed to
+break the pipe-laying machine, so as to furnish a plausible excuse to
+the newspapers and such public as there may be said to have been before
+there was any telegraph line. Days were spent in consultation at the
+Relay House, and in finding the cause of the difficulty and the remedy.
+Of the congressional appropriation nearly all had been spent. The
+interested parties even quarreled, as mere men will under such
+circumstances, and the want of a little knowledge which is now
+elementary about electricity came near wrecking forever an enterprise
+whose vast importance could not be, and was not then, even approximately
+measured.
+
+[Illustration: ALFRED VAIL.]
+
+Finally, after some weeks delay, it was decided to introduce what has
+become the most familiar feature of the landscape of civilization, and
+string the wires on poles. There is little need to follow the enterprise
+further. Morse stayed with one instrument in the Capitol at Washington,
+and Vail carried another with him at the end of the line. Already the
+type-and-rule and all the symbols and dictionaries had been discarded,
+and the dot-and-dash alphabet was substituted. On April 23d, 1844, Vail
+substituted the earth for the metallic circuit as an experiment, and
+that great step both in knowledge and in practice was taken.
+
+Within an incredibly brief space the Morse Electric Telegraph had spread
+all over the world. No man's triumph was ever more complete. He passed
+to those riches and honors that must have been to him almost as a
+fulfilled dream. In Europe his progresses were like those of a monarch.
+He was made a member of almost all of the learned societies of the
+world, and on his breast glittered the medals and orders that are the
+insignia of human greatness. A congress of representatives of ten of the
+governments of Europe met in Paris in 1858, and it was unanimously
+decided that the sum of four hundred thousand francs--about a hundred
+thousand dollars--should be presented to him. He died in New York in
+1872.
+
+[Illustration: PROF. HENRY'S ELECTROMAGNET AND ARMATURE]
+
+Yet not a single feature of the invention of Morse, as formulated in his
+caveat and described in his original patent, is to be found among the
+essentials of modern telegraphy. They had mostly been abandoned before
+the first line had been completed, and the arrangements of his
+associate, Vail, were substituted. Professor Joseph Henry had, in 1832,
+constructed an electromagnetic telegraph whose signals were made by
+sound, as all signals now are in the so-called Morse system. He hung a
+bar-magnet on a pivot in its center as a compass-needle is hung. He
+wound a U-shaped piece of soft iron with insulated wire, and made it an
+electro-magnet, and placed the north end of the magnetized bar between
+the two legs of this electro-magnet. When the latter was made a magnet
+by the current the end of the bar thus placed was attracted by one leg
+of the magnet and repelled by the other, and was thus caused to swing in
+a horizontal plane so that the opposite end of it struck a bell. Thus
+was an electric telegraph made as an experimental toy, and fulfilling
+all the conditions of such an one giving the signals by sound, as the
+modern telegraph does. It lacked one thing--the essential. [Footnote:
+The details of the construction of the modern telegraph line are not
+here stated. There are none that change, in principle, the outline above
+given.]
+
+The Vail telegraphic alphabet had not been thought of. Had such an idea
+been conceived previously a message could have been read as it is read
+now, and with the toy of Professor Henry which he abandoned without an
+idea of its utility or of the possibilities of any telegraph as we have
+long known them. Morse knew these possibilities. He was one of the
+innumerable eccentrics who have been right, one of the prophets who have
+been in the beginning without honor, not only in respect to their own
+country, but in respect to their times.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF TELEGRAPH SYSTEM.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+THE OCEAN CABLE.--The remaining department of Telegraphy is embodied in
+the startling departure from ancient ideas of the possible which we know
+as cable telegraphy, the messages by such means being _cablegrams_.
+About these ocean systems there are many features not applying to lines
+on land, though they are intended to perform the same functions in the
+same way, with the same object of conveying intelligence in language,
+instantly and certainly, but under the sea.
+
+The marine cables are not simple wires. There is in the center a strand
+of usually seven small copper wires, intended as the conductor of the
+current. These, twisted loosely into a small cable, are surrounded by
+repeated layers of gutta-percha, which is, in turn, covered with jute.
+Outside of all there is an armor of wires, and the entire cable appears
+much like any other of the wire cables now in common use with elevators,
+bridges, and for many purposes. In the shallow waters of bays and
+harbors, where anchors drag and the like occurrences take place, the
+armor of a submarine cable is sometimes so heavy as to weigh more than
+twenty tons to the mile.
+
+There are peculiar difficulties encountered in sending messages by an
+ocean cable, and some of these grow out of the same induction whose laws
+are indispensable in other cases. The inner copper core sets up
+induction in the strands of the outer armor, and that again with the
+surrounding water. There is, again, a species of re-induction affecting
+the core, so that faint impulses may be received at the terminals that
+were never sent by the operators. All of these difficulties combined
+result in what electricians term "retardation." It is one of the
+departments of telegraphy that, like the unavoidable difficulties in all
+machines and devices, educates men to their special care, and keeps them
+thinking. It is one of the natural features of all the mechanical
+sciences that results in the continual making of improvements.
+
+The first impression in regard to ocean cables would be that very strong
+currents are used in sending impulses so far. The opposite is true. The
+receiving instrument is not the noisy "sounder" of the land lines. There
+was, until recently, a delicate needle which swung to and fro with the
+impulses, and reflected beams of light which, according to their number
+and the space between them spelled out the message according to the Vail
+dot-and-dash alphabet. Now, however, a means still more delicate has
+been devised, resulting in a faint wavy ink-line on a long, unwinding
+slip of paper, made by a fountain pen. This strange manuscript may be
+regarded as the latest system of writing in the world, having no
+relationship to the art of Cadmus, and requiring an expert and a special
+education to decipher it. Those faint pulsations, from a hand three
+thousand miles away across the sea, are the realization of a magic
+incredible. The necromancy and black art of all antiquity are childish
+by comparison. They give but faint indications of what they often
+are--the messages of love and death; the dictations of statesmanship;
+the heralds of peace or war; the orders for the disposition of millions
+of dollars.
+
+The story of the laying of the first ocean cable is worthy of the
+telling in any language, but should be especially interesting to the
+American boy and girl. It is a story of native enterprise and
+persistence; perhaps the most remarkable of them all.
+
+The earliest ocean telegraph was that laid by two men named Brett,
+across the English Channel. For this cable, a pioneer though crossing
+only a narrow water, the conservative officials of the British
+government refused a charter. In August, 1850, they laid a single copper
+wire covered with gutta-percha from Dover in England to the coast of
+France. The first wire was soon broken, and a second was made consisting
+of several strands, and this last was soon imitated in various short
+reaches of water in Europe.
+
+But the Atlantic had always been considered unfathomable. No line had
+ever sounded its depths, and its strong currents had invariably swept
+away the heaviest weights before they reached its bed. Its great
+feature, so far as known, was that strange ocean river first noted and
+described by Franklin, and known to us as the Gulf Stream. In 1853 a
+circumstance occurred which again turned the attention of a few men to
+the question of an Atlantic cable. Lieutenant Berryman, of the Navy,
+made a survey of the bottom of the Atlantic from Newfoundland to
+Ireland, and the wonderful discovery was made that the floor of the
+ocean was a vast plain, not more than two miles below the surface,
+extending from one continent to the other. This plain is about four
+hundred miles wide and sixteen hundred long, and there are no currents
+to disturb the mass of broken shells and unknown fishes that lie on its
+oozy surface. It was named the "Telegraphic Plateau," with a view to its
+future use. At either edge of this plateau huge mountains, from four to
+seven thousand feet high, rise out of the depths. There are precipices
+of sheer descent down which the cable now hangs. The Azores and Bermudas
+are peaks of ocean mountains. The warm river known as the Gulf Stream,
+coming northward meets the ice-bergs and melts them, and deposits the
+shells, rocks and sand they carry on this plain. When it was discovered
+the difficulty in the way of an Atlantic cable seemed no longer to
+exist, and those who had been anxious to engage in the enterprise began
+to bestir themselves.
+
+Of these the most active was the American, Cyrus W. Field. He began life
+as a clerk in New York City. When thirty-five years old he became
+engaged in the building of a land line of telegraph across Newfoundland,
+the purpose of which was to transmit news brought by a fast line of
+steamers intended to be established, and the idea is said to have
+occurred to him of making a line not only so far, but across the sea. In
+November, 1856, he had succeeded in forming a company, and the entire
+capital, amounting to 350,000 pounds, was subscribed. The governments of
+England and the United States promised a subsidy to the stockholders.
+The cable was made in England. The _Niagara_ was assigned by the
+United States, and the _Agamemnon_ by England, each attended by
+smaller vessels, to lay the cable. In August, 1857, the Niagara left the
+coast of Ireland, dropping her cable into the sea. Even when it dropped
+suddenly down the steep escarpment to the great plateau the current
+still flowed. But through the carelessness of an assistant the cable
+parted. That was the beginning of mishaps. The task was not to be so
+easily done, and the enterprise was postponed until the following year.
+
+That next year was still more memorable for triumph and disappointment.
+It was now designed that the two vessels should meet in mid-ocean, unite
+the ends of the cable, and sail slowly to opposite shores. There were
+fearful storms. The huge _Agamemnon_, overloaded with her half of
+the cable, was almost lost. But finally the spot in the waste and middle
+of the Atlantic was reached, the sea was still, and the vessels steamed
+away from each other slowly uncoiling into the sea their two halves of
+the second cable. It parted again, and the two ships returned to
+Ireland.
+
+In July they again met in mid-ocean. Europe and America were both
+charitably deriding the splendid enterprise. All faith was lost. It was
+known, to journalism especially, that the cable would never be laid and
+that the enterprise was absurd. But it was like the laying of the first
+land line. There was a way to do it, existing in the brains and faith of
+men, though at first that way was not known. From this third meeting the
+two ships again sailed away, the _Niagara_ for America, the
+_Agamemnon_ for Valencia Bay. This time the wire did not part, and
+on August 29th, 1858, the old world and the new were bound together for
+the first time, and each could read almost the thoughts of the other.
+The queen saluted America, and the president replied. There were salutes
+of cannon and the ringing of bells. But the messages by the cable grew
+indistinct day by day, and finally ceased. The Atlantic cable had been
+laid, and--had failed.
+
+Eight years followed, and the cable lay forgotten at the bottom of the
+sea. The reign of peace on earth and good will to men had so far failed
+to come and they were years of tumult and bitterness. The Union of the
+United States was called upon to defend its integrity in a great war. A
+bitter enmity grew up between us and England. The telegraph, and all its
+persevering projectors, were almost absolutely forgotten. Electricians
+declared the project utterly impracticable, and it began, finally, to be
+denied that any messages had ever crossed the Atlantic at all, and Field
+and his associates were discredited. It was said that the current could
+not be made to pass through so long a circuit. New routes were spoken
+of--across Bering's Strait, and overland by way of Siberia--and
+measures began to be taken to carry this scheme into effect.
+
+Amid these discouragements, Field and his associates revived their
+company, made a new cable, and provided everything that science could
+then suggest to aid final success. This new cable was more perfect than
+any of the former ones, and there was a mammoth side-wheel steamer known
+as the _Great Eastern_, unavailable as it proved for the ordinary
+uses of commerce, and this vessel was large enough to carry the entire
+cable in her hold. In July, 1865, the huge steamer left Ireland,
+dropping the endless coil into the sea. The same men were engaged in
+this last attempt that had failed in all the previous ones. It is one of
+the most memorable instances of perseverance on record. But on August
+6th a flaw occurred, and the cable was being drawn up for repairs. The
+sound of the wheel suddenly stopped; the cable broke and sunk into the
+depths. The _Great Eastern_ returned unsuccessful to her port.
+
+Field was present on board on this occasion, and had been present on
+several similar ones. There was, so far as known, no record made by him
+of his thoughts. There were now five cables in the bed of the Atlantic,
+and each one had carried down with it a large sum of money, and a still
+larger sum of hopes. Yet the Great Eastern sailed again in July, 1866,
+her tanks filled with new cable and Field once more on her decks. It was
+the last, and the successful attempt. The cable sank steadily and
+noiselessly into the sea, and on July 26th the steamer sailed into
+Trinity Bay. The connection was made at Heart's Content, a little New
+Foundland fishing village, and one for this occasion admirably named.
+Then the lost cable of 1865 was found, raised and spliced.
+
+In these later times, if a flaw should occur, science would locate it,
+and go and repair it. Even if this were not true, the fact remains that
+this last cable, and that of 1865, have been carrying their messages
+under the sea for nearly thirty years. The lesson is that repeated
+failures do not mean _final_ failure. There is often said to be a
+malice, a spirit of rebellion, in inanimate things. They refuse to
+become slaves until they are once and for all utterly subdued, and then
+they are docile forever. Yet the malice truly lies in the inaptitude and
+inexperience of men. Had Field and his associates known how to make and
+lay an Atlantic cable in the beginning as well as they did in the end,
+the first one laid would have been successful. The years were passed in
+the invention of machinery for laying, and in improving the construction
+of each successive cable. Many have been laid since then, certainly and
+without failure. Men have learned how. [Footnote: At present the total
+mileage of submarine cables is about 152,000 miles, costing altogether
+$200,000,000. The length of land wires throughout the world is over
+2,000,000 miles, costing $225,000,000. The capital invested in all
+lines, land and sea, is about $530,000,000.]
+
+Thirteen years were passed in this succession of toils, expenditures,
+trials and failures. Field crossed the Atlantic more than fifty times in
+these years, in pursuit of his great idea. At last, like Morse, he was
+crowned with wealth, success, medals and honors. He was acquainted with
+all the difficulties. It is now known that he knew through them all that
+an ocean cable could finally be laid.
+
+THE TELEPHONE.--The telegraph had become old. All nations had become
+accustomed to its use. More than thirty years had elapsed--a long time
+in the last half of the nineteenth century--before mankind awoke to a
+new and startling surprise; the telegraph had been made to transmit not
+only language, but the human voice in articulate speech. [Footnote: It
+has been noted that Morse's idea was a _recording_ telegraph, that
+being in his mind its most valuable point, and that this idea has long
+been obsolete. In like manner, when the Telephone was invented there was
+a general business opinion that it was perhaps an instrument useful in
+colleges for demonstrating the wonders of electricity, but not useful
+for commercial purposes _because it made no record_. "Business will
+always be done in black and white" was the oracular verdict of prominent
+and experienced business men. It may be true, but a little conversation
+across space has been found indispensable. The telephone is a remarkable
+business success.] The fact first became known in 1873, and was the
+invention of Alexander G. Bell, of Chicago.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF TELEPHONE.--THE BLAKE TRANSMITTER.]
+
+There were several, no one knows how many, attempts to accomplish this
+remarkable feat previous to the success of Professor Bell. One of these
+was by Reis, of Frankfort, in 1860. It did not embrace any of the most
+valuable principles involved in what we know as the telephone, since it
+could not transmit _speech_. Professor Bell's first operative
+apparatus was accompanied by simultaneous inventions by Gray, Edison,
+and others. This remarkable instance of several of the great
+electricians of the country evolving at nearly the same time the same
+principal details of a revolutionary invention, has never been fully
+explained. The first rather crude and ineffective arrangements were
+rapidly improved by these men, and by others, prominent among whom is
+Blake, whose remarkable transmitter will be described presently. The
+best devices of these inventors were finally embodied, and in the
+resulting instrument we have one of the chiefest of those modern wonders
+whose first appearance taxed the credulity of mankind. [Footnote: There
+were, until a recent period, a line of statements, alleged facts and
+reasonings, that were incredible in proportion to intelligence. The
+occurrences of recent times have reversed this rule with regard to all
+things in the domain of applied science. It is the ignorant and narrow
+only who are incredulous, and the ears of intelligence are open to every
+sound. All that is not absurd is possible, and all that is possible is
+sure to be accomplished. The telephone, as a statement, _was_
+absurd, but not to the men who worked for its accomplishment and finally
+succeeded. The lines grow narrow. It requires now a high intelligence to
+decide even upon the fact of absurdity within the domain of natural
+law.]
+
+In reality the telephone is simple in construction. Workmen who are not
+accomplished electricians constantly erect, correct and repair the lines
+and instruments. The machine is not liable to derangement. Any person
+may use it the first time of trying, and this use is almost universal.
+Yet it is, from the view of any hour in all the past, an
+incomprehensible mystery. A moment of reflection drifts the mind
+backward and renders it almost incredible in the present. The human
+voice, recognizable, in articulate words, is apparently borne for miles,
+now even for some hundreds of miles, upon an attenuated wire which hangs
+silent in the air carrying absolutely nothing more than thousands of
+little varying impulses of electricity. Not a word that is spoken at one
+end of it is ever heard at the other, and the conclusion inevitable to
+the reason of even twenty years ago would be that if one person does not
+actually hear the other talk there is a miracle. Probably this idea that
+the voice is actually carried is not very uncommon. The facts seem
+incomprehensible otherwise, and it is not considered that if that idea
+were correct it _would_ be a miracle.
+
+The entire explanation of the magic of the telephone lies in electrical
+induction. To the brief explanation of that phenomenon previously given
+the reader is again referred for a better understanding of what now
+follows.
+
+But, first, a moment's consideration may be given to the results
+produced by the use of this appliance, which, as an illustration of the
+way of the world was an innovation that, had it remained uninvented or
+impossible, would never have been even desired. One third more business
+is said now to be transacted in the average day than was possible
+previously. Since many things can now go on together which previously
+waited for direction, authority and personal arrangement, a man's
+business life is lengthened one-third, while his business may mostly be
+done, to his great convenience, from one place. It has given employment
+to a large number of persons, a large proportion of whom are young
+women. The status of woman in the business world has been, fortunately
+or unfortunately, by so much changed. It has introduced a new necessity,
+never again to be dispensed with. It has changed the ancient habits, and
+with them, unconsciously, _the habit of thought_. Contact not
+personal between man and man has increased. The _thought_ of others
+is quickly arrived at. It has caused us to become more appreciative of
+the absolute meanings and values of words, without assistance from face,
+manner or gesture. Laughter may be heard, but tears are unseen. It has
+induced caution in speech and enforces brevity. While none of its
+conveniences are now noted, and all that it gives is expected, the
+telephone, with all its effects, has entered--into the sum of life.
+
+On the wall or table there is a box, and beside this box projects a
+metal arm. In a fork of this arm hangs a round, black, trumpet-shaped,
+hard rubber tube. This last is the receiving instrument. It is taken
+from its arm and held close to the ear. The answers are heard in it as
+though the person speaking were there concealed in an impish embodiment
+of himself. Meantime the talking is done into a hole in the side of the
+box, while the receiver is held to the ear. This is all that appears
+superficially. An operation incredible has its entire machinery
+concealed in these simplicities. It is difficult to explain the mystery
+of the telephone in words--though it has been said to be simple--and it
+is almost impossible unless the reader comprehends, or will now
+undertake to comprehend, what has been previously said on the subject of
+the production of magnetism by a current of electricity, as in the case
+of the electro-magnet, and on the subject of induction and its laws.
+
+It has been shown that electricity produces magnetism; that the current,
+properly managed as described, creates instantly a powerful magnet out
+of a piece of soft iron, and leaves it again a mere piece of iron at the
+will of the operator. This process also will work backwards. An electric
+current produces a magnet, and _a magnet also may be made to produce
+an electric current_. It is one more of the innumerable, almost
+universal, cases where scientific and mechanical processes may be
+reversed. When the dynamo is examined this process is still further
+exemplified, and when we examine the dynamo and the motor together we
+have a striking example of the two processes going on together.
+
+The application of this making of a current, or changing its intensity,
+in the telephone, is apparently totally unlike the continuous
+manufacture of the induced current for daily use by means of the steam
+engine and dynamo. But it is in exact accord with the same laws. It
+will, perhaps, be more readily understood by recalling the results of
+the experiment of the two wires, where it was found that an _approach
+to_, or a _receding from_, a wire carrying a current, produces
+an impulse over the wire that has by itself no current at all. Now, it
+must be added to that explanation that if the battery were detached from
+that conducting wire, and if, instead of its being a wire for the
+carrying of a battery current _it were itself a permanent magnet_,
+the same results would happen in the other wire if it were rapidly moved
+toward and away from this permanent magnet. If the reader should stretch
+a wire tightly between two pegs on a table, and should then hold the
+arms of a common horseshoe magnet very near it, and should twang the
+stretched wire with his finger, as he would a guitar string, the
+electrometer would show an induced alternate current in the wire. Since
+this is an illustration of the principle of the dynamo, stated in its
+simplest form, it may be well to remember that in this manner--with the
+means multiplied and in all respects made the most of--a very strong
+current of electricity may be evolved without any battery or other
+source of electricity except a magnet. In connection with this
+substitution of a magnet for a current-carrying wire, it must be
+remembered that moving the magnet toward or from the wire has the same
+result as moving the wire instead. It does not matter which piece is
+moved.
+
+In addition to the above, it should be stated that not only will an
+induced current be set up in the wire, but also _the magnetism in the
+magnet will be increased or diminished as the tremblings of the wire
+cause it to approach or recede from it_. Therefore if a wire be led
+away from each pole of a permanent magnet, and the ends united to form a
+circuit, an induced current will appear in this wire if a piece of soft
+iron is passed quickly near the magnet.
+
+There is an essential part of the telephone that it is necessary to go
+outside of the field of electricity to describe. It is undoubtedly
+understood by the reader that all sound is produced by vibrations, or
+rapid undulations, of the surrounding air. If a membrane of any kind is
+stretched across a hoop, and one talks against it, so to speak, the
+diaphragm or membrane will be shaken, will vibrate, with the movement of
+the air produced by the voice. If a cannon be fired all the windows
+rattle, and are often broken. A peal of thunder will cause the same jar
+and rattle of window panes, manifestly by what we call
+"sound"--vibrations of the air. The window frame is a "diaphragm." The
+ear is constructed on the same principle, its diaphragm being actually
+moved by the vibrations of air, being what we call hearing. With these
+facts about sound understood in connection with those given in
+connection with the substitution of a magnet for a battery current, it
+is entirely possible for any non-expert to understand the theory of the
+construction of the telephone.
+
+In the Bell telephone, now used with the Blake transmitter [which
+differs somewhat from the arrangement I shall now describe] a bar magnet
+has a portion of its length wound with very fine insulated wire. Across
+the opposite end of this polarized [Footnote: "Polarized" means
+magnetized; having the two poles of a permanent magnet. The term is
+frequently used in descriptions of electrical appliances. Instead of
+using the terms _positive_ and _negative_, it is also
+customary to speak of the "North" or the "South" of a magnet, battery or
+circuit.] magnet, crosswise to it, and very close, there is placed a
+diaphragm of thin sheet iron. This is held only around its edge, and its
+center is free to vibrate toward and from the end of this polarized
+magnet. This thin disc of iron, therefore, follows the movements, the
+"soundwaves," of the air against it, which are caused by the human
+voice. We have an instance of apiece of soft iron moving toward, and
+away from, a magnet. It moves with a rapidity and violence precisely
+proportioned to the tones and inflections of the voice. Those movements
+are almost microscopic, not perceptible to the eye, but sufficient.
+
+The approaching and receding have made a difference, in the quality of
+the magnet. Its magnetism has been increased and diminished, and the
+little coil of insulated wire around it has felt these changes, and
+carried them as impulses over the circuit of which it is a part. In that
+circuit, at the other end, there is a precisely similar little insulated
+coil, upon a precisely similar polarized magnet. These impulses pass
+through this second coil, and increase or diminish the magnetism in the
+magnet round which it is coiled. That, in turn, affects by magnetic
+attraction the diaphragm that is arranged in relation to its magnet
+precisely as described for the first. The first being controlled as to
+the extent and rapidity of its movements by the loudness and other
+modifications of the voice, the impulses sent over the circuit vary
+accordingly. As a consequence, so does the strength of the magnet whose
+coil is also in the circuit. So, therefore, does its power of attraction
+over its diaphragm vary. The result is that the movements that are
+caused in the first diaphragm by the voice, are caused in the second by
+an _attraction_ that varies in strength in proportion to the
+vibrations of the voice speaking against the first diaphragm.
+
+This is the theory of the telephone. The sounds are not carried, but
+_mechanically produced_ again by the rattle of a thin piece of iron
+close to the listener's ear. The voice is full, audible, distinct, as we
+hear it naturally, and as it impinges upon the transmitting diaphragm.
+In reproduction at the receiving instrument it is small in volume;
+almost microscopic, if the phrase may be applied to sound. We hear it
+only by placing the ear close to the diaphragm. It will be seen that
+this is necessarily so. No attempts to remedy the difficulty have so far
+been successful. There is no means of reproducing the volume of the
+voice with the minute vibrations of a little iron disc.
+
+In actual service an electro-magnet is used instead of, or in addition
+to, the bar magnets described above. A steady flow from a battery is
+passed through an instrument which throws this current into proper
+vibrations by stopping the flow of the current at each interval between
+impulses. There is a piece of carbon between the diaphragm and its
+support. The wires are connected with the diaphragm and its support, and
+the current passes through the carbon. When the diaphragm vibrates, the
+carbon is slightly compressed by it. Pressure reduces its resistance,
+and a greater current passes through it and over the wires of the
+circuit for the instant during which the touch remains. This is the
+Blake transmitter. It should be explained that carbon stands low on the
+list of conductors of electricity. The more dense it is, the better
+conductor. The varying pressures of the diaphragm serve to produce this
+varying density and the consequent varying impulses of the current which
+effect the receiving diaphragm.
+
+The transmitter, as above described, is in the square box, and its round
+black diaphragm may be seen behind the round hole into which one talks.
+[Footnote: Shouting into a telephone doubtless comes of the idea,
+unconscious, that one is speaking to a person at a distance. To speak
+distinctly is better, and in an ordinary tone.] The receiver is the
+trumpet-shaped tube which hangs on its side, and is taken from its hook
+to be used. The call-bell has nothing to do with the telephone. It is
+operated by a small magneto-generator,--a very near relative of the
+dynamo-the current from which is sent over the telephone circuit (the
+same wires) when the small crank is turned. Sometimes the question
+occurs: "Why ring one's own bell when one desires to ring only that at
+the central office?" The answer is that both bells are in the same
+circuit. If the circuit is uninterrupted your bell will ring when you
+ring the other, and a bell at each end of your circuit is necessary in
+any case, else you could not yourself be called.
+
+When the receiving instrument is on its hook its weight depresses the
+lever slightly. This slight movement _connects_ the bell circuit
+and _disconnects_ the telephone circuit. Take it off the hook and
+the reverse is effected.
+
+The long-distance telephone differs from the ordinary only in larger
+conductors, improved instruments, and a metallic circuit--two wires
+instead of the ordinary single wire and ground connections.
+
+[Illustration: TELEAUTOGRAPH TRANSMITTING INSTRUMENT.]
+
+THE TELAUTOGRAPH.--This, the latest of modern miracles in the field of
+electricity, comes naturally after the telegraph and telephone, since it
+supplements them as a means of communication between individuals. It
+also is the invention of Prof. Elisha Gray, who seems to be as well the
+author of the name of his extraordinary achievement. It is not the first
+instrument of the kind attempted. The desire to find a means of writing
+at a distance is old. Bain, of Edinburgh, made a machine partially
+successful fifty years ago. Like the telegraph as intended by Morse,
+there was the interposition of typesetting before a message could be
+sent. It did not write, or follow the hand of the operator in writing,
+though it did reproduce at the other end of the circuit in facsimile the
+faces of the types that had been set by the sender. It was a process by
+electrolysis, well understood by all electricians. Several of this
+variety of writing telegraphs have been made, some of them almost
+successful, but all lacking the vital essential. [Footnote: The lack of
+_one vital essential_ has been fatal to hundreds of inventions.
+Inventors unconsciously follow paths made by predecessors. The entire
+class of transmitting instruments must dispense with tedious
+preliminaries, and must use _words_. Vail accomplished this in
+telegraphy. Bell and others in the telephone, and Gray has borne the
+same fact in mind in the present development of the telautograph.] In
+1856 Casselli, of Florence, made a writing telegraph which had a
+pendulum arrangement weighing fourteen pounds. Only one was ever made,
+but it resulted in many new ideas all pertaining to the facsimile
+systems--the following of the faces of types--and all were finally
+abandoned.
+
+The invention of Gray is a departure. The sender of a message sits down
+at a small desk and takes up a pencil, writing with it on ordinary paper
+and in his usual manner. A pen at the other end of the circuit follows
+every movement of his hand. The result is an autograph letter a hundred
+miles or more away. A man in Chicago may write and sign a check payable
+in Indianapolis. Personal directions may be given authoritatively and
+privately. As in the case of the telephone, no intervening operator is
+necessary. No expertness is required. Even the use of the alphabet is
+not necessary. A drawing of any description, anything that can be traced
+with a pen or pencil, is copied precisely by the pen at the receiving
+desk. The possibilities of this instrument, the uses it may develop, are
+almost inconceivable. It might be imagined that the lines drawn would be
+continuous. On the contrary, when the pen is lifted by the writer at the
+sending desk it also lifts itself from the paper at that of the
+receiver.
+
+The action of the telautograph depends upon the variations in magnetic
+strength between two small electro-magnets. It has been seen that an
+electro-magnet exerts its attractive force in proportion to the current
+which passes through its coil. To use a phrase entirely non-technical,
+it will "pull" hard or easy in proportion to the strength of the passing
+current. This fact has been observed as the cause of action in the
+telephone, where one diaphragm, moved by the air-vibrations caused by
+the voice, causes a varying current to pass over the wire, attracting
+the other diaphragm less or more as the first is moved toward or away
+from its magnet. In the telautograph the varying currents are caused not
+by the diaphragm influenced by the voice, but _by a pencil moved by
+the hand_.
+
+To show how these movements may be caused let us imagine a case that may
+occur in nature. It is an interesting mechanical study. There is an
+upright rush or reed growing in the middle of a running stream. The stem
+of this rush has elasticity naturally; it has a tendency to stand
+upright; but it bends when there is a current against it. It is easy
+enough to imagine it bending down stream more or less as the current is
+more or less strong.
+
+Imagine now another stream entering the first at right angles to it, and
+that the rush stands in the center of both currents. It will then bend
+to the force of the second stream also, and the direction in which it
+will lean will be a compromise between the forces of the two. Lessen the
+flow of the current in one of the streams, and the rush will bend a
+little less before that current and swing around to the side from which
+it receives less pressure. Cut off either of the currents entirely, and
+it will bend in the direction of the other current only. In a word,
+_if the quantity or strength of the current of both streams can be
+controlled at will, the rush can be made to swing in any direction
+between the two, and its tip will describe any figure desired, aided, of
+course, by its own disposition to stand upright when there is no
+pressure_.
+
+Let us imagine the rush to be a pen or pencil, and the two streams of
+water to be two currents of electricity having power to sway and move
+this pencil in proportion to their relative strength, as the streams did
+the rush. Imagine further that these two currents are varied and changed
+with reference to each other by the movements of a pen in a man's hand
+at another place. It is an essential part of the mechanism of the
+telautograph, and the movement is known among mechanicians as
+"compounding a point."
+
+Gray, while using the principles involved in compounding a point, seems
+to have discarded the ways of transmitting magnetic impulses of varying
+strength commonly in use. His method he calls the "step-by-step"
+principle, and it is a striking example of what patience and ingenuity
+may accomplish in the management of what is reputedly the most elusive
+and difficult of the powers of nature. The machine was some six years in
+being brought into practical form, and was perfected only after a long
+series of experiments. In its operation it deals with infinitesimal
+measurements and quantities. The first attempts were on the "variable
+current" system, which was later discarded for the "step-by-step" plan
+mentioned.
+
+In writing an ordinary lead pencil may be used. From the point of this
+two silk cords are extended diagonally, their directions being at right
+angles to each other, and the ends of these cords enter openings made
+for them in the cast iron case of the instrument on each side of the
+small desk on which the writing is done.
+
+Inside the case each cord is wound on a small drum which is mounted on a
+vertical shaft. Now if the pencil-point is moved straight upward or
+downward it is manifest that both shafts will move alike. If the
+movement is oblique in any direction, one of the shafts will turn more
+than the other, and the degree of all these turnings of each shaft in
+reference to the other will be precisely governed by the direction in
+which the pencil-point is moved.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF MECHANICAL TELAUTOGRAPH. BOW-DRILL
+ARRANGEMENT.]
+
+Now, suppose each shaft to carry a small, toothed wheel, and that upon
+these teeth a small arm rests. As the wheel turns this arm will move as
+a pawl does on a ratchet. Imagine that at each slight depression between
+the ratchet-teeth it breaks a contact and cuts off a current, and at
+each slight rise renews the contact and permits a current to pass. This
+current affects an electro-magnet--one for each shaft--at the receiving
+end, and each of these magnets, when the current is on, attracts an
+armature bearing a pawl, which, being lifted, allows the notched wheel,
+upon which it bears, to turn _to the extent of one notch_. The
+arrangement may be called an electric clutch, that may be arranged in
+many ways, and the detail of its action is unimportant in description,
+so that it be borne in mind that _each time a notch is passed in
+turning the shaft by drawing upon or relaxing the cords attached to the
+pencil-point_, an impulse of electricity is sent to an electro-magnet
+and armature which allows _a corresponding wheel and its shaft to turn
+one notch, or as many notches, as are passed at the transmitting
+shaft_. In moving the pencil one inch to one side, we will suppose it
+permits the shaft on which the cord is wound to turn forty notches. Then
+forty impulses of electricity have been sent over the wire, the clutch
+has been released forty times, and the shaft to which it is attached has
+turned precisely as much as the shaft has which was turned, or was
+allowed to turn, by the cord wound upon it and attached to the pencil.
+
+It will be remembered that the arrangement is double. There are two
+shafts operated by the writer's pencil--one on each side of it. Two
+corresponding shafts occupy relative positions in respect to the
+automatic pen of the receiving instrument. There are two circuits, and
+two wires are at present necessary for the operation of the instrument.
+It remains to describe the manner of operating the automatic pen by
+connection with its two shafts which are turned by the step-by-step
+arrangement described, precisely as much and at the same time as those
+of the transmitting instrument are.
+
+[Illustration: WORK OF THE TELAUTOGRAPH. COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION, 1893.]
+
+To each shaft of the receiving instrument is attached an aluminum
+pen-arm by means of cords, each arm being fixed, in regard to its shaft,
+as a bow drill is in regard to its drill. These arms meet in the center
+of the writing tablet, V-shaped, as the cords are with relation to the
+writer's pencil in the sending instrument. A small tube conveys ink from
+a reservoir along one of the pen-arms, and into a glass tube upright at
+the junction of the arms. This tube is the pen. Now, let us imagine the
+pencil of the writer pushed straight upward from the apex of the
+V-shaped figure the cords and pencil-point make on the writing desk.
+Then both the shafts at the points of the arms of the V will rotate
+equally. [Footnote: See diagram of mechanical Telautograph, and of bow
+drill. In the latter, in ordinary use, the stick and string; rotate the
+spool. Rotating the spool will, in turn, move the stick and string, and
+this is its action in the pen-arms of the Telautograph.] The number of
+impulses sent from each of these shafts, by the means explained, will be
+equal. Each of the shafts of the receiving instrument will rotate alike,
+and each draw up its arm of the automatic pen precisely as though one
+took hold of the points of the two legs of the V, and drew them apart to
+right and left in a straight line. This moves the apex of the V, with
+its pen, in a straight line upward at the same time the writer at the
+sending instrument pushed his pencil upward. If this one movement,
+considered alone, is understood, all the rest follow by the same means.
+This is, as nearly as it may be described without the use of technical
+mechanical terms, the principle of the telautograph. It must be seen
+that all that is necessary to describe any movement of the sender's
+pencil upon the paper under the receiving pen is that the rotating
+upright shafts of the latter should move precisely as much, and at the
+same time, with those two which get their movement from the wound cords
+and attached pencil-points in the hand of the writer.
+
+Only one essential item of the movement remains. The shafts of both
+instruments must be rotated by some separate mechanical agency, capable
+of being automatically reversed. By an arrangement unnecessary to
+explain in detail, the pencil of the writer lifted from the paper
+resting on the metallic table which forms the desk; results in the
+automatic lifting of the pen from the paper at the receiving desk.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Prof. Elisha Gray was born in 1835, in Ohio. He was a blacksmith, and
+later, a carpenter. But he was given to chemical and mechanical
+experiments rather than to the industries. When twenty-one, he entered
+Oberlin College, remaining there five years, and earning all the money
+he spent. He devoted his time chiefly to studies of the physical
+sciences. As a young man he was an invalid. Later he was not remarkably
+successful in business, failing several times in his beginnings. His
+first invention was a telegraph self-adjusting relay. It was not
+practically successful. Afterwards he was employed with an electrical
+manufacturing company at Cleveland and Chicago. Most of his earlier
+inventions in the line of electrical utility are not distinctively
+known. He has never been idle, and they all possessed practical merit.
+For many years before he was known as the wizard of the telautograph, he
+was foremost in the ranks of physicists and electricians. He is not a
+discoverer of great principles, but is professionally skillful and
+accomplished, and eminently practical. His every effort is exerted to
+avoid intricacy and clumsiness in machinery. In 1878 he was awarded the
+grand prize at the Paris Exposition, and was given the degree of
+Chevalier and the decorations of the Legion of Honor by the French
+Government, and again in 1881, at the Electrical Exposition at Paris, he
+was honored with the gold medal for his inventions. He secured the
+degree of A.M. at Oberlin College, and was the recipient of the degree
+of Ph.D. from the Ripon (Wis.) College. For years he was connected with
+those institutions as non-resident Lecturer in Physics. Another
+University gave him the degree of LL.D. He is a member of the American
+Philosophical Society, the Society of Electrical Engineers of England,
+and the Society of Telegraph Engineers of London. He received an award
+and a certificate from the Centennial Exposition for his inventions in
+electricity.
+
+The same lesson is to be gathered from his career, so far, that is given
+by the life of every noted American. It means that money, family,
+prestige, have no place as leverages of success in any field. The rule
+is toward the opposite. The qualities and capacities that win do so
+without these early advantages, and all the more surely because there is
+an inducement to use them. There is no "luck."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE ELECTRIC LIGHT.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It has been stated that modern theory recognizes two classes of
+electricity, the _Static_ and the _Dynamic_. The difference
+is, however, solely noticeable in operation. Of the dynamic class there
+can be no more common and striking example than the now almost universal
+electric light. Yet, with a sufficient expenditure of chemicals and
+electrodes, and a sufficient number of cells, electric lighting, either
+arc or incandescent, can be as effectively accomplished as with the
+current evolved by a powerful dynamo. [Footnote: As an illustration of
+the day of beginnings, a few years ago the _thalus_, or lantern,
+the pride of the rural Congressman, on the dome of the Capitol at
+Washington was lighted by electricity, and an immense circular chamber
+beneath the dome was occupied by hundreds of cells of the ordinary form
+of battery. The lamps were of the incandescent variety, and what we now
+know as the filament was platinum wire. Vacuum bulb, filament, carbon,
+dynamo, were all unknown. But the current, and the heat of resistance,
+and every fact now in use in electric lighting, were there in
+operation.]
+
+The reader will understand that modern dynamic electricity owes its
+development to the principle of economy in production. Practical science
+most effectively awakens from its lethargy at the call of commerce.
+Nevertheless, from the earliest moment in which it became known that
+electricity was akin to heat--that an interruption of the easy passage
+of a current produced heat--the minds of men were busy with the question
+of how to turn the tremendous fact to everyday use. Progress was slow,
+and part of it was accidental. The great servant of modern mankind was
+first an untrained one. It was a marked advance when the gaslights in a
+theater could be all lighted at once by means of batteries and the spark
+of an induction coil. The bottom of Hell Gate, in New York harbor, was
+blown out by Gen. Newton by the same means, and would have been
+impossible otherwise. But these were only incidents and suggestions.
+The question was how to make this instantaneous spark _continuous_.
+There was pondering upon the fact that the only difference between heat
+and electricity is one of molecular arrangement. Heat is a molecular
+motion like that of electricity, without the symmetry and harmony of
+action electricity has. The vibrations of electricity are accomplished
+rapidly, and without loss. Those of heat are slow, and greatly
+radiated. _When a current of electricity reaches a place in the
+conductor where it cannot pass easily, and the orderly vibrations of its
+molecules are disturbed, they are thrown into the disorderly motion
+known as heat._ So, when the conductor is not so good; when a large
+wire is reduced suddenly to a small one; when a good conductor, such as
+copper, has a section of resisting conduction, such as carbon; heat and
+light are at once evolved at that point, and there is produced what we
+know as the electric light. However concealed by machinery and devices,
+and all the arrangements by which it is made more lasting, steady,
+economical and automatic, it is no more nor less than this. _The
+difference between heat and electricity is only a difference in the
+rates of vibration of their molecules._ Whatever the theory as to
+molecules, or essence, or actual nature and origin, the practical fact
+that heat and light are the results of the circumstances described above
+remains. This has long been known, and the question remained how to
+produce an adequate current economically. The result was the machine we
+know as the Dynamo.
+
+The first electric light was very brief and brilliant and was made by
+accident. Sir Humphrey Davy, in 1809, in pulling apart the two ends of
+wires attached to a battery of two thousand small cells, the most
+powerful generator that had been made to that time, produced a brief and
+brilliant spark, the result of momentarily _imperfect contact._
+Every such spark, produced since then innumerable times by accident, is
+an example of electric lighting. There are now in use in the United
+States some two million arc lights and nearly double that number of
+incandescent.
+
+There are two principal systems of electric lighting; one is by actually
+burning away the ends of carbon-points in the open air. This is the
+"arc." The other is by heating to a white heat a filament of carbon, or
+some substance of high resistance, in a glass bulb from which the air
+has been exhausted. This is the "incandescent."
+
+[Illustration: THE INCANDESCENT LIGHT]
+
+In the arc light the current passes across an _imperfect contact_,
+and this imperfection consists in a gap of about one-sixteenth of an
+inch between the extremities of two rods of carbon carrying a current.
+This small gap is a place of bad conduction and of the piling up of
+atoms, producing heat, burning, light. In the body of the lamp there are
+appliances for the automatic holding apart of the two points of the
+carbon, and the causing of them to continually creep together, yet never
+touch. Many devices have been contrived to this end. With all theories
+and reasons well known, and all effects accurately calculated, upon this
+small arrangement depends the practical utility of the arc light. The
+best arrangement is the invention of Edison, and is controlled most
+ingeniously by the current itself, acting through the increased
+difficulty of its passage when the two carbon-points are too far apart,
+and the increased ease with which it flows when they are too near
+together. The current, in leaping the small gap between the
+carbon-points, takes a _curved_ path, hence the name "arc" light.
+In passing from the positive to the negative carbon it carries small
+particles of incandescent carbon with it, and consequently the end of
+the positive carbon is hollowed out, while the end of the negative is
+built up to a point.
+
+The incandescent light is in principle the same as the arc, produced by
+the same means and based upon the same principle of impediment to the
+free passage of the current. It was first produced by heating with the
+current to incandescence a fine platinum wire. As stated above,
+electricity that quietly traverses a large wire will suddenly develop
+great heat upon reaching a point where it is called upon to traverse, a
+smaller one. Platinum was attempted for this place of greater resistance
+because of its qualities. It does not rust, has a low specific heat, and
+is therefore raised to a higher temperature with less heat imparted. But
+it was a scarce and expensive material, and so long as it was heated to
+incandescence in the open air, that is, so long as its heat was fed as
+other heat is, by oxygen, it was slowly consumed. Platinum is no longer
+in the field of electric lighting, and the substitute which takes its
+place in the present incandescent lamp, and which is known as a
+"filament," is not heated in contact with the air. The experiments and
+endeavors that brought this result constitute the story of the
+incandescent lamp.
+
+The result is due to the patient intelligence of the American scientist
+and inventor, Thomas A. Edison. After all the absolute essentials of a
+practical incandescent lamp had been thought out; after the qualities
+and characteristics of the current were all known under the
+circumstances necessary to its use in lighting, the practical
+accomplishment still remained. Edison is said to have once worked for
+several weeks in the making of a single loop-shaped carbon filament that
+would bear the most delicate handling. This was then carefully carried
+to a glass-worker to be inclosed in a bulb, and at the first movement he
+broke it, and the work must be done over and done better. It finally
+was. The little pear-shaped bulb with its delicate loop of filament,
+which cost months of toil and experiment at first, is now a common
+article, manufactured at an absurdly small cost, packed in barrelfuls
+and shipped everywhere, and consumed by the million. A means has been
+found for producing the vacuum of its interior rapidly, cheaply and
+thoroughly, and the beautiful incandescent glow hangs in lines and
+clusters over the civilized world. The phenomenon of incandescence
+without oxygen seems peculiar to these lights alone. [Footnote: The
+"electric field," previously explained, seemed to exist by giving a
+magnetic quality to the surrounding air. It would be as true if one
+should speak of a magnetized vacuum, since the same field would exist in
+that as in surrounding air.]
+
+So simple are great facts when finally accomplished that there remains
+little to add on the subject of the mechanism of the electric light. The
+two varieties, arc and incandescent, are used together as most
+convenient, the large and very brilliant arc being especially adapted to
+out-of-doors situations, and the gentler, steadier and more permanent
+glow of the incandescent to interiors. The latter is also capable of a
+modification not applicable to the arc. It can, in theaters and other
+buildings, be "turned down" to a gentle, blood-red glow. The means by
+which this is accomplished is ingenious and surprising, since it means
+that the supply of electricity over a wire--seemingly the most subtle
+and elusive essence on earth--may be controlled like a stream from a
+cock, or the gas out of a burner. But this reduction of the current that
+makes the red glow in the clusters in a theater is by no means the only
+instance. The trolley-car, and even the common motor, may be made to
+start very slowly, and the unseen current whose touch kills is fed to
+its consumer at will.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+THE DYNAMO.--To the man who has been all his life thinking of the steam
+engine as the highest and almost only embodiment of controlled
+mechanical power, another machine, both supplementary to the steam
+engine and far excelling it, whose familiar _burring_ sound is now
+heard in almost every village in the United States and has become the
+characteristic sound of modern civilization, must constitute a source of
+continual question and surprise. To be accustomed to the dynamo, to look
+upon it as a matter of course and a conceded fact, one must have come to
+years of maturity and found it here.
+
+Its practical existence dates back at furthest to 1870. Yet it is based
+upon principles long since known, and can scarcely be said to be the
+invention of any one mind or man. Its lineal ancestor was the
+_magneto-electric machine_, in the early construction of which
+figure the names of Siemens, Wilde, Ladd, and earlier and later
+electricians. Kidder's medical battery used forty years ago or more, and
+still used and purchasable in its first form, was a dynamo. A footnote
+in a current encyclopedia states that: "An account of the
+Magneto-electric machine of M. Gramme, in the London _Standard_ of
+April 9th, 1873, confirmed by other information, leads to the belief
+that a decided improvement has been made in these machines." The word
+"dynamo" was then unknown. Later, Edison, Weston, Thompson, Hopkinson,
+Ferranti and others appear as improvers in the mechanism necessary for
+best developing a well-known principle, and many of these improvements
+may be classed among original inventions. As soon as the
+magneto-electric machine attained a size in the hands of experimenters
+that took it out of the field of scientific toys it began to be what we
+now know as a dynamo. A paragraph in the encyclopedia referred to says,
+in speaking of Ladd, of London, "These developments of electric action
+are not obtained without corresponding expenditure of force. The armatures
+are powerfully attracted by the magnets, and must be forcibly pulled away.
+Indeed, one of Wilde's machines, when producing a very intense electric
+light, required about five horse power to drive it."
+
+[Illustration: MAGNETO-ELECTRIC MACHINE. THE PREDECESSOR OF THE DYNAMO.]
+
+Thus was the secret in regard to electric power unconsciously divulged
+some twenty years ago.
+
+In all nature there is no recipe for getting something for nothing. The
+modern dynamo, apparently creating something out of nothing, like all
+other machines _gives back only what is given to it_, minus a fair
+percentage for waste, loss, friction, and common wear. Its advantages
+amount to a miracle of convenience only. So far as power is concerned,
+it merely transfers it for long distances over a single wire. So far as
+light is considered, it practically creates it where wanted, in new and
+convenient forms, with a new intensity and beauty, but with the same
+expenditure of transmitted energy in the form of burned coal as would be
+used in manufacturing the gas that was new, wonderful, and a luxury at
+the beginning of the century.
+
+The dynamo is the most prominent instance of actual mechanical utility
+in the field of electrical induction. It seems almost incredible that
+the apparently small facts discovered by Faraday, the bookbinder, the
+employ� of Sir Humphrey Davy at weekly wages the struggling experimenter
+in the subtleties of an infant giant, should have produced such results
+within sixty years. [Footnote: Faraday was not entirely alone in his
+life of physical research. He was associated with Davy, and quarreled
+with him about the liquefaction of chlorine and other gases, and was the
+companion of Wallaston, Herschel, Brand, and others. In connection with
+Stodart, he experimented with steel, with results still considered
+valuable. The scientific world still speaks of his quarrel with Davy
+with regret, since the personalities of great men should be free from
+ordinary weaknesses. But Lady Davy was not a scientist, and while the
+brilliant young mechanic was in her husband's employment for scientific
+purposes she insisted upon treating him as a servant, whereat the
+independence of thinking which made him capable of wandering in fields
+unknown to conventionality and routine blazed into natural resentment.
+The quarrel of 1823 must have been greatly augmented, in the lady's
+eyes, in 1824, for in that year Faraday was made a member of the Royal
+Society.
+
+In his lectures and public experiments he was greatly assisted by a man
+now almost forgotten, an "intelligent artilleryman" named Andersen. This
+unknown soldier with a taste for natural science doubtless had his
+reward in the exquisite pleasure always derived from the personal
+verification of facts hitherto unknown. There is often a pecuniary
+reward for the servant of science. Just as often there is not, and the
+work done has been the same.
+
+It was on Christmas morning, 1821, that Faraday first succeeded in
+making a magnetic needle rotate around a wire carrying an electric
+current. He was the discoverer of benzole, the basis of our modern
+brilliant aniline dyes. In 1831 he made the discovery he had been
+leading to for many years--that of magneto-electric induction. All we
+have of electricity that is now a part of our daily life is the result
+of this discovery.
+
+Faraday was born in 1791, and died August, 1867, in a house presented to
+him by Victoria, who had not the same opinion of his relations to the
+aristocracy that Lady Davy seems to have had. His insight into science
+was something explainable only on the supposition that he was gifted
+with a kind of instinct. He was a scientific prophet. A man who could,
+in 1838, foresee the ocean cable, and describe those minute difficulties
+in its working that all in time came true, must be classed as one of the
+great, clear, intuitive intellects of his race. He was in youth
+apprenticed to a bookbinder, "and many of the books he bound he read." A
+line in his indentures says: "In consideration of his faithful service,
+no premium is to be given." When these words were written there was no
+dream that the "faithful service" should be for all posterity.]
+
+[Illustration: Faraday's Spark. Striking the leg of a horseshoe magnet
+with an iron bar wound with insulated wire causes a contact between
+loose end of wire and small disc, and a spark.
+
+Faraday's First Magneto-Electric Experiment. A horseshoe magnet passed
+near a bent soft iron wound with insulated wire caused an induced
+current in the wire.
+
+TWO OF FARADAY'S EARLY EXPERIMENTS IN INDUCTION.]
+
+He who made the first actual machine to evolve a current in compliance
+with Faraday's formulated laws was an Italian named Pix�, in 1832. His
+machine consisted of a horseshoe magnet set on a shaft, and made to
+revolve in front of two cores of, soft iron wound with wire, and having
+their ends opposite the legs of the magnet. Shortly after Pix�, the
+inventors of the times ceased to turn the magnet on a shaft, and turned
+the iron cores instead, because they were lighter. In like manner, the
+huge field magnets of a modern dynamo are not whirled round a stationary
+armature, but the armature is whirled within the legs of the magnet with
+very great rapidity. The next step was to increase the number of magnets
+and the number of wire-wound iron cores--bobbins. The magnets were made
+compound, laminated; a large number of thin horseshoe magnets were laid
+together, with opposite poles touching. These were all comparatively
+small machines--what we now, with some reason, regard as having been
+toys whose present results were rather long in coming.
+
+[Illustration: THE SIEMENS' ARMATURE AND WINDING. THE FIRST STEP TOWARD
+THE MODERN DYNAMO.]
+
+Then came Siemens, of Berlin, in 1857. He was probably the first to wind
+the iron core, what we now call the _armature_, with wire from end
+to end, _lengthwise_, instead of round and round as a spool. This
+resulted, of course, in the shaft of the armature being also placed
+crosswise to the legs of the magnet, as it is in the modern dynamo. One
+of the ends of the wire used in this winding was fastened to the axle of
+the armature, and the other to a ring insulated from the shaft, but
+turning with it. Two springs, one bearing on the shaft and the other on
+the ring, carried away the current through wires attached to them.
+Siemens also originated the mechanical idea of hollowing out the legs of
+the magnet on the inside for the armature to turn in close to the
+magnet, almost fitting. It was the first time any of these things had
+been done, and their author probably had no idea that they would be
+prominent features of the dynamo of a little later time, in all
+essentials closely imitated.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF SHAFT, SPLIT RING AND "BRUSHES."]
+
+It will be guessed from what has been previously said on the subject of
+induction that the currents from such an electro-magnetic machine would
+be alternating currents, the impulses succeeding each other in alternate
+directions. To remedy this and cause the currents to flow always in the
+same direction, the "_commutator_" was devised. The ring mentioned
+above was split, and the two springs both bore upon it, one on each
+side. The ends of the wires were both fastened to this ring. The springs
+came to be known as "brushes." The effect was that one of them was in
+the insulated space between the split halves of the ring while the other
+was bearing on the metal to which the wire was attached. This action was
+alternate, and so arranged that the current carried away was always
+direct. When an armature has a winding of more than one wire, as the
+practical dynamo always has, the insulated ring is divided into as many
+pieces as there are wires, and the two brushes act as above for the
+entire series.
+
+Pacinotti, of Florence, constructed a magneto-electric machine in which
+the current flows always in one direction without a commutator. It has
+what is known as a _ring armature_, and is the mother of all
+dynamos built upon that principle. It is exceedingly ingenious in
+construction, and for certain purposes in the arts is extensively used.
+A description of it is too technical to interest others than those
+personally interested in the class of dynamo it represents.
+
+Wilde, of Manchester, England, improved the Siemens machine in 1866 by
+doing that which is the feature that makes possible the huge "field
+magnet" of the modern dynamo, which is not a magnet at all, strictly
+speaking. He caused the current, after it had been rectified by the
+commutator, to return again into coils of wire round the legs of his
+field magnets, as shown in the diagram. This induced in them a new
+supply of magnetism, and this of course intensified the current from the
+armature. It is true he had a separate smaller magneto-electric machine,
+with which he evolved a current for the coil around the legs of the
+field magnet of a greatly larger machine upon which he depended for his
+actual current, and that he did not know, although he was practically
+doing the same thing, that if he should divert this current made by the
+larger machine itself back through the coils of its field magnet, he
+would not need the extra small machine at all, and would have a much
+more powerful current.
+
+[Illustration: SIMPLEST FORM OF DYNAMO]
+
+And here arises a difference and a change of name. All generating
+machines to this date had been called "_Magneto-electric_" because
+they used _permanent_ steel magnets with which to generate a
+current by the whirling of the bobbin which we now call an armature. The
+time came, led to by the improvement of Wilde, in which those steel
+permanent magnets were no longer used. Then the machine became the
+"_dynamo-electric_" machine, and leaving off one word, according to
+our custom, "_dynamo_."
+
+Siemens and Wheatstone almost simultaneously invented so much of the
+dynamo as was yet incomplete. It has "cores"--the parts that answer to
+the legs of a horseshoe magnet--of soft iron, sometimes now even of cast
+iron. These, at starting, possess very little magnetism--practically
+none at all--yet sufficient to generate a very weak current in the
+coils, windings, of the armature when it begins to turn. This weak
+current, passing through the windings of the field magnet, makes these
+still stronger magnets, and the effect is to evolve a still stronger
+current in the armature. Soon the full effect is reached. The big iron
+field magnet, often weighing some thousands of pounds, is then the same
+as a permanent steel horseshoe magnet, which would hardly be possible at
+all. One who has watched the installation of a dynamo, knowing that
+there is nowhere near any ordinary source of electricity, and has seen
+its armature begin to whirl and hum, and then in a few moments the
+violet sparklings of the brushes and the evident presence of a powerful
+current of electricity, is almost justified in the common opinion that
+the genius of man has devised a machine to _create_ something out
+of nothing. It is true that a _starting_ quantity of electricity is
+required. It exists in almost every piece of iron. Sometimes, to hasten
+first action, some cells of a galvanic battery are used to pass a
+current through the coils of the field magnet. After the first use there
+is always enough magnetism remaining in them during rest or stoppage to
+make a dynamo efficient after a few moments operation.
+
+[Illustration: PACINOTTI'S RING-ARMATURE DYNAMO.]
+
+This is the dynamo in principle of action. The varieties in construction
+now in use number scores, perhaps hundreds. Some of them are monsters in
+size, and evolve a current that is terrific. They are all essentially
+the same, depending for action upon the laws illustrated in the simplest
+experiment in induced electricity. One of the best known of the modern
+machines is Edison's, represented in the picture at the head of this
+article. In it the field magnet--answering to the horseshoe magnet of
+the magneto-electric machine--is plainly distinguishable to the
+unskilled observer. It is not even solid, but is made of several pieces
+bolted together. Its legs are hollowed at the ends to admit closely the
+armature which turns there. There are valuable peculiarities in its
+construction, which, while complying in all respects with the dynamo
+principle, utilize those principles to the best mechanical advantage. So
+do others, in other respects that did not occur even to Edison, or were
+not adopted by him. Probably the modern dynamo is the most efficient,
+the most accurately measurable, the least wasteful of its power, and the
+most manageable, of any power-machine so far constructed by man for
+daily use.
+
+The motor.--This is the twin of the dynamo. In all essentials the two
+are of the same construction. A difference in the arrangement of the
+terminals of the wire coils or the wrappings of armature and field
+magnet, makes of the one a dynamo and of the other a motor.
+Nevertheless, they are separate studies in electrical science. Practice
+has brought about modified constructions, as in the case of the dynamo.
+The differences between the two machines, and their similarities as
+well, may be explained by a general brief statement.
+
+_It is the work of the dynamo to convert mechanical energy into the
+form of electrical energy. The motor, in turn, changes this electrical
+energy back again into mechanical energy._
+
+Where the electric light is produced by the dynamo current no motor
+intervenes. The current is converted into heat and light by merely
+having an impediment, a restriction, a narrowness, interposed to its
+free passage on a conducting wire, as heretofore explained, very much as
+water in a pipe foams and struggles at a narrow place or an obstruction.
+Where mechanical movements are to be produced by the dynamo current the
+motor is always the intermediate machine. In the dynamo the armature is
+rotated by steam power, producing an electrical energy in the form of a
+powerful current transmitted by a wire. In the motor the armature, in
+turn, _is rotated by_ this current. It is but another instance of
+that ability to work backwards--to reverse a process--that seems to
+pervade all machines, and almost all processes. I have mentioned steam
+power, and, consequently, the necessary burning of coal and expenditure
+of money in producing the dynamo current. The dynamo and motor are not
+necessarily economical inventions, but the opposite when the force
+produced is to be transmitted again, with some loss, into the same
+mechanical energy that has already been produced by the burning of coal
+and the making of steam. Across miles of space, and into places where
+steam would not be possible, the power is invisibly carried. Suggestions
+of this convenience--stated cases--it is not necessary to cite. The
+fact is a prominent one, to be noted everywhere.
+
+And it may be made a mechanical economy. The most prominent instance of
+this is the new utilization of Niagara as a turbine water-power with
+which to whirl the armatures of gigantic dynamos, using the power thus
+obtained upon motors, and in the production of light and the
+transmission of power to neighboring cities.
+
+The discovery of the possibility of transmitting power by a wire, and
+converting it again into mechanical energy, is a strange story of the
+human blindness that almost always attends an acuteness, a thinking
+power, a prescience, that is the characteristic of humanity alone, but
+which so often stops short of results. This discovery has been
+attributed to accident alone; the accident of an employ� mistaking the
+uses of wires and fastening their ends in the wrong places. But a French
+electrician thus describes the occurrence as within his own experience.
+His name is Hypolyte Fontaine.
+
+But let us first advert to the forgetfulness of the man who really
+invented the machine that was capable of the opposite action of both
+dynamo and motor. This was the Italian, Pacinotti. [Footnote: Moses G.
+Farmer, an American, and celebrated in his day for intelligent
+electrical researches, is claimed to have made the first reversible
+motor ever contrived. A small motor made by Farmer in 1847, and
+embodying the electro-dynamic principle was exhibited at the great
+exposition at Chicago in 1893. If the genealogy of this machine remains
+undisputed it fixes the fact that the discovery belongs to this country,
+and to an American.] He mentioned that his machine could be used either
+to generate a current of electricity on the application of motive power
+to its armature, or to produce motive power on connecting it with a
+source of electricity. Yet it did not occur to him to definitely
+experiment with two of his machines for the purpose of accomplishing
+that which in less than twenty years has revolutionized our ideas and
+practice in transmitted force. He did not suggest that two of his
+machines could be run together, one as a generator and the other as a
+motor. He did not think of its advantages with the facilities for it, of
+his own creation, in his hands.
+
+M. Fontaine states that at the Vienna Exposition of 1873 there was a
+Gramme machine intended to be operated by a primary battery, to show
+that the Gramme was capable of being worked by a current, and, as there
+was also a second machine of the same kind there, of also generating
+one. These two machines were to demonstrate this range of capacity as
+_separately worked_, one by power, the other with a battery. There
+was, then, no intention of coupling them together as late as 1873, with
+the means at hand and the suggestion almost unavoidable. The dynamo and
+motor had not occurred to any one. But M. Fontaine states that he failed
+to get the primary (battery) current in time for the opening, and was
+troubled by the dilemma. Then the idea occurred to him, as he could do
+no better, to work one of the machines with a current "deprived," partly
+stolen, from the other, as a temporary measure. A friend lent him the
+necessary piece of wire, and he connected the two machines. The machine
+used as a motor was connected with a pumping apparatus, and when the
+machine intended as a generator started, and this make-shift,
+temporarily-stolen current was carried to the acting motor, the action
+of the last was so much more vigorous than was intended that the water
+was thrown over the sides of the tank. Fontaine was forced to remedy
+this excessive action by procuring an additional wire of such length
+that its resistance permitted the motor to work more mildly and throw
+less water. This accidentally established the fact of distance,
+convenience, a revolution in the power of the industrial world. Fontaine
+states that Gramme had previously told him that he had done the same
+thing with his machines. The idea was never patented. Neither Pacinotti,
+who invented the machine originally, nor Gramme, one of the great names
+of modern electricity, nor this skilled practical electrician, Fontaine,
+who had charge of the exhibit of the Gramme system at Vienna, considered
+the fact of the transmission of concentrated power over a thin wire to a
+great distance as one of value to its inventor or to the industries of
+mankind. With the motor and the dynamo already made, it was an accident
+that brought them together after all.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may be amusing, if not useful, to spend a moment in reviewing of the
+efforts of men to utilize the power of the electrical current in
+mechanics before the day of the dynamo and a motor, and while yet the
+electric light was an infant in the nursery of the laboratory. They knew
+then, about 1835 to 1870, of the laws of induction as applied to the
+electro-magnet, or in small machines the generating power, so called, of
+the magneto-electric arrangement embodied, as a familiar example, in
+Kidder's medical battery. There is a long list of those inventors,
+American and European. The first patent issued for an American
+electro-motor was in 1837, to a man named Thomas Davenport, of Brandon,
+Vt. He was a man far ahead of his times. He built the first electric
+railroad ever seen, at Springfield, Mass., in 1835, and considering the
+means, whose inadequacy is now better understood by any reader of these
+lines than it then was by the deepest student of electricity, this first
+railroad was a success. Davenport came as near to solving the problem of
+an electric motor as was possible without the invention of Pacinotti.
+Following this there were many patents issued for electro-magnetic
+motors to persons residing in all parts of the country, north and south.
+One was made by C. G. Page, of the Smithsonian Institute, in which the
+motive power consisted in a round rod, acting as a plunger, being pulled
+into the space where the core would be in an ordinary electro-magnet,
+and thereby working a crank. [Footnote: The _National
+Intelligencer_, a prominent Washington newspaper, said with reference
+to Page's motor "He has shown that before long electro-magnetic action
+will have dethroned steam and will be the adopted motor," etc. This was
+an enthusiasm not based upon any fact then known about a machine not
+even in the line of the present facts of electro-dynamics.] A large
+motor of this kind is alleged, in 1850, to have developed ten horse
+power. It was actually applied to outdoor experiment as a car-motor on
+an actual railroad track, and was efficient for several miles. But it
+carried with it its battery-cells, and they were disarranged and stirred
+by the jolting, and being made of crockeryware were broken. The
+chemicals cost much more than fuel for steam, and there could be no
+economical motive for further experiment. It was a huge toy, as the
+entire sum of electrical science was until it was made useful first in
+the one instance of the telegraph, and long after that date the use of
+the electro-magnet, with a cam to cut off and turn on again the current
+at proper intervals, which was the one principle of all attempts, was a
+repeated and invariable failure. That which was wanted and lacking was
+not known, and was finally discovered and successively developed as has
+been described.
+
+Electric railroads.--There was an instance of almost simultaneous
+invention in the case of the first practical electric railroads. S. D.
+Field, Dr. Siemens, and Thomas A. Edison all applied for patents in
+1880. Of these, Field was first in filing, and was awarded patents. The
+combined dynamo and motor were, of course, the parents of the practical
+idea. Field's patents covered a motor in or under the car, operated by a
+current from a stationary source of electricity--of course a dynamo.
+These first electric roads had the current carried on the rail. They
+were partially successful, but there was something wrong in the plan,
+and that something was induction by the earth. Later came, as a remedy
+for this, the "Trolley" system; the trolley being a small, grooved wheel
+running upon a current-carrying wire overhead. The question of how best
+to convey a current to the car-motor is a serious one, doubtless at this
+moment occupying the attention of highly-trained intelligence
+everywhere. The motor current is one of high power, and as such
+intractable; and it is in the character of this current, rather than in
+methods of insulation, that the remedy for the much-objected-to overhead
+wire is to be found. It will be remembered that all the phenomena of
+induction are _unhindered by insulation_.
+
+Aside from the current-carrying problem, the electric road is
+explainable in all its features upon the theory and practice of the
+dynamo and motor. It is merely an application of the two machines. The
+last is, in usual practice, under the car, and geared to the truck-axle.
+A more modern mechanical improvement is to make the axle the shaft of
+the motor armature. When the motor has used the current it passes by
+most systems into the rail and the ground. By others there is a
+"metallic circuit"--two wires. Many men whose interest and occupation
+leads them to a study of such matters know that the use of electricity,
+instead of steam locomotion, is merely a question of time on all
+railroads. I have said elsewhere that the actual age of electricity had
+not yet fully come. It seems to us now that we have attained the end;
+that there is little more to know or to do. But so have all the
+generations thought in their day. In the field of electricity there are
+yet to come practical results of which one may have some foreshadowings
+in the experiments of men like Tesla, which will make our present times
+and knowledge seem tame and slow.
+
+Electrolysis.--In all history, fire has been the universal practical
+solvent. It has been supplanted by the electrical current in some of the
+most beautiful and useful phenomena of our time. Electrolysis is the
+name of the process by which fluid chemicals are decomposed by the
+current.
+
+A familiar early experiment in electrolysis is the decomposition of
+water--a chemical composed of oxygen and hydrogen, though always thought
+of and used as a simple, pure fluid. If the poles of a galvanic battery
+are immersed in water slightly mixed with sulphuric acid to favor
+electrical action, these poles will become covered with bubbles of gas
+which presently rise to the surface and pass off. These bubbles are
+composed of the two constituents of water, the oxygen rising from the
+positive and the hydrogen from the negative pole. Particles of the
+substance decomposed are transferred, some to one pole and some to the
+other; and, therefore, electrolysis is always practiced in a fluid in
+order that this transference may more readily occur.
+
+The quantity of _electrolyte_--the substance decomposed--that is
+transferred in a given time is in proportion to the strength of the
+current. When this electrolyte is composed of many substances a current
+will act a little on all of them, and the quantity in which the
+elementary bodies appear at the poles of the current depends upon the
+quantities of the compounds in the liquid, and on the relative ease with
+which they yield to the electrical action.
+
+The electrolytic processes are not the mere experiments a brief
+description of them would indicate, but are among the important
+processes for the mechanical products of modern times. The extensive
+nickel-plating that became a permanent fad in this country on the
+discovery of a special process some years ago, is all done by
+electrolysis. The silver plating of modern tableware and table cutlery,
+as beautiful and much less expensive than silver, and the fine finish of
+the beautiful bronze hardware now used in house-furnishing, are the
+results of the same process. Some use for it enters into almost every
+piece of fine machinery, and into the beautifying or preserving of
+innumerable small articles that are made and used in unlimited quantity.
+
+The process and its principle is general, but there are many details
+observed in the actual work of electroplating which interest only those
+engaged. One of the most usual of these is that of making an
+electrotype. This may mean the making of an exact impression of a medal,
+coin, or other figure, or a depositing of a coating of the same on any
+metallic surface. Formerly the faces of the types used in printing were
+very commonly faced with copper to give them finish and a wearing
+quality. Even fresh, natural fruits that have been evenly coated with
+plumbago may be covered with a thin shell of metal. A silver head may be
+placed on the wood of a walking stick, precisely conforming on the
+outside to the form of the wood within.
+
+The deposit of metal in the electrotyping process always takes place at
+the negative pole--the pole by which the current passes out of the fluid
+into its conductor. This is the "_cathode_." The other is the
+"_anode_." The "bath," as the fluid in which the process is
+accomplished is called, for silver, gold or platinum contains one
+hundred parts of water, ten of potassium cyanide, and one of the cyanide
+of whichever of those metals is to be deposited. The articles to be
+plated are suspended in this bath and the battery-power, varying in
+intensity according to circumstances, is applied. After removal they are
+buffed and finished. A varying detail is practiced for different metals,
+and the current now commonly used is from a dynamo. [Footnote: Among
+modern modifications of the dynamic current, is its use, modified by
+proper appliances, for the telegraph and the telephone circuits of
+cities and the larger towns. Every electric current may now be safely
+attributed to that source, and from the same circuit and generator all
+modifications may be produced at once.]
+
+The origin of electrolysis is said to be with Daniell, who noticed the
+deposit of copper while experimenting with the battery that bears his
+name. Jacobi, at St. Petersburg, first published a description of the
+process in 1839. The Elkingtons were the first to actually put the
+process into commercial practice.
+
+It would be interesting now, were it apropos, to describe the seemingly
+very ancient processes by which our ancestors gilded, plated, were
+deceived and deceived others, previous to about 1845. For those things
+were done, and the genuineness of life has by no means been destroyed by
+the modern ease with which a precious metal may be deposited upon one
+utterly base. A contemplation of the moral side of the subject might
+lead at once to the conclusion that we could now spare one of the least
+in actual importance of the processes of the all-pervading and wonderful
+essence that alike makes the lightning-stroke and gilds the plebeian pin
+that fastens a baby's napkin. But from any other view we could not now
+dispense with anything electricity does.
+
+General facts.--The names of many of the original investigators of
+electrical phenomena are perpetuated in the familiar names of electrical
+measurements. For, notwithstanding its seeming subtlety, there is no
+force in use, or that has ever been used by men, capable of being so
+definitely calculated, measured, determined beforehand, as electricity
+is. As time passes new measurements are adopted and named, some of them
+being proposed as lately as 1893. An instance of the value of some of
+these old determinations of a time when all we now know of electrical
+science was unknown, may be given in what is known as Ohm's Law. Ohm was
+a native of Erlangen, in Bavaria, and was Professor of Physics at
+Munich, where he died in 1874. He formulated this Law in 1827, and it
+was translated into English in 1847. He was recognized at the time, and
+was given the Copley medal of the Royal Society of London. The Law--for
+by that distinctive name is it still called, though the name "Ohm," also
+expresses a unit of measurement--is that _the quantity of current that
+will pass through a conductor is proportional to the pressure and
+inversely proportional to the distance_. That is:
+
+Current = Pressure / Resistance.
+
+Transposing the terms of the equation we may get an expression for
+either of those elements, current, pressure, or resistance, in the terms
+of the other two. This relation holds true and is accurate in every
+possible case and condition of practical work. This remarkable precision
+and definiteness of action has made possible the creation of an
+extensive school of electrical testing, by which we are not only enabled
+to make accurate measurement of electrical apparatus and appliances, but
+also to make determinations in _other_ fields by the agency of
+electricity. When an ocean cable is injured or broken the precise
+location of the trouble is made _by measuring the electrical
+resistance of the parts on each side of the injury_.
+
+The magnitudes of measurements of electricity are expressed in the
+following convenient electrical units:
+
+The VOLT (named from Volta) equals a unit of _pressure_ that is
+equal to one cell of a gravity battery.
+
+The OHM, as a unit of measurement, equals a unit of _resistance_
+that is equivalent to the resistance of a hundred feet of copper wire
+the size of a pin.
+
+The AMP�RE (named from Amp�re, 1775-1836, author of a "Collection of
+Observations on Electro-Dynamics" and other works, and a profound
+practical investigator) equals a unit of _current_ equivalent to
+the current which one Volt of pressure will produce through one Ohm of
+wire (or resistance).
+
+The Coulomb (1736--inventor of the means of measuring electricity called
+the "Torsion balance," and general early investigator) equals a unit of
+_quantity_ of one Ampere flowing for one second.
+
+The Farad (from Faraday, the discoverer of the laws of Induction, see
+_ante_), equals that unit of _capacity_ which is the capacity
+for holding one Coulomb. Death current.--What is now spoken of as the
+"Death Current" is one that will instantly overcome the "resistance" of
+the human, or animal, body. It is a current of from one to two thousand
+Volts--about the same as that used in maintaining the large arc lights.
+This question of the killing capacity of the current became officially
+prominent some years ago, upon the passage by the legislature of the
+State of New York of a statute requiring the death penalty to be
+inflicted by means of electricity. The object was to deter evildoers by
+surrounding the penalty with scientific horror, [Footnote: Hence also
+the new lingual atrocity, the word "electrocute," derived from "execute"
+by decapitation and the addition of "electro"] and the idea had its
+origin in the accidents which formerly occurred much more frequently
+than now. The "death current" is now almost everywhere, though the care
+of the men who continually work about "live" wires has grown to be much
+like that of men who continually handle firearms or explosives, and
+accidents seldom happen. At first it was apparently difficult for the
+general public to appreciate the fact that the silent and
+harmless-looking wires must be avoided. There was suddenly a new and
+terrific power in common use, and it was as slender, silent and
+unobtrusive as it was fatal.
+
+Insulation of the hands by the use of rubber gloves, and extreme care,
+are the means by which those who are called "linemen"--a new
+industry--protect themselves in their occupation. But there is a new
+commandment added to the list of those to be memorized by the
+body-politic. "Do not tread upon, drive over, or touch _any_ wire."
+It may be, and probably is, harmless. But you cannot positively
+know. [Footnote: It is a common trait of general human nature to refuse
+to learn save by the hardest of experiences, and so far as the crediting
+of statements is concerned, to at first believe everything that is not
+true, and reject most that is. The supernatural, the phenomena of
+alleged witchcraft and diabolism, and of "luck," "hoodoo," "fate," etc.,
+find ready disciples among those who reject disdainfully the results of
+the working of natural law. When the railroads were first built across
+the plains the Indians repeatedly attempted to stop moving trains by
+holding the ends of a rope stretched across the track in front of the
+engine, and with results which greatly surprised them When the lines
+were first constructed in northern Mexico the Mexican peasant could not
+be induced to refrain from trying personal experiments with the new
+power, and scores of him were killed before he learned that standing on
+the track was dangerous. In the United States the era of accidents
+through indifference to common-looking wires has almost passed, but for
+some years the fatality was large because people are always governed by
+appearances connected with _previous_ notions, until _new_
+experiences teach them better.]
+
+INSTRUMENTS OF MEASUREMENT.--Some of the most costly and beautiful of
+modern scientific instruments are those used in the measurements and
+determinations of electrical science. There are many forms and varieties
+for every specific purpose. Electrical measurement has become a
+department of physical science by itself, and a technical, extensive and
+varied one. Already the electrical specialist, no more an original
+experimenter or investigator than the average physician is, has become
+professional. He makes plans, submits facts, estimates cost, and states
+results with almost certainty.
+
+ELECTRICITY AS AN INDUSTRY.--Immense factories are now devoted to the
+manufacture of electrical goods exclusively. Large establishments in
+cities are filled with them. The installation of the electric plant in a
+dwelling house is done in the same way, and as regularly, as the
+plumbing is. Soon there must be still another enlargement, since the
+heating of houses through a wire, and the kitchen being equipped with
+cooking utensils whose heat is for each vessel evolved in its own
+bottom, is inevitable.
+
+The following are some of the facts, in figures, of the business side of
+electricity in the United States at the present writing. In 1866, about
+twenty years after the establishment of the telegraph, but with a
+population of only a little more than half the present, there were
+75,686 miles of telegraph wire in use, and 2,520 offices. In 1893 there
+were 740,000 miles of wire, and more than 20,000 offices. The receipts
+for the year first named are unknown, but for 1893 they were about
+$24,000,000. The expenses of the system for the same year were
+$16,500,000.
+
+The telephone, an industry now about sixteen years old, had in 1893, for
+the Bell alone, over 200,000 miles of wire on poles, and over 90,000
+miles of wire under ground. The instruments were in 15,000 buildings.
+There were 10,000 employ�s, and 233,000 subscribers. All companies
+combined had 441,000 miles of wire. Ninety-two millions of dollars were
+invested in telephone _fixtures_.
+
+In 1893, the average cost of a telegram was thirty-one and one
+six-tenths cents, and the average alleged cost of sending the same to
+the companies was twenty-two and three-tenths cents, leaving a profit of
+nine and three-tenths cents on every message. It must be remembered that
+with mail facilities and cheapness that are unrivalled, the telegraph
+message is always an extraordinary mode of communication; an emergency.
+These few figures may serve to give the reader a dim idea of the
+importance to which the most ordinary and general of the branches of
+electrical industry have grown in the United States.
+
+MEDICAL ELECTRICITY.--For more than fifty years the medical fraternity
+in regular practice persisted in disregarding all the claims made for
+the electric current as a therapeutic agent. In earlier times it was
+supposed to have a value that supplanted all other medical agencies.
+Franklin seems to have been one of the earliest experimenters in this
+line, and to have been successful in many instances where his brief
+spark from the only sources of the current then known were applicable to
+the case. The medical department of the science then fell into the hands
+of charlatans, and there is a natural disposition to deal in the
+wonderful, the miraculous or semi-miraculous, in the cure of disease.
+Divested of the wonder-idea through a wider study and greater knowledge
+of actual facts, electricity has again come forward as a curative agent
+in the last ten years. Instruction in its management in disease is
+included in the curriculum of almost every medical school, and most
+physicians now own an outfit, more or less extensive, for use in
+ordinary practice. To decry and utterly condemn is no longer the custom
+of the steady-going physician, the ethics of whose cloth had been for
+centuries to condemn all that interfered with the use of drugs, and
+everything whose action could not be understood by the examples of
+common experience, and without special study outside the lines of
+medical knowledge as prescribed.
+
+Perhaps the developments based upon the discoveries of Faraday have had
+much to do with the adoption of electricity as a curative agent. The
+current usually used is the Faradic; the induced alternate current from
+an induction coil. This is, indeed, the current most useful in the
+majority of the nervous derangements in the treatment of which the
+current is of acknowledged utility.
+
+In surgery the advance is still greater. "Galvano-cautery" is the
+incandescent light precisely; the white-hot wire being used to cut off,
+or burn off, and cauterize at the same time, excrescences and growths
+that could not be easily reached by other means than a tube and a small
+loop of platinum wire. A little incandescent lamp with a bulb no bigger
+than a pea is used to light up and explore cavities, and this advance
+alone, purely mechanical and outside of medical science, is of immense
+importance in the saving of life and the avoidance of human suffering.
+
+It may be added that there is nothing magical, or by the touch, or
+mysterious, in the treatment of disease by the electrical current. The
+results depend upon intelligent applications, based upon reason and
+experience, a varied treatment for varying cases. Nor is it a remedy to
+be applied by the patient himself more than any other is. On the
+contrary, he may do himself great injury. The pills, potions, powders
+and patent medicines made to be taken indiscriminately, and which he
+more or less understands, may be still harmful yet much safer. Even the
+application of one or the other of the two poles with reference to the
+course of a nerve, may result in injury instead of good.
+
+INCOMPLETE POSSIBILITIES.--There are at least two things greatly desired
+by mankind in the field of electrical science and not yet attained. One
+of these, that may now be dismissed with a word, is the resolving of the
+latent energy of, say a ton of coal, into electrical energy without the
+use of the steam engine; without the intervention of any machine. For
+electricity is not manufactured; not created by men in any case. It
+exists, and is merely gathered, in a measure and to a certain extent
+confined and controlled, and sent out as a _concentrated form of
+energy_ on its various errands. Should a means for the concentration
+of this universally diffused energy be found whereby it could be made to
+gather, by the new arrangement of some natural law such as places it in
+enormous quantities in the thundercloud, a revolution that would
+permeate and visibly change all the affairs of men would take place,
+since the industrial world is not a thing apart, but affects all men,
+and all institutions, and all thought.
+
+The other desideratum, more reasonable apparently, yet far from present
+accomplishment, is a means of storing and carrying a supply of
+electricity when it has been gathered by the means now used, or by any
+means.
+
+THE STORAGE BATTERY is an attempt in this last direction. The name is
+misleading, since even in this attempt electricity is in no sense
+"stored," but a chemical action producing a current takes place in the
+machine. The arrangement is in its infancy. Instances occur in which,
+under given circumstances, it is more or less efficient, and has been
+improved into greater efficiency. But many difficulties intervene, one
+of which is the great weight of the appliances used, and another,
+considerable cost. The term "storage battery" is now infrequently used,
+and the name "secondary" battery is usually substituted. The principle
+of its action is the decomposing of combined chemicals by the action of
+a current applied from a stationary generator or dynamo, and that these
+chemicals again unite as soon as they are allowed to do so by the
+completing of a circuit, _and in re-combining give off nearly as much
+electricity as was first used in separating them._ The action of the
+secondary, "storage," battery, once charged, is like that of a primary
+battery. The current is produced by chemical action. Two metals outside
+of the solution contained in a primary battery cell, but under differing
+physical conditions from each other, will yield a current. A piece of
+polished iron and a piece of rusty iron, connected by a wire, will yield
+a small current. Rusty lead, so to speak, so connected with bright lead,
+has a high electromotive force. Oxygen makes lead rusty, and hydrogen
+makes it bright. Oxygen and hydrogen are the two gases cast off when
+water is subjected to a current. (See _ante_ under
+_Electrolysis_) So Augustin Plant�, the inventor of as much as we
+yet have of what is called a storage or secondary battery, suspended two
+plates of lead in water, and when a current of electricity was passed
+through it hydrogen was thrown off at one plate, making it bright, and
+oxygen at the other plate, peroxydizing its surface. When the current
+was removed the altered plates, connected by a wire, would send off a
+current which was in the opposite direction from the first, and this
+would continue until the plates were again in their original condition.
+This is the principle and mode of action of the storage battery. So far
+it has assumed many forms. Scores of modifications have been invented
+and patented. The leaden plates have taken a variety of forms, yet have
+remained leaden plates, one cleaned and the other fouled by the
+electrolytic action of a current, and giving off an almost equivalent
+current again by the return process. The arrangement endures for several
+repetitions of the process, but is finally expensive and always
+inconvenient. The secondary battery, in its infancy, as stated, presents
+now much the same obstacles to commercial use the galvanic, or primary,
+battery did before the induced current had become the servant of man.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+ELECTRICAL INVENTION IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+
+A list of the electrical inventors of this country would be very long.
+Many of the names are, in the mass and number of inventions, almost
+lost. It happens that many of the practical applications described in
+this volume, indeed most of them, are the work of citizens of this
+country.
+
+In previous chapters I have referred briefly to Franklin, Morse, Field,
+and others. These men have left names that, without question, may be
+regarded as permanent. Their chiefest distinguishing trait was
+originality of idea, and each one of them is a lesson to the American
+boy. In a sense the greatest of all these, and in the same sense, the
+greatest American, was Benjamin Franklin. A sketch of his career has
+been given, but to that may be added the following: He had arrived at
+conclusions that were vast in scope and startling in result by applying
+the reasoning faculty upon observations of phenomena that had been
+recurring since the world was made, and had been misunderstood from the
+beginning. He used the simplest means. His experiment was in a different
+way daily performed for him by nature. He was philosophically daring,
+indifferently a tinker with nature's terrific machinery; a knocker at
+the door of an august temple that men were never known to have entered;
+a mortal who smiled in the face of inscrutable and awful mystery, and
+who defied the lightning in a sense not merely moral. [Footnote:
+Professor Richmann, of St. Petersburg, was instantly killed by lightning
+while repeating Franklin's experiment.]
+
+His genius lay in a power of swift inductive reasoning. His common sense
+and his sense of humor never forsook him. He uttered keen apothegms that
+have lived like those of Solon. He was a philosopher like Diogenes,
+lacking the bitterness. He wrote the "Busy-Body," and annually made the
+plebeian and celebrated "Almanac," and the "Ephemera" that were not
+ephemeral, and is the author of the story of "The Whistle," that
+everybody knows, and everybody reads with shamefacedness because it is a
+brief chapter out of his own history.
+
+He was apparently an adept in the art of caring for himself, one of the
+most successful worldings of his time, yet he wrote, thought, toiled
+incessantly, for his fellow men. He had little education obtained as it
+is supposed an education must be obtained. He was commonplace. No one
+has ever told of his "silver tongue," or remembered a brilliant
+after-dinner speech that he has made. Yet he finally stood before
+mankind the companion of princes, the darling of splendid women, covered
+with the laurels of a brilliant scientific renown. But he was a printer,
+a tinkerer with stoves, the inventor of the lightning rod, the man who
+had spent one-half his life in teaching apprentices, such as he himself
+had been when his jealous and common-minded brother had whipped him,
+that "time is money," that "credit is money"--which is the most
+prominent fact in the commercial world of 1895--and that honor and
+self-respect are better than wealth, pleasure, or any other good.
+
+Yet clear, keen, cold and inductive as was Franklin's mind, no vision
+reached him, in the moment of that triumph when he felt the lightning
+tingling in his fingers from a hempen string, of those wonders which
+were to come. He knew absolutely nothing of that necromancy through
+which others of his countrymen were to girdle the world with a common
+intelligence, and yet others were to use in sprinkling night with
+clusters as innumerable and mysterious as the higher stars.
+
+The story of the Morse telegraph has been repeatedly told, and I have
+briefly sketched it in connection with the subject of the telegraph.
+But, unlike the original, scientifically lonely and independent
+Franklin, Morse had the best assistance of his times in the persons of
+men more skilled than himself and almost as persistent. The chief of
+these was Alfred Vail, a name until lately almost unknown to scientific
+fame, who eliminated the clumsy crudities of Morse's conception, remade
+his instruments, and was the inventor of that renowned alphabet which
+spells without letters or writing or types, that may be seen or heard or
+felt or tasted, that is adapted to any language and to all conditions,
+and that performs to this day, and shall to all time, the miracle of
+causing the inane rattle of pieces of metal against each other to speak
+to even a careless listener the exact thoughts of one a thousand miles
+away.
+
+Another of the men who might be appropriately included in any
+comprehensive list of aiders and abettors of the present telegraph
+system were Leonard D. Gale, then Professor of Chemistry in the
+University of New York, and Professor Joseph Henry, who had made, and
+was apparently indifferent to the importance of it because there was no
+alphabet to use it with, the first electric telegraph ever constructed
+to be read, or used, _by sound_. Last, though hardly least if all
+facts are understood, might be included a skillful youth named William
+Baxter, afterwards known as the inventor of the "Baxter Engine," who,
+shut in a room with Vail in a machine shop in New Jersey, made in
+conjunction with the author of the alphabet the first telegraphic
+instrument that, with Henry's magnet and battery cells, sent across
+space the first message ever read by a person who did not know what the
+words of the message would say or mean until they had been received.
+
+After the telegraph the state of electrical knowledge was for a long
+time such that electrical invention was in a sense impossible. The
+renowned exploit of Field was not an invention, but a heroic and
+successful extension of the scope and usefulness of an invention. But
+thought was not idle, and filled the interval with preparations for
+final achievements unequaled in the history of science. Two of these
+results are the electric light and the telephone. For the various
+"candles," such as that of Jablochkoff, exhibited at Paris in 1870, only
+served to stimulate investigation of the alluring possibilities of the
+subject. The details of these great inventions are better known than
+those of any others. The telegraph and the newspaper reporter had come
+upon the field as established institutions. Every process and progress
+was a piece of news of intense interest. When the light glowed in its
+bulb and sparkled and flashed at the junction points of its
+chocolate-colored sticks it had been confidently expected. There was
+little surprise. The practical light of the world was considered
+probable, profitable, and absolutely sure. The real story will never be
+told. The thoughts, which phrase may also include the inevitable
+disappointments of the inventor, are never written down by him. That
+variety of brain which, with a few great exceptions, was not known until
+modern, very recent times, which does not speculate, contrive, imagine
+only, but also reduces all ideas to _commercial_ form, has yet to
+have its analysis and its historian, for it is to all intents a new
+phase of the evolution of mind.
+
+[Illustration: THOMAS A. EDISON.]
+
+A typical example of this class of intellect is Mr. Thomas A. Edison. It
+may be doubted if such a man could, in the qualities that make him
+remarkable, be the product of any other country than ours. In common
+with nearly all those who have left a deep impression upon our country,
+Edison was the child of that hackneyed "respectable poverty" which here
+is a different condition from that existing all over Europe, where the
+phrase was coined. There, the phrase, and the condition it describes,
+mean a dull content, an incapacity to rise, a happy indifference to all
+other conditions, a dullness that does not desire to learn, to change,
+to think. To respectable poverty in other civilizations there are strong
+local associations like those of a cat, not arising to the dignity of
+love of country. In the United States, without a word, without argument
+or question, a young man becomes a pioneer--not necessarily one of
+locality or physical newness, but a pioneer in mind--in creed, politics,
+business--in the boundless domain of hope and endeavor. In America no
+man is as his father was except in physical traits. No man there is a
+volunteer soldier fighting his country's battles except from a
+conviction that he ought to be. A man is an inventor, a politician, a
+writer, first because he knows that valuable changes are possible, and,
+second, because he can make such changes profitable to himself. It is
+the great realm of immutable steadfastness combined with constant
+change; unique among the nations.
+
+Edison never had more than two months regular schooling in his entire
+boyhood. There is, therefore, nothing trained, "regular," technical,
+about him. If there had been it is probable that we might never have
+heard of him. He is one of the innumerable standing arguments against
+the old system advocated by everybody's father, and especially by the
+older fathers of the church, and which meant that every man and woman
+was practically cut by the same pattern, or cast in the same general
+mould, and was to be fitted for a certain notch by training alone. No
+more than thirty years ago the note of preparation for the grooves of
+life was constantly sounded. Natural aptitude, "bent," inclination, were
+disregarded. The maxim concocted by some envious dull man that "genius
+is only another name for industry," was constantly quoted and believed.
+
+But Edison's mother had been trained, practically, as an instructor of
+youth. He had hints from her in the technical portions of a boy's
+primary training. He is not an ignorant man, but, on the contrary, a
+very highly educated one. But it is an education he has constructed for
+himself out of his aptitudes, as all other actual educations have really
+been. When he was ten years old he had read standard works, and at
+twelve is stated to have struggled, ineffectually perhaps, with Newton's
+_Principia_. At that age he became a train-boy on the Grand Trunk
+railroad for the purpose of earning his living; only another way of
+pioneering and getting what was to be got by personal endeavor. While in
+that business he edited and printed a little newspaper; not to please an
+amateurish love of the beautiful art of printing, but for profit. He was
+selling papers, and he wanted one of his own to sell because then he
+would get more out of it in a small way. He never afterwards showed any
+inclination toward journalism, and did not become a reporter or
+correspondent, or start a rural daily. While he was a train-boy,
+enjoying every opportunity for absorbing a knowledge of human nature,
+and of finally becoming a passenger conductor or a locomotive engineer,
+something called his attention to the telegraph as a promoter of
+business, as a great and useful institution, and he resolved to become
+an "operator." This was his electrical beginning. Yet before he took
+this step he was accused of a proclivity toward extraordinary things. In
+the old "caboose" where he edited, set up, and printed his newspaper he
+had established a small chemical laboratory, and out of these chemicals
+there is said to have been jolted one day an accident which caused him
+some unpopularity with the railroad people. He was all the time a
+business man. He employed four boy helpers in his news and publishing
+business. It took him a long time to learn the telegraph business under
+the circumstances, and when he was at last installed on a "plug" circuit
+he began at once to do unusual things with the current and its machines
+and appliances. This is what he tells of his first electrical invention.
+
+There was an operator at one end of the circuit who was so swift that
+Edison and his companion could not "take" fast enough to keep up with
+him. He found two old Morse registers--the machines that printed with a
+steel point the dots and dashes on a paper slip wound off of a reel.
+These he arranged in such a way that the message written, or indented,
+on them by the first instrument were given to him by the second
+instrument at any desired rate of speed or slowness.
+
+This gave to him and his friend time to catch up. This, in Morse's time,
+would have been thought an achievement. Edison seems to regard it as a
+joke. There was no time for prolonged experiment. It was an emergency,
+and the idea must necessarily have been supplemented by a quick
+mechanical skill.
+
+It was this same automatic recorder, the idea embodied in it, that by
+thought and logical deduction afterwards produced that wonderful
+automaton, the phonograph. He rigged a hasty instrument that was based
+upon the idea that if the indentations made in a slip of paper could be
+made to repeat the ticking sound of the instrument, similar indentations
+made by a point on a diaphragm that was moved by the _voice_ might
+be made to repeat the voice. His rude first instrument gave back a sound
+vaguely resembling the single word first shouted into it and supposed to
+be indented on a slip of paper, and this was enough to stimulate further
+effort. He finally made drawings and took them to a machinist whom he
+knew, afterwards one of his assistants, who laughed at the idea but made
+the model. Previously he bet a friend a barrel of apples that he could
+do it. When the model was finished he arranged a piece of tin foil and
+talked into it, and when it gave back a distinct sound the machinist was
+frightened, and Edison won his barrel of apples, "which," he says, "I
+was very glad to get."
+
+The "Wizard" is a man evidently pertaining to the class of human
+eccentrics who excite the interest of their fellow-men "to see what they
+will do next," but without any idea of the final value of that which may
+come by what seems to them to be mere unbalanced oddity. Such people are
+invariably misunderstood until they succeed. When he invented the
+automatic repeating telegraph he was discharged, and walked from Decatur
+to Nashville, 150 miles, with only a dollar or two as his entire
+possessions. With a pass thence to Louisville, he and a friend arrived
+at that place in a snowstorm, and clad in linen "dusters." This does not
+seem scientific or professor-like, but it has not hindered; possibly it
+has immensely helped. It reminds one of the Franklinic episodes when
+remembered in connection with future scientific renown and the court of
+France.
+
+One of the secrets of Edison's great success is the ease with which he
+concentrates his mind. He is said to possess the faculty of leaving one
+thing and taking up another whenever he wills. He even carries on in his
+mind various trains of thought at the same time. The operations of his
+brain are imitated in his daily conduct, which is direct and simple in
+all respects. He is never happier than when engaged in the most
+absorbing and exacting mental toil. He dresses in a machinist's clothes
+when thus employed in his laboratory, and was long accustomed to work
+continuously for as long as he was so inclined without regard to
+regularity, or meals, or day or night. He is willing to eat his food
+from a bench that is littered with filings, chips and tools. To relieve
+strain and take a moment's recreation he is known to have bought a
+"cottage" organ and taught himself to play it, and to go to it in the
+middle of the night and grind out tunes for relaxation. He has a working
+library containing several thousand books. He pores over these volumes
+to inform himself upon some pressing idea, and does so in the midst of
+his work. No man could have made some of his inventions unaided by
+technical science and a knowledge of the results of the investigations
+of many others, and it has often been wondered how a man not technically
+educated could have seemed so well to know. There was a mistake. He
+_is_ educated; a scientific investigator of remarkable attainments.
+
+In thinking of the inventions of Edison and their value, a dozen of the
+first class, that would each one have satisfied the ambition or taken
+the time of an ordinary man, can be named. The mimeograph and the
+electric pen are minor. Then there are the stock printer, the automatic
+repeating telegraph, quadruplex telegraphy, the phono-plex, the
+ore-milling process, the railway telegraph, the electric engine, the
+phonograph. Some of these inventions seem, in the glow of his
+incandescent light, or with one's ear to the tube of the telephone he
+improved in its most essential part, to be too small for Edison. But
+nothing was too small for Franklin, or for the boy who played idly with
+the lid of his mother's tea-kettle and almost invented the steam-engine
+of today, or for Hero of Alexandria, who dreamed a thousand years before
+its time of the power that was to come. So was Henry's first electric
+telegraph the merest toy, and his electro-magnet was supported upon a
+pile of books, his signal bell was that with which one calls a servant,
+and his idea was a mere experiment without result. There was a boy
+Edison needed there then, whose toys reap fortunes and light, and
+enlighten, the world. The electric pen was in its day immensely useful
+in the business world, because it was the application of the stencil to
+ordinary manuscript, and caused the making of hundreds of copies upon
+the stencil idea, and with a printer's roller instead of a brush. The
+mimeograph was the same idea in a totally different form. It was writing
+upon a tablet that is like a bastard-file, with a steel-pointed stylus.
+Each slight projection makes a hole in the paper, and then the stencil
+idea begins again.
+
+Something has been previously said of the difficulties attending the
+making of the filament for the incandescent light. It is a little thing,
+smaller than a thread, frail, delicate, sealed in a bulb almost
+absolutely exhausted of air, smooth without a flaw, of absolutely even
+caliber from end to end. The world was searched for substances out of
+which to make it, and experiments were endlessly and tediously tried;
+all for this one little part of a great invention, which, like all other
+inventions, would be valueless in the want of a single little part.
+
+There are hundreds, an unknown number, of inventions in electricity in
+this country whose authors are unknown, and will never be known to the
+general public. The patent office shows many thousands of such in the
+aggregate. Many useful improvements in the telephone alone have come
+under the eye of every casual reader of the newspapers. These are now
+locked up from the world, with many other patented changes in existing
+machines, because of the great expense attending their substitution for
+those arrangements now in use.
+
+All the principles--the principles that, finally demonstrated, become
+laws--upon which electrical invention is based, are old. It seems
+impossible, during the entire era of modern thought, to have found a new
+trait, a development, a hitherto unsuspected quality. Tesla, in some of
+his most wonderful experiments, seems almost to have touched the
+boundaries of an unexplored realm, yet not quite, not yet, and most
+likely absolute discovery can no farther go. To play upon those known
+laws--to twist them to new utilities and give them new developments--has
+been the work of the creators of all the modern electrical miracles.
+There is scarcely a field in which men work in which the results are not
+more apparent, yet all we have, and undoubtedly most we shall ever have,
+of electricity we shall continue to owe to the infant period of the
+science.
+
+It may be truthfully claimed that most of these extraordinary
+applications of electricity have been made by American inventors.
+Wherever there is steam, on sea or land, there, intimately associated
+with American management, will be found the dynamic current and all its
+uses. The science of explosive destruction has almost entirely changed,
+and with a most extraordinary result. But one of the factors of this
+change has been the electric current, a something primarily having
+nothing to do with guns, ships or sailing. The modern man-of-war,
+beginning with those of our own navy, is lighted by the electric light,
+signalled and controlled by the current, and her ponderous guns are
+loaded, fired, and even _sighted_ by the same means. Her officers
+are a corps of electrical experts. A large part of her crew are trained
+to manipulate wires instead of ropes, and her total efficiency is
+perhaps three times what it would be with the same tonnage under the old
+r�gime. There is a new sea life and sea science, born full grown within
+ten years from a service encrusted with traditions like barnacles, and
+that could not have come by any other agency. A big gun is no longer
+merely that, but also an electrical machine, often with machinery as
+complicated as that of a chronometer and much more mysterious in
+operation.
+
+I have said that the huge piece was even sighted by electricity. There
+is really nothing strange in the statement, though it may read like a
+fairy tale or a metaphor to whoever has never had his attention called
+to the subject. In a small way, with the name of its inventor almost
+unknown except to his messmates, it is one of the most wonderful, and
+one of the simplest, of the modern miracles. As a mere instance of the
+wide extent of modern ideas of utility, and of the possibilities of
+application of the laws that were discovered and formulated by those
+whose names the units of electrical measurements bear, it may be briefly
+stated how a group of gunners may work behind an iron breastwork, and
+never see the enemy's hull, and yet aim at him with a hundred times the
+accuracy possible in the day of the _Old Ironsides_ and the
+_Guerriere_.
+
+And first it may be stated that the _range-finder_ is largely a
+measure of mere economy. A two-million-dollar cruiser is not sailed, or
+lost, as a mere pastime. Whoever aims best will win the fight. Ten years
+ago the way of finding distance, or range, which is the same thing, was
+experimental. If a costly shot was fired over the enemy the next one was
+fired lower, and possibly between the two the range might be got, both
+vessels meantime changing positions and range. To change this, to either
+injure an antagonist quickly or get away, the "range-finder" was
+invented, as a matter not of business profit, by Lieutenant Bradley A.
+Fiske, of the U. S. Navy, in 1889. It has its reason in the familiar
+mathematical proposition that if two angles and one side of a triangle
+are known, the other sides of the triangle are easily found. That is,
+that it can be determined how far it is to a distant object without
+going to it. But Fiske's range-finder makes no mathematical
+calculations, nor requires them to be made, and is automatic. A base
+line permanently fixed on the ship is the one side of a triangle
+required. The distance of the object to be hit is determined by its
+being the apex of an imaginary triangle, and at each of the other
+angles, at the two ends of the base line, is fixed a spyglass. These are
+directed at the object.
+
+So far electricity has had nothing to do with the arrangement, but now
+it enters as the factor without which the device could have no
+adaptation. As the telescopes are turned to bear upon the target they
+move upon slides or wires bent into an arc, and these carry an electric
+current. The difference in length of the slide passed over in turning
+the telescopes upon the object causes a greater or less resistance to
+the current, precisely as a short wire carries a current more easily;
+with less "resistance;" than a long one. A contrivance for measuring the
+current, amounting to the same thing that other instruments do of the
+same class that are used every day, allows of this resistance being
+measured and read, not now in units of electricity, but _in distance
+to the apex of the triangle where the target is_; in yards. The man
+at each telescope has only to keep it pointed at the target as it moves,
+or as the vessel moves which wishes to hit it. And now even the
+telephone enters into the arrangement. Elsewhere in the ship another man
+may stand with the transmitter at his ear. He will hear a buzzing sound
+until the telescopes stop moving, and at the same time there will be
+under his eye a pointer moving over a graduated scale. The instant the
+sound ceases he reads the range denoted by the index and scale. The
+information is then conveyed in any desired way to the men at the guns;
+these, of course, being aimed by a scale corresponding to that under the
+eye of the man at the telephone. The plan is not here detailed as
+technical information valuable to the casual reader, but as showing the
+wide range of electrical applications in fields where possible
+usefulness would not have been so much as suspected a few years ago. The
+same gentleman, Lieut. Fiske, is also the author of ingenious electrical
+appliances for the working of those immense gun-carriages that have
+grown too big for men to move, and for the hoisting into their cavernous
+breeches of shot and shell. The men who work these guns now do not need
+to see the enemy, even through the porthole or the embrasure. They can
+attend strictly to the business of loading and firing, assisted by
+machines nearly or quite automatic, and can cant and lay the piece by an
+index, and fire with an electric lanyard. The genius of science has
+taken the throne vacated by the goddess of glory. The sailor has gone,
+and the expert mechanician has taken his place. The tar and his training
+have given way to the register, the gauge and the electrometer. The big
+black guns are no longer run backward amid shouts and flying splinters,
+and rammed by men stripped to the waist and shrouded in the smoke of the
+last discharge, but swing their long and tapering muzzles to and fro out
+of steel casemates, and tilt their ponderous breeches like huge
+grotesque animals lying down. The grim machinery of naval battle is
+moved by invisible hands, and its enormous weight is swayed and tilted
+by a concealed and silent wire.
+
+This strange slave, that toils unmoved in the din of battle, has been
+reduced to domestic servitude of the plainest character. The
+demonstrations made of cooking by electricity at the great fair of 1893
+leave that service possible in the future without any question.
+Electrical ovens, models of neatness, convenience and _coolness_,
+were shown at work. They were made of wood, lined with asbestos, and
+were lighted inside with an incandescent lamp. The degree of temperature
+was shown by a thermometer, and mica doors rendered the baking or
+roasting visible. There could be no question of too much heat on one
+side and too little on another, because switches placed at different
+points allowed of a cutting off, or a turning on, whenever needed.
+Laundry irons had an insulated pliable connection attached, so that heat
+was high and constant at the bottom of the iron and not elsewhere. There
+were all the appliances necessary for the broiling of steaks, the making
+of coffee and the baking of cakes, and the same mystery, which is no
+longer a mystery, pervaded it all. Woman is also to become an
+electrician, at least empirically, and in time soon to come will
+understand her voltage and her Amp�res as she now does her drafts and
+dampers and the quality of her fuel.
+
+It is a practical fact that chickens are hatched by the thousand by the
+electrical current, and that men have discovered more than nature knew
+about the period of incubation, and have reduced it by electricity from
+twenty-one to nineteen days. The proverb about the value of the time of
+the incubating hen has passed into antiquity with all things else in the
+presence of electrical science.
+
+Whenever an American mechanician, a manufacturer or an inventor, is
+confronted by a difficulty otherwise insolvable he turns to electricity.
+Its laws and qualities are few. They seem now to be nearly all known,
+but the great curiosity of modern times is the almost infinite number of
+applications which these laws and qualities may be made to serve. One
+may turn at a single glance from the loading and firing of naval guns to
+the hatching of chickens and the cooking of chocolate by precisely the
+same means, silently used in the same way. Most of these applications,
+and all the most extraordinary ones, are of American origin. Their
+inventors are largely unknown. There is no attempt made here to more
+than suggest the possibilities of the near future by a glimpse of the
+present. The generation that is rising, the boy who is ten years old,
+should easily know more of electrical science than Franklin did. There
+are certain primal laws by which all explanations of all that now is,
+and most probably of almost all that is to come so far as principles go,
+may be readily understood, and these I have endeavored, in this and
+preceding chapters, to explain.
+
+There are in the United States new applications of electricity literally
+every day. Before the written page is printed some startling application
+is likely to be made that gives to that page at once an incompleteness
+it is impossible to guard against or avoid. There is a strong
+inclination to prophesy; to tell of that which is to come; to picture
+the warmed and illuminated future, smokeless and odorless, and the homes
+in which the children of the near future shall be reared. Some of those
+few apprehended things, suggested as being possible or desirable in
+these chapters, have been since done and the author has seen them. This
+American facility of electrical invention has one great cause, one
+specific reason for its fruitfulness. It is because so many acute minds
+have mastered the simple laws of electrical action. This knowledge not
+only fosters intelligent and fruitful experiment but it prevents the
+doing of foolish things. No man who has acquired a knowledge of
+mechanical forces, who understands at least that great law that for all
+force exerted there is exacted an equivalent, ever dreams upon the folly
+of the perpetual motion. In like manner does a knowledge, purely
+theoretical, of the laws of electricity prevent that waste of time in
+gropings and dreams of which the story of science and the long human
+struggle in all ages and in all departments is full.
+
+Finally, I would, if possible dispell all ideas of strangeness and
+mystery and semi-miracle as connected with electrical phenomena. There
+is no mystery; above all, there is no caprice. There are, in electricity
+and in all other departments of science, still many things undiscovered.
+It is certain that causes lead far back into that realm which is beyond
+present human investigation. _Force_ has innumerable manifestations
+that are visible, that are understood, that are controlled. Its
+_origin_ is behind the veil. A thousand branching threads of
+argument may be taken up and woven into the single strand that leads
+into the unknown. Out of the thought that is born of things has already
+arisen a new conception of the universe, and of the Eternal Mind who is
+its master. Among these things, these daily manifestations of a seeming
+mystery, the most splendid are the phenomena of electricity. They court
+the human understanding and offer a continual challenge to that faculty
+which alone distinguishes humanity from the beasts. The assistance given
+in the preceding pages toward a clear understanding of the reason why,
+so far as known, is perhaps inadequate, but is an attempt offered for
+what of interest or value may be found.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
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+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Steam Steel and Electricity, by James W. Steele</title>
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Steam Steel and Electricity, by James W. Steele
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Steam Steel and Electricity
+
+Author: James W. Steele
+
+Posting Date: March 26, 2014 [EBook #7886]
+Release Date: April, 2005
+First Posted: May 30, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STEAM STEEL AND ELECTRICITY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Tonya Allen and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<h1>STEAM</h1>
+
+<h1>STEEL</h1>
+
+<h2>AND</h2>
+
+<h1>ELECTRICITY</h1>
+
+<h3>By</h3>
+
+<h2>JAMES W. STEELE</h2>
+
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<p>
+<b>CONTENTS</b>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a href="#steam">THE STORY OF STEAM.</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What Steam is.--Steam in Nature.--The Engine in its earlier<br>
+forms.--Gradual explosion.--The Hero engine.--The Temple-door<br>
+machine.--Ideas of the Middle Ages.--Beginnings of the modern<br>
+engine.--Branca's engine.--Savery's engine.--The Papin engine<br>
+using cylinder and piston.--Watt's improvements upon the<br>
+Newcomen idea.--The crank movement.--The first use of steam<br>
+expansively.--The "Governor."--First engine by an American<br>
+Inventor.--Its effect upon progress in the United<br>
+States.--Simplicity and cheapness of the modern engine.--Actual<br>
+construction of the modern engine.--Valves, piston, etc., with<br>
+diagrams.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a href="#age">THE AGE OF STEEL.</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The various "Ages" in civilization.--Ancient knowledge of the<br>
+metals.--The invention and use of Bronze.--What Steel is.--The<br>
+"Lost Arts."--Metallurgy and chemistry.--Oriental Steel.--Modern<br>
+definition of Steel.--Invention of Cast Steel.--First iron-ore<br>
+discoveries in America.--First American Iron-works.--Early<br>
+methods without steam.--First American casting.--Effect of iron<br>
+industry upon independence.--Water-power.--The trip-hammer.--The<br>
+steam-hammer of Nasmyth.--Machine-tools and their<br>
+effects.--First rolling-mill.--Product of the iron industry in<br>
+1840-50.--The modern nail, and how it came.--Effect of iron upon<br>
+architecture.--The "Sky-Scraper."--Gas as fuel in iron<br>
+manufactures.--The Steel of the present.--The invention of<br>
+Kelley.--The Bessemer process.--The "Converter."--Present<br>
+product of Steel.--The Steel-mill.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a href="#elec">THE STORY OF ELECTRICITY.</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The oldest and the youngest of the sciences.--Origin of the<br>
+name.--Ancient ideas of Electricity.--Later experiments.--Crude<br>
+notions and wrong conclusions.--First Electric<br>
+Machine.--Frictional Electricity.--The Leyden Jar.--Extreme<br>
+ideas and Fakerism.--Franklin, his new ideas and their<br>
+reception.--Franklin's Kite.--The Man Franklin.--Experiments<br>
+after Franklin, leading to our present modern uses.--Galvani and<br>
+his discovery.--Volta, and the first "Battery."--How a battery<br>
+acts.--The laws of Electricity, and how they were<br>
+discovered.--Induction, and its discoverer.--The line at which<br>
+modern Electricity begins.--Magnetism and Electricity.--The<br>
+Electro-Magnet.--The Molecular theory.--Faraday, and his Law of<br>
+Magnetic Force.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a href="#mod">MODERN ELECTRICITY.</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+CHAPTER I. The Four great qualities of Electricity which make<br>
+its modern uses possible.--The universal wire.--Conductors and<br>
+non conductors.--Electricity an exception in the ordinary Laws<br>
+of Nature.--A dual nature: "Positive" and "Negative."--All<br>
+modern uses come under the law of Induction.--Some of the laws<br>
+of this induction.--Magnets and Magnetism.--Relationship between<br>
+the two.--Magnetic "poles."--Practical explanation of the action<br>
+of induction.--The Induction Coil.--Dynamic and Static<br>
+Electricity.--The Electric Telegraph.--First attempts.--Morse,<br>
+and his beginnings.--The first Telegraph Line.--Vail, and the<br>
+invention of the dot-and-dash alphabet.--The old instruments and<br>
+the new.--The final simplicity of the telegraph.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+CHAPTER II. The Ocean Cable.--Differences between land lines and<br>
+cables.--The story of the first cable.--Field and his final<br>
+success.--The Telephone.--Early attempts.--Description of Bell's<br>
+invention.--The Telautograph.--Early attempts and the idea upon<br>
+which they were based.--Description of Gray's invention.--How a<br>
+Telautograph may be made mechanically.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+CHAPTER III. The Electric Light.--Causes of heat and light in<br>
+the conductor of a current.--The first Electric Light.--The Arc<br>
+Light, and how constructed.--The Incandescent.--The<br>
+Dynamo.--Date of the invention.--Successive steps.--Faraday the<br>
+discoverer of its principle.--Pix�'s<br>
+machine.--Pacinatti.--Wilde.--Siemens' and Wheatstone.--The<br>
+Motor.--How the Dynamo and Motor came to be coupled.--Review of<br>
+first attempts.--Kidder's battery.--Page's machine.--Electric<br>
+Railroads.--Electrolysis.--General facts.--Electrical<br>
+Measurements.--"Death Current."--Instruments of<br>
+Measurement.--Electricity as an Industry.--Medical<br>
+Electricity.--Incomplete possibilities.--What the "Storage<br>
+Battery" is.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+CHAPTER IV. Electrical Invention in the United States.--Review<br>
+of the careers of Franklin, Morse, Field, Edison and<br>
+others.--Some of the surprising applications of<br>
+Electricity.--The Range-Finder.--Cooking and heating by<br>
+Electricity.
+</p>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="steam">THE STORY OF STEAM</a></h2>
+
+<p>
+That which was utterly unknown to the most splendid civilizations of the
+past is in our time the chief power of civilization, daily engaged in
+making that history of a new era that is yet to be written in words. It
+has been demonstrated long since that men's lives are to be influenced
+not by theory, or belief, or argument and reason, so much as by that
+course of daily life which is not attempted to be governed by argument
+and reason, but by great physical facts like steam, electricity and
+machinery in their present applications.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The greatest of these facts of the present civilization are expressed in
+the phrase, Steam and Steel. The theme is stupendous. Only the most
+prominent of its facts can be given in small space, and those only in
+outline. The subject is also old, yet to every boy it must be told
+again, and the most ordinary intelligence must have some desire to know
+the secrets, if such they are, of that which is unquestionably the
+greatest force that ever yielded to the audacity of humanity. It is now
+of little avail to know that all the records that men revere, all the
+great epics of the world, were written in the absence of the
+characteristic forces of modern life. A thousand generations had lived
+and died, an immense volume of history had been enacted, the heroes of
+all the ages, and almost those of our own time, had fulfilled their
+destinies and passed away, before it came about that a mere physical
+fact should fill a larger place in our lives than all examples, and that
+the evanescent vapor which we call steam should change daily, and
+effectively, the courses and modes of human action, and erect life upon
+another plane.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It may seem not a little absurd to inquire now "what is steam?"
+Everybody knows the answer. The non-technical reader knows that it is
+that vapor which, for instance, pervades the kitchen, which issues from
+every cooking vessel and waste-pipe, and is always white and visible,
+and moist and warm. We may best understand an answer to the question,
+perhaps, by remembering that steam is one of the three natural
+conditions of water: ice, fluid water, and steam. One or the other of
+these conditions always exists, and always under two others: pressure
+and heat. When the air around water reaches the temperature of
+thirty-two degrees by the scale of Fahrenheit, or � or zero by the
+Centigrade scale, and is exposed to this temperature for a time, it
+becomes ice. At two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit it becomes
+steam. Between these two temperatures it is water. But the change to
+steam which is so rapid and visible at the temperature above mentioned
+is taking place slowly all the time when water, in any situation, is
+exposed to the air. As the temperature rises the change becomes more
+rapid. The steam-making of the arts is merely that of all nature,
+hastened artificially and intentionally.
+
+The element of pressure, mentioned above, enters into the proposition
+because water boils at a lower temperature, with less heat, when the
+weight of the atmosphere is less than normal, as it is at great
+elevations, and on days when, as we now express it, there is a low
+barometer. Long before any cook could explain the fact it was known that
+the water boiling quickly was a sign of storm. It has often been found
+by camping-parties on mountains that in an attempt to boil potatoes in a
+pot the water would all "boil away," and leave the vegetables uncooked.
+The heat required to evaporate it at the elevation was less than that
+required to cook in boiling water. It is one of the instances where the
+problems of nature intrude themselves prominently into the affairs of
+common life without previous notice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This universal evaporation, under varying circumstances, is probably the
+most important agency in nature, and the most continuous and potent.
+There was only so much water to begin with. There will never be any less
+or any more. The saltness of the sea never varies, because the loss by
+evaporation and the new supply through condensation of the
+steam--rain--necessarily remain balanced by law forever. The surface of
+our world is water in the proportion of three to one. The extent of
+nature's steam-making, silent, and mostly invisible, is immeasurable and
+remains an undetermined quantity. The three forms of water combine and
+work together as though through intentional partnership, and have, thus
+combined, already changed the entire land surface of the world from what
+it was to what it is, and working ceaselessly through endless cycles
+will change it yet more. The exhalations that are steam become the water
+in a rock-cleft. It changes to ice with a force almost beyond
+measurement in the orderly arrangement of its crystals in compliance
+with an immutable law for such arrangement, and rends the rock. The
+process goes on. There is no high mountain in any land where water will
+not freeze. The water of rain and snow carries away the powdered remains
+from year to year, and from age to age. The comminuted ruins of
+mountains have made the plains and filled up and choked the mouth of the
+Mississippi. The soil that once lay hundreds of miles away has made the
+delta of every river that flows into the sea. The endless and resistless
+process goes on without ceasing, a force that is never expended, and but
+once interrupted within the knowledge of men, then covered a large area
+of the world with a sea of ice that buried for ages every living thing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The common idea of the steam that we make by boiling water is that it is
+all water, composed of that and nothing else, and this conception is
+gathered from apparent fact. Yet it is not entirely true. Steam is an
+invisible vapor in every boiler, and does not become what we know by
+sight as steam until it has become partly cooled. As actual steam
+uncooled, it is a gas, obeying all the laws of the permanent gases. The
+creature of temperature and pressure, it changes from this gaseous form
+when their conditions are removed, and in the change becomes visible to
+us. Its elasticity, its power of yielding to compression, are enormous,
+and it gives back this elasticity of compression with almost
+inconceivable readiness and swiftness. To the eye, in watching the
+gliding and noiseless movements of one of the great modern engines, the
+power of which one has only a vague and inadequate conception seems not
+only inexplicable, but gentle. The ponderous iron pieces seem to weigh
+nothing. There is a feeling that one might hinder the movement as he
+would that of a watch. There is an inability to realize the fact that
+one of the mightiest forces of nature is there embodied in an easy,
+gliding, noiseless impulse. Yet it is one that would push aside massy
+tons of dead weight, that would almost unimpeded crush a hole through
+the enclosing wall, that whirls upon the rails the drivers of a
+locomotive weighing sixty tons as though there were no weight above
+them, no bite upon the rails. There is an enormous concentration of
+force somewhere; of a force which perhaps no man can fairly estimate;
+and it is under the thin shell we call a boiler. Were it not elastic it
+could not be so imprisoned, and when it rebels, when this thin shell is
+torn like paper, there is a havoc by which we may at last inadequately
+measure the power of steam.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We have in modern times applied the word "engine" almost exclusively to
+the machine which is moved by the pressure of steam. Yet we might go
+further, since one of the first examples of a pressure engine, older
+than the steam machine by nearly four hundred years, is the gun. Reduced
+to its principle this is an engine whose operation depends upon the
+expansion of gas in a cylinder, the piston being a projectile. The same
+principle applies in all the machines we know as "engines." An
+air-engine works through the expansion of air in a cylinder by heat. A
+gas-engine, now of common use, by the expansion, which is explosion,
+caused by burning a mixture of coal-gas and air, and the steam-engine,
+the universal power generator of modern life, works by the expansion of
+the vapor of water as it is generated by heat. Steam may be considered a
+species of <i>gradual</i> explosion applied to the uses of industry. It
+often becomes a real one, complying with all the conditions, and as
+destructive as dynamite.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It cannot be certainly known how long men have experimented with the
+expansive force of steam. The first feeble attempt to purloin the power
+of the geyser was probably by Hero, of Alexandria, about a hundred and
+thirty years before Christ. His machine was also the first known
+illustration of what is now called the "turbine" principle; the
+principle of <i>reaction</i> in mechanics. [<a href="#f1">1</a>] He made a closed vessel from whose
+opposite sides radiated two hollow arms with holes in their sides, the
+holes being on opposite sides of the tubes from each other. This vessel
+he mounted on an upright spindle, and put water in it and heated the
+water. The steam issuing from the holes in the arms drove them backward.
+The principle of the action of Hero's machine has been accepted for two
+thousand years, though never in a steam-engine. It exists under all
+circumstances similar to his. In water, in the turbine wheel, it has
+been made most efficacious. The power applied now for the harnessing of
+Niagara for the purpose of sending electric currents hundreds of miles
+is the turbine wheel.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f1">1.</a> This principle is
+often a puzzle to students. There is an old story of the man who put a
+bellows in his boat to make wind against the sail, and the wind did not
+affect the sail, but the boat went backward in an opposite direction
+from the nozzle of the bellows. There is probably no better illustration
+of reaction than the "kick" of a gun, which most persons know about. The
+recoil of a six-pound field piece is usually from six to twelve feet. It
+can be understood by supposing a gun to be loaded with powder and an
+iron rod longer than the barrel to be left on the charge. If the outer
+end of this rod were then placed against a tree, and the gun were fired,
+it is manifest that the gun would become the projectile, and be fired
+off of the rod backward or burst. In ordinary cases the air in the bore,
+and immediately outside of the muzzle, acts comparatively, and in a
+measure, as the supposed rod against the tree would. It gives way, and
+is elastic, but not as quickly as the force of the explosion acts, and
+the gun is pushed backwards. It is the turbine principle, running into
+hundreds of uses in mechanics.
+</p>
+
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/014.png"><img src="images/014th.png" alt="THE SUPPOSED HERO ENGINE"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hero appears to the popular imagination as the greatest inventor of the
+past. Every school boy knows him. Archimedes, the Greek, was the
+greater, and a hundred and fifty years the earlier, and was the author
+of the significance of the word "Eureka," as we use it now. But Hero was
+the pioneer in steam. He made the first steam-engine, and is immortal
+through a toy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first <i>practical</i> device in which expansion was used seems to
+have been for the exploiting of an ecclesiastical trick intended to
+impress the populace. There is a saying by an antique wit that no two
+priests or augurs could ever meet and look at each other without a
+knowing wink of recognition. Hero is said to have been the author of
+this contrivance also. The temple doors would open by themselves when
+the fire burned on the altar, and would close again when that fire was
+extinguished, and the worshippers would think it a miracle. It is
+interesting because it contained the principle upon which was afterwards
+attempted to be made the first working low-pressure or atmospheric
+steam-engine. Yet it was not steam, but air, that was used. A hollow
+altar containing air was heated by the fire being kindled upon it. The
+air expanded and passed through a pipe into a vessel below containing
+water. It pressed the water out through another pipe into a bucket
+which, being thereby made heavier, pulled open the temple doors. When
+the fire went out again there was a partial vacuum in the vessel that
+had held the water at first, and the water was sucked back through the
+pipe out of the bucket. That became lighter again and allowed the doors
+to close with a counter-weight. All that was then necessary to convince
+the populace of the genuineness of the seeming miracle was to keep them
+from understanding it. The machinery was under the floor. There have
+been thousands of miracles since then performed by natural agencies, and
+there have passed many ages since Hero's machine during which not to
+understand a thing was to believe it to be supernatural.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/016.png"><img src="images/016th.png" alt="THE TEMPLE-DOOR TRICK"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the time of Hero until the seventeenth century there is no record
+of any attempt being made to utilize steam-pressure for a practical
+purpose. The fact seems strange only because steam-power is so prominent
+a fact with ourselves. The ages that intervened were, as a whole, times
+of the densest superstition. The human mind was active, but it was
+entirely occupied with miracle and semi-miracle; in astrology, magic and
+alchemy; in trying to find the key to the supernatural. Every thinker,
+every educated man, every man who knew more than the rest, was bent upon
+finding this key for himself, so that he might use it for his own
+advantage. During all those ages there was no idea of the natural
+sciences. The key they lacked, and never found, that would have opened
+all, is the fact that in the realm of science and experiment there is no
+supernatural, and only eternal law; that cause produces its effect
+invariably. Even Kepler, the discoverer of the three great laws that
+stand as the foundation of the Copernican system of the universe, was in
+his investigations under the influence of astrological and cabalistic
+superstitions. Footnote: Kepler, a German, lived between 1571 and 1630.
+His life was full of vicissitudes, in the midst of which he performed an
+astonishing Even the science of amount of intellectual labor, with
+lasting results. He was the personal friend of Galileo and Tycho Brahe,
+and his life may be said to have been spent in finding the abstract
+intelligible reason for the actual disposition of the solar system, in
+which physical cause should take the place of arbitrary hypothesis. He
+did this.] medicine was, during those ages, a magical art, and the idea
+of cure by medicine, that drugs actually <i>cure</i>, is existent to
+this day as a remnant of the Middle Ages. A man's death-offense might be
+that he knew more than he could make others understand about the then
+secrets of nature. Yet he himself might believe more or less in magic.
+No one was untouched; all intellect was more or less enslaved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And when experiments at last began to be made in the mechanisms by which
+steam might be utilized they were such as boys now make for amusement;
+such as throwing a steam-jet against the vanes of a paddle-wheel. Such
+was Branca's engine, made nine years after the landing of our
+forefathers at Plymouth, and thought worthy of a description and record.
+The next attempt was much more practical, but cannot be accurately
+assigned. It consisted of two chambers, from each of which alternately
+water was forced by steam, and which were filled again by cooling off
+and the forming of a vacuum where the steam had been. One chamber worked
+while the other cooled. It was an immense advance in the direction of
+utility.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+About 1698, we begin to encounter the names that are familiar to us in
+connection with the history of the steam-engine. In that year Thomas
+Savery obtained a patent for raising water by steam. His was a
+modification of the idea described above. The boilers used would be of
+no value now, nevertheless the machine came into considerable use, and
+the world that learned so gradually became possessed with the idea that
+there was a utility in the pressure of steam. Savery's engine is said to
+have grown out of the accident of his throwing a flask containing a
+little wine on the fire at a tavern. Concluding immediately afterwards
+that he wanted it, he snatched it off of the fender and plunged it into
+a basin of water to cool it. The steam inside instantly condensing, the
+water rushed in and filled it as it cooled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We now come to the beginning of the steam engine as we understand the
+term; the machine that involves the use of the cylinder and piston.
+These two features had been used in pumps long before, the atmospheric
+pump being one of the oldest of modern machines. The vacuum was known
+and utilized long before the cause of it was known. [<a href="#f2">2</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f2">2.</a>The
+discoverer was an Italian, Torricelli, about 1643. Gallileo, his tutor
+and friend, did not know why water would not rise in a tube more than
+thirty-three feet. No one knew of the <i>weight of the atmosphere</i>,
+so late as the early days of this republic. Many did not believe the
+theory long after that time. Torricelli, by his experiments, demonstrated
+the fact and invented the mercurial barometer, long known as the
+"Torricellian Tube." This last instrument led to another discovery; that
+the weight of the atmosphere varied from time to time in the same
+locality, and that storms and weather changes were indicated by a rising
+and falling of the column of mercury in the tube of the
+siphon-barometer. That which we call the "weather-bureau," organized by
+General Albert J. Myer, United States Army, in 1870, and growing out of
+the army signal service, of which he was chief, makes its "forecasts" by
+the use of the telegraph and the barometer. The "low pressure area"
+follows a path, which means a change of weather on that path. Notices by
+telegraph define the route, and the coming storm is not foretold, but
+<i>foreknown;</i> not prophesied, but <i>ascertained.</i> If we have
+been led from the crude pump of Gallileo's time directly to the weather
+bureau of the present with its invaluable signals to sailors and
+convenience to everybody, it is no more than is continually to be traced
+even to the beginning of the wonderful school of modern science.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But in the beginning it was not proposed to use steam in connection with
+the cylinder and piston which now really constitutes the steam-engine.
+Reverting again to the example of the gun, it was suggested to push a
+piston forward in a tube by the explosion of gunpowder behind it, or to
+repeat the Savery experiment with powder instead of steam. These ideas
+were those of about 1678-1685. The very earliest cylinder and piston
+engine was suggested by Denis Papin in 1690. These early inventors only
+went a portion of the way, and almost the entire idea of the
+steam-engine is of much later date. Mankind had then a singular gift of
+beginning at the wrong end. Every inventor now uses facts that seem to
+him to have been always known, and that are his by a kind of intuition.
+But they were all acquired by the tedious experience of a past that is
+distinguished by a few great names whose owners knew in their time
+perhaps one-tenth part as much as the modern inventor does, who is
+unconsciously using the facts learned by old experience. But the others
+began at the beginning.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/021.png"><img src="images/021th.png" alt="EARLY NEWCOMEN PUMPING ENGINE. STEAM-COCK, COLD WATER COCK AND WASTE-SPIGOT ALL WORKED BY HAND"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1711, almost a hundred years after the arrival at Jamestown and
+Plymouth of the fathers of our present civilization, the steam-engine
+that is called Newcomen's began to be used for the pumping of water out
+of mines. This engine, slightly modified, and especially by the boy who
+invented the automatic cut-off for the steam valves, was a most rude and
+clumsy machine measured by our ideas. There appears to have been
+scarcely a single feature of it that is now visible in a modern engine.
+The cylinder was always vertical. It had the upper end open, and was a
+round iron vessel in which a plunger moved up and down. Steam was let in
+below this plunger, and the walking-beam with which it was connected by
+a rod had that end of it raised. When raised the steam was cut off, and
+all that was then under the piston was condensed by a jet of cold water.
+The outside air-pressure then acted upon it and pushed it down again. In
+this down-stroke by air-pressure the work was done. The far end of the
+walking-beam was even counter-weighted to help the steam-pressure. The
+elastic force of compressed steam was not depended upon, was hardly even
+known, in this first working and practical engine of the world. Every
+engine of that time was an experimental structure by itself. The boiler,
+as we use it, was unknown. Often it was square, stayed and braced
+against pressure in a most complicated way. Yet the Newcomen engine held
+its place for about seventy-five years; a very long time in our
+conception, and in view of the vast possibilities that we now know were
+before the science. [<a href="#f3">3</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f3">3.</a> As late as 1880, the steam-engine
+illustrated and described in the "natural philosophy" text books was
+still the Newcomen, or Newcomen-Watt engine, and this while that engine
+was almost unknown in ordinary circumstances, and double-acting
+high-pressure engines were in operation everywhere. This last, without
+which not much could be done that is now done, was evidently for a long
+time after it came into use regarded as a dangerous and unphilosophical
+experiment, hardly scientific, and not destined to be permanently
+adopted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the year 1760, James Watt, who was by occupation what is now known as
+a model-maker, and who lived in Glasgow, was called upon to repair a
+model of a Newcomen engine belonging to the university. While thus
+engaged he was impressed with the great waste of steam, or of time and
+fuel, which is the same thing, involved in the alternate heating and
+cooling of Newcomen's cylinder. To him occurred the idea of keeping the
+cylinder as hot as the steam used in it. Watt was therefore the inventor
+of the first of those economies now regarded as absolute requirements in
+construction. He made the first "steam-jacket," and was, as well, the
+author of the idea of covering the cylinder with a coat of wood, or
+other non-conductor. He contrived a second chamber, outside of the
+cylinder, where the then indispensable condensation should take place.
+Then he gave this cylinder for the first time two heads, and let out the
+piston-rod through a hole in the upper head, with packing. He used steam
+on the upper side of the piston as well as the lower, and it will be
+seen that he came very near to making the modern engine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet he did not make it. He was still unable to dispense with the
+condensing and vacuum and air-pressure ideas. Acting for the first time
+in the line of real efficiency, he failed to go far enough to attain it.
+He made a double-acting engine by the addition of many new parts; he
+even attained the point of applying his idea to the production of
+circular motion. But he merely doubled the Newcomen idea. His engine
+became the Newcomen-Watt. He had a condensing chamber at each end of the
+stroke and could therefore command a reciprocating movement. The
+walking-beam was retained, not for the purpose for which it is often
+used now, but because it was indispensable to his semi-atmospheric
+engine.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/024.png"><img src="images/024th.png" alt="THE PERFECTED NEWCOMEN-WATT ENGINE"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It may seem almost absurd that the universal crank-movement of an engine
+was ever the subject of a patent. Yet such was the case. A man named
+Pickard anticipated Watt, and the latter then applied to his engines the
+"sun-and-planet" movement, instead of the crank, until the patent on the
+latter expired. The steam-engine marks the beginning of a long series of
+troubles in the claims of patentees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1782 came Watt's last steam invention, an engine that used steam
+<i>expansively</i>. This was an immense stride. He was also at the same
+time the inventor of the "throttle," or choke valve, by which he
+regulated the supply of steam to the piston. It seems a strange thing
+that up to this time, about 1767, an engine in actual use was started by
+getting up steam enough to make it go, and waiting for it to begin, and
+stopped by putting out the fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he invented the "governor," a contrivance that has scarcely changed
+in form, and not at all in action, since it was first used, and is one
+of the few instances of a machine perfect in the beginning. Two balls
+hang on two rods on each side of an upright shaft, to which the rods are
+hinged. The shaft is rotated by the engine, and the faster it turns the
+more the two balls stand out from it. The slower it turns the more they
+hang down toward it. Any one can illustrate this by whirling in his
+hands a half-open umbrella. There is a connection between the movement
+of these balls and the throttle; as they swing out more they close it,
+as they fall closer to the shaft they open it. The engine will therefore
+regulate its own speed with reference to the work it has to do from
+moment to moment.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/026.png"><img src="images/026th.png" alt="THE GOVERNOR"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Through all these changes the original idea remained of a vacuum at the
+end of every stroke, of indispensable assistance from atmospheric
+pressure, of a careful use of the direct expansive power of steam, and
+of the avoidance of the high pressures and the actual power of which
+steam is now known to be safely capable. [<a href="#f4">4</a>] Then an almost unknown American came upon the scene. In
+English hands the story at once passes from this point to the
+experiments of Trevethick and George Stevenson with steam as applied to
+railway locomotion. But as Watt left it and Trevethick found it, the
+steam engine could never have been applied to locomotion. It was slow,
+ponderous, complicated and scientific, worked at low pressures, and Watt
+and his contemporaries would have run away in affright from the
+innovation that came in between them and the first attempts of the
+pioneers of the locomotive. This innovation was that of Evans, the
+American, of whom further presently.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f4">4.</a> In a reputable
+school "philosophy" printed in 1880, thus: "In some engines" (describing
+the modern high-pressure engine, universal in most land service) "the
+apparatus for condensing steam alternately above and below the piston is
+dispensed with, and the steam, after it has moved the piston from one
+end of the cylinder to the other, is allowed to escape, by the opening
+of a valve, directly into the air. To accomplish this it is evident that
+the steam must have an elastic force greater than the pressure of the
+air, <i>or it could not expand and drive out the waste steam on the
+other side of the piston, in opposition to the pressure of the air</i>."
+According to this teaching, which the young student is expected to
+understand and to entirely believe, a pressure of steam of, say eighty
+to a hundred and twenty pounds to the inch on one side of the piston is
+accompanied by an absolute vacuum there, which permits the pressure of
+the outside air to exert itself against the opposite side of the piston
+through the open port at the other end of the cylinder. That is, a state
+of things which would exist if the steam behind the piston <i>were
+suddenly condensed</i>, exists anyway. If it be true the facts should be
+more generally known; if not, most of the school "philosophies" need
+reviewing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first steam-engine ever built in the United States was probably of
+the Watt pattern, in 1773. In 1776, the year of beginning for ourselves,
+there were only two engines of any kind in the colonies; one at Passaic,
+N. J., the other at Philadelphia. We were full of the idea of the
+independence we had won soon afterwards, but in material respects we had
+all before us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1787, Oliver Evans introduced improvements in grain mills, and was
+generally efficient as one of the beginners in the field of American
+invention. Soon afterwards he is known to have made a steam-engine which
+was the first high-pressure double-acting engine ever made. The engine
+that used steam at each end of the cylinder with a vacuum and a
+condenser, was in this first instance, so far as any record can be
+found, supplanted by the engine of to-day. The reason of the delay it is
+difficult to account for on any other grounds than lack of boldness, for
+unquestionably the early experimenters knew that such an engine could be
+made. They were afraid of the power they had evoked. Such a machine may
+have seemed to them a willful toying with disaster. Their efforts were
+bent during many years toward rendering a treacherous giant useful, yet
+entirely harmless. Their boilers, greatly improved over those I have
+mentioned, never were such as were afterwards made to suit the high
+pressures required by the audacity of Hopkins. This audacity was the
+mother of the locomotive, and of that engine which almost from that date
+has been used for nearly every purpose of our modern life that requires
+power. The American innovation may have passed unnoticed at the time,
+but intentionally or otherwise it was imitated as a preliminary to all
+modern engines. Nearly a century passed between the making of the first
+practical engine and that one which now stands as the type of many
+thousands. But now every little saw-mill in the American woods could
+have, and finally did have, its little cheap, unscientific, powerful and
+non-vacuum engine, set up and worked without experience, and maintained
+in working order by an unskilled laborer. A thousand uses for steam grew
+out of this experiment of a Yankee who knew no better than to tempt fate
+with a high-pressure and speed and recklessness that has now become
+almost universal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was with Watt and his contemporaries apparently a fondness for
+cost and complications. Most likely the finished Watt engine was a
+handsome and stately machine, imposing in its deliberate movements.
+There is apparently nothing simpler than the placing of the head of the
+piston-rod between two guide-pieces to keep it in line and give it
+bearing. Yet we have only to turn back a few years and see the elaborate
+and beautiful geometrical diagram contrived by Watt to produce the same
+simple effect, and known as a "parallel motion." It kept its place until
+the walking-beam was cast away, and the American horizontal engine came
+into almost universal use.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The object of this chapter so far has been to present an idea of
+beginnings; of the evolution of the universal and indispensable machine
+of civilization. The steam-engine has given a new impetus to industry,
+and in a sense an added meaning to life. It has made possible most that
+was ever dreamed of material greatness. It has altered the destiny of
+this nation, and other nations, made greatness out of crude beginnings,
+wealth out of poverty, prosperity upon thousands of square miles of
+uninhabitable wilderness. It was the chiefest instrumentality in the
+widening of civilization, the bringing together of alien peoples, the
+dissemination of ideas. Electricity may carry the idea; steam carries
+the man with the idea. The crude misconceptions of old times existed
+naturally before its time, and have largely vanished since it came.
+Marco Polo and Mandeville and their kind are no longer possibilities.
+Applied to transportation, locomotion alone, its effects have been
+revolutionary. Applied to common life in its minute ramifications these
+effects could not have been believed or foretold, and are incredible.
+The thought might be followed indefinitely, and it is almost impossible
+to compare the world as we know it with the world of our immediate
+ancestors. Only by means of contrasts, startling in their details, can
+we arrive at an adequate estimate, even as a moral farce, of the power
+of steam as embodied in the modern engine in a thousand forms.
+</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps it might be well to attempt to convey, for the benefit of the
+youngest reader, an idea of the actual working of the machine we call a
+steam-engine. There are hundreds of forms, and yet they are all alike
+in essentials. To know the principle of one is to know that of all.
+There is probably not an engine in the world in effective common
+use--the odd and unusual rotary and other forms never having been
+practical engines--that is not constructed upon the plan of the cylinder
+and piston. These two parts make the engine. If they are understood only
+differences in construction and detail remain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Imagine a short tube into which you have inserted a pellet, or wad of
+any kind, so that it fits tolerably, yet moves easily back and forth in
+the bore of the tube. If this pellet or wad is at one end of the tube
+you may, by inserting that end in your mouth and putting air-pressure
+upon it, make it slide to the other end. You do not touch it with
+anything; you may push it back and forth with your breath as many times
+as you wish, not by blowing against it, so to speak, but by producing an
+actual air-pressure upon it which is confined by the sides of the tube
+and cannot go elsewhere. The only pressure necessary is enough to move
+the pellet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, if you push this little pellet one way by the air-pressure from
+your mouth, and then, instead of reversing the tube in the mouth and
+pushing it back again in the same way, reverse the process and suck the
+air out from behind it, it comes back by the pressure of the outside
+atmosphere. This was the way the first steam engines worked. Their only
+purpose was to get the piston lifted, and air-pressure did all the
+actual work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If you turn the tube, and put an air-pressure first at one end and then
+at the other, and pay no attention to vacuum or atmospheric pressure,
+you will have the principle of the later modern, almost universal,
+high-pressure, double-acting steam-engine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But now you must imagine that the tube is fixed immovably, and that the
+air-pressure is constant in a pipe leading to the tube, and yet must be
+admitted first to one end of the tube and then to the other alternately,
+in order to push the pellet back and forth in it. It seems simple.
+Perhaps the young reader can find a way to do it, but it required about
+a hundred years for ingenious men to find out how to do precisely the
+same thing automatically. It involves the steam-chest and the
+slide-valve, and all other kinds of steam valves that have been
+invented, including the Corliss cut-off, and all others that are akin to
+it in object and action.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But now imagine the tube closed at each end to begin with, and the
+little moving pellet, or plunger, on the inside. To get the air into
+both ends of the tube alternately, and to use its pressure on each side
+of the pellet, we will suppose that the air-pipe is forked, and that one
+end of each fork is inserted into the side of the tube near the end,
+like the figure below, and imagine also that you have put a finger over
+each end of the tube.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/033.png"><img src="images/033th.png" alt="Fig. 1"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We are now getting the air-pressure through the pipe in both ends of the
+tube alike, and do not move the pellet either way. To make it move we
+must do something more, and open one end of the tube, and close that
+fork of the air-pipe, and thus get all the pressure on one side of the
+pellet. Remove one finger from the end of the tube, and pinch the fork
+of the air-tube that is on that side. The pellet will now move toward
+that end of the tube which is open. Reverse the process, and it can be
+pushed back again with air-pressure to the other end, and so on
+indefinitely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let us improve the process. We will close each end of the tube
+permanently, and insert four cocks in the tube and forked pipe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We have here two tubes inserted at each end of the large tube, and in
+each of these is a cock. We have each cock connected by a rod to the
+lever set on a pin in the middle of the tube. We must have these cocks
+so arranged that when the lever is moved (say) to the right, A. is
+opened and B. is closed, and D. is opened and C. is closed. Now if the
+air-pressure is constant through the forked air-tube, and the cock E. is
+open, if the top of the lever is moved to the right, the pellet will be
+pushed to the left in the large tube. If the lever is moved to the left,
+and the two cocks that were open are closed, and the two that were
+closed are opened again, the pellet will be sent back to the other end
+of the tube. This movement of the pellet in the tube will occur as often
+as the lever is moved and there is any air-pressure in the forked tube.
+There is a <i>supply</i>-cock, opened and an <i>escape</i>-cock closed,
+and an escape-cock <i>opened</i> and a supply-cock <i>closed</i>, at
+each end of the tube, <i>every time the lever is moved</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/035.png"><img src="images/035th.png" alt="Fig. 2"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We are using air instead of steam, and the movement of these four cocks
+all at the same time, and the result of moving them, is precisely that
+of the slide-valve of a steam-engine. The diagrams of this slide-valve
+would be difficult to understand. The action of the cocks can be more
+readily understood, and the result, and even much of the action, is
+precisely the same.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But to make the arrangement entirely efficient we must go a little
+further into the construction of a steam-engine. The pellet in the tube
+has no connection with the outside, and we can get nothing from it. So
+we give it a stem, thus: and when we do so we change it into a piston
+and its rod. Where it passes through the stopper at the end of the tube
+it must pass air- (or steam-) tight. Then as we push the piston back and
+forth we have a movement that we can attach to machinery at the end of
+the rod, and get a result from. We also move the cocks, or valves,
+automatically by the movement of the rod.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/036.png"><img src="images/036th.png" alt="Fig. 3"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Turning now to Fig. 3 again let us imagine a connection made between the
+rod and the end of the lever in Fig. 2. Now put on the air (or steam)
+pressure, and when the piston has reached the right-hand end of the tube
+it automatically, by its connections, closes B. and opens A., and opens
+D. and closes C. The pellet will be pushed back in the tube and go to
+the other end of it, through the pressure coming against the piston
+through the part of the air tube where the cock D. is open. It reaches
+the left-hand end of the tube, and we must imagine that when it gets
+there it, in the same manner and by the proper connections, closes D.,
+opens C., closes A. and opens B. If these mechanical movements are
+completed it must be plain that so long as the air (or steam) pressure
+is continued in the forked pipe the piston will automatically cut off
+its supply and open its escape at each alternate end, and move back and
+forth. Any boy can see how a backward and forward movement may be made
+to give motion to a crank. All other details in an engine are questions
+of convenience in construction, and not questions of principle or manner
+of action.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of older readers, I might request the supposition that, in Fig. 2, only
+the valves A. and B. were automatically and invariably opened and closed
+by the action of the piston-rod of Fig. 3, and that C. and D. were
+controlled solely by the governor, before mentioned, which we will
+suppose to be located at E. Then the escape of the steam ahead of the
+piston must always come at the same time with reference to the stroke,
+but the supply will depend upon the requirements of each individual
+stroke, and the work it has to do, and afford to the piston a greater or
+less push, as the emergencies of that particular instant may require.
+This arrangement would be one of regularity of movement and of economy
+in the use of steam. That which is needed is supplied, and no more. This
+is the principle and the object of the Corliss cut-off, and of all
+others similar to it in purpose. Their principle is that <i>only the
+escape is automatically controlled by the movements of the
+piston-rod</i>, occurring always at the same time with reference to the
+stroke, while <i>the supply is under control of the movement of the
+governor</i>, and regulated according to the emergencies of the
+movement. The governor, in any of its forms, as ordinarily applied,
+performs only half of this function. It regulates the general supply of
+steam to the cylinder, but the supply-valve continues to be opened,
+always to full width, and always at the same moment with reference to
+the stroke. With the two separate sets of automatic machinery required
+by engines of the Corliss type, the piston does not always receive its
+steam at the beginning of the stroke, and the supply may be cut off
+partially or entirely at any point in its passage along the cylinder, as
+the work to be done requires. The economic value of such an arrangement
+is manifest. No attempt is made here to explain by means of elaborate
+diagrams. It is believed that if the reason of things, and the principle
+of action, is clear, the particulars may be easily studied by any reader
+who is disposed to master mechanical details.
+</p>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="age">THE AGE OF STEEL</a></h2>
+
+<p>
+In very recent times the processes of civilization have had a strong and
+almost unnoted tendency toward the increased use of the <i>best</i>.
+Thus, most that iron once was, in use and practice, steel now is. This
+use, growing daily, widens the scope that must be taken in discussing
+the features of an Age of Steel. One name has largely supplanted the
+other. In effect iron has become steel. Had this chapter been written
+twenty, or perhaps ten, years earlier, it should have been more
+appropriately entitled the Age of Iron. A separation of the two great
+metals in general description would be merely technical, and I shall
+treat the subject very much as though, in accordance with the practical
+facts of the case, the two metals constituted one general subject, one
+of them gradually supplanting the other in most of the fields of
+industry where iron only was formerly used.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The greatest progresses of the race are almost always unappreciated at
+the time, and are certainly undervalued, except by contrast and
+comparison. We must continually turn backward to see how far we have
+gone. An individual who is born into a certain condition thinks it as
+hard as any other until by experience and comparison he discovers what
+his times might have been. As for us, in the year 1894, we are not
+compelled to look backward very far to observe a striking contrast.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/041.png"><img src="images/041th.png" alt="IN OLD TIMES. PRYING OUT A 'BLOOM'"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the wealth of today is built upon the forests and prairies and
+swamps of yesterday, and we must take a wider and more comprehensive
+glance backward if we should wish to institute those comparisons which
+make contrasts startling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We are accustomed to read and to hear of the "Age" of this or that.
+There was a "Stone" Age, beginning with the tribes to whom it came
+before the beginnings of their history, or even of tradition, and if we
+look far backward we may contrast our own time with the times of men who
+knew no metals. They were men. They lived and hoped and died as we do,
+even in what is now our own country. Often they were not even
+barbarians. They builded houses and forts, and dug drains and built
+aqueducts, and tilled the soil. They knew the value of those things we
+most value now, home and country; and they organized armies, and fought
+battles, and died for an idea, as we do. Yet all the time, a time ages
+long, the utmost help they had found for the bare and unaided hand was
+the serrated edge of a splintered flint, or the chance-found fragment
+beside a stream that nature, in a thousand or a million years of
+polishing, had shaped into the rude semblance of a hammer or a pestle.
+All men have in their time burned and scraped and fashioned all they
+needed with an astonishing faculty of making it answer their needs. They
+once almost occupied the world. Such were those who, so far as we know,
+were once the exclusive owners of this continent. They were an
+agricultural, industrious and home-loving people. [<a href="#f5">5</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f5">5.</a> The Mound Builders and Cave Dwellers. They knew only lead and copper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came, with a strange leaving out of the plentiful and easily worked
+metals which are the subject of this chapter, the great Age of Bronze.
+This next stage of progress after stone was marked by a skillful alloy,
+requiring even now some scientific knowledge in its compounding of
+copper and tin. A thousand theories have been brought forward to account
+for this hiatus in the natural stages of human progress, the truth
+probably being that both tin and copper are more fusible than iron-ores,
+and that both are found as natural metals. Some accident such as
+accounts for the first glass, [<a href="#f6">6</a>] some
+camp-fire unintended fusion, produced the alloy that became the metal of
+all the arms and arts, and so remained for uncounted centuries. In this
+connection it is declared that the Age of Bronze knew something that we
+cannot discover; the art of tempering the alloy so that it would bear an
+edge like fine steel. If this be true and we could do it, we should by
+choice supplant the subject of this chapter for a thousand uses. As the
+matter stands, and in our ignorance of a supposed ancient secret, the
+tempering of bronze has an effect precisely opposite to that which the
+process has upon steel.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f6">6.</a> The story is told by Pliny.
+Some sailors, landing on the eastern coast of Spain, supported their
+cooking utensils on the sand with stones, and built a fire under them.
+When they had finished their meal, glass was found to have been made
+from the niter and sea-sand by the heat of their fire. The same thing
+has been done, by accident, in more recent times, and may have been done
+before the incident recounted. It is also done by the lightning striking
+into sand and making those peculiar glass tubes known as
+<i>Fulmenites</i>, found in museums and not very uncommon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, the old Age of Bronze had its vicissitudes. Those men knew
+nothing that we consider knowledge now. It was a time when some of the
+most splendid temples, palaces and pyramids were constructed, and these
+now lie ruined yet indestructible in the nooks and corners of a desert
+world. Perhaps the hard rock was chiselled with tools of tempered
+copper. The fact is of little importance now since the object of the art
+is almost unknown, and the scattered capitals and columns of Baalbeck
+are like monuments without inscriptions; the commemorating memorials of
+a memory unknown. The Age of Bronze and all other ages that have
+preceded ours lacked the great essentials that insure perpetuity. The
+Age of Steel, that came last, that is ours now; a degenerate time by all
+ancient standards; has for its crowning triumph a single machine which
+is alone enough to satisfy the union of two names that are to us what
+Caster and Pollux were to the bronze-armed Roman legions of the heroic
+time--the modern power printing-press.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It may be well to ask and answer the question that at the first view may
+seem to the reader almost absurd. What is steel? The answer must, in the
+majority of instances, be given in accordance with the common
+conception; which is that it is not iron, yet very like it. The old
+classification of the metal, even familiarly known, needs now to be
+supplemented, since it does not describe the modern cast and malleable
+compounds of iron, carbon and metalloids used for structural purposes,
+and constituting at least three-fourths of the metal now made under the
+name of steel. The old term, steel, meant the cast, but malleable,
+product of iron, containing as much carbon as would cause the metal to
+harden when heated to redness and quenched in water. It must also be
+included in the definition that the product must be as free as possible
+from all admixtures except the requisite amount of carbon. This is
+"tool" steel. [<a href="#f7">7</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f7">7.</a> It must not be understood that tool steel was
+always a cast metal. In manufacturing, iron bars were laid together in
+a box or retort, together with powdered charcoal, and heated to a
+certain degree for a certain time. The carbon from the charcoal was
+absorbed by the iron, and from the blistered appearance of the bars when
+taken out this product was, and is known as "blister" steel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And here occurs a strange thing. A skill in chemistry, the successor of
+alchemy, is the educational product of the highest form of civilization.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/046.png"><img src="images/046th.png" alt="ANCIENT SMELTING. A RUDE WALL ENCLOSING ALTERNATE LAYERS OF IRON ORE AND CHARCOAL"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Metallurgy is the highest and most difficult branch of chemistry. Steel
+is the best result of metallurgy. Yet steel is one of the oldest
+products of the race, and in lands that have been asleep since written
+history began. Wendell Phillips in a lecture upon "The Lost Arts,"--
+celebrated at the date of its delivery, but now obsolete because not
+touching upon advances made in science since Phillips's day,--states
+that the first needle ever made in England, in the time of Henry VIII,
+was made by a Negro, and that when he died the art died with him. They
+did not know how to prepare the steel or how to make the needle. He adds
+that some of the earliest travelers in Africa found a tribe in the
+interior who gave them better razors than the explorers had. Oriental
+steel has been celebrated for ages as an inimitable product. It is
+certainly true that by the simple processes of semi-barbarism the finest
+tool-steel has been manufactured, perhaps from the days of Tubal Cain
+downward. The keenness of edge, the temper whose secret is now unknown,
+the marvelous elasticity of the tools of ancient Damascus, are familiar
+by repute to every reader and have been celebrated for thousands of
+years. The swords and daggers made in central Asia two thousand years
+ago were more remarkable than any similar product of the present for
+elaborate and beautiful finish as well as for a cutting quality and a
+tenacity of edge unknown to modern days. All the tests and experiments
+of a modern government arsenal, with all the technical knowledge of
+modern times, do not produce such tool-steel. It is also alleged that
+the ancient weapons did not rust as ours do, and that the oldest are
+bright to this day. The steel tools and arms that are made in the
+strange country of India do not rust there, while in the same climate
+ours are eaten away. Besides the secret of tempering bronze, it would
+seem that among the lost arts [<a href="#f8">8</a>]--a subject that it is easy to make too much
+of--there was a chemical ingredient or proportion in steel that we now
+know nothing of. The old lands of sameness and slumber have kept their
+secrets.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f8">8.</a> Modern science dates from three
+discoveries. That of Copernicus, the effect of which was to separate
+scientific astronomy, the astronomy of natural law and defined cause,
+from astrology, or the astronomy of assertion and tradition. That of
+Torricelli and Paschal of the actual and measurable weight of the
+atmosphere, which was the beginning for us of the science of physics,
+and that of Lavoisier who suspected, and Priestly who demonstrated,
+oxygen and destroyed the last vestiges of the theory of alchemy. Stahl
+was the last of these, and Lavoisier the first of the new school in that
+which I have stated is the highest development of modern science,
+chemistry. In all these departments we have no adequate reason to assert
+that we are not ourselves mere students. Some of the functions of
+oxygen, and the simplest, were unknown within five years before the date
+of these chapters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The definition of the word "steel" has been the subject of a scientific
+quarrel on account of new processes. The grand distinguishing trait of
+steel, to which it owes all the qualities that make it valuable for the
+uses to which no other metal can be put, is <i>homogeneity due to
+fusion</i>. Wrought iron, while having similar chemical qualities, and
+often as much carbon, is <i>laminated in structure</i>. Structural
+qualities are largely increasing in importance, and as the structural
+compounds came gradually to be produced more and more by the casting
+processes; as they ceased to be laminated in structure and became
+homogeneous, they were called by the name of steel. The name has been
+based upon the structure of the material rather than upon its chemical
+ingredients as heretofore. There is now a disposition to call all
+compounds of iron that are crystalline in structure, made homogeneous by
+casting, by the general name of steel, and to distinguish all those
+whose structural quality is due to welding by the name of iron.
+[<a href="#f9">9</a>] This is an outline of the controversy about the differences
+which should be expressed by a name, between tool steel and structural
+steel. In tool steel there is an almost infinite variety as to quality.
+The best is a high product of practical science, and how to make the
+best seems now, as hinted above, a lost art. It has, besides, a great
+variety. These varieties are only produced after thousands of
+experiments directed to finding out what ingredients and processes make
+toward the desired result. These processes, were they all known outside
+the manufactories of certain specialists, would little interest the
+general reader. All machinists know of certain brands of tool steel
+which they prefer. Tool steel is made especially for certain purposes;
+as for razors and surgical instruments, for saws, for files, for
+springs, for cutting tools generally. In these there may be little
+actual difference of quality or manufacture. The tempering of steel
+after it has been forged into shape is a specialty, almost a natural
+gift. The manufacture of tool steel, is, as stated, one of the most
+technical of the arts, and one of the most complicated of the
+applications of long experience and experiment.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f9">9.</a> It should be understood that the shapes of structural and
+other forms of what we now call steel are given by rolling the ingot
+after casting, and that the crystalline composition of the metal
+remains.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cast steel was first made in 1770 by Huntsman, who for the first time
+melted the "blistered" steel, which until that time had been the tool
+steel of commerce, in a crucible. Since that time the process of melting
+wrought iron has become practical and cheap, and results in
+<i>crystalline</i>, instead of a laminated structure for all steels. The
+definition of steel now is that it is <i>a compound of iron which has
+been cast from a fluid state into a malleable mass.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The ordinary test applied to distinguish wrought iron from steel is to
+ascertain whether the metal hardens with heating and suddenly cooling in
+cold water, becoming again softened on reheating and cooling slowly. If
+it does this it is steel of some quality, good or bad; if not, it is
+iron.
+</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p>
+The first mention of iron-ore in America is by Thomas Harriot, an
+English writer of the time of Raleigh's first colonies. He wrote a
+history of the settlement on Roanoke Island, in which he says: "In two
+places in the countrey specially, one about foure score and the other
+six score miles from the port or place where wee dwelt, wee founde neere
+the water side the ground to be rockie, which by the triall of a
+minerall man, was found to hold iron richly. It is founde in manie
+places in the countrey else." Harriot speaks further of "the small
+charge for the labour and feeding of men; the infinite store of wood;
+the want of wood and the deerness thereof in England." It was before the
+day of coal and coke, or of any of the processes known now. The iron
+mines of Roanoke Island were never heard of again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Iron-ore in the colonies is again heard of in the history of Jamestown,
+in 1607. A ship sailed from there in 1608 freighted with "iron-ore,
+sassafras, cedar posts and walnut boards." Seventeen tons of iron were
+made from this ore, and sold for four pounds per ton. This was the first
+iron ever made from American ores. The first iron-works ever erected in
+this country were, of course almost, burned by the Indians, in 1622, and
+in connection three hundred persons were killed.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/051.png"><img src="images/051th.png" alt="EARLY SMELTING IN AMERICA"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fire and blood was the end of the beginning of many American industries.
+Ore was plentiful, wood was superabundant, methods were crude. They
+could easily excel the Virginia colonists in making iron in Persia and
+India at the same date. The orientals had certain processes, descended
+to them from remote times, discovered and practiced by the first
+metal-workers that ever lived. The difference in the situation now is
+that here the situation and methods have so changed that the story is
+almost incredible. There, they remain as always. The first instance of
+iron-smelting in America is a text from which might be taken the entire
+vast sermon of modern industrial civilization.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The orientals lacked the steam-engine. So did we in America. The blast
+was impossible everywhere except by hand, and contrivances for this
+purpose are of very great antiquity. The bellows was used in Egypt three
+thousand years ago. It may be that the very first thought by primitive
+man was of how to smelt the metals he wanted so much and needed so
+badly. His efforts to procure a means of making his fire burn under his
+little dump of ore led him first into the science which has attained a
+new importance in very recent times, pneumatics. The first American
+furnaces were blown by the ordinary leather bellows, or by a contrivance
+they had which was called a "blowing tub," or by a very ancient machine
+known as a <i>"trompe"</i> in which water running through a wooden pipe
+was very ingeniously made to furnish air to a furnace. It is when the
+means are small that ingenuity is actually shown. If the later man is
+deprived of the use of the latest machinery he will decline to undertake
+an enterprise where it is required. The same man in the woods, with
+absolute necessity for his companion, will show an astonishing capacity
+for persevering invention, and will live, and succeed.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/053.png"><img src="images/053th.png" alt="WATER-POWER BLOWING TUB"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the lack of steam they learned, as stated, to use water-power for
+making the blast. The "blowing-tub" was such a contrivance. It was built
+of wood, and the air-boxes were square. There were two of these, with
+square pistons and a walking-beam between them. A third box held the air
+under a weighted piston and fed it to the furnace. Some of these were
+still in effective use as late as 1873. They were still used long after
+steam came. The entire machine might be called, correctly, a very large
+piston-bellows. A smaller machine with a single barrel may be found now,
+reduced, in the hands of men who clean the interior of pianos, and tune
+them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first iron works built in the present United States that were
+commercially successful, were established in Massachusetts, in the town
+of Saugus, a few miles from Boston. The company had a monopoly of
+manufacture under grant for ten years. [<a href="#f10">10</a>] They began in 1643, twenty-three years after the landing,
+which is one of the evidences of the anxiety of those troublesome people
+to be independent, and of how well men knew, even in those early times,
+how much the production of iron at home has to do with that
+independence. This new industry was, at all times, controlled and
+regulated by law.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f10">10.</a> Some quaint records
+exist of the incidents of manufacturing in those times.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+In 1728, Samuel Higley and Joseph Dewey, of Connecticut, represented to
+the Legislature that Higley had, "with great pains and cost, found out
+and obtained a curious art by which to convert, change, or transmute,
+common iron into good steel sufficient for any use, and was the first
+that ever performed such an operation in America." A certificate, signed
+by Timothy Phelps and John Drake, blacksmiths, states that, in June,
+1725, Mr. Higley obtained from the subscribers several pieces of iron,
+so shaped that they could be known again, and that a few days later "he
+brought the same pieces which we let him have, and we proved them and
+found them good steel, which was the first steel that ever was made in
+this country, that we ever saw or heard of." But this remarkable
+transmuting process was not heard of again unless it be the process of
+"case-hardening," re-invented some years ago, and known now to mechanics
+as a recipe.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+The smallness of things may be inferred from the fact that, in 1740, the
+Connecticut Legislature granted to Messrs. Fitch, Walker &amp; Wyllys "the
+sole privilege of making steel for the term of fifteen years, upon this
+condition that they should, in the space of two years, make half a ton
+of steel." Even this condition was not complied with and the term was
+extended.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The very first hollow-ware casting made in America is said to be still
+in existence. It was a little kettle holding less than a quart.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/056.png"><img src="images/056th.png" alt="THE FIRST CASTING MADE IN AMERICA"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The beginnings of the iron industry in America were none too early.
+There came a need for them very soon after they had extended into other
+parts of New England, and into New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and
+Maryland. In 1775, there were a large number of small furnaces and
+foundries. But coal and iron, the two earth-born servants of national
+progress which are now always twins, were not then coupled. The first of
+them was out of consideration. The early iron men looked for water-falls
+instead, and for the wood of the primeval forest. [<a href="#f11">11</a>] They became very
+necessary to the country in 1755--when the "French" war came, and they
+then began the making of the shot and guns used in that struggle, and
+became accustomed to the manufacture in time for the Revolution. Looking
+back for causes conducive to momentous results, we may here find one not
+usually considered in the histories. But for the advancement of the iron
+industry in America, great for the time and circumstances, independence
+could not have been won, and even the <i>feeling</i> and desire of
+independence would have been indefinitely delayed.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f11">11.</a> It is now
+easy to learn that a coal-mine may be a more valuable possession than a
+gold-mine, and that iron is better as an industry than silver. There are
+mountains of iron in Mexico, but no coal, and silver-mines so rich that
+silver, smelted with expensive wood fuel, is the staple product of the
+country. Yet the people are among the poorest in Christendom. There is a
+ceaseless iron-famine, so that the chiefest form of railway robbery is
+the stealing of the links and pins from trains. There are almost no
+metal industries. A barbaric agriculture prevails for the want of
+material for the making of tools. The actual means of progress are not
+at hand, notwithstanding the product of silver, which goes by weight as
+a commodity to purchase most that the country needs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The industry was slow, painful, and uncertain, only because the mechanic
+arts were pursued only to an extent possible with the skill and muscular
+energy of men. There were none of the wonderful automatic mechanisms
+that we know as machine-tools. There was only the almost unaided human
+arm with which to subdue the boundless savagery of a continent, and win
+independence and form a nation besides. The demand for huge masses of
+the most essential of the factors of civilization has grown since,
+because the ironclad and the big gun have come, and those inadequate
+forces and crude methods supplied for a time the demand that was small
+and imperative. The largest mass made then, and frequently spoken of in
+colonial records, was a piece called a "sow;" spelled then "sowe." It
+was a long, triangular mass, cast by being run into a trench made in
+sand. [<a href="#f12">12</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f12">12.</a> When, later, little side-trenches were made beside the
+first, with little channels to carry the metal into them, the smaller
+castings were naturally called "pigges." Hence our "pig-iron."
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/058.png"><img src="images/058th.png" alt="MAKING A TRENCH TO CAST A 'SOWE.'"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Those were the palmy days of the "trip hammer." Nasmyth was not born
+until 1808, and no machine inventor had yet come upon the scene. The
+steam-hammer that bears his name, which means a ponderous and powerful
+machine in which the hammer is lifted by the direct action of steam in a
+piston, the lower end of whose rod is the hammer-head, has done more for
+the development of the iron industry than any other mechanical
+invention. It was not actually used until 1842, or '43. It finally, with
+many improvements in detail, grew into a monster, the hammer-head, or
+"tup," being a mass of many tons. And they of modern times were not
+content merely to let this great mass fall. They let in steam above the
+piston, and jammed it down upon the mass of glowing metal, with a shock
+that jars the earth. The strange thing about this Titanic machine is
+that it can crack an egg, or flatten out a ton or more of glowing iron.
+Hundreds of the forgings of later times, such as the wrought iron or
+steel frames of locomotives, and the shafts of steamers, and the forged
+modern guns, could not be made by forging without this steam hammer.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/059.png"><img src="images/059th.png" alt="THE STEAM HAMMER"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then slowly came the period of all kinds of "machine tools." During the
+period briefly described above they could not make sheet metal. The
+rolling mill must have come, not only before the modern steam-boiler,
+but even before the modern plow could be made. Can the reader imagine a
+time in the United States when sheet metal could not be rolled, and even
+tin plates were not known? If so, he can instantly transport himself to
+the times of the wooden "trencher," and the "pewter" mug and pitcher, to
+the days when iron rails for tramways were unknown, and when even the
+"strap-iron," always necessary, was rudely and slowly hammered out on an
+anvil. [<a href="#f13">13</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f13">13.</a> About 1720, nails were the most needed of all the
+articles of a new country. Farmers made them for themselves, at home.
+The secret of how to roll out a sheet and split it into nail-rods was
+stolen from the one shop that knew how, at Milton, Mass., to give to
+another at Mlddleboro. The thief had the Biblical name of Hashay H.
+Thomas. He stole the secret while the hands of the Milton mill were gone
+to dinner, and served his country and broke up a small monopoly in so
+doing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Shears came with the "rolls;" vast engines of gigantic biting capacity,
+that cut sheets of iron as a lady's scissors cut paper. This cut the
+squares of metal used for boiler plates, and the steam-engine having
+come, was turned to the manufacture of materials for its own
+construction. Others were able to bite off great bars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first mill in which iron was rolled in America, was built in 1817
+near Connellsville, in Fayette county, Penn. Until 1844, the rolling
+mills of this country produced little more than bar-iron, hoops, and
+plates. All the early attempts at railroads used the "strap" rail;
+unless cast "fish-bellies" were used; which was flat bar-iron provided
+with counter sunk holes, in which to drive nails for holding the iron to
+long stringers of wood laid upon ties. When actual rail-making for
+railroads began, the rolling mill raised its powers to meet the
+emergency. The "T" rail, universally now used, was invented by Robert
+Stevens, president and chief engineer of the Camden and Amboy railroad,
+and the first of them were laid as track for that road in 1832. From
+this time until 1850, rolling mills for making "U" and "T" rails rapidly
+increased in number, but in that year all but two had ceased to be
+operated because of foreign competition.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/061.png"><img src="images/061th.png" alt="SHEARS FOR CUTTING BAR-IRON"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During some five years previous to this writing a revolution has taken
+place in the construction of buildings which has resulted in what is
+known as the "sky-scraper." This was, in many respects, the most
+startling innovation of times that are startling in most other respects,
+and was begun in that metropolis of surprises and successes, the city of
+Chicago. This innovation was really such in the matter of using steel in
+the entire framing of a commercial building, but it was not the first
+use of metal as a building material. The first iron beams used in
+buildings were made in 1854, in a rolling mill at Trenton, N. J., and
+were used in the construction of the Cooper Institute, and the building
+of Harper &amp; Brothers. For these special rolls, of a special invention,
+were made. These have now become obsolete, and a new arrangement is used
+for what are known as "structural shapes."
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/062.png"><img src="images/062th.png" alt="HYDRAULIC SHEARS. THE KNIFE HAS A PRESSURE OF 3,000 TONS, CLIPPING PIECES OF IRON TWO BY FOUR FEET"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have spoken of the use of wood-fuel in the early stages of iron
+manufacture in this country, followed by the adoption exclusively of
+coal and its products. Then, many years later, came the departure from
+this in the use of gas for fuel. The first use of this kind is said to
+date as far back as the eighth century, and modifications of the idea
+had been put in practice in this country, in which gas was first made
+from coal and then used as fuel. Then came "natural gas." This product
+has been known for many centuries. It was the "eternal" fuel of the
+Persian fire-worshippers, and has been used as fuel in China for ages.
+Its earliest use in this country was in 1827, when it was made to light
+the village of Fredonia, N. Y. Probably its first use for manufacturing
+purposes was by a man named Tompkins, who used it to heat salt-kettles
+in the Kenawha valley in 1842. Its next use for manufacturing purposes
+was made in a rolling mill in Armstrong county, Penn., in 1874,
+forty-seven years after it had been used at Fredonia, and twenty-nine
+years after it had been used to boil salt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now the use of natural gas as manufacturing fuel is universal, not alone
+over the spot where the gas is found, but in localities hundreds of
+miles away. It is one of the strangest developments of modern scientific
+ingenuity. That enormous battery of boilers, which was one of the most
+imposing spectacles of the Columbian Exhibition of 1893, whose roar was
+like that of Niagara, was fed by invisible fuel that came silently in
+pipes from a state outside of that where the great fair was held. We are
+left to the conclusion that the making of the coal into gas at the mine,
+and the shipping of it to the place of consumption through pipes, is
+more certain of realization than were a hundred of the early problems of
+American progress that have now been successful for so long that the
+date of their beginning is almost forgotten.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE STEEL OF THE PRESENT.--The story of steel has now almost been told,
+in that general outline which is all that is possible without an
+extensive detail not interesting to the general reader. In it is
+included, of necessity, a resum� of the progress, from the earliest
+times in this country, of the great industry which is more indicative
+than any other of the material growth of a nation. I now come to that
+time when steel began to take the place that iron had always held in
+structural work of every class. The differences between this structural
+steel and that which men have known by the name exclusively from remote
+ages, I have so far indicated only by reference to the well-known
+qualities of the latter. It now remains to describe the first.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1846 an American named William Kelley was the owner of an iron-works
+at Eddyville, Ky. It was an early era in American manufactures of all
+kinds, and the district was isolated, the town not having five hundred
+inhabitants, and the best mechanical appliances were remote.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1847, Kelley began, without suggestion or knowledge of any
+experiments going on elsewhere, to experiment in the processes now known
+as the "Bessemer," for the converting of iron into steel. To him
+occurred, as it now appears first, the idea that in the refining process
+fuel would be unnecessary after the iron was melted if <i>powerful
+blasts of air were forced into the fluid metal</i>. This is the basic
+principle of the Bessemer process. The theory was that the heat
+generated by the union of the oxygen of the air with the carbon of the
+metal, would accomplish the refining. Kelley was trying to produce
+malleable iron in a new, rapid and effective way. It was merely an
+economy in manufacture he was endeavoring to attain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To this end he made a furnace into which passed an air-blast pipe,
+through which a stream of air was forced into the mass of melted metal.
+He produced refined iron. Following this he made what is now called a
+"converter," in which he could refine fifteen hundred pounds of metal in
+five minutes, effecting a great saving in time and fuel, and in his
+little establishment the old processes were thenceforth dispensed with.
+It was locally known as "Kelley's air-boiling process." It proved
+finally to be the most important, in large results, ever conceived in
+metallurgy. I refer to it hurriedly, and do not attempt to follow the
+inventor's own description of his constructions and experiments. When he
+heard that others in England were following the same line of experiment,
+he applied for a patent. He was decided to be the first inventor of the
+process, and a patent was granted him over Bessemer, who was a few days
+before him. There is no question that others were more skillful, and
+with better opportunities and scientific associations, in carrying out
+the final details, mechanical and chemical, which have completed the
+Kelley process for present commercial uses. Neither is there any
+question that this back-woods iron-making American was the first to
+refine iron by passing through it, while fluid, a stream of air, which
+is the process of making that steel which is not tool steel, and yet is
+steel, the now almost universal material for the making of structures;
+the material of the Ferris wheel, the wonderful palaces of the Columbian
+exposition, the sky-scrapers of Chicago, the rails, the tacks,
+[<a href="#f14">14</a>] the
+fence-wire, the sheet-metal, the rails of the steam-railroads and the
+street-lines, the thousand things that cannot be thought of without a
+list, and which is a material that is furnished more cheaply than the
+old iron articles were for the same purposes.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f14">14.</a> In the history of Rhode Island, by Arnold, it is claimed that
+the first cold cut nails in the world were made by Jeremiah Wilkinson,
+in 1777. The process was to cut them from an old chest-lock with a pair
+of shears, and head them in a smith's vise. Then small nails were cut
+from old Spanish hoops, and headed in a vise by hand. Needles and pins
+were made by the same person from wire drawn by himself. Supposing this
+to be the beginning of the cut-nail idea, <i>the machine for making
+them</i> would still remain the actual and practical invention, since it
+would mark the beginning of the industry as such. The importance of the
+latter event may be measured by the fact that about the end of the last
+century there began a strong demand. In the homely farm-houses, or the
+little contracted shops of New England villages, the descendants of the
+Pilgrims toiled providently, through the long winter months, at beating
+into shape the little nails which play so useful a part in modern
+industry. A small anvil served to beat the wire or strip of iron into
+shape and point it; a vise worked by the foot clutched it between jaws
+furnished with a gauge to regulate the length, leaving a certain portion
+projecting, which, when beaten flat by a hammer, formed the head. This
+was industry, but not manufacture, for in 1890 the manufacturers of this
+country produced over <i>eight hundred million pounds</i> of iron,
+steel, and wire nails, representing a consumption of this absolutely
+indispensable manufacture for that year, at the rate of over <i>twelve
+pounds</i> for each individual inhabitant of the United States.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/068.png"><img src="images/068th.png" alt="SECTIONAL VIEW OF A BESSEMER 'CONVERTER.'"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The technical detail of steel-making is exceedingly interesting to
+students of applied science, but it <i>is</i> detail, the key to which
+is in the process mentioned; the forcing of a stream of air through a
+molten mass of iron. The "converter" is a huge pitcher-shaped vessel,
+hung upon trunnions so as to be tilted, and it is usual to admit through
+these trunnions, by means of a continuing pipe, the stream of air. The
+converters may contain ten tons or more of liquid metal at one time,
+which mass is converted from iron into steel at one operation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Forty-five years ago, or less, works that could turn out fifty tons of
+iron in a day were very large. Now there are many that make <i>five
+hundred tons</i> of steel in the same time. Then, nearly all the work
+was done by hand, and men in large numbers handled the details of all
+processes. Now it would be impossible for human hands and strength to do
+the work. The steel-mill is, indeed, the most colossal combination of
+Steam and Steel. There are tireless arms, moved by steam, insensible
+alike to monstrous strains and white heat, which seize the vast ingots
+and carry them to and fro, handling with incredible celerity the masses
+that were unknown to man before the invention of the Bessemer process.
+And all these operations are directed and controlled by a man who stands
+in one place, strangely yet not inappropriately named a "pulpit," by
+means of the hand-gear that gives them all to him like toys.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No one who has seen a steel-mill in operation, can go away and really
+write a description of it; no artist or camera has ever made its
+portrait, yet it is the most impressive scene of the modern, the
+industrial, world. There is a "fervent heat," surpassing in its
+impressions all the descriptions of the Bible, and which destroys all
+doubt of fire with capacity to burn a world and "roll the heavens
+together as a scroll." There is a clang and clatter accompanying a
+marvelous order. There are clouds of steam. There are displays of sparks
+and glow surpassing all the pyrotechnics of art. Monstrous throats gasp
+for a draught of white-hot metal and take it at a gulp. Glowing masses
+are trundled to and fro. There are mountains of ore, disappearing in a
+night, and ever renewed. There is a railway system, and the huge masses
+are conveyed from place to place by locomotive engines. There is a water
+system that would supply a town. There may be miles of underground pipes
+bringing gas for fuel. Amid these scenes flit strong men, naked to the
+waist, unharmed in the red pandemonium, guiding every process,
+superintending every result; like other men, yet leading a life so
+strange that it is apparently impossible. The glowing rivers they
+escape; corruscating showers of flying white-hot metal do not fall upon
+them; the leaping, roaring, hungry, annihilating flames do not touch
+them; the gurgling streams of melted steel are their familiar
+playthings; yet they are but men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The "rolling" of these slabs and ingots into rails is a following
+operation still. The continuous rail is often more than a hundred feet
+in length, which is cut into three or four rails of thirty feet each,
+and it goes through every operation that makes it a "T" rail weighing
+ninety pounds to the yard with the single first heat. There are trains
+of rolls that will take in a piece of white-hot metal weighing six tons,
+and send it out in a long sheet three thirty-seconds of an inch thick
+and nearly ten feet wide. The first steel rails made in this country
+were made by the Chicago Rolling Mill Company, in May, 1865. Only six
+rails were then made, and these were laid in the tracks of the Chicago
+and North Western Railroad. It is said they lasted over ten years. The
+first nails, or tacks, were made of steel at Bridgewater, Mass., at
+about the same date.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/071.png"><img src="images/071th.png" alt="ROLLING INGOTS"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some thirty years ago there were but two Bessemer converters in the
+United States, and the manufacture of steel did not reach then five
+hundred tons per annum. In 1890 the product was more than five million
+tons.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1872 the price of steel was one hundred and eighty-six dollars per
+gross ton. It can be purchased now at varying prices less than thirty
+dollars per ton. The consumption of seventy millions of people is so
+great that it is difficult to imagine how so enormous a mass of almost
+imperishable material can be absorbed, and the latest figures show a
+consumption greatly in excess of those mentioned as the sum of
+manufactures.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We turn again for the comparison without which all figures are valueless
+to the good year 1643, when the "General court" passed a resolve
+commending the great progress made in the manufacture of iron which they
+had licensed two years before, and granted the company still further
+privileges and immunities upon condition that it should furnish the
+people "with barre iron of all sorts for their use at not exceedynge
+twenty pounds per ton." We recall the first little piece of hollow ware
+made in America. We remember how old the old world is said to be and how
+long the tribes of men have plodded upon it, and then the picture
+appears of the progress that has grown almost under our eyes. The real
+Age of Steel began in 1865. It is not yet thirty years old. By
+comparison we are impressed with the fact that the real history of the
+metal is compressed into less than half an ordinary lifetime.
+</p>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="elec">THE STORY OF ELECTRICITY</a></h2>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/074.png"><img src="images/074th.png" alt="ERIPUIT CAELO FULMEN, SCEPTRUMQUE TYRANNIS"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is a sense in which electricity may be said to be the youngest of
+the sciences. Its modern development has been startling. Its phenomena
+appear on every hand. It is almost literally true that the lighting has
+become the servant of man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it is also the oldest among modern sciences. Its manifestations have
+been studied for centuries. So old is its story that it has some of the
+interest of a mediaeval romance; a romance that is true. Steam is gross,
+material, understandable, noisy. Its action is entirely comprehensible.
+The explosives, gunpowder, begriming the nations in all the wars since
+1350, nitroglycerine, oxygen and hydrogen in all the forms of their
+combination, seem to be gross and material, the natural, though
+ferocious, servants of mankind. But electricity floats ethereal, apart,
+a subtle essence, shining in the changing splendors of the aurora yet
+existent in the very paper upon which one writes; mysteriously
+everywhere; silent, unseen, odorless, untouchable, a power capable of
+exemplifying the highest majesty of universal nature, or of lighting the
+faint glow of the fragile insect that flies in the twilight of a summer
+night. Obedient as it has now been made by the ingenuity of modern man,
+docile as it may seem, obeying known laws that were discovered, not
+made, it yet remains shadowy, mysterious, impalpable, intangible,
+dangerous. It is its own avenger of the daring ingenuity that has
+controlled it. Touch it, and you die.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Electricity was as existent when the splendid scenes described in
+Genesis were enacted before the poet's eye as it is now, and was
+entirely the same. Its very name is old. Before there were men there
+were trees. Some of these exuded gum, as trees do now, and this gum
+found a final resting place in the sea, either by being carried thither
+by the currents of the streams beside which those trees grew, or by the
+land on which they stood being submerged in some of the ancient changes
+and convulsions to which the world has been frequently subject. In the
+lapse of ages this gum, being indestructible in water, became a fossil
+beneath the waves, and being in later times cast up by storms on the
+shores of the Baltic and other seas, was found and gathered by men, and
+being beautiful, finally came to be cut into various forms and used as
+jewelry. One has but to examine his pipe-stem, or a string of yellow
+beads, to know it even now. It is amber. The ancient Greeks knew and
+used it as we do, and without any reference to what we now call
+"electricity" their name for it was ELEKTRON. The earliest mention of it
+is by Homer, a poet whose personality is so hidden in the mists of far
+antiquity that his actual existence as a single person has been doubted,
+and he mentions it in connection with a necklace made of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But very early in human history, at least six hundred years before
+Christ, this elektron had been found to possess a peculiar property that
+was imagined to belong to it alone. It mysteriously attracted light
+bodies to it after it had been rubbed. Thales, the Franklin of his
+remote time, was the man who is said to have discovered this peculiar
+and mysterious quality of the yellow gum, and if it be true, to him must
+be conceded the unwitting discovery of electricity. It was the first
+step in a science that usurps all the prerogatives of the ancient gods.
+He recorded his discovery, and was impressed with awe by it, and
+accounted for the phenomenon he had observed by ascribing to the dull
+fossil a living soul. That is the unconscious impression still, after
+twenty-five hundred years have passed since Thales died; that hidden in
+the heart of electrical phenomena there is a weird sentience; what a
+Greek would consider something divine and immortal apart from matter.
+But neither Thales, nor Theophrastus, nor Pliny the elder, nor any
+ancient, could conceive of a fact but dimly guessed until the day of
+Franklin; that this secret of the silent amber was also that of the
+thunder-cloud, that the essence that drew to it a floating filament is
+also that which rends an oak, that had splintered their temples and
+statues, and had not spared even the image of Jupiter Tonans himself.
+The spectral lights which hung upon the masts of the ancient galleys of
+the Mediterranean were named Castor and Pollux, not electricity.
+Absolutely no discovery was made, though the religion of ancient Etruria
+was chiefly the worship of a spirit by them seen, but unknown; to us
+electrical science; a science chained, yet really unknown and still
+feared though chained. It is the story of this servitude only that is
+capable of being told, and the first weak bands were a hundred and
+forty-six years in forging; from the Englishman Gilbert's "<i>De
+Magnete</i>," to Franklin's Kite.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During all this time, and to a great degree long after, electricity was
+a scientific toy. Experiences in the sparkling of the fur of cats, the
+knowledge that there were fishes that possessed a mysterious paralyzing
+power, and various common phenomena all attributable to some unknown
+common cause, did not greatly increase the sum of actual knowledge of
+the subject. There was no divination of what the future would bring, and
+not the least conception of actual and impending possibilities. When,
+finally, the greatest thinkers of their times began to investigate; when
+Boyle began to experiment, and even the transcendent genius of Newton
+stooped to enquiry; from the days of those giants down to those of the
+American provincial postmaster, Benjamin Franklin, a period of some
+seventy years, almost all the knowledge obtained was only useful in
+indicating how to experiment still further. So small was the knowledge,
+so aimless the long experimenting, that the discovery that not amber
+only, but other substances as well, possessed the electric quality when
+rubbed, was a notable advance in knowledge. Later, in 1792, it was found
+by Gray that certain substances possessed the power of carrying;
+"conducting" as we now term it; the mysterious fluid from one substance
+to another; from place to place. This discovery constituted an actual
+epoch in the history of the science, and justly, since this small
+beginning with a wet string and a cylinder of glass or a globe of
+sulphur was the first unwitting illustration of the net-work of wires
+now hanging all over the world. The next step was to find that all
+substances were not alike in a power to conduct a current; <i>i.e.</i>,
+that there were "conductors" and "non-conductors," and all varying
+grades and powers between. The next discovery was that there were, as
+was then imagined, several kinds of electricity. This conclusion was
+incorrect, and its use was to lead at last to the discovery, by
+Franklin, that the many kinds were but two, and even these not kinds,
+but qualities, present always in the unchanging essence that is
+everywhere, and which are known to us now by the names that Franklin
+gave them; the <i>positive</i> and <i>negative</i> currents; one always
+present with the other, and in every phenomenon known to electrical
+science.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Probably the first machine ever contrived for producing an electric
+current was made by a monk, a Scotch Benedictine named Gordon who lived
+at Erfurt, in Saxony. I shall have occasion, hereafter, to describe
+other machines for the same purpose, and this first contrivance is of
+interest by comparison. It was a cylinder of glass about eight inches
+long, with a wooden shaft in the center, the ends of which were passed
+through holes in side-pieces, and it is said to have been operated by
+winding a string around the shaft and drawing the ends of the string
+back and forth alternately.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/080.png"><img src="images/080th.png" alt="THE FIRST ELECTRICAL MACHINE"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Franklinic machine, the modern glass disc fitted with combs,
+rubbers, bands and cranks, is nothing more in principle or manner of
+action than the first crude arrangement of the monk of Erfurt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All these experiments, and all that for many years followed, were made
+in electricity produced by friction; by rubbing some body like glass,
+sulphur or rosin. Many men took part in producing effects that were
+almost meaningless to them--the preliminaries to final results for us.
+Improved electrical machines were made, all seeming childish and
+inadequate now, and all wonderful in their day. There is a long list of
+immortal names connected with the slow development of the science, and
+among their experiments the seventeenth century passed away. Dufaye and
+the Abbe Nollet worked together about 1730, and mutually surprised each
+other daily. Guericke, better known as the inventor of the air-pump,
+made a sulphur-ball machine, often claimed to have been the first.
+Hawkesbee constructed a glass machine that was an improvement over that
+of Guericke. Stephen Gray unfolded the leading principles of the
+science, but without any understanding of their results as we now
+understand them. The next advance was made in finding a way to hold some
+of the electricity when gathered, and the toy which we know as the
+Leyden Jar surprised the scientific world. Its inventor, Professor
+Muschenbrock, wrote an account of it to R�aumur, and lacks language to
+express the terror into which his own experiments had thrown him. He had
+unwittingly accumulated, and had accidentally discharged, and had, for
+the first time in human experience, felt something of the shock the
+modern lineman dreads because it means death. He had toiled until he
+held the baleful genie in a glass vessel partially filled with water,
+and the sprite could not be seen. Accidentally he made a connection
+between the two surfaces of the jar, and declared that he did not
+recover from the experience for two days, and that nothing could induce
+him to repeat it. He had been touched by the lightning, and had not
+known it. [<a href="#f15">15</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f15">15.</a> The Leyden Jar has little place in the usefulness
+of modern electricity, and has no relationship with the modern so-called
+"Storage" Battery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then began the fakerism which attached itself to the science of
+electricity, and that has only measurably abandoned it in very late
+times. Itinerant electricians began to infest the cities of Europe,
+claiming medicinal and almost supernatural virtues for the mysterious
+shock of the Leyden Vial, and showing to gaping multitudes the quick and
+flashing blue spark which was, though no man knew it then, a miniature
+imitation of the bolt of heaven. That fact, verging as closely upon the
+sublimest power of nature as a man may venture to and live, was not even
+suspected until Franklin had invented a battery of such jars, and had
+performed hundreds of experiments therewith that finally established in
+his acute, though prosaic, mind the identity of his puny spark with that
+terrific flash that, until that time, had been regarded by all mankind
+as a direct and intentional expression of the power of Almighty God.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus Franklin came into the field. He was an investigator who brought to
+his aid a singular capacity possessed by the very few; the capacity for
+an unbiased looking for the hidden reasons of things. There was no field
+too sacred or too old for his prying investigations and his private
+conclusions. He was, as much as any man ever is, an original thinker. He
+knew of all the electrical experiments of others, and they produced in
+his mind conclusions distinctly his own. He was, upon topics pertaining
+to the field of reason, experience and common sense, the clearest and
+most vigorous writer of his time save one, and such conclusions as he
+arrived at he knew how to promulgate and explain. All that Franklin
+discovered would but add to the tedium of the subject of electricity
+now, but from his time definitely dates the knowledge that of
+electricity, in all its developments, there is really but one kind,
+though for convenience sake we may commonly speak of two, or even more.
+He first gave the names by which they are still known to the two
+qualities of one current; a name of convenience only. He knew first a
+fact that still puzzles inquiry, and is still largely unknown--that
+electricity is not <i>created</i>, produced, manufactured, by any human
+means, and that all we may do, then or now, is to gather it from its
+measureless diffusion in the air, the world, or the spaces of the wide
+creation, and that, like "heat" and "cold," it is a relative term. He
+demonstrated that any body which has electricity gives it to any other
+body that has at the moment less. Before he had actually tried that
+celebrated experiment which is alone sufficient to give him place among
+the immortals, he had declared the theory upon which he made it to be
+true, and by reasoning, in an age that but dimly understood the force
+and conditions of inductive reason, had proved that lightning is but an
+electric spark. It seems hardly necessary to add that his theories were
+ridiculed by the most intelligent scientists of his time, and scoffed at
+even by the countrymen of Newton and Davy, the members of the Royal
+Society of England. Franklin was a provincial American, and had, in
+other fields than electricity, troubled the British placidity.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/084.png"><img src="images/084th.png" alt="B. FRANKLIN"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Only one of these, a man named Collinson, saw any value in these
+researches of the provincial in the wilds of America. He published
+Franklin's letters to him. Buffon read them, and persuaded a friend to
+translate them into French. They were translated afterwards into many
+languages, and when in his isolation he did not even know it, the
+obscure printer, the country postmaster who kept his official accounts
+with his own hands, was the bearer of a famous name. He was assailed by
+the Nollet previously mentioned, and by a party of French philosophers,
+yet there arose, in his absence and without his knowledge, a party who
+called themselves distinctively "Franklinists."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came the personal test of the truth of these theories that had been
+promulgated over Europe in the name of the unknown American. He was then
+forty-five years old, successful in his walk and well-known in his
+immediate locality, but by no means as prominent or famous among his
+neighbors as he was in Europe. He was not so fertile in resources as to
+be in any sense inspired, and had privately waited for the finishing of
+a certain spire in the little town of Philadelphia so that he might use
+it to get nearer to the clouds to demonstrate his theory of lightning.
+It was in June, 1752, that this great exemplar of the genius of
+common-sense descended to the trial of the experiment that was the
+simplest and the most ordinary and the most sublime; the commonest in
+conception and means yet the most famous in results; ever tried by man.
+He had grown impatient of delay in the matter of the spire, and hastily,
+as by a sudden thought, made a kite. It was merely a silk handkerchief
+whose four corners were attached to the points of two crossed sticks. It
+was only the idea that was great; the means were infantile. A thunder
+shower came over, and in an interval between sprinklings he took with
+him his son, and went by back ways and alleys to a shed in an open
+field. The two raised the kite as boys did then and do now, and stood
+within the shelter. There was a hempen string, and on this, next his
+hand, he had tied a bit of ribbon and an ordinary iron key. A cloud
+passed over without any indications of anything whatever. But it began
+to rain, and as the string became wet he noticed that the loose
+filaments were standing out from it, as he had often seen them do in his
+experiments with the electrical machine. He drew a spark from the key
+with his finger, and finally charged a Leyden jar from this key, and
+performed all the then known proof-experiments with the lightning drawn
+from heaven.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is manifest that the slightest indication of the presence of the
+current in the string was sufficient to have demonstrated the fact which
+Franklin sought to fix. But it would have been insufficient to the
+general mind. The demonstration required was absolute. Even among
+scientists of the first class less was then known about electricity and
+its phenomena, and the causes of them, than now is known by every child
+who has gone to school. No estimate of the boldness and value of
+Franklin's renowned experiment can be made without a full appreciation
+of his times and surroundings. He demonstrated that which was undreamed
+before, and is undoubted now. The wonders of one age have been the toys
+and tools of the next through the entire history of mankind. The meaning
+of the demonstration was deep; its results were lasting The
+experimenters thereafter worked with a knowledge that their
+investigations must, in a sense, include the universe. Perhaps the
+obscure man who had toyed with the lightnings himself but vaguely
+understood the real meaning of his temerity. For he had, as usual, an
+intensely practical purpose in view. He wished to find a way of "drawing
+from the heavens their lightnings, and conducting them harmless to the
+earth." He was the first inventor of a practical machine, for a useful
+purpose, with which electricity had to do. That machine was the
+lightning-rod. Whatever its purpose, mankind will not forget the simple
+greatness of the act. At this writing the statue of Franklin stands
+looking upward at the sky, a key in his extended hand, in the portico of
+a palace which contains the completest and most beautiful display of
+electrical appliances that was ever brought together, at the dawn of
+that Age of Electricity which will be noon with us within one decade.
+The science and art of the civilized world are gathered about him, and
+on the frieze above his head shines, in gold letters, that sentence
+which is a poem in a single line. "ERIPUIT CAELO FULMEN, SCEPTRUMQUE
+TYRANNIS." [<a href="#f16">16</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f16">16.</a> "He snatched the lightning from heaven, and the
+sceptre from tyrants."
+</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p>
+THE MAN FRANKLIN.--Benjamin Franklin was born at Boston, Mass., Jan.
+17th, 1706. His father was a chandler, a trade not now known by that
+term, meaning a maker of soaps and candles. Benjamin was the fifteenth
+of a family of seventeen children. He was so much of the same material
+with other boys that it was his notion to go to sea, and to keep him
+from doing so he was apprenticed to his brother, who was a printer. To
+be apprenticed then was to be absolutely indentured; to belong to the
+master for a term of years. Strangely enough, the boy who wanted to be a
+sailor was a reader and student, captivated by the style of the
+<i>Spectator</i>, a model he assiduously cultivated in his own extensive
+writings afterwards. He was not assisted in his studies, and all he ever
+knew of mathematics he taught himself. Being addicted to literature by
+natural proclivity he inserted his own articles in his brother's
+newspaper, and these being very favorably commented upon by the local
+public, or at least noticed and talked about, his authorship of them was
+discovered, and this led to a quarrel between the two brothers.
+Nevertheless, when James, the elder brother, was imprisoned for alleged
+seditious articles printed by him, the paper was for a time issued in
+young Benjamin's name. But the quarrel continued, the boy was imposed
+upon by his master, and brother, as naturally as might have been
+expected under the circumstances of the younger having the monopoly of
+all the intellectual ability that existed between the two, and in 1723,
+being then only seventeen, he broke his indentures, a heinous offense in
+those times, and ran away, first to New York and then to Philadelphia,
+where he found employment as a journeyman printer. He had attained a
+skill in the business not usual at the time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boy had, up to this time, read everything that came into his hands.
+A book of any kind had a charm for him. His father observing this had
+intended him for the ministry, that being the natural drift of a pious
+father's mind in the time of Franklin's youth, when he discovered any
+inclination to books on the part of a son. But, later, he would neglect
+the devotions of the Sabbath if he had found a book, notwithstanding the
+piety of his family. Sometimes he distressed them further by neglecting
+his meals, or sitting up at night, for the same reason. There is no
+question that young Franklin was a member of that extensive fraternity
+now known as "cranks." [<a href="#f17">17</a>] He
+read a book advocating exclusive subsistence upon a vegetable diet and
+immediately adopted the idea, remaining a disciple of vegetarianism for
+several years. But there is another reason hinted. He saved money by the
+vegetable scheme, and when his printer's lunch had consisted of
+"biscuits (crackers) and water" for some days, he had saved money enough
+to buy a new book.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f17">17.</a> Most people, then and now, can point
+to people of their acquaintance whom they hold in regard as originals or
+eccentrics. It is a somewhat dubious title for respect, even with us who
+are reckoned so eccentric a nation. And yet all the great inventions
+which have done so much for civilization have been discovered by
+eccentrics--that is, by men who stepped out of the common groove; who
+differed more or less from other men in their habits and ideals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This young printer, who, at school, in the little time he attended one,
+had "failed entirely in mathematics," could assimilate "Locke on the
+Understanding," and appreciate a translation of the Memorabilia of
+Xenophon. Even after his study of this latter book he had a fondness for
+the calm reasoning of Socrates, and wished to imitate him in his manner
+of reasoning and moralizing. There is no question but that the great
+heathen had his influence across the abyss of time upon the mind of a
+young American destined also to fill, in many respects, the foremost
+place in his country's history. There was one, at least, who had no
+premonition of this. His brother chastised him before he had been
+imprisoned, and after he had begun to attract attention as a writer in
+one of the only two newspapers then printed in America, and beat him
+again after he was released, having meantime been vigorously defended by
+his apprentice editorially while he languished. To have beaten Benjamin
+Franklin with a stick, when he was seventeen years old, seems an absurd
+anti-climax in American history. But it is true, and when the young man
+ran away there was still another odd episode in a great career.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon his first arrival in Philadelphia as a runaway apprentice, with one
+piece of money in his pocket, occurs the one gleam of romance in
+Franklin's seemingly Socratic life. He says he walked in Market Street
+with a baker's loaf under each arm, with all his shirts and stockings
+bulging in his pockets, and eating a third piece of bread as he walked,
+and this on a Sunday morning. Under these circumstances he met his
+future wife, and he seems to have remembered her when next he met her,
+and to have been unusually prepossessed with her, because on the first
+occasion she had laughed at him going by. He was one of those whose
+sense of humor bears them through many difficulties, and who are even
+attracted by that sense in others. He was, at this period, absurd
+without question. Having eaten all the bread he could, and bestowed the
+remainder upon another voyager, he drank out of the Delaware and went to
+church; that is, he sat down upon a bench in a Quaker meeting-house and
+went to sleep, and was admonished thence by one of the brethren at the
+end of the service.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Franklin had, in the time of his youth, the usual experiences in
+business. He made a journey to London upon promises of great advancement
+in business, and was entirely disappointed, and worked at his trade in
+London. Afterwards, during the return voyage to America, he kept a
+journal, and wrote those celebrated maxims for his own guidance that are
+so often quoted. The first of these is the gem of the collection: "I
+resolve to be extremely frugal for some time, until I pay what I owe." A
+second resolve is scarcely less deserving of imitation, for it declares
+it to be his intention "to speak all the good I know of everybody." It
+must be observed that Franklin was afterwards the great maximist of his
+age, and that his life was devoted to the acquisition of worldly wisdom.
+In his body of philosophy there is included no word of confidence in the
+condemnation of offenses by the act or virtue of another, no promise of,
+or reference to, the rewards of futurity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When about twenty-one years of age, we find this old young man tired of
+a drifting life and many projects, and desiring to adopt some occupation
+permanently. He had courted the girl who had laughed at him, and then
+gone to England and forgotten her. She had meantime married another man,
+and was now a widow. In 1730 he married her. Meantime, entering into the
+printing business on his own account, he often trundled his paper along
+the streets in a wheelbarrow, and was intensely occupied with his
+affairs. His acquisitive mind was never idle, and in 1732 he began the
+publication of the celebrated "Poor Richard's Almanac." This was among
+the most successful of all American publications, was continued for
+twenty-five years, and in the last issue, in 1757, he collected the
+principal matter of all preceding numbers, and the issue was extensively
+republished in Great Britain, was translated into several foreign
+languages, and had a world-wide circulation. He was also the publisher
+of a newspaper, <i>The Pennsylvania Gazette</i>, which was successful
+and brought him into high consideration as a leader of public opinion in
+times which were beginning to be troubled by the questions that finally
+brought about a separation from the mother country.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Time and space would fail in anything like a detailed account of the
+life of this remarkable man. His only son, the boy who was with him at
+the flying of the kite, was an illegitimate child, and it is a
+remarkable instance of unlikeness that this only son became a royalist
+governor of New Jersey, was never an American in feeling, and removed to
+England and died there. The sum of Franklin's life is that he was a
+statesman, a financier of remarkable ability, a skillful diplomat, a
+law-maker, a powerful and felicitous writer though without imagination
+or the literary instinct, and a controversialist who seldom, if ever,
+met his equal. He was always a printer, and at no period of his great
+career did he lose his affection for the useful arts and common
+interests of mankind. He is the founder of the American Philosophical
+Society, and of a college which grew into the present University of
+Pennsylvania. To him is due the origin of a great hospital which is
+still doing beneficent work. He raised, and caused to be disciplined,
+ten thousand men for the defense of the country. He was a successful
+publisher of the literature of the common people, yet a literature that
+was renowned. He could turn his attention to the improvement of
+chimneys, and invented a stove still in use, and still bearing his name
+as the author of its principle. [<a href="#f18">18</a>] He organized the postal system of
+the United States before the Union existed. He was a signer of the
+Declaration of Independence. He sailed as commissioner to France at the
+age of seventy-one, and gave all his money to his country on the eve of
+his departure, yet died wealthy for his time. Serene, even-tempered,
+philosophical, he was yet far-seeing, care-taking, sagacious, and
+intensely industrious. He acquired a knowledge of the Italian and
+Spanish languages, and was a proficient French speaker and writer. He
+possessed, in an extraordinary degree, the power of gaining the regard,
+even the affection, of his fellow-men. He was even a competent musician,
+mastering every subject to which his attention was turned; and
+province-born and reared in the business of melting tallow and setting
+types, without collegiate education, he shone in association with the
+men and women who had place in the most brilliant epoch of French
+intellectual history. At fourscore years he performed the work that
+would have exhausted a man of forty, and at the same time wrote, for
+mere amusement, sketches such as the "Dialogue between Franklin and the
+Gout," and added, with the cool philosophy of all his life still
+lingering about his closing hours: "When I consider how many terrible
+diseases the human body is liable to, I think myself well off that I
+have only three incurable ones, the gout, the stone, and old age."
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f18">18.</a> The stove was not used in
+Franklin's time to any extent. The "Franklin Stove" was a fireplace so
+far as the advantages were concerned, such as ventilation and the
+pleasure of an open fire. But it also radiated heat from the back and
+sides as well as the front, and was intended to sit further out into a
+room; to be both fireplace and stove.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/096.png"><img src="images/096th.png" alt="THE FRANKLIN STOVE"></a>
+</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p>
+After Franklin, electrical experiments went on with varying results,
+confined within what now seems to have been a very narrow field, until
+1790. The great facts outside of the startling disclosure made by
+Franklin's experiments remained unknown. It was another forty years of
+amused and interested playing with a scientific toy. But in that year
+the key to the <i>utility</i> of electricity was found by one Galvani.
+He was not an electrician at all, but a professor of anatomy in the
+university of Bologna. It may be mentioned in passing that he never knew
+the weight or purport of his own discovery, and died supposing and
+insisting that the electric fluid he fancied he had discovered had its
+origin in the animal tissues. Misapprehending all, he was yet
+unconsciously the first experimenter in what we, for convenience,
+designate <i>dynamic</i> electricity. He knew only of <i>animal</i>
+electricity, and called it by that name; a misnomer and a mistake of
+fact, and the cause of an early scientific quarrel the promoting of
+which was the actual reason of the advance that was made in the science
+following his accidental and enormously important discovery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There are many stories of the details of the ordinarily entirely
+unimportant circumstances that led to <i>Galvanism</i> and the
+<i>Galvanic Battery</i>. Volta actually made this battery, then known as
+the Voltaic Pile, but he made it because of Galvani's discovery. The
+reader is requested to bear these names in mind; Galvani and Volta. They
+have a unique claim upon us. With others that will follow, they have
+descended to all posterity in the immortal nomenclature of the science
+of electricity. It is through the accidental discovery of the plodding
+demonstrator of anatomy in a medical college, a man who died at last in
+poverty and in ignorance of the meaning of his own work, that we have
+now the vast web of telegraph and telephone wires that hangs above the
+paths of men in every civilized country, and the cables that lie in the
+ooze of the oceans from continent to continent. His discovery was the
+result of one of the commonest incidents of domestic life. Variously
+described by various writers, the actual circumstance seems reducible to
+this.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In Galvani's kitchen there was an iron railing, and immediately above
+the railing some copper hooks, used for the purpose of hanging thereon
+uncooked meats. His wife was an invalid, and wishing to tempt her
+appetite he had prepared a frog by skinning it, and had hung it upon one
+of the copper hooks. The only use intended to be asked of this renowned
+batrachian was the making of a little broth. Another part of the skinned
+anatomy touched the iron rail below, and the anatomist observed that
+this casual contact produced a convulsive twitching of the dead
+reptile's legs. He groped about this fact for many years. He fancied he
+had discovered the principle of life. He made the phenomenon to hang
+upon the facts clustering about his own profession, familiar to him, and
+about which it was natural for him to think. He promulgated theories
+about it that are all now absurd, however tenable then. His was an
+instance of how the fatuities of men in all the fields of science, faith
+or morals, have often led to results as extraordinary as they have been
+unexpected. That he died in poverty in 1798 is a mere human fact. That
+in this life he never knew is merely another. It is but a part of that
+sadness that, through life, and, indeed, through all history, hangs over
+the earthly limitations of the immortal mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Volta, his contemporary and countryman, finally solved the problem as to
+the reason why. and made that "Voltaic Pile" which came to be our modern
+"battery." Acting upon the hint given by Galvani's accident, this pile
+was made of thin sheets of metal, say of copper and zinc, laid in series
+one above the other, with a piece of cloth wet with dilute acid
+interposed between each sheet and the next. The sheets were connected at
+the edges in pairs, a sheet of zinc to a sheet of copper, and the pile
+began with a sheet of one metal and ended with one of the other. It is
+to be noted that a single pair would have produced the same result as a
+hundred pairs, only more feebly. A single large pair is, indeed, the
+modern electric battery of one cell. The beginning and the ending sheets
+of the Voltaic pile were connected by a wire, through which the current
+passed. We, in our commonest industrial battery, use the two pieces of
+metal with the fluid between. The metals are usually copper and zinc,
+and the fluid is water in which is dissolved sulphate of copper. The
+wire connection we make hundreds of miles long, and over this wire
+passes the current. If we part this wire the current ceases. If we join
+it again we instantly renew it. There are many forms of this battery.
+The two metals, the <i>electrodes</i>, are not necessarily zinc and
+copper and no others. The acidulated fluid is not invariably water with
+sulphate of copper dissolved in it. Yet in all modifications the same
+thing is done in essentially the same way, and the Voltaic pile, and a
+little back of that Galvani's frog, is the secret of the telegraph, the
+telephone, the telautograph, the cable message. In the case of Galvani's
+frog, the fluids of the recently killed body furnished the liquid
+containing the acid, the copper hook and the iron railing furnished the
+dissimilar metals, and the nerves and muscles of the frog's body,
+connecting the two metals, furnished the wire. They were as good as
+Franklin's wet string was. The effect of the passage of a current of
+electricity through a muscle is to cause it to spasmodically contract,
+as everyone knows who has held the metallic handles of an ordinary small
+battery. Many years passed before the mystery that has long been plain
+was solved by acute minds. Galvani thought he saw the electric quality
+<i>in the tissues of the</i> frog. Volta came to see them as produced
+<i>by chemical action upon two dissimilar metals</i>. The first could
+not maintain his theories against facts that became apparent in the
+course of the investigations of several years, yet he asserted them with
+all the pertinacious conservatism of his profession, which it has
+required ages to wear away, and died poor and unhonored. The other
+became a nobleman and a senator, and wore medals and honors. It is a
+world in which success alone is seen, and in which it may be truthfully
+said that the contortions of an eviscerated and unconscious frog upon a
+casual hook were the not very remote cause of the greatest advancements
+and discoveries of modern civilization.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet the mystery is not yet entirely explained. In the study of
+electricity we are accustomed to accept demonstrated facts as we find
+them. When it is asked <i>how</i> a battery acts, what produces the
+mysterious current, the only answer that can now be given is that it is
+<i>by the conversion of the energy of chemical affinity into the energy
+of electrical vibrations</i>. Many mixtures produce heat. The
+explanation can be no clearer than that for electricity. Electricity and
+heat are both <i>forms of energy</i>, and, indeed, are so similar that
+one is almost synonymous with the other. The enquiry into the original
+sources of energy, latent but present always, will, when finally
+answered, give us an insight into mysteries that we can only now infer
+are reserved for that hereafter, here or elsewhere, which it is part of
+our nature to believe in and hope for. The theory of electrical
+vibrations is explained elsewhere as the only tenable one by which to
+account for electrical action. One may also ask how fire burns, or,
+rather, why a burning produces what we call "heat," and the actual
+question cannot be answered. The action of fire in consuming fuel, and
+the action of chemicals in consuming metals, are similar actions. They
+each result in the production of a new form of energy, and of energy in
+the form of vibrations. In the action of fire the vibrations are
+irregular and spasmodic; in electricity they are controlled by a certain
+rhythm or regularity. Between heat and electricity there is apparently
+only this difference, and they are so similar, and one is so readily
+converted into the other, that it is a current scientific theory that
+one is only a modified form of the other. Many acute minds have
+reflected upon the problem of how to convert the latent energy of coal
+into the energy of electricity without the interposition of the steam
+engine and machinery. There apparently exist reasons why the problem
+will never be solved. There is no intelligence equal to answering the
+question as to precisely where the heat came from, or how it came, that
+instantly results upon the striking of a common match. It was
+<i>evolved</i> through friction. The means were necessary. Friction, or
+its precise equivalent in energy, must occur. The result is as strange,
+and in the same manner strange, as any of the phenomena of electricity.
+Precisely here, in the beginning of the study of these phenomena, the
+student should be warned that an attitude of wonder or of awe is not one
+of enquiry. The demonstrations of electricity are startling chiefly for
+three reasons: newness, silence, and inconceivable rapidity of action.
+Let one hold a wire in one's hand six or eight inches from the end, and
+then insert that end into the flame of a gas-jet. It is as old as human
+experience that that part of the wire which is not in the flame finally
+grows hot, and burns one's fingers. A change has taken place in the
+molecules of the wire that is not visible, is noiseless, and that has
+<i>traveled along the wire</i>. It excites neither wonder nor remark. No
+one asks the reason why. Yet it cannot be explained except by some
+theory more or less tenable, and the phenomenon, in kind though not in
+degree, is as unaccountable as anything in the magic of electricity. In
+a true sense there is, nothing supernatural, or even wonderful, in all
+the vast universe of law. If we would learn the facts in regard to
+anything, it must be after we have passed the stage of wonder or of
+reverence in respect to it. That which was the "Voice of God"--as truly,
+in a sense, it was and is--until Franklin's day, has since been a
+concussion of the air, an echo among the clouds, the passage of an
+electric discharge. It is the first lesson for all those who would
+understand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The time had now come when that which had seemed a lawless wonder should
+have its laws investigated, formulated and explained. A man named
+Coulomb, a Frenchman, is the author of a system of measurements of the
+electric current, and he it was who discovered that the action of
+electricity varies, not with the distance, but, like gravity, <i>in the
+inverse ratio of the square of the distance</i>. Coulomb was the maker
+of the first instrument for measuring a current, which was known as the
+<i>torsion balance</i>. The results of his practical investigations made
+easier the practical application of electrical power as we now use it,
+though he foresaw nothing of that application; and the engineer of
+to-day applies his laws, and those of his fellow scientists, as those
+which do not fail. Volta was one of these, and he also furnished, as
+will hereafter be seen, a name for one of the units of electrical
+measurement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Both Galvani and Volta passed into shadow, when, in 1820, Professor H.
+C. Oersted, of Copenhagen, discovered the law upon which were afterwards
+slowly built the electrical appliances of modern life. It was the great
+principle of INDUCTION. The student of electricity may begin here if he
+desires to study only results, and is not interested in effects, causes,
+and the pains and toils which led to those results. The term may seem
+obscure, and is, doubtless, as a name, the result of a sudden idea; but
+upon induction and its laws the simplest as well as the most complicated
+of our modern electrical appliances depend for a reason for action. Its
+discovery set Amp�re to work. They had all imagined previously that
+there was some connection between electricity and magnetism, and it was
+this idea that instigated the investigations of Ampere. It was imagined
+that the phenomena of electricity were to be explained by magnetism.
+This was not untrue, but it was only a part of the truth. Ampere proved
+that <i>magnetism could also readily be produced by a current of
+electricity</i>. From this idea, practically carried out, grew the
+ELECTRO MAGNET, and to Amp�re we are indebted for the actual discovery
+of the elementary principles of what we now call electrodynamics, or
+dynamic electricity, [<a href="#f19">19</a>] in
+which are included the Dynamo, and its twin and indispensable, the
+Motor. Amp�re is also the author of the <i>molecular theory</i>, by
+which alone, with our present knowledge, can the action of electricity
+be explained in connection with the iron core which is made a magnet by
+the current, and left again a mere piece of iron when the current is
+interrupted. Ten years later Faraday explained and applied the laws of
+Induction, basing them upon the demonstrations of Amp�re. The use of a
+core of soft iron, magnetized by the passage of a current through a
+helix of wire wrapping it as the thread does a spool, is the
+indispensable feature, in some form meaning the same thing, with the
+same results, in all machines that are given movement to by an electric
+current. This is the electro-magnet. It is made a magnet not by actual
+contact, or by being made the conductor of a current, but by being
+placed in the "electrical field" and temporarily magnetized by
+induction.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f19">19.</a> In all science there is a continual
+going back to the past for a means of expression for things whose
+application is most modern. <i>Dynamic</i>; DYNAMO, is the Greek word
+for power; to be able. Once established, these names are seldom
+abandoned. There is no more reason for calling our electrical
+power-producing machine a "Dynamo" than there would be in so designating
+a steam engine or a water-wheel. But, a term of general significance if
+used at all, it has come to be the special designation of that one
+machine. It is brief, easily said, and to the point, but is in no way
+necessarily connected with <i>electrical</i> power distinctively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Faraday began his brilliant series of experiments in 1831. To express
+briefly the laws of action under which he worked, he wrote the
+celebrated statement of the Law of Magnetic Force. He proved that the
+current developed by induction is the same in all its qualities with
+other currents, and, indeed, demonstrated Franklin's theory that all
+electricity is the same; that, as to <i>kind</i>, there is but one. All
+electrical action is now viewed from the Faradic position.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The story of electricity, as men studied it in the primary school of the
+science, ends where Faraday began. Under the immutable laws he
+discovered and formulated we now enter the field of result, of action,
+of commercial interest and value. We might better say the field of
+usefulness, since commercial value is but another expression for
+usefulness. A revolution has been wrought in all the ways and thoughts
+of men since a date which a man less than sixty years old can recall.
+The laws under which the miracle has been wrought existed from all
+eternity. They were discovered but yesterday. Progress, the destiny of
+man, has kept pace in other fields. We live our time in our predestined
+day, learning and knowing, like grown-up children, what we may. In a
+future whose distance we may not even guess, the children of men shall
+reap the full fruition of the prophesy that has grown old in waiting,
+and "shall be as gods, knowing good from evil."
+</p>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2><a name="mod">MODERN ELECTRICITY</a></h2>
+
+<h3><a name="i">CHAPTER I.</a></h3>
+
+<p>
+Electricity, in all its visible exhibitions, has certain unvarying
+qualities. Some of these have been mentioned in the preceding chapter.
+Others will appear in what is now to follow. These qualities or habits,
+invariable and unchangeable, are, briefly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(1) It has the unique power of drawing, "attracting" other objects at a
+distance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(2) For all human uses it is instantaneous in action, through a
+conductor, at any distance. A current might be sent around the world
+while the clock ticked twice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(3) It has the power of decomposing chemicals (Electrolysis), and it
+should be remembered that even water is a chemical, and that substances
+composed of one pure organic material are very rare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(4) It is readily convertible into heat in a wire or other conductor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These four qualities render its modern uses possible, and should be
+remembered in connection with what is presently to be explained.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These uses are, in application, the most startling in the entire history
+of civilization. They have come about, and their applications have been
+made effective, within twenty years, and largely within ten. This
+subtlest and most elusive essence in nature, not even now entirely
+understood, is a part of common life. Some years ago we began to spell
+our thoughts to our fellow-men across land and sea with dots and dashes.
+Within the memory of the present high school boy we began to talk with
+each other across the miles. Now there is no reason why we shall not
+begin to write to each other letters of which the originals shall never
+leave our hands, yet which shall stand written in a distant place in our
+own characters, indisputably signed by us with our own names. We
+apparently produce out of nothing but the whirling of a huge bobbin of
+wire any power we may wish, and send it over a thin wire to where we
+wish to use it, though every adult can remember when the difficulty of
+distance, in the propelling of machinery, was thought to have been
+solved to the satisfaction of every reasonable man by the making of wire
+cables that would transmit power between grooved wheels a distance of
+some hundreds of feet. We turn night into day with the glow of lamps
+that burn without flame, and almost without heat, whose mysterious glow
+is fed from some distant place, that hang in clusters, banners, letters,
+in city streets, and that glow like new stars along the treeless prairie
+horizon where thirty years ago even the beginnings of civilization were
+unknown. Yet the mysterious agent has not changed. It is as it was when
+creation began to shape itself out of chaos and the abyss. Men have
+changed in their ability to reason, to deduce, to discover, and to
+construct. To know has become a part of the sum of life; to understand
+or to abandon is the rule. When the ages of tradition, of assertion
+without the necessity for proof, of content with all that was and was
+right or true because it was a standard fixed, went by, the age not
+necessarily of steam, or of steel, or of electricity, but the age of
+thought, came in. Some of the results of this thought, in one of the
+most prominent of its departments, I shall attempt to describe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A wire is the usual concomitant in all electrical phenomena. It is
+almost the universally used conductor of the current. In most cases it
+is of copper, as pure as it can be made in the ordinary course of
+manufacture. There are other metals that conduct an electrical current
+even better than copper does, but they happen to be expensive ones, such
+as silver. The usual telegraph-line is efficient with only iron wire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We habitually use the words "conductor" and "conduct" in reference to
+the electric current. A definition of that common term may be useful. It
+is a relative one. <i>A conductor is any substance whose atoms, or
+molecules, have the power of conveying to each other quickly their
+electricities</i>. Before the common use of electricity we were
+accustomed to commonly speak of conductors of heat; good, or poor. The
+same meaning is intended in speaking of conductors of electricity.
+<i>Non-conductors are those whose molecules only acquire this power
+under great pressure</i>. Electricity always takes the <i>easiest</i>
+road, not necessarily the shortest. This is the path that electricians
+call that of "least resistance." There are no absolutely perfect
+conductors, and there are no substances that may be called absolutely
+non-conductors. A non-conductor is simply a reluctant, an excessively
+slow, conductor. In all electrical operations we look first for these
+two essentials: a good conductor and a good non-conductor. We want the
+latter as supports and attachments for the first. If we undertake to
+convey water in a pipe we do not wish the pipe to leak. In conveying
+electricity upon a wire we have a little leak wherever we allow any
+other conductor to come too near, or to touch, the wire carrying the
+current. These little electrical leaks constantly exist. All nature is
+in a conspiracy to take it wherever it can find it, and from everything
+which at the moment has more than some other has, or more than its share
+with reference to the air and the world, of the mysterious essence that
+is in varying quantities everywhere. Glass is the usual non-conductor in
+daily use. A glance at the telegraph poles will explain all that has
+just been said. Water in large quantity or widely diffused is a fair
+conductor. Therefore, the glass insulators on the telegraph-poles are
+cup-shaped usually on the under side where the pin that holds them is
+inserted, so that the rain may not actually wet this pin, and thus make
+a water-connection between the wire, glass, pin, pole and ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We are accustomed to things that are subject to the law of gravity.
+Water will run through a pipe that slants downward. It will pass through
+a pipe that slants upward only by being pushed. But electricity, in its
+far journeys over wires, is not subject to gravity. It goes
+indifferently in any direction, asking only a conductor to carry it.
+There is also a trait called <i>inertia</i>; that property of all matter
+by which it tends when at rest to remain so, and when in motion to
+continue in motion, which we meet at every step we take in the material
+world. Electricity is again an exception. It knows neither gravity, nor
+inertia, nor material volume, nor space. It cannot be contained or
+weighed. Nothing holds it in any ordinary sense. It is difficult to
+express in words the peculiar qualities that caused the early
+experimenters to believe it had a soul. It is never idle, and in its
+ceaseless journeyings it makes choice of its path by a conclusion that
+is unerring and instantaneous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We find that it is the constant endeavor of electricity to <i>equalize
+its quantities and its two qualities, in all substances that are near it
+that are capable of containing it</i>. To this end, seemingly by
+definite intention, it is found on the outsides of things containing it.
+It gathers on the surfaces of all conductors. If there are knobs or
+points it will be found in them, ready to leap off. When any electrified
+body is approached by a conductor, the fluid will gather on the side
+where the approach is made. If in any conductor the current is weak,
+very little of it, if any, will go off into the conductor before actual
+contact is made. If it is strong, it will often leap across the space
+with a spark. One body may be charged with positive, and another with
+negative, electricity. There is then a disposition to equalize that
+cannot be easily repressed. The positive and the negative will assume
+their dual functions, their existence together, in spite of obstacles.
+So as to quantity. That which has most cannot be restrained from
+imparting to that which has less. The demonstration of these facts
+belongs to the field of experimental, or laboratory, electricity. The
+most common of the visible experiments is on a vast scale. It is the
+thunder-storm. Mother Earth is the great depository of the fluid. The
+heavy clouds, as they gather, are likewise full. Across the space that
+lies between the exchange takes place--the lightning-flash.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the preceding chapter I have hastily alluded to the phenomenon known
+as the key to electricity as a utilitarian science; a means of material
+usefulness. These uses are all made possible under the laws of what we
+term INDUCTION. To comprehend this remarkable feature of electric
+action, it must first be understood that all electrical phenomena occur
+in what has been termed an "<i>Electrical Field</i>" This field may be
+illustrated simply. A wire through which a current is passing <i>is
+always surrounded by a region of attractive force</i>. It is
+scientifically imagined to exist in the form of rings around the wire.
+In this field lie what are termed "lines of force." The law as stated is
+that the lines in which the magnetism produced by electricity acts
+<i>are always at right angles with the direction in which the current is
+passing</i>. Let us put this in ordinary phrase, and say that in a wire
+through which a current is passing there is a magnetic attraction, and
+that the "pull" is always <i>straight toward the wire</i>. This
+magnetism in a wire, when it is doubled up and multiplied sufficiently,
+has strong powers of attraction. This multiplying is accomplished by
+winding the wire into a compact coil and passing a current through it.
+If one should wind insulated wire around a core, or cylinder, and should
+then pull out the cylinder and attach the two ends of the wire to the
+opposite poles of a battery, when the current passed through the coil
+the hollow interior of it would be a strong magnetic field. The air
+inside might be said to be a magnet, though if there were no air there,
+and the coil were under the exhausted receiver of an air-pump, the
+effect would be the same, and the <i>vacuum</i> would be magnetized. A
+piece of iron inserted where the core was, would instantly become a
+magnet, and when the insulated wire is wound around a soft iron core,
+and the core is left in place, we have at once what is known as an
+<i>Electro-Magnet</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wire windings of an electro-magnet are always insulated; wound with
+a non-conductor, like silk or cotton; so that the coils may not touch
+each other in the winding and thus permit the current to run off through
+contact by the easiest way, and cut across and leave most of the coil
+without a current. For it may as well be stated now that no matter how
+good a conductor a wire may be, two qualities of it cause what is called
+"<i>resistance</i>"--the current does not pass so easily. These two
+qualities are <i>thinness</i> and <i>length</i>. The current will not
+traverse all the length of a long coil if it can pass straight through
+the same mass, and it is made to go the long way <i>by keeping the wires
+from touching each other</i>--preventing "contact," and lessening the
+opportunity to jump off which electricity is always looking for.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When this coil is wound in layers, like the thread upon a spool, it
+increases the intensity of the magnetism in the core by as many times as
+there are coils, up to a certain point. If the core is merely soft iron,
+and not steel, it becomes magnetized instantly, as stated, and will draw
+another piece of iron to it with a snap, and hold it there as long as
+there is a current passing through the coil. But as instantly, when the
+current is stopped, this soft iron core ceases to be a magnet, and
+becomes as it was before--an inert and ordinary piece of iron. What has
+just been described is always, in some form, one of the indispensable
+parts of the electromagnetic machines used in industrial electricity,
+and in all of them except the appliances of electric lighting, and even
+in that case it is indispensable in producing the current which consumes
+the points of the carbon, or heats the filament to a white glow. The
+current may traverse the wire for a hundred miles to reach this little
+coil. But, instantly, at a touch a hundred miles away that forms a
+contact, there is a continuous "circuit;" the core becomes a magnet, and
+the piece of iron near it is drawn suddenly to it. Remove the distant
+finger from the button, the contact is broken, and the piece of iron
+immediately falls away again. It is the wonder of <i>the production of
+instant movement at any distance, without any movement of any connecting
+part</i>. It is a mysterious and incredible transmission of force not
+included among human possibilities forty years ago. It is now common,
+old, familiar. Conceive of its possibilities, of its annihilation of
+time and space, of its distant control, and of that which it is made to
+mean and represent in the spelled-out words of language, and it still
+remains one of the wonders of the world: the Electric Telegraph.
+</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p>
+MAGNETS AND MAGNETISM.--Having described a magnet that is made and
+unmade at will, it may be appropriate to describe magnets generally. The
+ordinary, permanent magnet, natural or artificial, has little place in
+the arts. It cannot be controlled. In common phrase, it cannot be made
+to "let go" at will. The greatest value of magnetism, as connected with
+electricity, consists in the fact of the intimate relationship of the
+two. A magnet may be made at will with the electric current, as
+described above. A little later we shall see how the process may be
+reversed, and the magnet be made to produce the most powerful current
+known, and yet owe its magnetism to the same current.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The word <i>Magnet</i> comes from the country of <i>Magnesia</i>, where
+"loadstone" (magnetic iron ore) seems first to have been found. The
+artificial magnet, as made and used in early experiments and still
+common as a toy or as a piece in some electrical appliances, is a piece
+of fine steel, of hard temper, which has been magnetized, usually by
+having had a current passed through or around it, and sometimes by
+contact with another magnet. For the singular property of a magnet is
+that it may continually impart its quality, yet never lose any of its
+own. Steel alone, of all the metals, has the decided quality of
+retaining its property of being a magnet. A "bar" magnet is a straight
+piece of steel magnetized. A "horseshoe" magnet is a bar magnet bent
+into the form of the letter "U."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Every magnet has two "poles"--the positive, or North pole, and the
+negative, or South pole. If any magnet, of any size, and having as one
+piece two poles only, be cut into two, or a hundred pieces, each
+separate piece will be like the original magnet and have its two poles.
+The law is arbitrary and invariable under all circumstances, and is a
+law of nature, as unexplainable and as invariable as any in that
+mysterious code. All bar magnets, when suspended by their centers, turn
+their ends to the North and South, a familiar example of this being the
+ordinary compass. But in magnetism, <i>like repels like</i>. The world
+is a huge magnet. The pole of the magnet which points to the North is
+not the North pole of the needle as we regard it, but the opposite, the
+South.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No one can explain precisely why iron, the purer and softer the better,
+becomes a powerful and effective magnet under the influence of the
+current, and instantly loses that character when the current ceases, and
+why steel, the purer and harder the better, at first rejects the
+influence, and comes slowly under it, but afterwards retains it
+permanently. Iron and steel are the magnetic metals, but there is a
+considerable list of metals not magnetic that are better than they as
+<i>conductors</i> of the electric current. In a certain sense they are
+also the electric metals. A Dynamo, or Motor, made of brass or copper
+entirely would be impossible. All the phenomena of combined magnetism
+and electricity, all that goes to make up the field of industrial
+electric action, would be impossible without the indispensable of
+ordinary iron, and for the sole reason that it possesses the peculiar
+qualities, the affinities, described.
+</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p>
+There is now an understanding of the electro-magnet, with some idea of
+the part it may be made to play in the movement of pieces, parts, and
+machines in which it is an essential. It has been explained how soft
+iron becomes a magnet, not necessarily by any actual contact with any
+other magnet, or by touching or rubbing, but by being placed in an
+electric field. It acquired its magnetism by induction; by <i>drawing
+in</i> (since that is the meaning of the term) the electricity that was
+around it. But induction has a still wider field, and other
+characteristics than this alone. Some distinct idea of these may be
+obtained by supposing a simple case, in which I shall ask the reader to
+follow me.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/121.png"><img src="images/121th.png" alt="DIAGRAM THEORY OF INDUCTION"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let us imagine a wire to be stretched horizontally for a little space,
+and its two ends to be attached to the two poles of an ordinary battery
+so that a current may pass through it. Another wire is stretched beside
+the first, not touching it, and not connected with any source of
+electricity. Now, if a current is passed through the first wire a
+current will also show in the second wire, passing in an <i>opposite
+direction</i> from the first wire's current. But this current in the
+second wire does not continue. It is a momentary impulse, existing only
+at the moment of the first passing of the current through the wire
+attached to the poles of the battery. After this first instantaneous
+throb there is nothing more. But now cut off the current in the first
+wire, and the second wire will show another impulse, this time in the
+<i>same direction</i> with the current in the first wire. Then it is all
+over again, and there is nothing more. The first of these wires and
+currents, the one attached to the battery poles, is called the
+<i>Primary</i>. The second unattached wire, with its impulses, is called
+the <i>Secondary</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let us now imagine the primary to be attached to the battery-poles
+permanently. We will not make or break the circuit, and we can still
+produce currents, "impulses," in the secondary. Let us imagine the
+primary to be brought nearer to the secondary, and again moved away from
+it, the current passing all the time through it. Every time it is moved
+nearer, an impulse will be generated in the secondary which will be
+opposite in direction to the current in the primary. Every time it is
+moved away again, an impulse in the secondary will be in the same
+direction as the primary current. So long, as before, as the primary
+wire is quiet, there will be no secondary current at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is still a third effect. If the current in the primary be
+<i>increased or diminished</i> we shall have impulses in the secondary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is a supposed case, to render the facts, the laws of induction,
+clear to the understanding. The experiment might actually be performed
+if an instrument sufficiently delicate were attached to the terminals of
+the secondary to make the impulses visible. The following facts are
+deduced from it in regard to all induced currents. They are the primary
+laws of induction:--
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A current which begins, which approaches, or which increases in strength
+in the primary, induces, with these movements or conditions, a momentary
+current in the <i>opposite direction</i> in the secondary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A current which stops, which retires, or which decreases in strength in
+the primary, induces a momentary current <i>in the same direction</i>
+with the current in the primary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To make the results of induction effective in practice, we must have
+great length of wire, and to this end, as in the case of the
+electro-magnet, we will adopt the spool form. We will suppose two wires,
+insulated so as to keep them from actually touching, held together side
+by side, and wound upon a core in several layers. There will then be two
+wires in the coil, and the opposite ends of one of these wires we will
+attach to the poles of a battery, and send a current through the coil.
+This would then be the primary, and the other would be the secondary, as
+described above. But, since the power and efficiency of an induced
+current depends upon the length of the secondary wire that is exposed to
+the influence of the current carried by the primary, we fix two separate
+coils, one small enough to slip inside of the other. This smaller, inner
+coil is made with coarser wire than the outer, and the latter has an
+immense length of finer wire. The current is passed through the smaller,
+inside coil, and each time that it is stopped, or started, there will be
+an impulse, and a very strong one, through the outer--the secondary
+coil. Leave the current uninterrupted, and move the outer coil, or the
+inner one, back and forth, and the same series of strong impulses will
+be observed in the coil that has no connection with any source of
+electricity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What I have just described as an illustration of the laws governing the
+production of induced currents, is, in fact, what is known as the
+<i>Induction Coil</i>. In the old times of a quarter of a century ago it
+was extensively used as an illustrator of the power of the electric
+current. Sometimes the outer coil contained fifty miles of wire, and the
+spark, a close imitation of a flash of lightning, would pass between the
+terminals of the secondary coil held apart for a distance of several
+feet, and would pierce sheets of plate glass three inches thick. Before
+the days of practical electric lighting the induction-coil was used for
+the simultaneous lighting of the gas-jets in public buildings, and is
+still so used to a limited extent. Its description is introduced here as
+an illustration of the laws of induction which the reader will find
+applied hereafter in newer and more effective ways. The commonest
+instance now of the use of the induction-coil is in the very frequent
+small machine known as a medical battery. There must be a means of
+making and breaking the current (the circuit) as described above. This,
+in the medical battery, is automatic, and it is that which produces the
+familiar buzzing sound. The mechanism is easily understood upon
+examination.
+</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p>
+At some risk of tediousness with those who have already made an
+examination of elementary electricity, I have now endeavored to convey
+to the reader a clear idea of (1), what electricity is, so far as known.
+(2) Of how the current is conducted, and its influence in the field
+surrounding the conductor. (3) The nature of the induced current, and
+the manner in which it is produced. The sum of the information so far
+may be stated in other words to be how to make an electromagnet, and how
+to produce an induced current. Such information has an end in view. A
+knowledge of these two items, an understanding of the details, will be
+found, collectively or separately, to underlie an understanding of all
+the machines and appliances of modern electricity, and in all
+probability, of all those that are yet to come.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But in the prominent field of electric lighting (to which presently we
+shall come), there is still another principle involved, and this
+requires some explanation (as well given here as elsewhere) of the
+current theory as to what electricity is. [<a href="#f20">20</a>] As to this, all we may be said to know, as has been
+remarked, is that it is one of the <i>forms of energy</i>, and its
+manifestations are in the form of <i>motion</i> of the minute and
+invisible atoms of which it is composed. This movement is
+instantaneously communicated along the length of a conductor. There
+must, of course, be an end to this process in theory, because all the
+molecules once moved must return to rest, or to a former condition,
+before being moved again. Therefore it is necessary to add that when
+the motion of the last molecule has been absorbed by some apparatus
+for applying it to utility, the last particles, atoms, molecules, are
+restored to rest, and may again receive motion from infringing particles,
+and this transmission of energy along a conductor is
+continuous--continually absorbed and repeated. This is <i>dynamic</i>
+electricity; not differing in kind, in essence, from any other, but only
+in application.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f20">20.</a> There are several
+"schools" among scientists, those who pursue pure science, irrespective
+of practical applications, and who are rather disposed to narrow the
+term to include that field alone, that are divided among themselves upon
+the question of what electricity is. The "Substantialists" believe that
+it is a kind of matter. Others deny that, and insist that it is a "form
+of Energy," on which point there can be no serious question. Still
+others reject both these views. Tesla has said that "nothing stands in
+the way of our calling electricity 'ether associated with matter, or
+bound ether.'" Professor Lodge says it is "a form, or rather a mode of
+manifestation, of the ether" The question is still in dispute whether we
+have only one electricity or two opposite electricities. The great field
+of chemistry enters into the discussion as perhaps having the solution
+of the question within its possibilities. The practical electrician acts
+upon facts which he knows are true without knowing their cause;
+empirically; and so far adheres to the molecular hypothesis. The
+demonstrations and experiments of Tesla so far produce only new
+theories, or demonstrate the fallacies of the old, but give us nothing
+absolute. Nevertheless, under his investigations, the possibilities of
+the near future are widely extended. By means of currents alternating
+with very high frequency, he has succeeded in passing by induction,
+through the glass of 1 lamp, energy sufficient to keep a filament in a
+state of incandescence <i>without the use of any connecting wires</i>.
+He has even lighted a room by producing in it such a condition that an
+illuminating appliance may be placed anywhere and lighted without being
+electrically connected with anything. He has produced the required
+condition by creating in the room a powerful electrostatic field
+alternating very rapidly. He suspends two sheets of metal, each
+connected with one of the terminals of the coil. If an exhausted tube is
+carried anywhere between these sheets, or placed anywhere, it remains
+always luminous.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+Something of the unquestionable possibilities are shown in the following
+quotation from <i>Nature</i>, as expressed in a lecture by Prof. Crookes
+upon the implied results of Tesla's experiments.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+The extent to which this method of illumination may be practically
+available, experiments alone can decide. In any case, our insight into
+the possibilities of static electricity has been extended, and the
+ordinary electric machine will cease to be regarded as a mere toy.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+Alternating currents have, at the best, a rather doubtful reputation.
+But it follows from Tesla's researches that, is the rapidity of the
+alternation increases, they become not more dangerous but less so. It
+further appears that a true flame can now be produced without chemical
+aid--a flame which yields light and heat without the consumption of
+material and without any chemical process. To this end we require
+improved methods for producing excessively frequent alternations and
+enormous potentials. Shall we be able to obtain these by tapping the
+ether? If so, we may view the prospective exhaustion of our coal-fields
+with indifference; we shall at once solve the smoke question, and thus
+dissolve all possible coal rings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Electricity seems destined to annex the whole field, not merely of
+optics, but probably also of thermotics.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rays of light will not pass through a wall, nor, as we know only too
+well, through a dense fog. But electrical rays of a foot or two
+wave-length, of which we have spoken, will easily pierce such mediums,
+which for them will be transparent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another tempting field for research, scarcely yet attacked by pioneers,
+awaits exploration. I allude to the mutual action of electricity and
+life. No sound man of science indorses the assertion that "electricity
+is life." nor can we even venture to speak of life as one of the
+varieties or manifestations of energy. Nevertheless, electricity has an
+important influence upon vital phenomena, and is in turn set in action
+by the living being--animal or vegetable. We have electric fishes--one
+of them the prototype of the torpedo of modern warfare. There is the
+electric slug which used to be met with in gardens and roads about
+Hoinsey Rise; there is also an electric centipede. In the study of such
+facts and such relations the scientific electrician has before him an
+almost infinite field of inquiry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The slower vibrations to which I have referred reveal the bewildering
+possibility of telegraphy without wires, posts, cables, or any of our
+present costly appliances. It is vain to attempt to picture the marvels
+of the future. Progress, as Dean Swift observed, may be "too fast for
+endurance."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If the conductor is entirely insulated, so that no molecular movements
+can be communicated by it to contiguous bodies, all its particles become
+energized, and remain so as long as the conductor is attached to a
+source of electricity. In such a case an additional charge is required
+only when some of the original charge is taken away, escapes. This is
+<i>Static</i> electricity; the same as the other, but in theory
+differing in application.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The molecular theory is, unquestionably, tenable under present
+conditions. It is that to which science has attained in its inquiries to
+the present date. The electric light is scarcely explainable upon any
+other hypothesis. The remaining conclusions may be left in abeyance, and
+without argument.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Science began with static electricity, so called, because its sources
+were more readily and easily discovered in the course of scientific
+accidents, as in the original discovery of the property of rubbed amber,
+etc., and the long course of investigations that were suggested by that
+antique, accidental discovery. What we know as the dynamic branch of the
+subject was created by the investigations of Faraday; induction was its
+mother. It is the practically important branch, but its investigation
+required the invention of machinery to perform its necessary operations.
+Between the two branches the sole difference--a difference that may be
+said not actually to exist--is in <i>quantity and pressure</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To the department of static electricity all those industrial appliances
+first known belong, as the telegraph, electro-plating, etc. I shall
+first consider this class of appliances and machines. The most important
+of the class is
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/130.png"><img src="images/130th.png" alt=""></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH.--The word is Greek, meaning, literally, "to
+write from a distance." But long since, and before Morse's invention, it
+had come to mean the giving of any information, by any means, from afar.
+The existence of telegraphs, not electric, is as old as the need of
+them. The idea of quickness, speedy delivery, is involved. If time is
+not an object, men may go or send. The means used in telegraphing, in
+ancient and modern times, have been sound and sight. Anything that can
+be expressed so as to be read at a distance, and that conveys a meaning,
+is a telegram. [<a href="#f21">21</a>] Our plains Indians used columns of
+smoke, or fires, and are the actual inventors of the <i>heliograph</i>,
+now so called, though formerly meaning the making of a picture by the
+aid of the sun--photography. The vessels of a squadron at sea have long
+used telegraphic signals. Some of the celebrated sentences of our
+history have been written by visual signals, such as "Hold the fort, for
+I am coming," "Don't give up the ship," etc. Order of showing,
+positions, and colors are arbitrarily made to mean certain words. The
+sinking of the "<i>Victoria</i>" in 1893, was brought about by the
+orders conveyed by marine signals. Bells and guns signal by sound. So
+does the modern electric telegraph, contrary to original design. It is
+all telegraphy, but it all required an agreed and very limited code, and
+comparative nearness. None of the means in ancient use were available
+for the multifarious uses of modern commerce.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f21">21.</a> This word is of American coinage, and first
+appeared in the <i>Albany Evening Journal</i>, in 1852. It avoids the
+use of two words, as "Telegraphic Message," or "Telegraphic Dispatch,"
+and the ungrammatical use of "Telegraph," for a message by telegraph.
+The new word was at once adopted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As soon as it was known that electricity could be sent long distances
+over wires, human genius began to contrive a way of using it as a means
+of conveying definite intelligence. The first idea of the kind was
+attempted to be put into effect in 1774. This was, however, before the
+discovery of the electro-magnet (about 1800), or even the Galvanic
+battery, and it was seriously proposed to have as many wires as there
+were letters; each wire to have a frictional battery for generating
+electricity at one end of the circuit, and a pith-ball electroscope at
+the other. The modern reader may smile at the idea of the hurried sender
+of a message taking a piece of cat-skin, or his silk handkerchief, and
+rubbing up the successive letter-balls of glass or sulphur until he had
+spelled out his telegram. Later a man named Dyer, of New York, invented
+a system of sending messages by a single wire, and of causing a record
+to be made at the receiving office by means of a point passing over
+litmus paper, which the current was to mark by chemical action, the
+paper passing over a roller or drum during the operation. The battery
+for this arrangement was also frictional. They knew of no other. Then
+came the deflected-needle telegraph, first suggested by Amp�re, and a
+few such lines were constructed, and to some extent operated. In one of
+the original telegraph lines the wires were bound in hemp and laid in
+pipes on the surface of the ground. The expedient of poles and
+atmospheric insulation was not thought of until it was adopted as a last
+resort during the construction of Morse's first line between Washington
+and Baltimore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the year 1832, an American named Samuel F. B. Morse was making a
+voyage home from Havre to New York in the sailing packet <i>Sully</i>.
+He was an educated man, a graduate of Yale, and an artist, being the
+holder of a gold medal awarded him for his first work in sculpture, and
+no want of success drove him to other fields. But during this tedious
+voyage of the old times in a sailing vessel he seems to have conceived
+the idea which thenceforth occupied his life. It was the beginning of
+the present Electric Telegraph. During this same voyage he embodied his
+notions in some drawings, and they were the beginnings of vicissitudes
+among the most long-continued and trying for which life affords any
+opportunity. He abandoned his studies. He paid attention to no other
+interest. He passed years in silent and lonesome endeavors that seemed
+to all others useless. He subjected himself to the reproaches of all his
+friends, lost the confidence of business men, gained the reputation of
+being a monomaniac, and was finally given over to the following of
+devices deemed the most useless and unpromising that up to that time had
+occupied the mind of any man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The rank and file of humanity had no definite idea of the plan, or of
+the results that would follow if it were successful. In reality no one
+cared. It was Morse's enterprise exclusively--a crank's fad alone. There
+has been no period in the history of society when the public, as a body,
+was interested in any great change in the systems to which it was
+accustomed. There is always enmity against an improver. In reality, the
+question of how much money Morse should make by inventing the electric
+telegraph was the question of least importance. Yet it was regarded as
+the only one. He is dead. His profits have gone into the mass, his
+honors have become international. The patents have long expired. The
+public, the entire world, are long since the beneficiaries, and the
+benefits continue to be inconceivably vast. Nothing in all history
+exceeds in moral importance the invention of the telegraph except the
+invention of printing with movable types.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/135.png"><img src="images/135th.png" alt="AN ELECTRO-MAGNET OF MORSE'S TIME"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After eight years of waiting, and the repeated instruction of the entire
+Congress of the United States in the art of telegraphy, that body was
+finally induced to make an appropriation of thirty thousand dollars to
+be expended in the construction of an experimental line between
+Washington and Baltimore. And now begins the actual strangeness of the
+story of the Telegraph. After many years of toil, Morse still had
+learned nothing of the efficient construction of an electro-magnet. The
+magnet which he attempted to use unchanged was after the pattern of the
+first one ever made--a bent U-shaped bar, around which were a few turns
+of wire not insulated. The bar was varnished for insulation, and the
+turns of wire were so few that they did not touch each other. The
+apparatus would not work at a distance of more than a few feet, and not
+invariably then. Professor Leonard D. Gale suggested the cause of the
+difficulty as being in the sparseness of the coils of wire on the magnet
+and the use of a single-cell battery. He furnished an electro-magnet and
+battery out of his own belongings, with which the efficiency of the
+contrivance was greatly increased. The only insulated wire then known
+was bonnet-wire, used by milliners for shaping the immense flaring
+bonnets worn by our grandmothers, and when it finally came to
+constructing the instruments of the first telegraphic system the entire
+stock of New York was exhausted. The immense stocks of electrical
+supplies now available for all purposes was then, and for many years
+afterwards, unknown. Previous to the investigations of Professor Henry,
+in 1830, only the theory of causing a core of soft iron to become a
+magnet was known, and the actual magnet, as we make it, had not been
+made. Morse, in his beginnings, had not money enough to employ a
+competent mechanic, and was himself possessed of but scant mechanical
+skill or knowledge of mechanical results. Persistency was the quality by
+which he succeeded.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/136.png"><img src="images/136th.png" alt="DIAGRAM OF MORSE'S INSTRUMENT, 1830, WITH ITS WRITING"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The battery used first by Morse, as stated, was a single cell. The one
+made later by his partner, Alfred Vail, the real author of all the
+workable features of the Morse telegraph, and of every feature which
+identifies it with the telegraph of the present, was a rectangular
+wooden box divided into eight compartments, and coated inside with
+beeswax so that it might resist the action of acids. The telegraphic
+instrument as made by Morse was a rectangular frame of wood, now in the
+cabinet of the Western Union Telegraph Company, at New York, which was
+intended to be clamped to the edge of a table when in use. He knew
+nothing of the splendid invention since known as the "Morse Alphabet,"
+and the spelling of words in a telegram was not intended by him. His
+complicated system, as described in his caveat filed by him in 1837,
+consisted in a system of signs, by which numbers, and consequently words
+and sentences, were to be indicated. There was then a set of type
+arranged to regulate and communicate the signs, and rules in which to
+set this type. There was a means for regulating the movement forward of
+the rule containing the types. This was a crank to be turned by the
+hand. The marking or writing apparatus at the receiving instrument was a
+pendulum arranged to be swung <i>across</i> the slip of paper, as it was
+unwound from the drum, making a zig-zag mark the points of which were to
+be counted, a certain number of points meaning a certain numeral, which
+numeral meant a word. A separate type was used to represent each
+numeral, having a corresponding number of projections or teeth. A
+telegraphic dictionary was necessary, and one was at great pains
+prepared by Morse. His process was, therefore, to translate the message
+to be sent into the numerals corresponding to the words used, to set the
+types corresponding to those numerals in the rule, and then to pass the
+rule through the appliance arranged for the purpose in connection with
+the electric current. The receiver must then translate the message by
+reference to the telegraphic dictionary, and write out the words for the
+person to whom the message was sent. This was all changed by Vail, who
+invented the "dot-and-dash" alphabet, and modified the mechanical action
+of the instrument necessary for its use. The arrangement of a steel
+embossing-point working upon a grooved roller--a radical difference--was
+a portion of this change. The invention of the axial magnet, also
+Vail's, was another. Morse had regarded a mechanical arrangement for
+transmitting signals as necessary. Vail, in the practice of the first
+line, grew accustomed to sending messages by dipping the end of the wire
+in the mercury cup,--the beginning of the present transmitting
+instrument, which is also his invention--and Morse's "port-rule," types,
+and other complicated arrangements, went into the scrap-heap.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/139.png"><img src="images/139th.png" alt="MODERN TRANSMITTER"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet there were some strange things still left. The receiving relay
+weighed 185 pounds. An equally efficient modern one need not weigh more
+than half a pound. Morse had intended to make a <i>recording</i>
+telegraph distinctively; it was to his mind its chiefest value. Almost
+in the beginning it ceased to be such, and the recording portion of the
+instrument has for many years been unknown in a telegraph office, being
+replaced by the "sounder." This was also the invention of Vail. The more
+expert of the operators of the first line discovered that it was
+possible to read the signals <i>by the sound</i> made by the armature
+lever. In vain did the managers prohibit it as unauthorized. The
+practice was still carried on wherever it could be without detection.
+Morse was uncompromising in his opposition to the innovation. The
+wonderful alphabet of the telegraph, the most valuable of the separate
+inventions that make up the system, was not his conception. The
+invention of this alphabetical code, based on the elements of time and
+space, has never met with the appreciation it has deserved. It has been
+found applicable everywhere. Flashes of light, the raising and lowering
+of a flag, the tapping of a finger, the long and short blasts of a steam
+whistle, spell out the words of the English language as readily as does
+the sounder in a telegraph-office. It may be interpreted by sight,
+touch, taste, hearing. With a wire, a battery and Vail's alphabet,
+telegraphy is entirely possible without any other appliances.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/140.png"><img src="images/140th.png" alt="MODERN 'SOUNDER.'"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A brief sketch of the difficulties attending the making of the first
+practical telegraph line will be interesting as showing how much and how
+little men knew of practical electricity in 1843. [<a href="#f22">22</a>] To begin
+with, it was a "metallic circuit;" that is, two wires were to be used
+instead of one wire and a "ground connection." They knew nothing of this
+last. Vail discovered and used it before the line was finished. The two
+wires, insulated, were inclosed in a pipe, lead presumably, and the pipe
+was placed in the ground. Ezra Cornell, afterwards the founder of
+Cornell University, had been engaged in the manufacture and sale of a
+patent plow, and undertook to make a pipe-laying machine for this new
+telegraph line. After the work had been begun Vail tested and united the
+conductors as each section was laid. When ten miles were laid the
+insulation, which had been growing weaker, failed altogether. There was
+no current. Probably every schoolboy now knows what the trouble was. The
+earth had stolen the current and absorbed it. The modern boy would
+simply remark "Induction," and turn his attention to some efficient
+remedy. Then, there was consternation. Cornell dexterously managed to
+break the pipe-laying machine, so as to furnish a plausible excuse to
+the newspapers and such public as there may be said to have been before
+there was any telegraph line. Days were spent in consultation at the
+Relay House, and in finding the cause of the difficulty and the remedy.
+Of the congressional appropriation nearly all had been spent. The
+interested parties even quarreled, as mere men will under such
+circumstances, and the want of a little knowledge which is now
+elementary about electricity came near wrecking forever an enterprise
+whose vast importance could not be, and was not then, even approximately
+measured.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f22">22.</a> There was
+no possibility of their knowing more, notwithstanding that, viewed from
+the present, their inexperienced struggles seem almost pathetic. So,
+also, do the ideas of Galvani and the experiments and conclusions of all
+except Franklin, until we come to Faraday. It is one of the features of
+the time in which we live that, regardless of age, we are all scholars
+of a new school in which mere diligence and behavior are not rewarded,
+and in which it is somewhat imperative that we should keep up with our
+class in an understanding of <i>what are now the facts of daily
+life</i>, wonders though they were in the days of our youth.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/142.png"><img src="images/142th.png" alt="ALFRED VAIL"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finally, after some weeks delay, it was decided to introduce what has
+become the most familiar feature of the landscape of civilization, and
+string the wires on poles. There is little need to follow the enterprise
+further. Morse stayed with one instrument in the Capitol at Washington,
+and Vail carried another with him at the end of the line. Already the
+type-and-rule and all the symbols and dictionaries had been discarded,
+and the dot-and-dash alphabet was substituted. On April 23d, 1844, Vail
+substituted the earth for the metallic circuit as an experiment, and
+that great step both in knowledge and in practice was taken.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Within an incredibly brief space the Morse Electric Telegraph had spread
+all over the world. No man's triumph was ever more complete. He passed
+to those riches and honors that must have been to him almost as a
+fulfilled dream. In Europe his progresses were like those of a monarch.
+He was made a member of almost all of the learned societies of the
+world, and on his breast glittered the medals and orders that are the
+insignia of human greatness. A congress of representatives of ten of the
+governments of Europe met in Paris in 1858, and it was unanimously
+decided that the sum of four hundred thousand francs--about a hundred
+thousand dollars--should be presented to him. He died in New York in
+1872.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/144.png"><img src="images/144th.png" alt="PROF. HENRY'S ELECTROMAGNET AND ARMATURE"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet not a single feature of the invention of Morse, as formulated in his
+caveat and described in his original patent, is to be found among the
+essentials of modern telegraphy. They had mostly been abandoned before
+the first line had been completed, and the arrangements of his
+associate, Vail, were substituted. Professor Joseph Henry had, in 1832,
+constructed an electromagnetic telegraph whose signals were made by
+sound, as all signals now are in the so-called Morse system. He hung a
+bar-magnet on a pivot in its center as a compass-needle is hung. He
+wound a U-shaped piece of soft iron with insulated wire, and made it an
+electro-magnet, and placed the north end of the magnetized bar between
+the two legs of this electro-magnet. When the latter was made a magnet
+by the current the end of the bar thus placed was attracted by one leg
+of the magnet and repelled by the other, and was thus caused to swing in
+a horizontal plane so that the opposite end of it struck a bell. Thus
+was an electric telegraph made as an experimental toy, and fulfilling
+all the conditions of such an one giving the signals by sound, as the
+modern telegraph does. It lacked one thing--the essential. [<a href="#f23">23</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f23">23.</a> The details of the construction of the modern telegraph line are not
+here stated. There are none that change, in principle, the outline above
+given.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Vail telegraphic alphabet had not been thought of. Had such an idea
+been conceived previously a message could have been read as it is read
+now, and with the toy of Professor Henry which he abandoned without an
+idea of its utility or of the possibilities of any telegraph as we have
+long known them. Morse knew these possibilities. He was one of the
+innumerable eccentrics who have been right, one of the prophets who have
+been in the beginning without honor, not only in respect to their own
+country, but in respect to their times.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/145.png"><img src="images/145th.png" alt="DIAGRAM OF TELEGRAPH SYSTEM"></a>
+</p>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="ii">CHAPTER II.</a></h3>
+
+<p>
+THE OCEAN CABLE.--The remaining department of Telegraphy is embodied in
+the startling departure from ancient ideas of the possible which we know
+as cable telegraphy, the messages by such means being <i>cablegrams</i>.
+About these ocean systems there are many features not applying to lines
+on land, though they are intended to perform the same functions in the
+same way, with the same object of conveying intelligence in language,
+instantly and certainly, but under the sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The marine cables are not simple wires. There is in the center a strand
+of usually seven small copper wires, intended as the conductor of the
+current. These, twisted loosely into a small cable, are surrounded by
+repeated layers of gutta-percha, which is, in turn, covered with jute.
+Outside of all there is an armor of wires, and the entire cable appears
+much like any other of the wire cables now in common use with elevators,
+bridges, and for many purposes. In the shallow waters of bays and
+harbors, where anchors drag and the like occurrences take place, the
+armor of a submarine cable is sometimes so heavy as to weigh more than
+twenty tons to the mile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There are peculiar difficulties encountered in sending messages by an
+ocean cable, and some of these grow out of the same induction whose laws
+are indispensable in other cases. The inner copper core sets up
+induction in the strands of the outer armor, and that again with the
+surrounding water. There is, again, a species of re-induction affecting
+the core, so that faint impulses may be received at the terminals that
+were never sent by the operators. All of these difficulties combined
+result in what electricians term "retardation." It is one of the
+departments of telegraphy that, like the unavoidable difficulties in all
+machines and devices, educates men to their special care, and keeps them
+thinking. It is one of the natural features of all the mechanical
+sciences that results in the continual making of improvements.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first impression in regard to ocean cables would be that very strong
+currents are used in sending impulses so far. The opposite is true. The
+receiving instrument is not the noisy "sounder" of the land lines. There
+was, until recently, a delicate needle which swung to and fro with the
+impulses, and reflected beams of light which, according to their number
+and the space between them spelled out the message according to the Vail
+dot-and-dash alphabet. Now, however, a means still more delicate has
+been devised, resulting in a faint wavy ink-line on a long, unwinding
+slip of paper, made by a fountain pen. This strange manuscript may be
+regarded as the latest system of writing in the world, having no
+relationship to the art of Cadmus, and requiring an expert and a special
+education to decipher it. Those faint pulsations, from a hand three
+thousand miles away across the sea, are the realization of a magic
+incredible. The necromancy and black art of all antiquity are childish
+by comparison. They give but faint indications of what they often
+are--the messages of love and death; the dictations of statesmanship;
+the heralds of peace or war; the orders for the disposition of millions
+of dollars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The story of the laying of the first ocean cable is worthy of the
+telling in any language, but should be especially interesting to the
+American boy and girl. It is a story of native enterprise and
+persistence; perhaps the most remarkable of them all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The earliest ocean telegraph was that laid by two men named Brett,
+across the English Channel. For this cable, a pioneer though crossing
+only a narrow water, the conservative officials of the British
+government refused a charter. In August, 1850, they laid a single copper
+wire covered with gutta-percha from Dover in England to the coast of
+France. The first wire was soon broken, and a second was made consisting
+of several strands, and this last was soon imitated in various short
+reaches of water in Europe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the Atlantic had always been considered unfathomable. No line had
+ever sounded its depths, and its strong currents had invariably swept
+away the heaviest weights before they reached its bed. Its great
+feature, so far as known, was that strange ocean river first noted and
+described by Franklin, and known to us as the Gulf Stream. In 1853 a
+circumstance occurred which again turned the attention of a few men to
+the question of an Atlantic cable. Lieutenant Berryman, of the Navy,
+made a survey of the bottom of the Atlantic from Newfoundland to
+Ireland, and the wonderful discovery was made that the floor of the
+ocean was a vast plain, not more than two miles below the surface,
+extending from one continent to the other. This plain is about four
+hundred miles wide and sixteen hundred long, and there are no currents
+to disturb the mass of broken shells and unknown fishes that lie on its
+oozy surface. It was named the "Telegraphic Plateau," with a view to its
+future use. At either edge of this plateau huge mountains, from four to
+seven thousand feet high, rise out of the depths. There are precipices
+of sheer descent down which the cable now hangs. The Azores and Bermudas
+are peaks of ocean mountains. The warm river known as the Gulf Stream,
+coming northward meets the ice-bergs and melts them, and deposits the
+shells, rocks and sand they carry on this plain. When it was discovered
+the difficulty in the way of an Atlantic cable seemed no longer to
+exist, and those who had been anxious to engage in the enterprise began
+to bestir themselves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of these the most active was the American, Cyrus W. Field. He began life
+as a clerk in New York City. When thirty-five years old he became
+engaged in the building of a land line of telegraph across Newfoundland,
+the purpose of which was to transmit news brought by a fast line of
+steamers intended to be established, and the idea is said to have
+occurred to him of making a line not only so far, but across the sea. In
+November, 1856, he had succeeded in forming a company, and the entire
+capital, amounting to 350,000 pounds, was subscribed. The governments of
+England and the United States promised a subsidy to the stockholders.
+The cable was made in England. The <i>Niagara</i> was assigned by the
+United States, and the <i>Agamemnon</i> by England, each attended by
+smaller vessels, to lay the cable. In August, 1857, the Niagara left the
+coast of Ireland, dropping her cable into the sea. Even when it dropped
+suddenly down the steep escarpment to the great plateau the current
+still flowed. But through the carelessness of an assistant the cable
+parted. That was the beginning of mishaps. The task was not to be so
+easily done, and the enterprise was postponed until the following year.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That next year was still more memorable for triumph and disappointment.
+It was now designed that the two vessels should meet in mid-ocean, unite
+the ends of the cable, and sail slowly to opposite shores. There were
+fearful storms. The huge <i>Agamemnon</i>, overloaded with her half of
+the cable, was almost lost. But finally the spot in the waste and middle
+of the Atlantic was reached, the sea was still, and the vessels steamed
+away from each other slowly uncoiling into the sea their two halves of
+the second cable. It parted again, and the two ships returned to
+Ireland.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In July they again met in mid-ocean. Europe and America were both
+charitably deriding the splendid enterprise. All faith was lost. It was
+known, to journalism especially, that the cable would never be laid and
+that the enterprise was absurd. But it was like the laying of the first
+land line. There was a way to do it, existing in the brains and faith of
+men, though at first that way was not known. From this third meeting the
+two ships again sailed away, the <i>Niagara</i> for America, the
+<i>Agamemnon</i> for Valencia Bay. This time the wire did not part, and
+on August 29th, 1858, the old world and the new were bound together for
+the first time, and each could read almost the thoughts of the other.
+The queen saluted America, and the president replied. There were salutes
+of cannon and the ringing of bells. But the messages by the cable grew
+indistinct day by day, and finally ceased. The Atlantic cable had been
+laid, and--had failed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Eight years followed, and the cable lay forgotten at the bottom of the
+sea. The reign of peace on earth and good will to men had so far failed
+to come and they were years of tumult and bitterness. The Union of the
+United States was called upon to defend its integrity in a great war. A
+bitter enmity grew up between us and England. The telegraph, and all its
+persevering projectors, were almost absolutely forgotten. Electricians
+declared the project utterly impracticable, and it began, finally, to be
+denied that any messages had ever crossed the Atlantic at all, and Field
+and his associates were discredited. It was said that the current could
+not be made to pass through so long a circuit. New routes were spoken
+of--across Bering's Strait, and overland by way of Siberia--and
+measures began to be taken to carry this scheme into effect.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Amid these discouragements, Field and his associates revived their
+company, made a new cable, and provided everything that science could
+then suggest to aid final success. This new cable was more perfect than
+any of the former ones, and there was a mammoth side-wheel steamer known
+as the <i>Great Eastern</i>, unavailable as it proved for the ordinary
+uses of commerce, and this vessel was large enough to carry the entire
+cable in her hold. In July, 1865, the huge steamer left Ireland,
+dropping the endless coil into the sea. The same men were engaged in
+this last attempt that had failed in all the previous ones. It is one of
+the most memorable instances of perseverance on record. But on August
+6th a flaw occurred, and the cable was being drawn up for repairs. The
+sound of the wheel suddenly stopped; the cable broke and sunk into the
+depths. The <i>Great Eastern</i> returned unsuccessful to her port.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Field was present on board on this occasion, and had been present on
+several similar ones. There was, so far as known, no record made by him
+of his thoughts. There were now five cables in the bed of the Atlantic,
+and each one had carried down with it a large sum of money, and a still
+larger sum of hopes. Yet the Great Eastern sailed again in July, 1866,
+her tanks filled with new cable and Field once more on her decks. It was
+the last, and the successful attempt. The cable sank steadily and
+noiselessly into the sea, and on July 26th the steamer sailed into
+Trinity Bay. The connection was made at Heart's Content, a little New
+Foundland fishing village, and one for this occasion admirably named.
+Then the lost cable of 1865 was found, raised and spliced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In these later times, if a flaw should occur, science would locate it,
+and go and repair it. Even if this were not true, the fact remains that
+this last cable, and that of 1865, have been carrying their messages
+under the sea for nearly thirty years. The lesson is that repeated
+failures do not mean <i>final</i> failure. There is often said to be a
+malice, a spirit of rebellion, in inanimate things. They refuse to
+become slaves until they are once and for all utterly subdued, and then
+they are docile forever. Yet the malice truly lies in the inaptitude and
+inexperience of men. Had Field and his associates known how to make and
+lay an Atlantic cable in the beginning as well as they did in the end,
+the first one laid would have been successful. The years were passed in
+the invention of machinery for laying, and in improving the construction
+of each successive cable. Many have been laid since then, certainly and
+without failure. Men have learned how. [<a href="#f24">24</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f24">24.</a> At present the total
+mileage of submarine cables is about 152,000 miles, costing altogether
+$200,000,000. The length of land wires throughout the world is over
+2,000,000 miles, costing $225,000,000. The capital invested in all
+lines, land and sea, is about $530,000,000.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thirteen years were passed in this succession of toils, expenditures,
+trials and failures. Field crossed the Atlantic more than fifty times in
+these years, in pursuit of his great idea. At last, like Morse, he was
+crowned with wealth, success, medals and honors. He was acquainted with
+all the difficulties. It is now known that he knew through them all that
+an ocean cable could finally be laid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE TELEPHONE.--The telegraph had become old. All nations had become
+accustomed to its use. More than thirty years had elapsed--a long time
+in the last half of the nineteenth century--before mankind awoke to a
+new and startling surprise; the telegraph had been made to transmit not
+only language, but the human voice in articulate speech. [<a href="#f25">25</a>] The fact first became known in 1873, and was the
+invention of Alexander G. Bell, of Chicago.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f25">25.</a> It has been noted that Morse's idea was a <i>recording</i> telegraph, that being in his mind its most valuable point, and that this idea has long been obsolete. In like manner, when the Telephone was invented there was a general business opinion that it was perhaps an instrument useful in
+colleges for demonstrating the wonders of electricity, but not useful
+for commercial purposes <i>because it made no record</i>. "Business will
+always be done in black and white" was the oracular verdict of prominent
+and experienced business men. It may be true, but a little conversation
+across space has been found indispensable. The telephone is a remarkable
+business success.
+</p>
+
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/156.png"><img src="images/156th.png" alt="DIAGRAM OF TELEPHONE.--THE BLAKE TRANSMITTER"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were several, no one knows how many, attempts to accomplish this
+remarkable feat previous to the success of Professor Bell. One of these
+was by Reis, of Frankfort, in 1860. It did not embrace any of the most
+valuable principles involved in what we know as the telephone, since it
+could not transmit <i>speech</i>. Professor Bell's first operative
+apparatus was accompanied by simultaneous inventions by Gray, Edison,
+and others. This remarkable instance of several of the great
+electricians of the country evolving at nearly the same time the same
+principal details of a revolutionary invention, has never been fully
+explained. The first rather crude and ineffective arrangements were
+rapidly improved by these men, and by others, prominent among whom is
+Blake, whose remarkable transmitter will be described presently. The
+best devices of these inventors were finally embodied, and in the
+resulting instrument we have one of the chiefest of those modern wonders
+whose first appearance taxed the credulity of mankind. [<a href="#f26">26</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f26">26.</a> There
+were, until a recent period, a line of statements, alleged facts and
+reasonings, that were incredible in proportion to intelligence. The
+occurrences of recent times have reversed this rule with regard to all
+things in the domain of applied science. It is the ignorant and narrow
+only who are incredulous, and the ears of intelligence are open to every
+sound. All that is not absurd is possible, and all that is possible is
+sure to be accomplished. The telephone, as a statement, <i>was</i>
+absurd, but not to the men who worked for its accomplishment and finally
+succeeded. The lines grow narrow. It requires now a high intelligence to
+decide even upon the fact of absurdity within the domain of natural
+law.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In reality the telephone is simple in construction. Workmen who are not
+accomplished electricians constantly erect, correct and repair the lines
+and instruments. The machine is not liable to derangement. Any person
+may use it the first time of trying, and this use is almost universal.
+Yet it is, from the view of any hour in all the past, an
+incomprehensible mystery. A moment of reflection drifts the mind
+backward and renders it almost incredible in the present. The human
+voice, recognizable, in articulate words, is apparently borne for miles,
+now even for some hundreds of miles, upon an attenuated wire which hangs
+silent in the air carrying absolutely nothing more than thousands of
+little varying impulses of electricity. Not a word that is spoken at one
+end of it is ever heard at the other, and the conclusion inevitable to
+the reason of even twenty years ago would be that if one person does not
+actually hear the other talk there is a miracle. Probably this idea that
+the voice is actually carried is not very uncommon. The facts seem
+incomprehensible otherwise, and it is not considered that if that idea
+were correct it <i>would</i> be a miracle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The entire explanation of the magic of the telephone lies in electrical
+induction. To the brief explanation of that phenomenon previously given
+the reader is again referred for a better understanding of what now
+follows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But, first, a moment's consideration may be given to the results
+produced by the use of this appliance, which, as an illustration of the
+way of the world was an innovation that, had it remained uninvented or
+impossible, would never have been even desired. One third more business
+is said now to be transacted in the average day than was possible
+previously. Since many things can now go on together which previously
+waited for direction, authority and personal arrangement, a man's
+business life is lengthened one-third, while his business may mostly be
+done, to his great convenience, from one place. It has given employment
+to a large number of persons, a large proportion of whom are young
+women. The status of woman in the business world has been, fortunately
+or unfortunately, by so much changed. It has introduced a new necessity,
+never again to be dispensed with. It has changed the ancient habits, and
+with them, unconsciously, <i>the habit of thought</i>. Contact not
+personal between man and man has increased. The <i>thought</i> of others
+is quickly arrived at. It has caused us to become more appreciative of
+the absolute meanings and values of words, without assistance from face,
+manner or gesture. Laughter may be heard, but tears are unseen. It has
+induced caution in speech and enforces brevity. While none of its
+conveniences are now noted, and all that it gives is expected, the
+telephone, with all its effects, has entered--into the sum of life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the wall or table there is a box, and beside this box projects a
+metal arm. In a fork of this arm hangs a round, black, trumpet-shaped,
+hard rubber tube. This last is the receiving instrument. It is taken
+from its arm and held close to the ear. The answers are heard in it as
+though the person speaking were there concealed in an impish embodiment
+of himself. Meantime the talking is done into a hole in the side of the
+box, while the receiver is held to the ear. This is all that appears
+superficially. An operation incredible has its entire machinery
+concealed in these simplicities. It is difficult to explain the mystery
+of the telephone in words--though it has been said to be simple--and it
+is almost impossible unless the reader comprehends, or will now
+undertake to comprehend, what has been previously said on the subject of
+the production of magnetism by a current of electricity, as in the case
+of the electro-magnet, and on the subject of induction and its laws.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It has been shown that electricity produces magnetism; that the current,
+properly managed as described, creates instantly a powerful magnet out
+of a piece of soft iron, and leaves it again a mere piece of iron at the
+will of the operator. This process also will work backwards. An electric
+current produces a magnet, and <i>a magnet also may be made to produce
+an electric current</i>. It is one more of the innumerable, almost
+universal, cases where scientific and mechanical processes may be
+reversed. When the dynamo is examined this process is still further
+exemplified, and when we examine the dynamo and the motor together we
+have a striking example of the two processes going on together.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The application of this making of a current, or changing its intensity,
+in the telephone, is apparently totally unlike the continuous
+manufacture of the induced current for daily use by means of the steam
+engine and dynamo. But it is in exact accord with the same laws. It
+will, perhaps, be more readily understood by recalling the results of
+the experiment of the two wires, where it was found that an <i>approach
+to</i>, or a <i>receding from</i>, a wire carrying a current, produces
+an impulse over the wire that has by itself no current at all. Now, it
+must be added to that explanation that if the battery were detached from
+that conducting wire, and if, instead of its being a wire for the
+carrying of a battery current <i>it were itself a permanent magnet</i>,
+the same results would happen in the other wire if it were rapidly moved
+toward and away from this permanent magnet. If the reader should stretch
+a wire tightly between two pegs on a table, and should then hold the
+arms of a common horseshoe magnet very near it, and should twang the
+stretched wire with his finger, as he would a guitar string, the
+electrometer would show an induced alternate current in the wire. Since
+this is an illustration of the principle of the dynamo, stated in its
+simplest form, it may be well to remember that in this manner--with the
+means multiplied and in all respects made the most of--a very strong
+current of electricity may be evolved without any battery or other
+source of electricity except a magnet. In connection with this
+substitution of a magnet for a current-carrying wire, it must be
+remembered that moving the magnet toward or from the wire has the same
+result as moving the wire instead. It does not matter which piece is
+moved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In addition to the above, it should be stated that not only will an
+induced current be set up in the wire, but also <i>the magnetism in the
+magnet will be increased or diminished as the tremblings of the wire
+cause it to approach or recede from it</i>. Therefore if a wire be led
+away from each pole of a permanent magnet, and the ends united to form a
+circuit, an induced current will appear in this wire if a piece of soft
+iron is passed quickly near the magnet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is an essential part of the telephone that it is necessary to go
+outside of the field of electricity to describe. It is undoubtedly
+understood by the reader that all sound is produced by vibrations, or
+rapid undulations, of the surrounding air. If a membrane of any kind is
+stretched across a hoop, and one talks against it, so to speak, the
+diaphragm or membrane will be shaken, will vibrate, with the movement of
+the air produced by the voice. If a cannon be fired all the windows
+rattle, and are often broken. A peal of thunder will cause the same jar
+and rattle of window panes, manifestly by what we call
+"sound"--vibrations of the air. The window frame is a "diaphragm." The
+ear is constructed on the same principle, its diaphragm being actually
+moved by the vibrations of air, being what we call hearing. With these
+facts about sound understood in connection with those given in
+connection with the substitution of a magnet for a battery current, it
+is entirely possible for any non-expert to understand the theory of the
+construction of the telephone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the Bell telephone, now used with the Blake transmitter [which
+differs somewhat from the arrangement I shall now describe] a bar magnet
+has a portion of its length wound with very fine insulated wire. Across
+the opposite end of this polarized [<a href="#f27">27</a>] magnet, crosswise to it, and very close, there is placed a
+diaphragm of thin sheet iron. This is held only around its edge, and its
+center is free to vibrate toward and from the end of this polarized
+magnet. This thin disc of iron, therefore, follows the movements, the
+"soundwaves," of the air against it, which are caused by the human
+voice. We have an instance of apiece of soft iron moving toward, and
+away from, a magnet. It moves with a rapidity and violence precisely
+proportioned to the tones and inflections of the voice. Those movements
+are almost microscopic, not perceptible to the eye, but sufficient.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f27">27.</a> "Polarized" means
+magnetized; having the two poles of a permanent magnet. The term is
+frequently used in descriptions of electrical appliances. Instead of
+using the terms <i>positive</i> and <i>negative</i>, it is also
+customary to speak of the "North" or the "South" of a magnet, battery or
+circuit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The approaching and receding have made a difference, in the quality of
+the magnet. Its magnetism has been increased and diminished, and the
+little coil of insulated wire around it has felt these changes, and
+carried them as impulses over the circuit of which it is a part. In that
+circuit, at the other end, there is a precisely similar little insulated
+coil, upon a precisely similar polarized magnet. These impulses pass
+through this second coil, and increase or diminish the magnetism in the
+magnet round which it is coiled. That, in turn, affects by magnetic
+attraction the diaphragm that is arranged in relation to its magnet
+precisely as described for the first. The first being controlled as to
+the extent and rapidity of its movements by the loudness and other
+modifications of the voice, the impulses sent over the circuit vary
+accordingly. As a consequence, so does the strength of the magnet whose
+coil is also in the circuit. So, therefore, does its power of attraction
+over its diaphragm vary. The result is that the movements that are
+caused in the first diaphragm by the voice, are caused in the second by
+an <i>attraction</i> that varies in strength in proportion to the
+vibrations of the voice speaking against the first diaphragm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is the theory of the telephone. The sounds are not carried, but
+<i>mechanically produced</i> again by the rattle of a thin piece of iron
+close to the listener's ear. The voice is full, audible, distinct, as we
+hear it naturally, and as it impinges upon the transmitting diaphragm.
+In reproduction at the receiving instrument it is small in volume;
+almost microscopic, if the phrase may be applied to sound. We hear it
+only by placing the ear close to the diaphragm. It will be seen that
+this is necessarily so. No attempts to remedy the difficulty have so far
+been successful. There is no means of reproducing the volume of the
+voice with the minute vibrations of a little iron disc.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In actual service an electro-magnet is used instead of, or in addition
+to, the bar magnets described above. A steady flow from a battery is
+passed through an instrument which throws this current into proper
+vibrations by stopping the flow of the current at each interval between
+impulses. There is a piece of carbon between the diaphragm and its
+support. The wires are connected with the diaphragm and its support, and
+the current passes through the carbon. When the diaphragm vibrates, the
+carbon is slightly compressed by it. Pressure reduces its resistance,
+and a greater current passes through it and over the wires of the
+circuit for the instant during which the touch remains. This is the
+Blake transmitter. It should be explained that carbon stands low on the
+list of conductors of electricity. The more dense it is, the better
+conductor. The varying pressures of the diaphragm serve to produce this
+varying density and the consequent varying impulses of the current which
+effect the receiving diaphragm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The transmitter, as above described, is in the square box, and its round
+black diaphragm may be seen behind the round hole into which one talks.
+[<a href="#f28">28</a>] The receiver is the
+trumpet-shaped tube which hangs on its side, and is taken from its hook
+to be used. The call-bell has nothing to do with the telephone. It is
+operated by a small magneto-generator,--a very near relative of the
+dynamo-the current from which is sent over the telephone circuit (the
+same wires) when the small crank is turned. Sometimes the question
+occurs: "Why ring one's own bell when one desires to ring only that at
+the central office?" The answer is that both bells are in the same
+circuit. If the circuit is uninterrupted your bell will ring when you
+ring the other, and a bell at each end of your circuit is necessary in
+any case, else you could not yourself be called.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f28">28.</a> Shouting into a telephone doubtless comes of the idea,
+unconscious, that one is speaking to a person at a distance. To speak
+distinctly is better, and in an ordinary tone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the receiving instrument is on its hook its weight depresses the
+lever slightly. This slight movement <i>connects</i> the bell circuit
+and <i>disconnects</i> the telephone circuit. Take it off the hook and
+the reverse is effected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The long-distance telephone differs from the ordinary only in larger
+conductors, improved instruments, and a metallic circuit--two wires
+instead of the ordinary single wire and ground connections.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/167.gif"><img src="images/167th.gif" alt="TELEAUTOGRAPH TRANSMITTING INSTRUMENT"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE TELAUTOGRAPH.--This, the latest of modern miracles in the field of
+electricity, comes naturally after the telegraph and telephone, since it
+supplements them as a means of communication between individuals. It
+also is the invention of Prof. Elisha Gray, who seems to be as well the
+author of the name of his extraordinary achievement. It is not the first
+instrument of the kind attempted. The desire to find a means of writing
+at a distance is old. Bain, of Edinburgh, made a machine partially
+successful fifty years ago. Like the telegraph as intended by Morse,
+there was the interposition of typesetting before a message could be
+sent. It did not write, or follow the hand of the operator in writing,
+though it did reproduce at the other end of the circuit in facsimile the
+faces of the types that had been set by the sender. It was a process by
+electrolysis, well understood by all electricians. Several of this
+variety of writing telegraphs have been made, some of them almost
+successful, but all lacking the vital essential. [<a href="#f29">29</a>] In
+1856 Casselli, of Florence, made a writing telegraph which had a
+pendulum arrangement weighing fourteen pounds. Only one was ever made,
+but it resulted in many new ideas all pertaining to the facsimile
+systems--the following of the faces of types--and all were finally
+abandoned.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f29">29.</a> The lack of
+<i>one vital essential</i> has been fatal to hundreds of inventions.
+Inventors unconsciously follow paths made by predecessors. The entire
+class of transmitting instruments must dispense with tedious
+preliminaries, and must use <i>words</i>. Vail accomplished this in
+telegraphy. Bell and others in the telephone, and Gray has borne the
+same fact in mind in the present development of the telautograph.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The invention of Gray is a departure. The sender of a message sits down
+at a small desk and takes up a pencil, writing with it on ordinary paper
+and in his usual manner. A pen at the other end of the circuit follows
+every movement of his hand. The result is an autograph letter a hundred
+miles or more away. A man in Chicago may write and sign a check payable
+in Indianapolis. Personal directions may be given authoritatively and
+privately. As in the case of the telephone, no intervening operator is
+necessary. No expertness is required. Even the use of the alphabet is
+not necessary. A drawing of any description, anything that can be traced
+with a pen or pencil, is copied precisely by the pen at the receiving
+desk. The possibilities of this instrument, the uses it may develop, are
+almost inconceivable. It might be imagined that the lines drawn would be
+continuous. On the contrary, when the pen is lifted by the writer at the
+sending desk it also lifts itself from the paper at that of the
+receiver.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The action of the telautograph depends upon the variations in magnetic
+strength between two small electro-magnets. It has been seen that an
+electro-magnet exerts its attractive force in proportion to the current
+which passes through its coil. To use a phrase entirely non-technical,
+it will "pull" hard or easy in proportion to the strength of the passing
+current. This fact has been observed as the cause of action in the
+telephone, where one diaphragm, moved by the air-vibrations caused by
+the voice, causes a varying current to pass over the wire, attracting
+the other diaphragm less or more as the first is moved toward or away
+from its magnet. In the telautograph the varying currents are caused not
+by the diaphragm influenced by the voice, but <i>by a pencil moved by
+the hand</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To show how these movements may be caused let us imagine a case that may
+occur in nature. It is an interesting mechanical study. There is an
+upright rush or reed growing in the middle of a running stream. The stem
+of this rush has elasticity naturally; it has a tendency to stand
+upright; but it bends when there is a current against it. It is easy
+enough to imagine it bending down stream more or less as the current is
+more or less strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Imagine now another stream entering the first at right angles to it, and
+that the rush stands in the center of both currents. It will then bend
+to the force of the second stream also, and the direction in which it
+will lean will be a compromise between the forces of the two. Lessen the
+flow of the current in one of the streams, and the rush will bend a
+little less before that current and swing around to the side from which
+it receives less pressure. Cut off either of the currents entirely, and
+it will bend in the direction of the other current only. In a word,
+<i>if the quantity or strength of the current of both streams can be
+controlled at will, the rush can be made to swing in any direction
+between the two, and its tip will describe any figure desired, aided, of
+course, by its own disposition to stand upright when there is no
+pressure</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let us imagine the rush to be a pen or pencil, and the two streams of
+water to be two currents of electricity having power to sway and move
+this pencil in proportion to their relative strength, as the streams did
+the rush. Imagine further that these two currents are varied and changed
+with reference to each other by the movements of a pen in a man's hand
+at another place. It is an essential part of the mechanism of the
+telautograph, and the movement is known among mechanicians as
+"compounding a point."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Gray, while using the principles involved in compounding a point, seems
+to have discarded the ways of transmitting magnetic impulses of varying
+strength commonly in use. His method he calls the "step-by-step"
+principle, and it is a striking example of what patience and ingenuity
+may accomplish in the management of what is reputedly the most elusive
+and difficult of the powers of nature. The machine was some six years in
+being brought into practical form, and was perfected only after a long
+series of experiments. In its operation it deals with infinitesimal
+measurements and quantities. The first attempts were on the "variable
+current" system, which was later discarded for the "step-by-step" plan
+mentioned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In writing an ordinary lead pencil may be used. From the point of this
+two silk cords are extended diagonally, their directions being at right
+angles to each other, and the ends of these cords enter openings made
+for them in the cast iron case of the instrument on each side of the
+small desk on which the writing is done.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Inside the case each cord is wound on a small drum which is mounted on a
+vertical shaft. Now if the pencil-point is moved straight upward or
+downward it is manifest that both shafts will move alike. If the
+movement is oblique in any direction, one of the shafts will turn more
+than the other, and the degree of all these turnings of each shaft in
+reference to the other will be precisely governed by the direction in
+which the pencil-point is moved.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/172.png"><img src="images/172th.png" alt="DIAGRAM OF MECHANICAL TELAUTOGRAPH. BOW-DRILL ARRANGEMENT"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, suppose each shaft to carry a small, toothed wheel, and that upon
+these teeth a small arm rests. As the wheel turns this arm will move as
+a pawl does on a ratchet. Imagine that at each slight depression between
+the ratchet-teeth it breaks a contact and cuts off a current, and at
+each slight rise renews the contact and permits a current to pass. This
+current affects an electro-magnet--one for each shaft--at the receiving
+end, and each of these magnets, when the current is on, attracts an
+armature bearing a pawl, which, being lifted, allows the notched wheel,
+upon which it bears, to turn <i>to the extent of one notch</i>. The
+arrangement may be called an electric clutch, that may be arranged in
+many ways, and the detail of its action is unimportant in description,
+so that it be borne in mind that <i>each time a notch is passed in
+turning the shaft by drawing upon or relaxing the cords attached to the
+pencil-point</i>, an impulse of electricity is sent to an electro-magnet
+and armature which allows <i>a corresponding wheel and its shaft to turn
+one notch, or as many notches, as are passed at the transmitting
+shaft</i>. In moving the pencil one inch to one side, we will suppose it
+permits the shaft on which the cord is wound to turn forty notches. Then
+forty impulses of electricity have been sent over the wire, the clutch
+has been released forty times, and the shaft to which it is attached has
+turned precisely as much as the shaft has which was turned, or was
+allowed to turn, by the cord wound upon it and attached to the pencil.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It will be remembered that the arrangement is double. There are two
+shafts operated by the writer's pencil--one on each side of it. Two
+corresponding shafts occupy relative positions in respect to the
+automatic pen of the receiving instrument. There are two circuits, and
+two wires are at present necessary for the operation of the instrument.
+It remains to describe the manner of operating the automatic pen by
+connection with its two shafts which are turned by the step-by-step
+arrangement described, precisely as much and at the same time as those
+of the transmitting instrument are.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/175.png"><img src="images/175th.png" alt="WORK OF THE TELAUTOGRAPH. COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION, 1893"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To each shaft of the receiving instrument is attached an aluminum
+pen-arm by means of cords, each arm being fixed, in regard to its shaft,
+as a bow drill is in regard to its drill. These arms meet in the center
+of the writing tablet, V-shaped, as the cords are with relation to the
+writer's pencil in the sending instrument. A small tube conveys ink from
+a reservoir along one of the pen-arms, and into a glass tube upright at
+the junction of the arms. This tube is the pen. Now, let us imagine the
+pencil of the writer pushed straight upward from the apex of the
+V-shaped figure the cords and pencil-point make on the writing desk.
+Then both the shafts at the points of the arms of the V will rotate
+equally. [<a href="#f30">30</a>] The number of
+impulses sent from each of these shafts, by the means explained, will be
+equal. Each of the shafts of the receiving instrument will rotate alike,
+and each draw up its arm of the automatic pen precisely as though one
+took hold of the points of the two legs of the V, and drew them apart to
+right and left in a straight line. This moves the apex of the V, with
+its pen, in a straight line upward at the same time the writer at the
+sending instrument pushed his pencil upward. If this one movement,
+considered alone, is understood, all the rest follow by the same means.
+This is, as nearly as it may be described without the use of technical
+mechanical terms, the principle of the telautograph. It must be seen
+that all that is necessary to describe any movement of the sender's
+pencil upon the paper under the receiving pen is that the rotating
+upright shafts of the latter should move precisely as much, and at the
+same time, with those two which get their movement from the wound cords
+and attached pencil-points in the hand of the writer.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f30">30.</a> See diagram of mechanical Telautograph, and of bow
+drill. In the latter, in ordinary use, the stick and string; rotate the
+spool. Rotating the spool will, in turn, move the stick and string, and
+this is its action in the pen-arms of the Telautograph.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Only one essential item of the movement remains. The shafts of both
+instruments must be rotated by some separate mechanical agency, capable
+of being automatically reversed. By an arrangement unnecessary to
+explain in detail, the pencil of the writer lifted from the paper
+resting on the metallic table which forms the desk; results in the
+automatic lifting of the pen from the paper at the receiving desk.
+</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p>
+Prof. Elisha Gray was born in 1835, in Ohio. He was a blacksmith, and
+later, a carpenter. But he was given to chemical and mechanical
+experiments rather than to the industries. When twenty-one, he entered
+Oberlin College, remaining there five years, and earning all the money
+he spent. He devoted his time chiefly to studies of the physical
+sciences. As a young man he was an invalid. Later he was not remarkably
+successful in business, failing several times in his beginnings. His
+first invention was a telegraph self-adjusting relay. It was not
+practically successful. Afterwards he was employed with an electrical
+manufacturing company at Cleveland and Chicago. Most of his earlier
+inventions in the line of electrical utility are not distinctively
+known. He has never been idle, and they all possessed practical merit.
+For many years before he was known as the wizard of the telautograph, he
+was foremost in the ranks of physicists and electricians. He is not a
+discoverer of great principles, but is professionally skillful and
+accomplished, and eminently practical. His every effort is exerted to
+avoid intricacy and clumsiness in machinery. In 1878 he was awarded the
+grand prize at the Paris Exposition, and was given the degree of
+Chevalier and the decorations of the Legion of Honor by the French
+Government, and again in 1881, at the Electrical Exposition at Paris, he
+was honored with the gold medal for his inventions. He secured the
+degree of A.M. at Oberlin College, and was the recipient of the degree
+of Ph.D. from the Ripon (Wis.) College. For years he was connected with
+those institutions as non-resident Lecturer in Physics. Another
+University gave him the degree of LL.D. He is a member of the American
+Philosophical Society, the Society of Electrical Engineers of England,
+and the Society of Telegraph Engineers of London. He received an award
+and a certificate from the Centennial Exposition for his inventions in
+electricity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The same lesson is to be gathered from his career, so far, that is given
+by the life of every noted American. It means that money, family,
+prestige, have no place as leverages of success in any field. The rule
+is toward the opposite. The qualities and capacities that win do so
+without these early advantages, and all the more surely because there is
+an inducement to use them. There is no "luck."
+</p>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="iii">CHAPTER III.</a></h3>
+
+<p>
+THE ELECTRIC LIGHT.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/178.png"><img src="images/178th.png" alt=""></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It has been stated that modern theory recognizes two classes of
+electricity, the <i>Static</i> and the <i>Dynamic</i>. The difference
+is, however, solely noticeable in operation. Of the dynamic class there
+can be no more common and striking example than the now almost universal
+electric light. Yet, with a sufficient expenditure of chemicals and
+electrodes, and a sufficient number of cells, electric lighting, either
+arc or incandescent, can be as effectively accomplished as with the
+current evolved by a powerful dynamo. [<a href="#f31">31</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f31">31.</a> As an illustration of
+the day of beginnings, a few years ago the <i>thalus</i>, or lantern,
+the pride of the rural Congressman, on the dome of the Capitol at
+Washington was lighted by electricity, and an immense circular chamber
+beneath the dome was occupied by hundreds of cells of the ordinary form
+of battery. The lamps were of the incandescent variety, and what we now
+know as the filament was platinum wire. Vacuum bulb, filament, carbon,
+dynamo, were all unknown. But the current, and the heat of resistance,
+and every fact now in use in electric lighting, were there in
+operation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The reader will understand that modern dynamic electricity owes its
+development to the principle of economy in production. Practical science
+most effectively awakens from its lethargy at the call of commerce.
+Nevertheless, from the earliest moment in which it became known that
+electricity was akin to heat--that an interruption of the easy passage
+of a current produced heat--the minds of men were busy with the question
+of how to turn the tremendous fact to everyday use. Progress was slow,
+and part of it was accidental. The great servant of modern mankind was
+first an untrained one. It was a marked advance when the gaslights in a
+theater could be all lighted at once by means of batteries and the spark
+of an induction coil. The bottom of Hell Gate, in New York harbor, was
+blown out by Gen. Newton by the same means, and would have been
+impossible otherwise. But these were only incidents and suggestions.
+The question was how to make this instantaneous spark <i>continuous</i>.
+There was pondering upon the fact that the only difference between heat
+and electricity is one of molecular arrangement. Heat is a molecular
+motion like that of electricity, without the symmetry and harmony of
+action electricity has. The vibrations of electricity are accomplished
+rapidly, and without loss. Those of heat are slow, and greatly
+radiated. <i>When a current of electricity reaches a place in the
+conductor where it cannot pass easily, and the orderly vibrations of its
+molecules are disturbed, they are thrown into the disorderly motion
+known as heat.</i> So, when the conductor is not so good; when a large
+wire is reduced suddenly to a small one; when a good conductor, such as
+copper, has a section of resisting conduction, such as carbon; heat and
+light are at once evolved at that point, and there is produced what we
+know as the electric light. However concealed by machinery and devices,
+and all the arrangements by which it is made more lasting, steady,
+economical and automatic, it is no more nor less than this. <i>The
+difference between heat and electricity is only a difference in the
+rates of vibration of their molecules.</i> Whatever the theory as to
+molecules, or essence, or actual nature and origin, the practical fact
+that heat and light are the results of the circumstances described above
+remains. This has long been known, and the question remained how to
+produce an adequate current economically. The result was the machine we
+know as the Dynamo.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first electric light was very brief and brilliant and was made by
+accident. Sir Humphrey Davy, in 1809, in pulling apart the two ends of
+wires attached to a battery of two thousand small cells, the most
+powerful generator that had been made to that time, produced a brief and
+brilliant spark, the result of momentarily <i>imperfect contact.</i>
+Every such spark, produced since then innumerable times by accident, is
+an example of electric lighting. There are now in use in the United
+States some two million arc lights and nearly double that number of
+incandescent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There are two principal systems of electric lighting; one is by actually
+burning away the ends of carbon-points in the open air. This is the
+"arc." The other is by heating to a white heat a filament of carbon, or
+some substance of high resistance, in a glass bulb from which the air
+has been exhausted. This is the "incandescent."
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/182.png"><img src="images/182th.png" alt="THE INCANDESCENT LIGHT"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the arc light the current passes across an <i>imperfect contact</i>,
+and this imperfection consists in a gap of about one-sixteenth of an
+inch between the extremities of two rods of carbon carrying a current.
+This small gap is a place of bad conduction and of the piling up of
+atoms, producing heat, burning, light. In the body of the lamp there are
+appliances for the automatic holding apart of the two points of the
+carbon, and the causing of them to continually creep together, yet never
+touch. Many devices have been contrived to this end. With all theories
+and reasons well known, and all effects accurately calculated, upon this
+small arrangement depends the practical utility of the arc light. The
+best arrangement is the invention of Edison, and is controlled most
+ingeniously by the current itself, acting through the increased
+difficulty of its passage when the two carbon-points are too far apart,
+and the increased ease with which it flows when they are too near
+together. The current, in leaping the small gap between the
+carbon-points, takes a <i>curved</i> path, hence the name "arc" light.
+In passing from the positive to the negative carbon it carries small
+particles of incandescent carbon with it, and consequently the end of
+the positive carbon is hollowed out, while the end of the negative is
+built up to a point.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The incandescent light is in principle the same as the arc, produced by
+the same means and based upon the same principle of impediment to the
+free passage of the current. It was first produced by heating with the
+current to incandescence a fine platinum wire. As stated above,
+electricity that quietly traverses a large wire will suddenly develop
+great heat upon reaching a point where it is called upon to traverse, a
+smaller one. Platinum was attempted for this place of greater resistance
+because of its qualities. It does not rust, has a low specific heat, and
+is therefore raised to a higher temperature with less heat imparted. But
+it was a scarce and expensive material, and so long as it was heated to
+incandescence in the open air, that is, so long as its heat was fed as
+other heat is, by oxygen, it was slowly consumed. Platinum is no longer
+in the field of electric lighting, and the substitute which takes its
+place in the present incandescent lamp, and which is known as a
+"filament," is not heated in contact with the air. The experiments and
+endeavors that brought this result constitute the story of the
+incandescent lamp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The result is due to the patient intelligence of the American scientist
+and inventor, Thomas A. Edison. After all the absolute essentials of a
+practical incandescent lamp had been thought out; after the qualities
+and characteristics of the current were all known under the
+circumstances necessary to its use in lighting, the practical
+accomplishment still remained. Edison is said to have once worked for
+several weeks in the making of a single loop-shaped carbon filament that
+would bear the most delicate handling. This was then carefully carried
+to a glass-worker to be inclosed in a bulb, and at the first movement he
+broke it, and the work must be done over and done better. It finally
+was. The little pear-shaped bulb with its delicate loop of filament,
+which cost months of toil and experiment at first, is now a common
+article, manufactured at an absurdly small cost, packed in barrelfuls
+and shipped everywhere, and consumed by the million. A means has been
+found for producing the vacuum of its interior rapidly, cheaply and
+thoroughly, and the beautiful incandescent glow hangs in lines and
+clusters over the civilized world. The phenomenon of incandescence
+without oxygen seems peculiar to these lights alone. [<a href="#f32">32</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f32">32.</a> The
+"electric field," previously explained, seemed to exist by giving a
+magnetic quality to the surrounding air. It would be as true if one
+should speak of a magnetized vacuum, since the same field would exist in
+that as in surrounding air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So simple are great facts when finally accomplished that there remains
+little to add on the subject of the mechanism of the electric light. The
+two varieties, arc and incandescent, are used together as most
+convenient, the large and very brilliant arc being especially adapted to
+out-of-doors situations, and the gentler, steadier and more permanent
+glow of the incandescent to interiors. The latter is also capable of a
+modification not applicable to the arc. It can, in theaters and other
+buildings, be "turned down" to a gentle, blood-red glow. The means by
+which this is accomplished is ingenious and surprising, since it means
+that the supply of electricity over a wire--seemingly the most subtle
+and elusive essence on earth--may be controlled like a stream from a
+cock, or the gas out of a burner. But this reduction of the current that
+makes the red glow in the clusters in a theater is by no means the only
+instance. The trolley-car, and even the common motor, may be made to
+start very slowly, and the unseen current whose touch kills is fed to
+its consumer at will.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/185.png"><img src="images/185th.png" alt=""></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE DYNAMO.--To the man who has been all his life thinking of the steam
+engine as the highest and almost only embodiment of controlled
+mechanical power, another machine, both supplementary to the steam
+engine and far excelling it, whose familiar <i>burring</i> sound is now
+heard in almost every village in the United States and has become the
+characteristic sound of modern civilization, must constitute a source of
+continual question and surprise. To be accustomed to the dynamo, to look
+upon it as a matter of course and a conceded fact, one must have come to
+years of maturity and found it here.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Its practical existence dates back at furthest to 1870. Yet it is based
+upon principles long since known, and can scarcely be said to be the
+invention of any one mind or man. Its lineal ancestor was the
+<i>magneto-electric machine</i>, in the early construction of which
+figure the names of Siemens, Wilde, Ladd, and earlier and later
+electricians. Kidder's medical battery used forty years ago or more, and
+still used and purchasable in its first form, was a dynamo. A footnote
+in a current encyclopedia states that: "An account of the
+Magneto-electric machine of M. Gramme, in the London <i>Standard</i> of
+April 9th, 1873, confirmed by other information, leads to the belief
+that a decided improvement has been made in these machines." The word
+"dynamo" was then unknown. Later, Edison, Weston, Thompson, Hopkinson,
+Ferranti and others appear as improvers in the mechanism necessary for
+best developing a well-known principle, and many of these improvements
+may be classed among original inventions. As soon as the
+magneto-electric machine attained a size in the hands of experimenters
+that took it out of the field of scientific toys it began to be what we
+now know as a dynamo. A paragraph in the encyclopedia referred to says,
+in speaking of Ladd, of London, "These developments of electric action
+are not obtained without corresponding expenditure of force. The armatures
+are powerfully attracted by the magnets, and must be forcibly pulled away.
+Indeed, one of Wilde's machines, when producing a very intense electric
+light, required about five horse power to drive it."
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/187.png"><img src="images/187th.png" alt="MAGNETO-ELECTRIC MACHINE. THE PREDECESSOR OF THE DYNAMO"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus was the secret in regard to electric power unconsciously divulged
+some twenty years ago.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In all nature there is no recipe for getting something for nothing. The
+modern dynamo, apparently creating something out of nothing, like all
+other machines <i>gives back only what is given to it</i>, minus a fair
+percentage for waste, loss, friction, and common wear. Its advantages
+amount to a miracle of convenience only. So far as power is concerned,
+it merely transfers it for long distances over a single wire. So far as
+light is considered, it practically creates it where wanted, in new and
+convenient forms, with a new intensity and beauty, but with the same
+expenditure of transmitted energy in the form of burned coal as would be
+used in manufacturing the gas that was new, wonderful, and a luxury at
+the beginning of the century.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dynamo is the most prominent instance of actual mechanical utility
+in the field of electrical induction. It seems almost incredible that
+the apparently small facts discovered by Faraday, the bookbinder, the
+employ� of Sir Humphrey Davy at weekly wages the struggling experimenter
+in the subtleties of an infant giant, should have produced such results
+within sixty years. [<a href="#f33">33</a>]
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f33">33.</a> Faraday was not entirely alone in his
+life of physical research. He was associated with Davy, and quarreled
+with him about the liquefaction of chlorine and other gases, and was the
+companion of Wallaston, Herschel, Brand, and others. In connection with
+Stodart, he experimented with steel, with results still considered
+valuable. The scientific world still speaks of his quarrel with Davy
+with regret, since the personalities of great men should be free from
+ordinary weaknesses. But Lady Davy was not a scientist, and while the
+brilliant young mechanic was in her husband's employment for scientific
+purposes she insisted upon treating him as a servant, whereat the
+independence of thinking which made him capable of wandering in fields
+unknown to conventionality and routine blazed into natural resentment.
+The quarrel of 1823 must have been greatly augmented, in the lady's
+eyes, in 1824, for in that year Faraday was made a member of the Royal
+Society.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+In his lectures and public experiments he was greatly assisted by a man
+now almost forgotten, an "intelligent artilleryman" named Andersen. This
+unknown soldier with a taste for natural science doubtless had his
+reward in the exquisite pleasure always derived from the personal
+verification of facts hitherto unknown. There is often a pecuniary
+reward for the servant of science. Just as often there is not, and the
+work done has been the same.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+It was on Christmas morning, 1821, that Faraday first succeeded in
+making a magnetic needle rotate around a wire carrying an electric
+current. He was the discoverer of benzole, the basis of our modern
+brilliant aniline dyes. In 1831 he made the discovery he had been
+leading to for many years--that of magneto-electric induction. All we
+have of electricity that is now a part of our daily life is the result
+of this discovery.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+Faraday was born in 1791, and died August, 1867, in a house presented to
+him by Victoria, who had not the same opinion of his relations to the
+aristocracy that Lady Davy seems to have had. His insight into science
+was something explainable only on the supposition that he was gifted
+with a kind of instinct. He was a scientific prophet. A man who could,
+in 1838, foresee the ocean cable, and describe those minute difficulties
+in its working that all in time came true, must be classed as one of the
+great, clear, intuitive intellects of his race. He was in youth
+apprenticed to a bookbinder, "and many of the books he bound he read." A
+line in his indentures says: "In consideration of his faithful service,
+no premium is to be given." When these words were written there was no
+dream that the "faithful service" should be for all posterity.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/190.png"><img src="images/190th.png" alt="Faraday's Spark. Striking the leg of a horseshoe magnet with an iron bar wound with insulated wire causes a contact between loose end of wire and small disc, and a spark."></a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/190a.png"><img src="images/190ath.png" alt="Faraday's First Magneto-Electric Experiment. A horseshoe magnet passed near a bent soft iron wound with insulated wire caused an induced current in the wire."></a>
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+TWO OF FARADAY'S EARLY EXPERIMENTS IN INDUCTION.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He who made the first actual machine to evolve a current in compliance
+with Faraday's formulated laws was an Italian named Pix�, in 1832. His
+machine consisted of a horseshoe magnet set on a shaft, and made to
+revolve in front of two cores of, soft iron wound with wire, and having
+their ends opposite the legs of the magnet. Shortly after Pix�, the
+inventors of the times ceased to turn the magnet on a shaft, and turned
+the iron cores instead, because they were lighter. In like manner, the
+huge field magnets of a modern dynamo are not whirled round a stationary
+armature, but the armature is whirled within the legs of the magnet with
+very great rapidity. The next step was to increase the number of magnets
+and the number of wire-wound iron cores--bobbins. The magnets were made
+compound, laminated; a large number of thin horseshoe magnets were laid
+together, with opposite poles touching. These were all comparatively
+small machines--what we now, with some reason, regard as having been
+toys whose present results were rather long in coming.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/192.png"><img src="images/192th.png" alt="THE SIEMENS ARMATURE AND WINDING. THE FIRST STEP TOWARD THE MODERN DYNAMO"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came Siemens, of Berlin, in 1857. He was probably the first to wind
+the iron core, what we now call the <i>armature</i>, with wire from end
+to end, <i>lengthwise</i>, instead of round and round as a spool. This
+resulted, of course, in the shaft of the armature being also placed
+crosswise to the legs of the magnet, as it is in the modern dynamo. One
+of the ends of the wire used in this winding was fastened to the axle of
+the armature, and the other to a ring insulated from the shaft, but
+turning with it. Two springs, one bearing on the shaft and the other on
+the ring, carried away the current through wires attached to them.
+Siemens also originated the mechanical idea of hollowing out the legs of
+the magnet on the inside for the armature to turn in close to the
+magnet, almost fitting. It was the first time any of these things had
+been done, and their author probably had no idea that they would be
+prominent features of the dynamo of a little later time, in all
+essentials closely imitated.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/193.png"><img src="images/193th.png" alt="DIAGRAM OF SHAFT, SPLIT RING AND 'BRUSHES.'"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It will be guessed from what has been previously said on the subject of
+induction that the currents from such an electro-magnetic machine would
+be alternating currents, the impulses succeeding each other in alternate
+directions. To remedy this and cause the currents to flow always in the
+same direction, the "<i>commutator</i>" was devised. The ring mentioned
+above was split, and the two springs both bore upon it, one on each
+side. The ends of the wires were both fastened to this ring. The springs
+came to be known as "brushes." The effect was that one of them was in
+the insulated space between the split halves of the ring while the other
+was bearing on the metal to which the wire was attached. This action was
+alternate, and so arranged that the current carried away was always
+direct. When an armature has a winding of more than one wire, as the
+practical dynamo always has, the insulated ring is divided into as many
+pieces as there are wires, and the two brushes act as above for the
+entire series.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pacinotti, of Florence, constructed a magneto-electric machine in which
+the current flows always in one direction without a commutator. It has
+what is known as a <i>ring armature</i>, and is the mother of all
+dynamos built upon that principle. It is exceedingly ingenious in
+construction, and for certain purposes in the arts is extensively used.
+A description of it is too technical to interest others than those
+personally interested in the class of dynamo it represents.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wilde, of Manchester, England, improved the Siemens machine in 1866 by
+doing that which is the feature that makes possible the huge "field
+magnet" of the modern dynamo, which is not a magnet at all, strictly
+speaking. He caused the current, after it had been rectified by the
+commutator, to return again into coils of wire round the legs of his
+field magnets, as shown in the diagram. This induced in them a new
+supply of magnetism, and this of course intensified the current from the
+armature. It is true he had a separate smaller magneto-electric machine,
+with which he evolved a current for the coil around the legs of the
+field magnet of a greatly larger machine upon which he depended for his
+actual current, and that he did not know, although he was practically
+doing the same thing, that if he should divert this current made by the
+larger machine itself back through the coils of its field magnet, he
+would not need the extra small machine at all, and would have a much
+more powerful current.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/195.png"><img src="images/195th.png" alt="SIMPLEST FORM OF DYNAMO"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And here arises a difference and a change of name. All generating
+machines to this date had been called "<i>Magneto-electric</i>" because
+they used <i>permanent</i> steel magnets with which to generate a
+current by the whirling of the bobbin which we now call an armature. The
+time came, led to by the improvement of Wilde, in which those steel
+permanent magnets were no longer used. Then the machine became the
+"<i>dynamo-electric</i>" machine, and leaving off one word, according to
+our custom, "<i>dynamo</i>."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Siemens and Wheatstone almost simultaneously invented so much of the
+dynamo as was yet incomplete. It has "cores"--the parts that answer to
+the legs of a horseshoe magnet--of soft iron, sometimes now even of cast
+iron. These, at starting, possess very little magnetism--practically
+none at all--yet sufficient to generate a very weak current in the
+coils, windings, of the armature when it begins to turn. This weak
+current, passing through the windings of the field magnet, makes these
+still stronger magnets, and the effect is to evolve a still stronger
+current in the armature. Soon the full effect is reached. The big iron
+field magnet, often weighing some thousands of pounds, is then the same
+as a permanent steel horseshoe magnet, which would hardly be possible at
+all. One who has watched the installation of a dynamo, knowing that
+there is nowhere near any ordinary source of electricity, and has seen
+its armature begin to whirl and hum, and then in a few moments the
+violet sparklings of the brushes and the evident presence of a powerful
+current of electricity, is almost justified in the common opinion that
+the genius of man has devised a machine to <i>create</i> something out
+of nothing. It is true that a <i>starting</i> quantity of electricity is
+required. It exists in almost every piece of iron. Sometimes, to hasten
+first action, some cells of a galvanic battery are used to pass a
+current through the coils of the field magnet. After the first use there
+is always enough magnetism remaining in them during rest or stoppage to
+make a dynamo efficient after a few moments operation.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/197.png"><img src="images/197th.png" alt="PACINOTTI'S RING-ARMATURE DYNAMO"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is the dynamo in principle of action. The varieties in construction
+now in use number scores, perhaps hundreds. Some of them are monsters in
+size, and evolve a current that is terrific. They are all essentially
+the same, depending for action upon the laws illustrated in the simplest
+experiment in induced electricity. One of the best known of the modern
+machines is Edison's, represented in the picture at the head of this
+article. In it the field magnet--answering to the horseshoe magnet of
+the magneto-electric machine--is plainly distinguishable to the
+unskilled observer. It is not even solid, but is made of several pieces
+bolted together. Its legs are hollowed at the ends to admit closely the
+armature which turns there. There are valuable peculiarities in its
+construction, which, while complying in all respects with the dynamo
+principle, utilize those principles to the best mechanical advantage. So
+do others, in other respects that did not occur even to Edison, or were
+not adopted by him. Probably the modern dynamo is the most efficient,
+the most accurately measurable, the least wasteful of its power, and the
+most manageable, of any power-machine so far constructed by man for
+daily use.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The motor.--This is the twin of the dynamo. In all essentials the two
+are of the same construction. A difference in the arrangement of the
+terminals of the wire coils or the wrappings of armature and field
+magnet, makes of the one a dynamo and of the other a motor.
+Nevertheless, they are separate studies in electrical science. Practice
+has brought about modified constructions, as in the case of the dynamo.
+The differences between the two machines, and their similarities as
+well, may be explained by a general brief statement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>It is the work of the dynamo to convert mechanical energy into the
+form of electrical energy. The motor, in turn, changes this electrical
+energy back again into mechanical energy.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Where the electric light is produced by the dynamo current no motor
+intervenes. The current is converted into heat and light by merely
+having an impediment, a restriction, a narrowness, interposed to its
+free passage on a conducting wire, as heretofore explained, very much as
+water in a pipe foams and struggles at a narrow place or an obstruction.
+Where mechanical movements are to be produced by the dynamo current the
+motor is always the intermediate machine. In the dynamo the armature is
+rotated by steam power, producing an electrical energy in the form of a
+powerful current transmitted by a wire. In the motor the armature, in
+turn, <i>is rotated by</i> this current. It is but another instance of
+that ability to work backwards--to reverse a process--that seems to
+pervade all machines, and almost all processes. I have mentioned steam
+power, and, consequently, the necessary burning of coal and expenditure
+of money in producing the dynamo current. The dynamo and motor are not
+necessarily economical inventions, but the opposite when the force
+produced is to be transmitted again, with some loss, into the same
+mechanical energy that has already been produced by the burning of coal
+and the making of steam. Across miles of space, and into places where
+steam would not be possible, the power is invisibly carried. Suggestions
+of this convenience--stated cases--it is not necessary to cite. The
+fact is a prominent one, to be noted everywhere.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And it may be made a mechanical economy. The most prominent instance of
+this is the new utilization of Niagara as a turbine water-power with
+which to whirl the armatures of gigantic dynamos, using the power thus
+obtained upon motors, and in the production of light and the
+transmission of power to neighboring cities.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The discovery of the possibility of transmitting power by a wire, and
+converting it again into mechanical energy, is a strange story of the
+human blindness that almost always attends an acuteness, a thinking
+power, a prescience, that is the characteristic of humanity alone, but
+which so often stops short of results. This discovery has been
+attributed to accident alone; the accident of an employ� mistaking the
+uses of wires and fastening their ends in the wrong places. But a French
+electrician thus describes the occurrence as within his own experience.
+His name is Hypolyte Fontaine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But let us first advert to the forgetfulness of the man who really
+invented the machine that was capable of the opposite action of both
+dynamo and motor. This was the Italian, Pacinotti. [<a href="#f34">34</a>] He mentioned that his machine could be used either
+to generate a current of electricity on the application of motive power
+to its armature, or to produce motive power on connecting it with a
+source of electricity. Yet it did not occur to him to definitely
+experiment with two of his machines for the purpose of accomplishing
+that which in less than twenty years has revolutionized our ideas and
+practice in transmitted force. He did not suggest that two of his
+machines could be run together, one as a generator and the other as a
+motor. He did not think of its advantages with the facilities for it, of
+his own creation, in his hands.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f34">34.</a> Moses G.
+Farmer, an American, and celebrated in his day for intelligent
+electrical researches, is claimed to have made the first reversible
+motor ever contrived. A small motor made by Farmer in 1847, and
+embodying the electro-dynamic principle was exhibited at the great
+exposition at Chicago in 1893. If the genealogy of this machine remains
+undisputed it fixes the fact that the discovery belongs to this country,
+and to an American.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+M. Fontaine states that at the Vienna Exposition of 1873 there was a
+Gramme machine intended to be operated by a primary battery, to show
+that the Gramme was capable of being worked by a current, and, as there
+was also a second machine of the same kind there, of also generating
+one. These two machines were to demonstrate this range of capacity as
+<i>separately worked</i>, one by power, the other with a battery. There
+was, then, no intention of coupling them together as late as 1873, with
+the means at hand and the suggestion almost unavoidable. The dynamo and
+motor had not occurred to any one. But M. Fontaine states that he failed
+to get the primary (battery) current in time for the opening, and was
+troubled by the dilemma. Then the idea occurred to him, as he could do
+no better, to work one of the machines with a current "deprived," partly
+stolen, from the other, as a temporary measure. A friend lent him the
+necessary piece of wire, and he connected the two machines. The machine
+used as a motor was connected with a pumping apparatus, and when the
+machine intended as a generator started, and this make-shift,
+temporarily-stolen current was carried to the acting motor, the action
+of the last was so much more vigorous than was intended that the water
+was thrown over the sides of the tank. Fontaine was forced to remedy
+this excessive action by procuring an additional wire of such length
+that its resistance permitted the motor to work more mildly and throw
+less water. This accidentally established the fact of distance,
+convenience, a revolution in the power of the industrial world. Fontaine
+states that Gramme had previously told him that he had done the same
+thing with his machines. The idea was never patented. Neither Pacinotti,
+who invented the machine originally, nor Gramme, one of the great names
+of modern electricity, nor this skilled practical electrician, Fontaine,
+who had charge of the exhibit of the Gramme system at Vienna, considered
+the fact of the transmission of concentrated power over a thin wire to a
+great distance as one of value to its inventor or to the industries of
+mankind. With the motor and the dynamo already made, it was an accident
+that brought them together after all.
+</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<p>
+It may be amusing, if not useful, to spend a moment in reviewing of the
+efforts of men to utilize the power of the electrical current in
+mechanics before the day of the dynamo and a motor, and while yet the
+electric light was an infant in the nursery of the laboratory. They knew
+then, about 1835 to 1870, of the laws of induction as applied to the
+electro-magnet, or in small machines the generating power, so called, of
+the magneto-electric arrangement embodied, as a familiar example, in
+Kidder's medical battery. There is a long list of those inventors,
+American and European. The first patent issued for an American
+electro-motor was in 1837, to a man named Thomas Davenport, of Brandon,
+Vt. He was a man far ahead of his times. He built the first electric
+railroad ever seen, at Springfield, Mass., in 1835, and considering the
+means, whose inadequacy is now better understood by any reader of these
+lines than it then was by the deepest student of electricity, this first
+railroad was a success. Davenport came as near to solving the problem of
+an electric motor as was possible without the invention of Pacinotti.
+Following this there were many patents issued for electro-magnetic
+motors to persons residing in all parts of the country, north and south.
+One was made by C. G. Page, of the Smithsonian Institute, in which the
+motive power consisted in a round rod, acting as a plunger, being pulled
+into the space where the core would be in an ordinary electro-magnet,
+and thereby working a crank. [<a href="#f35">35</a>] A large
+motor of this kind is alleged, in 1850, to have developed ten horse
+power. It was actually applied to outdoor experiment as a car-motor on
+an actual railroad track, and was efficient for several miles. But it
+carried with it its battery-cells, and they were disarranged and stirred
+by the jolting, and being made of crockeryware were broken. The
+chemicals cost much more than fuel for steam, and there could be no
+economical motive for further experiment. It was a huge toy, as the
+entire sum of electrical science was until it was made useful first in
+the one instance of the telegraph, and long after that date the use of
+the electro-magnet, with a cam to cut off and turn on again the current
+at proper intervals, which was the one principle of all attempts, was a
+repeated and invariable failure. That which was wanted and lacking was
+not known, and was finally discovered and successively developed as has
+been described.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f35">35.</a> The <i>National
+Intelligencer</i>, a prominent Washington newspaper, said with reference
+to Page's motor "He has shown that before long electro-magnetic action
+will have dethroned steam and will be the adopted motor," etc. This was
+an enthusiasm not based upon any fact then known about a machine not
+even in the line of the present facts of electro-dynamics.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Electric railroads.--There was an instance of almost simultaneous
+invention in the case of the first practical electric railroads. S. D.
+Field, Dr. Siemens, and Thomas A. Edison all applied for patents in
+1880. Of these, Field was first in filing, and was awarded patents. The
+combined dynamo and motor were, of course, the parents of the practical
+idea. Field's patents covered a motor in or under the car, operated by a
+current from a stationary source of electricity--of course a dynamo.
+These first electric roads had the current carried on the rail. They
+were partially successful, but there was something wrong in the plan,
+and that something was induction by the earth. Later came, as a remedy
+for this, the "Trolley" system; the trolley being a small, grooved wheel
+running upon a current-carrying wire overhead. The question of how best
+to convey a current to the car-motor is a serious one, doubtless at this
+moment occupying the attention of highly-trained intelligence
+everywhere. The motor current is one of high power, and as such
+intractable; and it is in the character of this current, rather than in
+methods of insulation, that the remedy for the much-objected-to overhead
+wire is to be found. It will be remembered that all the phenomena of
+induction are <i>unhindered by insulation</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Aside from the current-carrying problem, the electric road is
+explainable in all its features upon the theory and practice of the
+dynamo and motor. It is merely an application of the two machines. The
+last is, in usual practice, under the car, and geared to the truck-axle.
+A more modern mechanical improvement is to make the axle the shaft of
+the motor armature. When the motor has used the current it passes by
+most systems into the rail and the ground. By others there is a
+"metallic circuit"--two wires. Many men whose interest and occupation
+leads them to a study of such matters know that the use of electricity,
+instead of steam locomotion, is merely a question of time on all
+railroads. I have said elsewhere that the actual age of electricity had
+not yet fully come. It seems to us now that we have attained the end;
+that there is little more to know or to do. But so have all the
+generations thought in their day. In the field of electricity there are
+yet to come practical results of which one may have some foreshadowings
+in the experiments of men like Tesla, which will make our present times
+and knowledge seem tame and slow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Electrolysis.--In all history, fire has been the universal practical
+solvent. It has been supplanted by the electrical current in some of the
+most beautiful and useful phenomena of our time. Electrolysis is the
+name of the process by which fluid chemicals are decomposed by the
+current.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A familiar early experiment in electrolysis is the decomposition of
+water--a chemical composed of oxygen and hydrogen, though always thought
+of and used as a simple, pure fluid. If the poles of a galvanic battery
+are immersed in water slightly mixed with sulphuric acid to favor
+electrical action, these poles will become covered with bubbles of gas
+which presently rise to the surface and pass off. These bubbles are
+composed of the two constituents of water, the oxygen rising from the
+positive and the hydrogen from the negative pole. Particles of the
+substance decomposed are transferred, some to one pole and some to the
+other; and, therefore, electrolysis is always practiced in a fluid in
+order that this transference may more readily occur.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The quantity of <i>electrolyte</i>--the substance decomposed--that is
+transferred in a given time is in proportion to the strength of the
+current. When this electrolyte is composed of many substances a current
+will act a little on all of them, and the quantity in which the
+elementary bodies appear at the poles of the current depends upon the
+quantities of the compounds in the liquid, and on the relative ease with
+which they yield to the electrical action.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The electrolytic processes are not the mere experiments a brief
+description of them would indicate, but are among the important
+processes for the mechanical products of modern times. The extensive
+nickel-plating that became a permanent fad in this country on the
+discovery of a special process some years ago, is all done by
+electrolysis. The silver plating of modern tableware and table cutlery,
+as beautiful and much less expensive than silver, and the fine finish of
+the beautiful bronze hardware now used in house-furnishing, are the
+results of the same process. Some use for it enters into almost every
+piece of fine machinery, and into the beautifying or preserving of
+innumerable small articles that are made and used in unlimited quantity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The process and its principle is general, but there are many details
+observed in the actual work of electroplating which interest only those
+engaged. One of the most usual of these is that of making an
+electrotype. This may mean the making of an exact impression of a medal,
+coin, or other figure, or a depositing of a coating of the same on any
+metallic surface. Formerly the faces of the types used in printing were
+very commonly faced with copper to give them finish and a wearing
+quality. Even fresh, natural fruits that have been evenly coated with
+plumbago may be covered with a thin shell of metal. A silver head may be
+placed on the wood of a walking stick, precisely conforming on the
+outside to the form of the wood within.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The deposit of metal in the electrotyping process always takes place at
+the negative pole--the pole by which the current passes out of the fluid
+into its conductor. This is the "<i>cathode</i>." The other is the
+"<i>anode</i>." The "bath," as the fluid in which the process is
+accomplished is called, for silver, gold or platinum contains one
+hundred parts of water, ten of potassium cyanide, and one of the cyanide
+of whichever of those metals is to be deposited. The articles to be
+plated are suspended in this bath and the battery-power, varying in
+intensity according to circumstances, is applied. After removal they are
+buffed and finished. A varying detail is practiced for different metals,
+and the current now commonly used is from a dynamo. [<a href="#f36">36</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f36">36.</a> Among
+modern modifications of the dynamic current, is its use, modified by
+proper appliances, for the telegraph and the telephone circuits of
+cities and the larger towns. Every electric current may now be safely
+attributed to that source, and from the same circuit and generator all
+modifications may be produced at once.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The origin of electrolysis is said to be with Daniell, who noticed the
+deposit of copper while experimenting with the battery that bears his
+name. Jacobi, at St. Petersburg, first published a description of the
+process in 1839. The Elkingtons were the first to actually put the
+process into commercial practice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It would be interesting now, were it apropos, to describe the seemingly
+very ancient processes by which our ancestors gilded, plated, were
+deceived and deceived others, previous to about 1845. For those things
+were done, and the genuineness of life has by no means been destroyed by
+the modern ease with which a precious metal may be deposited upon one
+utterly base. A contemplation of the moral side of the subject might
+lead at once to the conclusion that we could now spare one of the least
+in actual importance of the processes of the all-pervading and wonderful
+essence that alike makes the lightning-stroke and gilds the plebeian pin
+that fastens a baby's napkin. But from any other view we could not now
+dispense with anything electricity does.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+General facts.--The names of many of the original investigators of
+electrical phenomena are perpetuated in the familiar names of electrical
+measurements. For, notwithstanding its seeming subtlety, there is no
+force in use, or that has ever been used by men, capable of being so
+definitely calculated, measured, determined beforehand, as electricity
+is. As time passes new measurements are adopted and named, some of them
+being proposed as lately as 1893. An instance of the value of some of
+these old determinations of a time when all we now know of electrical
+science was unknown, may be given in what is known as Ohm's Law. Ohm was
+a native of Erlangen, in Bavaria, and was Professor of Physics at
+Munich, where he died in 1874. He formulated this Law in 1827, and it
+was translated into English in 1847. He was recognized at the time, and
+was given the Copley medal of the Royal Society of London. The Law--for
+by that distinctive name is it still called, though the name "Ohm," also
+expresses a unit of measurement--is that <i>the quantity of current that
+will pass through a conductor is proportional to the pressure and
+inversely proportional to the distance</i>. That is:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Current = Pressure / Resistance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Transposing the terms of the equation we may get an expression for
+either of those elements, current, pressure, or resistance, in the terms
+of the other two. This relation holds true and is accurate in every
+possible case and condition of practical work. This remarkable precision
+and definiteness of action has made possible the creation of an
+extensive school of electrical testing, by which we are not only enabled
+to make accurate measurement of electrical apparatus and appliances, but
+also to make determinations in <i>other</i> fields by the agency of
+electricity. When an ocean cable is injured or broken the precise
+location of the trouble is made <i>by measuring the electrical
+resistance of the parts on each side of the injury</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The magnitudes of measurements of electricity are expressed in the
+following convenient electrical units:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The VOLT (named from Volta) equals a unit of <i>pressure</i> that is
+equal to one cell of a gravity battery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The OHM, as a unit of measurement, equals a unit of <i>resistance</i>
+that is equivalent to the resistance of a hundred feet of copper wire
+the size of a pin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The AMP�RE (named from Amp�re, 1775-1836, author of a "Collection of
+Observations on Electro-Dynamics" and other works, and a profound
+practical investigator) equals a unit of <i>current</i> equivalent to
+the current which one Volt of pressure will produce through one Ohm of
+wire (or resistance).
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Coulomb (1736--inventor of the means of measuring electricity called
+the "Torsion balance," and general early investigator) equals a unit of
+<i>quantity</i> of one Ampere flowing for one second.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Farad (from Faraday, the discoverer of the laws of Induction, see
+<i>ante</i>), equals that unit of <i>capacity</i> which is the capacity
+for holding one Coulomb. Death current.--What is now spoken of as the
+"Death Current" is one that will instantly overcome the "resistance" of
+the human, or animal, body. It is a current of from one to two thousand
+Volts--about the same as that used in maintaining the large arc lights.
+This question of the killing capacity of the current became officially
+prominent some years ago, upon the passage by the legislature of the
+State of New York of a statute requiring the death penalty to be
+inflicted by means of electricity. The object was to deter evildoers by
+surrounding the penalty with scientific horror, [<a href="#f37">37</a>] and the idea had its
+origin in the accidents which formerly occurred much more frequently
+than now. The "death current" is now almost everywhere, though the care
+of the men who continually work about "live" wires has grown to be much
+like that of men who continually handle firearms or explosives, and
+accidents seldom happen. At first it was apparently difficult for the
+general public to appreciate the fact that the silent and
+harmless-looking wires must be avoided. There was suddenly a new and
+terrific power in common use, and it was as slender, silent and
+unobtrusive as it was fatal.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f37">37.</a> Hence also
+the new lingual atrocity, the word "electrocute," derived from "execute"
+by decapitation and the addition of "electro"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Insulation of the hands by the use of rubber gloves, and extreme care,
+are the means by which those who are called "linemen"--a new
+industry--protect themselves in their occupation. But there is a new
+commandment added to the list of those to be memorized by the
+body-politic. "Do not tread upon, drive over, or touch <i>any</i> wire."
+It may be, and probably is, harmless. But you cannot positively
+know. [<a href="#f38">38</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f38">38.</a> It is a common trait of general human nature to refuse
+to learn save by the hardest of experiences, and so far as the crediting
+of statements is concerned, to at first believe everything that is not
+true, and reject most that is. The supernatural, the phenomena of
+alleged witchcraft and diabolism, and of "luck," "hoodoo," "fate," etc.,
+find ready disciples among those who reject disdainfully the results of
+the working of natural law. When the railroads were first built across
+the plains the Indians repeatedly attempted to stop moving trains by
+holding the ends of a rope stretched across the track in front of the
+engine, and with results which greatly surprised them When the lines
+were first constructed in northern Mexico the Mexican peasant could not
+be induced to refrain from trying personal experiments with the new
+power, and scores of him were killed before he learned that standing on
+the track was dangerous. In the United States the era of accidents
+through indifference to common-looking wires has almost passed, but for
+some years the fatality was large because people are always governed by
+appearances connected with <i>previous</i> notions, until <i>new</i>
+experiences teach them better.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+INSTRUMENTS OF MEASUREMENT.--Some of the most costly and beautiful of
+modern scientific instruments are those used in the measurements and
+determinations of electrical science. There are many forms and varieties
+for every specific purpose. Electrical measurement has become a
+department of physical science by itself, and a technical, extensive and
+varied one. Already the electrical specialist, no more an original
+experimenter or investigator than the average physician is, has become
+professional. He makes plans, submits facts, estimates cost, and states
+results with almost certainty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+ELECTRICITY AS AN INDUSTRY.--Immense factories are now devoted to the
+manufacture of electrical goods exclusively. Large establishments in
+cities are filled with them. The installation of the electric plant in a
+dwelling house is done in the same way, and as regularly, as the
+plumbing is. Soon there must be still another enlargement, since the
+heating of houses through a wire, and the kitchen being equipped with
+cooking utensils whose heat is for each vessel evolved in its own
+bottom, is inevitable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The following are some of the facts, in figures, of the business side of
+electricity in the United States at the present writing. In 1866, about
+twenty years after the establishment of the telegraph, but with a
+population of only a little more than half the present, there were
+75,686 miles of telegraph wire in use, and 2,520 offices. In 1893 there
+were 740,000 miles of wire, and more than 20,000 offices. The receipts
+for the year first named are unknown, but for 1893 they were about
+$24,000,000. The expenses of the system for the same year were
+$16,500,000.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The telephone, an industry now about sixteen years old, had in 1893, for
+the Bell alone, over 200,000 miles of wire on poles, and over 90,000
+miles of wire under ground. The instruments were in 15,000 buildings.
+There were 10,000 employ�s, and 233,000 subscribers. All companies
+combined had 441,000 miles of wire. Ninety-two millions of dollars were
+invested in telephone <i>fixtures</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1893, the average cost of a telegram was thirty-one and one
+six-tenths cents, and the average alleged cost of sending the same to
+the companies was twenty-two and three-tenths cents, leaving a profit of
+nine and three-tenths cents on every message. It must be remembered that
+with mail facilities and cheapness that are unrivalled, the telegraph
+message is always an extraordinary mode of communication; an emergency.
+These few figures may serve to give the reader a dim idea of the
+importance to which the most ordinary and general of the branches of
+electrical industry have grown in the United States.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+MEDICAL ELECTRICITY.--For more than fifty years the medical fraternity
+in regular practice persisted in disregarding all the claims made for
+the electric current as a therapeutic agent. In earlier times it was
+supposed to have a value that supplanted all other medical agencies.
+Franklin seems to have been one of the earliest experimenters in this
+line, and to have been successful in many instances where his brief
+spark from the only sources of the current then known were applicable to
+the case. The medical department of the science then fell into the hands
+of charlatans, and there is a natural disposition to deal in the
+wonderful, the miraculous or semi-miraculous, in the cure of disease.
+Divested of the wonder-idea through a wider study and greater knowledge
+of actual facts, electricity has again come forward as a curative agent
+in the last ten years. Instruction in its management in disease is
+included in the curriculum of almost every medical school, and most
+physicians now own an outfit, more or less extensive, for use in
+ordinary practice. To decry and utterly condemn is no longer the custom
+of the steady-going physician, the ethics of whose cloth had been for
+centuries to condemn all that interfered with the use of drugs, and
+everything whose action could not be understood by the examples of
+common experience, and without special study outside the lines of
+medical knowledge as prescribed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps the developments based upon the discoveries of Faraday have had
+much to do with the adoption of electricity as a curative agent. The
+current usually used is the Faradic; the induced alternate current from
+an induction coil. This is, indeed, the current most useful in the
+majority of the nervous derangements in the treatment of which the
+current is of acknowledged utility.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In surgery the advance is still greater. "Galvano-cautery" is the
+incandescent light precisely; the white-hot wire being used to cut off,
+or burn off, and cauterize at the same time, excrescences and growths
+that could not be easily reached by other means than a tube and a small
+loop of platinum wire. A little incandescent lamp with a bulb no bigger
+than a pea is used to light up and explore cavities, and this advance
+alone, purely mechanical and outside of medical science, is of immense
+importance in the saving of life and the avoidance of human suffering.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It may be added that there is nothing magical, or by the touch, or
+mysterious, in the treatment of disease by the electrical current. The
+results depend upon intelligent applications, based upon reason and
+experience, a varied treatment for varying cases. Nor is it a remedy to
+be applied by the patient himself more than any other is. On the
+contrary, he may do himself great injury. The pills, potions, powders
+and patent medicines made to be taken indiscriminately, and which he
+more or less understands, may be still harmful yet much safer. Even the
+application of one or the other of the two poles with reference to the
+course of a nerve, may result in injury instead of good.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+INCOMPLETE POSSIBILITIES.--There are at least two things greatly desired
+by mankind in the field of electrical science and not yet attained. One
+of these, that may now be dismissed with a word, is the resolving of the
+latent energy of, say a ton of coal, into electrical energy without the
+use of the steam engine; without the intervention of any machine. For
+electricity is not manufactured; not created by men in any case. It
+exists, and is merely gathered, in a measure and to a certain extent
+confined and controlled, and sent out as a <i>concentrated form of
+energy</i> on its various errands. Should a means for the concentration
+of this universally diffused energy be found whereby it could be made to
+gather, by the new arrangement of some natural law such as places it in
+enormous quantities in the thundercloud, a revolution that would
+permeate and visibly change all the affairs of men would take place,
+since the industrial world is not a thing apart, but affects all men,
+and all institutions, and all thought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other desideratum, more reasonable apparently, yet far from present
+accomplishment, is a means of storing and carrying a supply of
+electricity when it has been gathered by the means now used, or by any
+means.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE STORAGE BATTERY is an attempt in this last direction. The name is
+misleading, since even in this attempt electricity is in no sense
+"stored," but a chemical action producing a current takes place in the
+machine. The arrangement is in its infancy. Instances occur in which,
+under given circumstances, it is more or less efficient, and has been
+improved into greater efficiency. But many difficulties intervene, one
+of which is the great weight of the appliances used, and another,
+considerable cost. The term "storage battery" is now infrequently used,
+and the name "secondary" battery is usually substituted. The principle
+of its action is the decomposing of combined chemicals by the action of
+a current applied from a stationary generator or dynamo, and that these
+chemicals again unite as soon as they are allowed to do so by the
+completing of a circuit, <i>and in re-combining give off nearly as much
+electricity as was first used in separating them.</i> The action of the
+secondary, "storage," battery, once charged, is like that of a primary
+battery. The current is produced by chemical action. Two metals outside
+of the solution contained in a primary battery cell, but under differing
+physical conditions from each other, will yield a current. A piece of
+polished iron and a piece of rusty iron, connected by a wire, will yield
+a small current. Rusty lead, so to speak, so connected with bright lead,
+has a high electromotive force. Oxygen makes lead rusty, and hydrogen
+makes it bright. Oxygen and hydrogen are the two gases cast off when
+water is subjected to a current. (See <i>ante</i> under
+<i>Electrolysis</i>) So Augustin Plant�, the inventor of as much as we
+yet have of what is called a storage or secondary battery, suspended two
+plates of lead in water, and when a current of electricity was passed
+through it hydrogen was thrown off at one plate, making it bright, and
+oxygen at the other plate, peroxydizing its surface. When the current
+was removed the altered plates, connected by a wire, would send off a
+current which was in the opposite direction from the first, and this
+would continue until the plates were again in their original condition.
+This is the principle and mode of action of the storage battery. So far
+it has assumed many forms. Scores of modifications have been invented
+and patented. The leaden plates have taken a variety of forms, yet have
+remained leaden plates, one cleaned and the other fouled by the
+electrolytic action of a current, and giving off an almost equivalent
+current again by the return process. The arrangement endures for several
+repetitions of the process, but is finally expensive and always
+inconvenient. The secondary battery, in its infancy, as stated, presents
+now much the same obstacles to commercial use the galvanic, or primary,
+battery did before the induced current had become the servant of man.
+</p>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h3><a name="iv">CHAPTER IV.</a></h3>
+
+<p>
+ELECTRICAL INVENTION IN THE UNITED STATES.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A list of the electrical inventors of this country would be very long.
+Many of the names are, in the mass and number of inventions, almost
+lost. It happens that many of the practical applications described in
+this volume, indeed most of them, are the work of citizens of this
+country.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In previous chapters I have referred briefly to Franklin, Morse, Field,
+and others. These men have left names that, without question, may be
+regarded as permanent. Their chiefest distinguishing trait was
+originality of idea, and each one of them is a lesson to the American
+boy. In a sense the greatest of all these, and in the same sense, the
+greatest American, was Benjamin Franklin. A sketch of his career has
+been given, but to that may be added the following: He had arrived at
+conclusions that were vast in scope and startling in result by applying
+the reasoning faculty upon observations of phenomena that had been
+recurring since the world was made, and had been misunderstood from the
+beginning. He used the simplest means. His experiment was in a different
+way daily performed for him by nature. He was philosophically daring,
+indifferently a tinker with nature's terrific machinery; a knocker at
+the door of an august temple that men were never known to have entered;
+a mortal who smiled in the face of inscrutable and awful mystery, and
+who defied the lightning in a sense not merely moral. [<a href="#f39">39</a>]
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+<a name="f39">39.</a> Professor Richmann, of St. Petersburg, was instantly killed by lightning
+while repeating Franklin's experiment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His genius lay in a power of swift inductive reasoning. His common sense
+and his sense of humor never forsook him. He uttered keen apothegms that
+have lived like those of Solon. He was a philosopher like Diogenes,
+lacking the bitterness. He wrote the "Busy-Body," and annually made the
+plebeian and celebrated "Almanac," and the "Ephemera" that were not
+ephemeral, and is the author of the story of "The Whistle," that
+everybody knows, and everybody reads with shamefacedness because it is a
+brief chapter out of his own history.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was apparently an adept in the art of caring for himself, one of the
+most successful worldings of his time, yet he wrote, thought, toiled
+incessantly, for his fellow men. He had little education obtained as it
+is supposed an education must be obtained. He was commonplace. No one
+has ever told of his "silver tongue," or remembered a brilliant
+after-dinner speech that he has made. Yet he finally stood before
+mankind the companion of princes, the darling of splendid women, covered
+with the laurels of a brilliant scientific renown. But he was a printer,
+a tinkerer with stoves, the inventor of the lightning rod, the man who
+had spent one-half his life in teaching apprentices, such as he himself
+had been when his jealous and common-minded brother had whipped him,
+that "time is money," that "credit is money"--which is the most
+prominent fact in the commercial world of 1895--and that honor and
+self-respect are better than wealth, pleasure, or any other good.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet clear, keen, cold and inductive as was Franklin's mind, no vision
+reached him, in the moment of that triumph when he felt the lightning
+tingling in his fingers from a hempen string, of those wonders which
+were to come. He knew absolutely nothing of that necromancy through
+which others of his countrymen were to girdle the world with a common
+intelligence, and yet others were to use in sprinkling night with
+clusters as innumerable and mysterious as the higher stars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The story of the Morse telegraph has been repeatedly told, and I have
+briefly sketched it in connection with the subject of the telegraph.
+But, unlike the original, scientifically lonely and independent
+Franklin, Morse had the best assistance of his times in the persons of
+men more skilled than himself and almost as persistent. The chief of
+these was Alfred Vail, a name until lately almost unknown to scientific
+fame, who eliminated the clumsy crudities of Morse's conception, remade
+his instruments, and was the inventor of that renowned alphabet which
+spells without letters or writing or types, that may be seen or heard or
+felt or tasted, that is adapted to any language and to all conditions,
+and that performs to this day, and shall to all time, the miracle of
+causing the inane rattle of pieces of metal against each other to speak
+to even a careless listener the exact thoughts of one a thousand miles
+away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another of the men who might be appropriately included in any
+comprehensive list of aiders and abettors of the present telegraph
+system were Leonard D. Gale, then Professor of Chemistry in the
+University of New York, and Professor Joseph Henry, who had made, and
+was apparently indifferent to the importance of it because there was no
+alphabet to use it with, the first electric telegraph ever constructed
+to be read, or used, <i>by sound</i>. Last, though hardly least if all
+facts are understood, might be included a skillful youth named William
+Baxter, afterwards known as the inventor of the "Baxter Engine," who,
+shut in a room with Vail in a machine shop in New Jersey, made in
+conjunction with the author of the alphabet the first telegraphic
+instrument that, with Henry's magnet and battery cells, sent across
+space the first message ever read by a person who did not know what the
+words of the message would say or mean until they had been received.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After the telegraph the state of electrical knowledge was for a long
+time such that electrical invention was in a sense impossible. The
+renowned exploit of Field was not an invention, but a heroic and
+successful extension of the scope and usefulness of an invention. But
+thought was not idle, and filled the interval with preparations for
+final achievements unequaled in the history of science. Two of these
+results are the electric light and the telephone. For the various
+"candles," such as that of Jablochkoff, exhibited at Paris in 1870, only
+served to stimulate investigation of the alluring possibilities of the
+subject. The details of these great inventions are better known than
+those of any others. The telegraph and the newspaper reporter had come
+upon the field as established institutions. Every process and progress
+was a piece of news of intense interest. When the light glowed in its
+bulb and sparkled and flashed at the junction points of its
+chocolate-colored sticks it had been confidently expected. There was
+little surprise. The practical light of the world was considered
+probable, profitable, and absolutely sure. The real story will never be
+told. The thoughts, which phrase may also include the inevitable
+disappointments of the inventor, are never written down by him. That
+variety of brain which, with a few great exceptions, was not known until
+modern, very recent times, which does not speculate, contrive, imagine
+only, but also reduces all ideas to <i>commercial</i> form, has yet to
+have its analysis and its historian, for it is to all intents a new
+phase of the evolution of mind.
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+<a href="images/229.png"><img src="images/229th.png" alt="THOMAS A. EDISON"></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A typical example of this class of intellect is Mr. Thomas A. Edison. It
+may be doubted if such a man could, in the qualities that make him
+remarkable, be the product of any other country than ours. In common
+with nearly all those who have left a deep impression upon our country,
+Edison was the child of that hackneyed "respectable poverty" which here
+is a different condition from that existing all over Europe, where the
+phrase was coined. There, the phrase, and the condition it describes,
+mean a dull content, an incapacity to rise, a happy indifference to all
+other conditions, a dullness that does not desire to learn, to change,
+to think. To respectable poverty in other civilizations there are strong
+local associations like those of a cat, not arising to the dignity of
+love of country. In the United States, without a word, without argument
+or question, a young man becomes a pioneer--not necessarily one of
+locality or physical newness, but a pioneer in mind--in creed, politics,
+business--in the boundless domain of hope and endeavor. In America no
+man is as his father was except in physical traits. No man there is a
+volunteer soldier fighting his country's battles except from a
+conviction that he ought to be. A man is an inventor, a politician, a
+writer, first because he knows that valuable changes are possible, and,
+second, because he can make such changes profitable to himself. It is
+the great realm of immutable steadfastness combined with constant
+change; unique among the nations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Edison never had more than two months regular schooling in his entire
+boyhood. There is, therefore, nothing trained, "regular," technical,
+about him. If there had been it is probable that we might never have
+heard of him. He is one of the innumerable standing arguments against
+the old system advocated by everybody's father, and especially by the
+older fathers of the church, and which meant that every man and woman
+was practically cut by the same pattern, or cast in the same general
+mould, and was to be fitted for a certain notch by training alone. No
+more than thirty years ago the note of preparation for the grooves of
+life was constantly sounded. Natural aptitude, "bent," inclination, were
+disregarded. The maxim concocted by some envious dull man that "genius
+is only another name for industry," was constantly quoted and believed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Edison's mother had been trained, practically, as an instructor of
+youth. He had hints from her in the technical portions of a boy's
+primary training. He is not an ignorant man, but, on the contrary, a
+very highly educated one. But it is an education he has constructed for
+himself out of his aptitudes, as all other actual educations have really
+been. When he was ten years old he had read standard works, and at
+twelve is stated to have struggled, ineffectually perhaps, with Newton's
+<i>Principia</i>. At that age he became a train-boy on the Grand Trunk
+railroad for the purpose of earning his living; only another way of
+pioneering and getting what was to be got by personal endeavor. While in
+that business he edited and printed a little newspaper; not to please an
+amateurish love of the beautiful art of printing, but for profit. He was
+selling papers, and he wanted one of his own to sell because then he
+would get more out of it in a small way. He never afterwards showed any
+inclination toward journalism, and did not become a reporter or
+correspondent, or start a rural daily. While he was a train-boy,
+enjoying every opportunity for absorbing a knowledge of human nature,
+and of finally becoming a passenger conductor or a locomotive engineer,
+something called his attention to the telegraph as a promoter of
+business, as a great and useful institution, and he resolved to become
+an "operator." This was his electrical beginning. Yet before he took
+this step he was accused of a proclivity toward extraordinary things. In
+the old "caboose" where he edited, set up, and printed his newspaper he
+had established a small chemical laboratory, and out of these chemicals
+there is said to have been jolted one day an accident which caused him
+some unpopularity with the railroad people. He was all the time a
+business man. He employed four boy helpers in his news and publishing
+business. It took him a long time to learn the telegraph business under
+the circumstances, and when he was at last installed on a "plug" circuit
+he began at once to do unusual things with the current and its machines
+and appliances. This is what he tells of his first electrical invention.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was an operator at one end of the circuit who was so swift that
+Edison and his companion could not "take" fast enough to keep up with
+him. He found two old Morse registers--the machines that printed with a
+steel point the dots and dashes on a paper slip wound off of a reel.
+These he arranged in such a way that the message written, or indented,
+on them by the first instrument were given to him by the second
+instrument at any desired rate of speed or slowness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This gave to him and his friend time to catch up. This, in Morse's time,
+would have been thought an achievement. Edison seems to regard it as a
+joke. There was no time for prolonged experiment. It was an emergency,
+and the idea must necessarily have been supplemented by a quick
+mechanical skill.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was this same automatic recorder, the idea embodied in it, that by
+thought and logical deduction afterwards produced that wonderful
+automaton, the phonograph. He rigged a hasty instrument that was based
+upon the idea that if the indentations made in a slip of paper could be
+made to repeat the ticking sound of the instrument, similar indentations
+made by a point on a diaphragm that was moved by the <i>voice</i> might
+be made to repeat the voice. His rude first instrument gave back a sound
+vaguely resembling the single word first shouted into it and supposed to
+be indented on a slip of paper, and this was enough to stimulate further
+effort. He finally made drawings and took them to a machinist whom he
+knew, afterwards one of his assistants, who laughed at the idea but made
+the model. Previously he bet a friend a barrel of apples that he could
+do it. When the model was finished he arranged a piece of tin foil and
+talked into it, and when it gave back a distinct sound the machinist was
+frightened, and Edison won his barrel of apples, "which," he says, "I
+was very glad to get."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The "Wizard" is a man evidently pertaining to the class of human
+eccentrics who excite the interest of their fellow-men "to see what they
+will do next," but without any idea of the final value of that which may
+come by what seems to them to be mere unbalanced oddity. Such people are
+invariably misunderstood until they succeed. When he invented the
+automatic repeating telegraph he was discharged, and walked from Decatur
+to Nashville, 150 miles, with only a dollar or two as his entire
+possessions. With a pass thence to Louisville, he and a friend arrived
+at that place in a snowstorm, and clad in linen "dusters." This does not
+seem scientific or professor-like, but it has not hindered; possibly it
+has immensely helped. It reminds one of the Franklinic episodes when
+remembered in connection with future scientific renown and the court of
+France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of the secrets of Edison's great success is the ease with which he
+concentrates his mind. He is said to possess the faculty of leaving one
+thing and taking up another whenever he wills. He even carries on in his
+mind various trains of thought at the same time. The operations of his
+brain are imitated in his daily conduct, which is direct and simple in
+all respects. He is never happier than when engaged in the most
+absorbing and exacting mental toil. He dresses in a machinist's clothes
+when thus employed in his laboratory, and was long accustomed to work
+continuously for as long as he was so inclined without regard to
+regularity, or meals, or day or night. He is willing to eat his food
+from a bench that is littered with filings, chips and tools. To relieve
+strain and take a moment's recreation he is known to have bought a
+"cottage" organ and taught himself to play it, and to go to it in the
+middle of the night and grind out tunes for relaxation. He has a working
+library containing several thousand books. He pores over these volumes
+to inform himself upon some pressing idea, and does so in the midst of
+his work. No man could have made some of his inventions unaided by
+technical science and a knowledge of the results of the investigations
+of many others, and it has often been wondered how a man not technically
+educated could have seemed so well to know. There was a mistake. He
+<i>is</i> educated; a scientific investigator of remarkable attainments.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In thinking of the inventions of Edison and their value, a dozen of the
+first class, that would each one have satisfied the ambition or taken
+the time of an ordinary man, can be named. The mimeograph and the
+electric pen are minor. Then there are the stock printer, the automatic
+repeating telegraph, quadruplex telegraphy, the phono-plex, the
+ore-milling process, the railway telegraph, the electric engine, the
+phonograph. Some of these inventions seem, in the glow of his
+incandescent light, or with one's ear to the tube of the telephone he
+improved in its most essential part, to be too small for Edison. But
+nothing was too small for Franklin, or for the boy who played idly with
+the lid of his mother's tea-kettle and almost invented the steam-engine
+of today, or for Hero of Alexandria, who dreamed a thousand years before
+its time of the power that was to come. So was Henry's first electric
+telegraph the merest toy, and his electro-magnet was supported upon a
+pile of books, his signal bell was that with which one calls a servant,
+and his idea was a mere experiment without result. There was a boy
+Edison needed there then, whose toys reap fortunes and light, and
+enlighten, the world. The electric pen was in its day immensely useful
+in the business world, because it was the application of the stencil to
+ordinary manuscript, and caused the making of hundreds of copies upon
+the stencil idea, and with a printer's roller instead of a brush. The
+mimeograph was the same idea in a totally different form. It was writing
+upon a tablet that is like a bastard-file, with a steel-pointed stylus.
+Each slight projection makes a hole in the paper, and then the stencil
+idea begins again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Something has been previously said of the difficulties attending the
+making of the filament for the incandescent light. It is a little thing,
+smaller than a thread, frail, delicate, sealed in a bulb almost
+absolutely exhausted of air, smooth without a flaw, of absolutely even
+caliber from end to end. The world was searched for substances out of
+which to make it, and experiments were endlessly and tediously tried;
+all for this one little part of a great invention, which, like all other
+inventions, would be valueless in the want of a single little part.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There are hundreds, an unknown number, of inventions in electricity in
+this country whose authors are unknown, and will never be known to the
+general public. The patent office shows many thousands of such in the
+aggregate. Many useful improvements in the telephone alone have come
+under the eye of every casual reader of the newspapers. These are now
+locked up from the world, with many other patented changes in existing
+machines, because of the great expense attending their substitution for
+those arrangements now in use.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the principles--the principles that, finally demonstrated, become
+laws--upon which electrical invention is based, are old. It seems
+impossible, during the entire era of modern thought, to have found a new
+trait, a development, a hitherto unsuspected quality. Tesla, in some of
+his most wonderful experiments, seems almost to have touched the
+boundaries of an unexplored realm, yet not quite, not yet, and most
+likely absolute discovery can no farther go. To play upon those known
+laws--to twist them to new utilities and give them new developments--has
+been the work of the creators of all the modern electrical miracles.
+There is scarcely a field in which men work in which the results are not
+more apparent, yet all we have, and undoubtedly most we shall ever have,
+of electricity we shall continue to owe to the infant period of the
+science.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It may be truthfully claimed that most of these extraordinary
+applications of electricity have been made by American inventors.
+Wherever there is steam, on sea or land, there, intimately associated
+with American management, will be found the dynamic current and all its
+uses. The science of explosive destruction has almost entirely changed,
+and with a most extraordinary result. But one of the factors of this
+change has been the electric current, a something primarily having
+nothing to do with guns, ships or sailing. The modern man-of-war,
+beginning with those of our own navy, is lighted by the electric light,
+signalled and controlled by the current, and her ponderous guns are
+loaded, fired, and even <i>sighted</i> by the same means. Her officers
+are a corps of electrical experts. A large part of her crew are trained
+to manipulate wires instead of ropes, and her total efficiency is
+perhaps three times what it would be with the same tonnage under the old
+r�gime. There is a new sea life and sea science, born full grown within
+ten years from a service encrusted with traditions like barnacles, and
+that could not have come by any other agency. A big gun is no longer
+merely that, but also an electrical machine, often with machinery as
+complicated as that of a chronometer and much more mysterious in
+operation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have said that the huge piece was even sighted by electricity. There
+is really nothing strange in the statement, though it may read like a
+fairy tale or a metaphor to whoever has never had his attention called
+to the subject. In a small way, with the name of its inventor almost
+unknown except to his messmates, it is one of the most wonderful, and
+one of the simplest, of the modern miracles. As a mere instance of the
+wide extent of modern ideas of utility, and of the possibilities of
+application of the laws that were discovered and formulated by those
+whose names the units of electrical measurements bear, it may be briefly
+stated how a group of gunners may work behind an iron breastwork, and
+never see the enemy's hull, and yet aim at him with a hundred times the
+accuracy possible in the day of the <i>Old Ironsides</i> and the
+<i>Guerriere</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And first it may be stated that the <i>range-finder</i> is largely a
+measure of mere economy. A two-million-dollar cruiser is not sailed, or
+lost, as a mere pastime. Whoever aims best will win the fight. Ten years
+ago the way of finding distance, or range, which is the same thing, was
+experimental. If a costly shot was fired over the enemy the next one was
+fired lower, and possibly between the two the range might be got, both
+vessels meantime changing positions and range. To change this, to either
+injure an antagonist quickly or get away, the "range-finder" was
+invented, as a matter not of business profit, by Lieutenant Bradley A.
+Fiske, of the U. S. Navy, in 1889. It has its reason in the familiar
+mathematical proposition that if two angles and one side of a triangle
+are known, the other sides of the triangle are easily found. That is,
+that it can be determined how far it is to a distant object without
+going to it. But Fiske's range-finder makes no mathematical
+calculations, nor requires them to be made, and is automatic. A base
+line permanently fixed on the ship is the one side of a triangle
+required. The distance of the object to be hit is determined by its
+being the apex of an imaginary triangle, and at each of the other
+angles, at the two ends of the base line, is fixed a spyglass. These are
+directed at the object.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So far electricity has had nothing to do with the arrangement, but now
+it enters as the factor without which the device could have no
+adaptation. As the telescopes are turned to bear upon the target they
+move upon slides or wires bent into an arc, and these carry an electric
+current. The difference in length of the slide passed over in turning
+the telescopes upon the object causes a greater or less resistance to
+the current, precisely as a short wire carries a current more easily;
+with less "resistance;" than a long one. A contrivance for measuring the
+current, amounting to the same thing that other instruments do of the
+same class that are used every day, allows of this resistance being
+measured and read, not now in units of electricity, but <i>in distance
+to the apex of the triangle where the target is</i>; in yards. The man
+at each telescope has only to keep it pointed at the target as it moves,
+or as the vessel moves which wishes to hit it. And now even the
+telephone enters into the arrangement. Elsewhere in the ship another man
+may stand with the transmitter at his ear. He will hear a buzzing sound
+until the telescopes stop moving, and at the same time there will be
+under his eye a pointer moving over a graduated scale. The instant the
+sound ceases he reads the range denoted by the index and scale. The
+information is then conveyed in any desired way to the men at the guns;
+these, of course, being aimed by a scale corresponding to that under the
+eye of the man at the telephone. The plan is not here detailed as
+technical information valuable to the casual reader, but as showing the
+wide range of electrical applications in fields where possible
+usefulness would not have been so much as suspected a few years ago. The
+same gentleman, Lieut. Fiske, is also the author of ingenious electrical
+appliances for the working of those immense gun-carriages that have
+grown too big for men to move, and for the hoisting into their cavernous
+breeches of shot and shell. The men who work these guns now do not need
+to see the enemy, even through the porthole or the embrasure. They can
+attend strictly to the business of loading and firing, assisted by
+machines nearly or quite automatic, and can cant and lay the piece by an
+index, and fire with an electric lanyard. The genius of science has
+taken the throne vacated by the goddess of glory. The sailor has gone,
+and the expert mechanician has taken his place. The tar and his training
+have given way to the register, the gauge and the electrometer. The big
+black guns are no longer run backward amid shouts and flying splinters,
+and rammed by men stripped to the waist and shrouded in the smoke of the
+last discharge, but swing their long and tapering muzzles to and fro out
+of steel casemates, and tilt their ponderous breeches like huge
+grotesque animals lying down. The grim machinery of naval battle is
+moved by invisible hands, and its enormous weight is swayed and tilted
+by a concealed and silent wire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This strange slave, that toils unmoved in the din of battle, has been
+reduced to domestic servitude of the plainest character. The
+demonstrations made of cooking by electricity at the great fair of 1893
+leave that service possible in the future without any question.
+Electrical ovens, models of neatness, convenience and <i>coolness</i>,
+were shown at work. They were made of wood, lined with asbestos, and
+were lighted inside with an incandescent lamp. The degree of temperature
+was shown by a thermometer, and mica doors rendered the baking or
+roasting visible. There could be no question of too much heat on one
+side and too little on another, because switches placed at different
+points allowed of a cutting off, or a turning on, whenever needed.
+Laundry irons had an insulated pliable connection attached, so that heat
+was high and constant at the bottom of the iron and not elsewhere. There
+were all the appliances necessary for the broiling of steaks, the making
+of coffee and the baking of cakes, and the same mystery, which is no
+longer a mystery, pervaded it all. Woman is also to become an
+electrician, at least empirically, and in time soon to come will
+understand her voltage and her Amp�res as she now does her drafts and
+dampers and the quality of her fuel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is a practical fact that chickens are hatched by the thousand by the
+electrical current, and that men have discovered more than nature knew
+about the period of incubation, and have reduced it by electricity from
+twenty-one to nineteen days. The proverb about the value of the time of
+the incubating hen has passed into antiquity with all things else in the
+presence of electrical science.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whenever an American mechanician, a manufacturer or an inventor, is
+confronted by a difficulty otherwise insolvable he turns to electricity.
+Its laws and qualities are few. They seem now to be nearly all known,
+but the great curiosity of modern times is the almost infinite number of
+applications which these laws and qualities may be made to serve. One
+may turn at a single glance from the loading and firing of naval guns to
+the hatching of chickens and the cooking of chocolate by precisely the
+same means, silently used in the same way. Most of these applications,
+and all the most extraordinary ones, are of American origin. Their
+inventors are largely unknown. There is no attempt made here to more
+than suggest the possibilities of the near future by a glimpse of the
+present. The generation that is rising, the boy who is ten years old,
+should easily know more of electrical science than Franklin did. There
+are certain primal laws by which all explanations of all that now is,
+and most probably of almost all that is to come so far as principles go,
+may be readily understood, and these I have endeavored, in this and
+preceding chapters, to explain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There are in the United States new applications of electricity literally
+every day. Before the written page is printed some startling application
+is likely to be made that gives to that page at once an incompleteness
+it is impossible to guard against or avoid. There is a strong
+inclination to prophesy; to tell of that which is to come; to picture
+the warmed and illuminated future, smokeless and odorless, and the homes
+in which the children of the near future shall be reared. Some of those
+few apprehended things, suggested as being possible or desirable in
+these chapters, have been since done and the author has seen them. This
+American facility of electrical invention has one great cause, one
+specific reason for its fruitfulness. It is because so many acute minds
+have mastered the simple laws of electrical action. This knowledge not
+only fosters intelligent and fruitful experiment but it prevents the
+doing of foolish things. No man who has acquired a knowledge of
+mechanical forces, who understands at least that great law that for all
+force exerted there is exacted an equivalent, ever dreams upon the folly
+of the perpetual motion. In like manner does a knowledge, purely
+theoretical, of the laws of electricity prevent that waste of time in
+gropings and dreams of which the story of science and the long human
+struggle in all ages and in all departments is full.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finally, I would, if possible dispell all ideas of strangeness and
+mystery and semi-miracle as connected with electrical phenomena. There
+is no mystery; above all, there is no caprice. There are, in electricity
+and in all other departments of science, still many things undiscovered.
+It is certain that causes lead far back into that realm which is beyond
+present human investigation. <i>Force</i> has innumerable manifestations
+that are visible, that are understood, that are controlled. Its
+<i>origin</i> is behind the veil. A thousand branching threads of
+argument may be taken up and woven into the single strand that leads
+into the unknown. Out of the thought that is born of things has already
+arisen a new conception of the universe, and of the Eternal Mind who is
+its master. Among these things, these daily manifestations of a seeming
+mystery, the most splendid are the phenomena of electricity. They court
+the human understanding and offer a continual challenge to that faculty
+which alone distinguishes humanity from the beasts. The assistance given
+in the preceding pages toward a clear understanding of the reason why,
+so far as known, is perhaps inadequate, but is an attempt offered for
+what of interest or value may be found.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Steam Steel and Electricity, by James W. Steele
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+Project Gutenberg's Steam Steel and Electricity, by James W. Steele
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Steam Steel and Electricity
+
+Author: James W. Steele
+
+Posting Date: March 26, 2014 [EBook #7886]
+Release Date: April, 2005
+First Posted: May 30, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STEAM STEEL AND ELECTRICITY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Tonya Allen and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+STEAM STEEL AND ELECTRICITY
+
+By
+
+JAMES W. STEELE
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+THE STORY OF STEAM.
+
+    What Steam is.--Steam in Nature.--The Engine in its earlier
+    forms.--Gradual explosion.--The Hero engine.--The Temple-door
+    machine.--Ideas of the Middle Ages.--Beginnings of the modern
+    engine.--Branca's engine.--Savery's engine.--The Papin engine
+    using cylinder and piston.--Watt's improvements upon the
+    Newcomen idea.--The crank movement.--The first use of steam
+    expansively.--The "Governor."--First engine by an American
+    Inventor.--Its effect upon progress in the United
+    States.--Simplicity and cheapness of the modern engine.--Actual
+    construction of the modern engine.--Valves, piston, etc., with
+    diagrams.
+
+THE AGE OF STEEL.
+
+    The various "Ages" in civilization.--Ancient knowledge of the
+    metals.--The invention and use of Bronze.--What Steel is.--The
+    "Lost Arts."--Metallurgy and chemistry.--Oriental Steel.--Modern
+    definition of Steel.--Invention of Cast Steel.--First iron-ore
+    discoveries in America.--First American Iron-works.--Early
+    methods without steam.--First American casting.--Effect of iron
+    industry upon independence.--Water-power.--The trip-hammer.--The
+    steam-hammer of Nasmyth.--Machine-tools and their
+    effects.--First rolling-mill.--Product of the iron industry in
+    1840-50.--The modern nail, and how it came.--Effect of iron upon
+    architecture.--The "Sky-Scraper."--Gas as fuel in iron
+    manufactures.--The Steel of the present.--The invention of
+    Kelley.--The Bessemer process.--The "Converter."--Present
+    product of Steel.--The Steel-mill.
+
+THE STORY OF ELECTRICITY.
+
+    The oldest and the youngest of the sciences.--Origin of the
+    name.--Ancient ideas of Electricity.--Later experiments.--Crude
+    notions and wrong conclusions.--First Electric
+    Machine.--Frictional Electricity.--The Leyden Jar.--Extreme
+    ideas and Fakerism.--Franklin, his new ideas and their
+    reception.--Franklin's Kite.--The Man Franklin.--Experiments
+    after Franklin, leading to our present modern uses.--Galvani and
+    his discovery.--Volta, and the first "Battery."--How a battery
+    acts.--The laws of Electricity, and how they were
+    discovered.--Induction, and its discoverer.--The line at which
+    modern Electricity begins.--Magnetism and Electricity.--The
+    Electro-Magnet.--The Molecular theory.--Faraday, and his Law of
+    Magnetic Force.
+
+MODERN ELECTRICITY.
+
+    CHAPTER I. The Four great qualities of Electricity which make
+    its modern uses possible.--The universal wire.--Conductors and
+    non conductors.--Electricity an exception in the ordinary Laws
+    of Nature.--A dual nature: "Positive" and "Negative."--All
+    modern uses come under the law of Induction.--Some of the laws
+    of this induction.--Magnets and Magnetism.--Relationship between
+    the two.--Magnetic "poles."--Practical explanation of the action
+    of induction.--The Induction Coil.--Dynamic and Static
+    Electricity.--The Electric Telegraph.--First attempts.--Morse,
+    and his beginnings.--The first Telegraph Line.--Vail, and the
+    invention of the dot-and-dash alphabet.--The old instruments and
+    the new.--The final simplicity of the telegraph.
+
+    CHAPTER II. The Ocean Cable.--Differences between land lines and
+    cables.--The story of the first cable.--Field and his final
+    success.--The Telephone.--Early attempts.--Description of Bell's
+    invention.--The Telautograph.--Early attempts and the idea upon
+    which they were based.--Description of Gray's invention.--How a
+    Telautograph may be made mechanically.
+
+    CHAPTER III. The Electric Light.--Causes of heat and light in
+    the conductor of a current.--The first Electric Light.--The Arc
+    Light, and how constructed.--The Incandescent.--The
+    Dynamo.--Date of the invention.--Successive steps.--Faraday the
+    discoverer of its principle.--Pixue's
+    machine.--Pacinatti.--Wilde.--Siemens' and Wheatstone.--The
+    Motor.--How the Dynamo and Motor came to be coupled.--Review of
+    first attempts.--Kidder's battery.--Page's machine.--Electric
+    Railroads.--Electrolysis.--General facts.--Electrical
+    Measurements.--"Death Current."--Instruments of
+    Measurement.--Electricity as an Industry.--Medical
+    Electricity.--Incomplete possibilities.--What the "Storage
+    Battery" is.
+
+    CHAPTER IV. Electrical Invention in the United States.--Review
+    of the careers of Franklin, Morse, Field, Edison and
+    others.--Some of the surprising applications of
+    Electricity.--The Range-Finder.--Cooking and heating by
+    Electricity.
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF STEAM
+
+
+That which was utterly unknown to the most splendid civilizations of the
+past is in our time the chief power of civilization, daily engaged in
+making that history of a new era that is yet to be written in words. It
+has been demonstrated long since that men's lives are to be influenced
+not by theory, or belief, or argument and reason, so much as by that
+course of daily life which is not attempted to be governed by argument
+and reason, but by great physical facts like steam, electricity and
+machinery in their present applications.
+
+The greatest of these facts of the present civilization are expressed in
+the phrase, Steam and Steel. The theme is stupendous. Only the most
+prominent of its facts can be given in small space, and those only in
+outline. The subject is also old, yet to every boy it must be told
+again, and the most ordinary intelligence must have some desire to know
+the secrets, if such they are, of that which is unquestionably the
+greatest force that ever yielded to the audacity of humanity. It is now
+of little avail to know that all the records that men revere, all the
+great epics of the world, were written in the absence of the
+characteristic forces of modern life. A thousand generations had lived
+and died, an immense volume of history had been enacted, the heroes of
+all the ages, and almost those of our own time, had fulfilled their
+destinies and passed away, before it came about that a mere physical
+fact should fill a larger place in our lives than all examples, and that
+the evanescent vapor which we call steam should change daily, and
+effectively, the courses and modes of human action, and erect life upon
+another plane.
+
+It may seem not a little absurd to inquire now "what is steam?"
+Everybody knows the answer. The non-technical reader knows that it is
+that vapor which, for instance, pervades the kitchen, which issues from
+every cooking vessel and waste-pipe, and is always white and visible,
+and moist and warm. We may best understand an answer to the question,
+perhaps, by remembering that steam is one of the three natural
+conditions of water: ice, fluid water, and steam. One or the other of
+these conditions always exists, and always under two others: pressure
+and heat. When the air around water reaches the temperature of
+thirty-two degrees by the scale of Fahrenheit, or  deg. or zero by the
+Centigrade scale, and is exposed to this temperature for a time, it
+becomes ice. At two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit it becomes
+steam. Between these two temperatures it is water. But the change to
+steam which is so rapid and visible at the temperature above mentioned
+is taking place slowly all the time when water, in any situation, is
+exposed to the air. As the temperature rises the change becomes more
+rapid. The steam-making of the arts is merely that of all nature,
+hastened artificially and intentionally.
+
+The element of pressure, mentioned above, enters into the proposition
+because water boils at a lower temperature, with less heat, when the
+weight of the atmosphere is less than normal, as it is at great
+elevations, and on days when, as we now express it, there is a low
+barometer. Long before any cook could explain the fact it was known that
+the water boiling quickly was a sign of storm. It has often been found
+by camping-parties on mountains that in an attempt to boil potatoes in a
+pot the water would all "boil away," and leave the vegetables uncooked.
+The heat required to evaporate it at the elevation was less than that
+required to cook in boiling water. It is one of the instances where the
+problems of nature intrude themselves prominently into the affairs of
+common life without previous notice.
+
+This universal evaporation, under varying circumstances, is probably the
+most important agency in nature, and the most continuous and potent.
+There was only so much water to begin with. There will never be any less
+or any more. The saltness of the sea never varies, because the loss by
+evaporation and the new supply through condensation of the
+steam--rain--necessarily remain balanced by law forever. The surface of
+our world is water in the proportion of three to one. The extent of
+nature's steam-making, silent, and mostly invisible, is immeasurable and
+remains an undetermined quantity. The three forms of water combine and
+work together as though through intentional partnership, and have, thus
+combined, already changed the entire land surface of the world from what
+it was to what it is, and working ceaselessly through endless cycles
+will change it yet more. The exhalations that are steam become the water
+in a rock-cleft. It changes to ice with a force almost beyond
+measurement in the orderly arrangement of its crystals in compliance
+with an immutable law for such arrangement, and rends the rock. The
+process goes on. There is no high mountain in any land where water will
+not freeze. The water of rain and snow carries away the powdered remains
+from year to year, and from age to age. The comminuted ruins of
+mountains have made the plains and filled up and choked the mouth of the
+Mississippi. The soil that once lay hundreds of miles away has made the
+delta of every river that flows into the sea. The endless and resistless
+process goes on without ceasing, a force that is never expended, and but
+once interrupted within the knowledge of men, then covered a large area
+of the world with a sea of ice that buried for ages every living thing.
+
+The common idea of the steam that we make by boiling water is that it is
+all water, composed of that and nothing else, and this conception is
+gathered from apparent fact. Yet it is not entirely true. Steam is an
+invisible vapor in every boiler, and does not become what we know by
+sight as steam until it has become partly cooled. As actual steam
+uncooled, it is a gas, obeying all the laws of the permanent gases. The
+creature of temperature and pressure, it changes from this gaseous form
+when their conditions are removed, and in the change becomes visible to
+us. Its elasticity, its power of yielding to compression, are enormous,
+and it gives back this elasticity of compression with almost
+inconceivable readiness and swiftness. To the eye, in watching the
+gliding and noiseless movements of one of the great modern engines, the
+power of which one has only a vague and inadequate conception seems not
+only inexplicable, but gentle. The ponderous iron pieces seem to weigh
+nothing. There is a feeling that one might hinder the movement as he
+would that of a watch. There is an inability to realize the fact that
+one of the mightiest forces of nature is there embodied in an easy,
+gliding, noiseless impulse. Yet it is one that would push aside massy
+tons of dead weight, that would almost unimpeded crush a hole through
+the enclosing wall, that whirls upon the rails the drivers of a
+locomotive weighing sixty tons as though there were no weight above
+them, no bite upon the rails. There is an enormous concentration of
+force somewhere; of a force which perhaps no man can fairly estimate;
+and it is under the thin shell we call a boiler. Were it not elastic it
+could not be so imprisoned, and when it rebels, when this thin shell is
+torn like paper, there is a havoc by which we may at last inadequately
+measure the power of steam.
+
+We have in modern times applied the word "engine" almost exclusively to
+the machine which is moved by the pressure of steam. Yet we might go
+further, since one of the first examples of a pressure engine, older
+than the steam machine by nearly four hundred years, is the gun. Reduced
+to its principle this is an engine whose operation depends upon the
+expansion of gas in a cylinder, the piston being a projectile. The same
+principle applies in all the machines we know as "engines." An
+air-engine works through the expansion of air in a cylinder by heat. A
+gas-engine, now of common use, by the expansion, which is explosion,
+caused by burning a mixture of coal-gas and air, and the steam-engine,
+the universal power generator of modern life, works by the expansion of
+the vapor of water as it is generated by heat. Steam may be considered a
+species of _gradual_ explosion applied to the uses of industry. It
+often becomes a real one, complying with all the conditions, and as
+destructive as dynamite.
+
+It cannot be certainly known how long men have experimented with the
+expansive force of steam. The first feeble attempt to purloin the power
+of the geyser was probably by Hero, of Alexandria, about a hundred and
+thirty years before Christ. His machine was also the first known
+illustration of what is now called the "turbine" principle; the
+principle of _reaction_ in mechanics. [Footnote: This principle is
+often a puzzle to students. There is an old story of the man who put a
+bellows in his boat to make wind against the sail, and the wind did not
+affect the sail, but the boat went backward in an opposite direction
+from the nozzle of the bellows. There is probably no better illustration
+of reaction than the "kick" of a gun, which most persons know about. The
+recoil of a six-pound field piece is usually from six to twelve feet. It
+can be understood by supposing a gun to be loaded with powder and an
+iron rod longer than the barrel to be left on the charge. If the outer
+end of this rod were then placed against a tree, and the gun were fired,
+it is manifest that the gun would become the projectile, and be fired
+off of the rod backward or burst. In ordinary cases the air in the bore,
+and immediately outside of the muzzle, acts comparatively, and in a
+measure, as the supposed rod against the tree would. It gives way, and
+is elastic, but not as quickly as the force of the explosion acts, and
+the gun is pushed backwards. It is the turbine principle, running into
+hundreds of uses in mechanics.] He made a closed vessel from whose
+opposite sides radiated two hollow arms with holes in their sides, the
+holes being on opposite sides of the tubes from each other. This vessel
+he mounted on an upright spindle, and put water in it and heated the
+water. The steam issuing from the holes in the arms drove them backward.
+The principle of the action of Hero's machine has been accepted for two
+thousand years, though never in a steam-engine. It exists under all
+circumstances similar to his. In water, in the turbine wheel, it has
+been made most efficacious. The power applied now for the harnessing of
+Niagara for the purpose of sending electric currents hundreds of miles
+is the turbine wheel.
+
+[Illustration: THE SUPPOSED HERO ENGINE.]
+
+Hero appears to the popular imagination as the greatest inventor of the
+past. Every school boy knows him. Archimedes, the Greek, was the
+greater, and a hundred and fifty years the earlier, and was the author
+of the significance of the word "Eureka," as we use it now. But Hero was
+the pioneer in steam. He made the first steam-engine, and is immortal
+through a toy.
+
+The first _practical_ device in which expansion was used seems to
+have been for the exploiting of an ecclesiastical trick intended to
+impress the populace. There is a saying by an antique wit that no two
+priests or augurs could ever meet and look at each other without a
+knowing wink of recognition. Hero is said to have been the author of
+this contrivance also. The temple doors would open by themselves when
+the fire burned on the altar, and would close again when that fire was
+extinguished, and the worshippers would think it a miracle. It is
+interesting because it contained the principle upon which was afterwards
+attempted to be made the first working low-pressure or atmospheric
+steam-engine. Yet it was not steam, but air, that was used. A hollow
+altar containing air was heated by the fire being kindled upon it. The
+air expanded and passed through a pipe into a vessel below containing
+water. It pressed the water out through another pipe into a bucket
+which, being thereby made heavier, pulled open the temple doors. When
+the fire went out again there was a partial vacuum in the vessel that
+had held the water at first, and the water was sucked back through the
+pipe out of the bucket. That became lighter again and allowed the doors
+to close with a counter-weight. All that was then necessary to convince
+the populace of the genuineness of the seeming miracle was to keep them
+from understanding it. The machinery was under the floor. There have
+been thousands of miracles since then performed by natural agencies, and
+there have passed many ages since Hero's machine during which not to
+understand a thing was to believe it to be supernatural.
+
+[Illustration: THE TEMPLE-DOOR TRICK.]
+
+From the time of Hero until the seventeenth century there is no record
+of any attempt being made to utilize steam-pressure for a practical
+purpose. The fact seems strange only because steam-power is so prominent
+a fact with ourselves. The ages that intervened were, as a whole, times
+of the densest superstition. The human mind was active, but it was
+entirely occupied with miracle and semi-miracle; in astrology, magic and
+alchemy; in trying to find the key to the supernatural. Every thinker,
+every educated man, every man who knew more than the rest, was bent upon
+finding this key for himself, so that he might use it for his own
+advantage. During all those ages there was no idea of the natural
+sciences. The key they lacked, and never found, that would have opened
+all, is the fact that in the realm of science and experiment there is no
+supernatural, and only eternal law; that cause produces its effect
+invariably. Even Kepler, the discoverer of the three great laws that
+stand as the foundation of the Copernican system of the universe, was in
+his investigations under the influence of astrological and cabalistic
+superstitions. [Footnote: Kepler, a German, lived between 1571 and 1630.
+His life was full of vicissitudes, in the midst of which he performed an
+astonishing Even the science of amount of intellectual labor, with
+lasting results. He was the personal friend of Galileo and Tycho Brahe,
+and his life may be said to have been spent in finding the abstract
+intelligible reason for the actual disposition of the solar system, in
+which physical cause should take the place of arbitrary hypothesis. He
+did this.] medicine was, during those ages, a magical art, and the idea
+of cure by medicine, that drugs actually _cure_, is existent to
+this day as a remnant of the Middle Ages. A man's death-offense might be
+that he knew more than he could make others understand about the then
+secrets of nature. Yet he himself might believe more or less in magic.
+No one was untouched; all intellect was more or less enslaved.
+
+And when experiments at last began to be made in the mechanisms by which
+steam might be utilized they were such as boys now make for amusement;
+such as throwing a steam-jet against the vanes of a paddle-wheel. Such
+was Branca's engine, made nine years after the landing of our
+forefathers at Plymouth, and thought worthy of a description and record.
+The next attempt was much more practical, but cannot be accurately
+assigned. It consisted of two chambers, from each of which alternately
+water was forced by steam, and which were filled again by cooling off
+and the forming of a vacuum where the steam had been. One chamber worked
+while the other cooled. It was an immense advance in the direction of
+utility.
+
+About 1698, we begin to encounter the names that are familiar to us in
+connection with the history of the steam-engine. In that year Thomas
+Savery obtained a patent for raising water by steam. His was a
+modification of the idea described above. The boilers used would be of
+no value now, nevertheless the machine came into considerable use, and
+the world that learned so gradually became possessed with the idea that
+there was a utility in the pressure of steam. Savery's engine is said to
+have grown out of the accident of his throwing a flask containing a
+little wine on the fire at a tavern. Concluding immediately afterwards
+that he wanted it, he snatched it off of the fender and plunged it into
+a basin of water to cool it. The steam inside instantly condensing, the
+water rushed in and filled it as it cooled.
+
+We now come to the beginning of the steam engine as we understand the
+term; the machine that involves the use of the cylinder and piston.
+These two features had been used in pumps long before, the atmospheric
+pump being one of the oldest of modern machines. The vacuum was known
+and utilized long before the cause of it was known. [Footnote: The
+discoverer was an Italian, Torricelli, about 1643. Gallileo, his tutor
+and friend, did not know why water would not rise in a tube more than
+thirty-three feet. No one knew of the _weight of the atmosphere_,
+so late as the early days of this republic. Many did not believe the
+theory long after that time. Torricelli, by his experiments, demonstrated
+the fact and invented the mercurial barometer, long known as the
+"Torricellian Tube." This last instrument led to another discovery; that
+the weight of the atmosphere varied from time to time in the same
+locality, and that storms and weather changes were indicated by a rising
+and falling of the column of mercury in the tube of the
+siphon-barometer. That which we call the "weather-bureau," organized by
+General Albert J. Myer, United States Army, in 1870, and growing out of
+the army signal service, of which he was chief, makes its "forecasts" by
+the use of the telegraph and the barometer. The "low pressure area"
+follows a path, which means a change of weather on that path. Notices by
+telegraph define the route, and the coming storm is not foretold, but
+_foreknown;_ not prophesied, but _ascertained._ If we have
+been led from the crude pump of Gallileo's time directly to the weather
+bureau of the present with its invaluable signals to sailors and
+convenience to everybody, it is no more than is continually to be traced
+even to the beginning of the wonderful school of modern science.]
+
+But in the beginning it was not proposed to use steam in connection with
+the cylinder and piston which now really constitutes the steam-engine.
+Reverting again to the example of the gun, it was suggested to push a
+piston forward in a tube by the explosion of gunpowder behind it, or to
+repeat the Savery experiment with powder instead of steam. These ideas
+were those of about 1678-1685. The very earliest cylinder and piston
+engine was suggested by Denis Papin in 1690. These early inventors only
+went a portion of the way, and almost the entire idea of the
+steam-engine is of much later date. Mankind had then a singular gift of
+beginning at the wrong end. Every inventor now uses facts that seem to
+him to have been always known, and that are his by a kind of intuition.
+But they were all acquired by the tedious experience of a past that is
+distinguished by a few great names whose owners knew in their time
+perhaps one-tenth part as much as the modern inventor does, who is
+unconsciously using the facts learned by old experience. But the others
+began at the beginning.
+
+[Illustration: EARLY NEWCOMEN PUMPING ENGINE. STEAM-COCK, COLD WATER
+COCK AND WASTE-SPIGOT ALL WORKED BY HAND.]
+
+In 1711, almost a hundred years after the arrival at Jamestown and
+Plymouth of the fathers of our present civilization, the steam-engine
+that is called Newcomen's began to be used for the pumping of water out
+of mines. This engine, slightly modified, and especially by the boy who
+invented the automatic cut-off for the steam valves, was a most rude and
+clumsy machine measured by our ideas. There appears to have been
+scarcely a single feature of it that is now visible in a modern engine.
+The cylinder was always vertical. It had the upper end open, and was a
+round iron vessel in which a plunger moved up and down. Steam was let in
+below this plunger, and the walking-beam with which it was connected by
+a rod had that end of it raised. When raised the steam was cut off, and
+all that was then under the piston was condensed by a jet of cold water.
+The outside air-pressure then acted upon it and pushed it down again. In
+this down-stroke by air-pressure the work was done. The far end of the
+walking-beam was even counter-weighted to help the steam-pressure. The
+elastic force of compressed steam was not depended upon, was hardly even
+known, in this first working and practical engine of the world. Every
+engine of that time was an experimental structure by itself. The boiler,
+as we use it, was unknown. Often it was square, stayed and braced
+against pressure in a most complicated way. Yet the Newcomen engine held
+its place for about seventy-five years; a very long time in our
+conception, and in view of the vast possibilities that we now know were
+before the science. [Footnote: As late as 1880, the steam-engine
+illustrated and described in the "natural philosophy" text books was
+still the Newcomen, or Newcomen-Watt engine, and this while that engine
+was almost unknown in ordinary circumstances, and double-acting
+high-pressure engines were in operation everywhere. This last, without
+which not much could be done that is now done, was evidently for a long
+time after it came into use regarded as a dangerous and unphilosophical
+experiment, hardly scientific, and not destined to be permanently
+adopted.]
+
+In the year 1760, James Watt, who was by occupation what is now known as
+a model-maker, and who lived in Glasgow, was called upon to repair a
+model of a Newcomen engine belonging to the university. While thus
+engaged he was impressed with the great waste of steam, or of time and
+fuel, which is the same thing, involved in the alternate heating and
+cooling of Newcomen's cylinder. To him occurred the idea of keeping the
+cylinder as hot as the steam used in it. Watt was therefore the inventor
+of the first of those economies now regarded as absolute requirements in
+construction. He made the first "steam-jacket," and was, as well, the
+author of the idea of covering the cylinder with a coat of wood, or
+other non-conductor. He contrived a second chamber, outside of the
+cylinder, where the then indispensable condensation should take place.
+Then he gave this cylinder for the first time two heads, and let out the
+piston-rod through a hole in the upper head, with packing. He used steam
+on the upper side of the piston as well as the lower, and it will be
+seen that he came very near to making the modern engine.
+
+Yet he did not make it. He was still unable to dispense with the
+condensing and vacuum and air-pressure ideas. Acting for the first time
+in the line of real efficiency, he failed to go far enough to attain it.
+He made a double-acting engine by the addition of many new parts; he
+even attained the point of applying his idea to the production of
+circular motion. But he merely doubled the Newcomen idea. His engine
+became the Newcomen-Watt. He had a condensing chamber at each end of the
+stroke and could therefore command a reciprocating movement. The
+walking-beam was retained, not for the purpose for which it is often
+used now, but because it was indispensable to his semi-atmospheric
+engine.
+
+[Illustration: THE PERFECTED NEWCOMEN-WATT ENGINE.]
+
+It may seem almost absurd that the universal crank-movement of an engine
+was ever the subject of a patent. Yet such was the case. A man named
+Pickard anticipated Watt, and the latter then applied to his engines the
+"sun-and-planet" movement, instead of the crank, until the patent on the
+latter expired. The steam-engine marks the beginning of a long series of
+troubles in the claims of patentees.
+
+In 1782 came Watt's last steam invention, an engine that used steam
+_expansively_. This was an immense stride. He was also at the same
+time the inventor of the "throttle," or choke valve, by which he
+regulated the supply of steam to the piston. It seems a strange thing
+that up to this time, about 1767, an engine in actual use was started by
+getting up steam enough to make it go, and waiting for it to begin, and
+stopped by putting out the fire.
+
+Then he invented the "governor," a contrivance that has scarcely changed
+in form, and not at all in action, since it was first used, and is one
+of the few instances of a machine perfect in the beginning. Two balls
+hang on two rods on each side of an upright shaft, to which the rods are
+hinged. The shaft is rotated by the engine, and the faster it turns the
+more the two balls stand out from it. The slower it turns the more they
+hang down toward it. Any one can illustrate this by whirling in his
+hands a half-open umbrella. There is a connection between the movement
+of these balls and the throttle; as they swing out more they close it,
+as they fall closer to the shaft they open it. The engine will therefore
+regulate its own speed with reference to the work it has to do from
+moment to moment.
+
+[Illustration: THE GOVERNOR.]
+
+Through all these changes the original idea remained of a vacuum at the
+end of every stroke, of indispensable assistance from atmospheric
+pressure, of a careful use of the direct expansive power of steam, and
+of the avoidance of the high pressures and the actual power of which
+steam is now known to be safely capable. [Footnote: In a reputable
+school "philosophy" printed in 1880, thus: "In some engines" (describing
+the modern high-pressure engine, universal in most land service) "the
+apparatus for condensing steam alternately above and below the piston is
+dispensed with, and the steam, after it has moved the piston from one
+end of the cylinder to the other, is allowed to escape, by the opening
+of a valve, directly into the air. To accomplish this it is evident that
+the steam must have an elastic force greater than the pressure of the
+air, _or it could not expand and drive out the waste steam on the
+other side of the piston, in opposition to the pressure of the air_."
+According to this teaching, which the young student is expected to
+understand and to entirely believe, a pressure of steam of, say eighty
+to a hundred and twenty pounds to the inch on one side of the piston is
+accompanied by an absolute vacuum there, which permits the pressure of
+the outside air to exert itself against the opposite side of the piston
+through the open port at the other end of the cylinder. That is, a state
+of things which would exist if the steam behind the piston _were
+suddenly condensed_, exists anyway. If it be true the facts should be
+more generally known; if not, most of the school "philosophies" need
+reviewing.] Then an almost unknown American came upon the scene. In
+English hands the story at once passes from this point to the
+experiments of Trevethick and George Stevenson with steam as applied to
+railway locomotion. But as Watt left it and Trevethick found it, the
+steam engine could never have been applied to locomotion. It was slow,
+ponderous, complicated and scientific, worked at low pressures, and Watt
+and his contemporaries would have run away in affright from the
+innovation that came in between them and the first attempts of the
+pioneers of the locomotive. This innovation was that of Evans, the
+American, of whom further presently.
+
+The first steam-engine ever built in the United States was probably of
+the Watt pattern, in 1773. In 1776, the year of beginning for ourselves,
+there were only two engines of any kind in the colonies; one at Passaic,
+N. J., the other at Philadelphia. We were full of the idea of the
+independence we had won soon afterwards, but in material respects we had
+all before us.
+
+In 1787, Oliver Evans introduced improvements in grain mills, and was
+generally efficient as one of the beginners in the field of American
+invention. Soon afterwards he is known to have made a steam-engine which
+was the first high-pressure double-acting engine ever made. The engine
+that used steam at each end of the cylinder with a vacuum and a
+condenser, was in this first instance, so far as any record can be
+found, supplanted by the engine of to-day. The reason of the delay it is
+difficult to account for on any other grounds than lack of boldness, for
+unquestionably the early experimenters knew that such an engine could be
+made. They were afraid of the power they had evoked. Such a machine may
+have seemed to them a willful toying with disaster. Their efforts were
+bent during many years toward rendering a treacherous giant useful, yet
+entirely harmless. Their boilers, greatly improved over those I have
+mentioned, never were such as were afterwards made to suit the high
+pressures required by the audacity of Hopkins. This audacity was the
+mother of the locomotive, and of that engine which almost from that date
+has been used for nearly every purpose of our modern life that requires
+power. The American innovation may have passed unnoticed at the time,
+but intentionally or otherwise it was imitated as a preliminary to all
+modern engines. Nearly a century passed between the making of the first
+practical engine and that one which now stands as the type of many
+thousands. But now every little saw-mill in the American woods could
+have, and finally did have, its little cheap, unscientific, powerful and
+non-vacuum engine, set up and worked without experience, and maintained
+in working order by an unskilled laborer. A thousand uses for steam grew
+out of this experiment of a Yankee who knew no better than to tempt fate
+with a high-pressure and speed and recklessness that has now become
+almost universal.
+
+There was with Watt and his contemporaries apparently a fondness for
+cost and complications. Most likely the finished Watt engine was a
+handsome and stately machine, imposing in its deliberate movements.
+There is apparently nothing simpler than the placing of the head of the
+piston-rod between two guide-pieces to keep it in line and give it
+bearing. Yet we have only to turn back a few years and see the elaborate
+and beautiful geometrical diagram contrived by Watt to produce the same
+simple effect, and known as a "parallel motion." It kept its place until
+the walking-beam was cast away, and the American horizontal engine came
+into almost universal use.
+
+The object of this chapter so far has been to present an idea of
+beginnings; of the evolution of the universal and indispensable machine
+of civilization. The steam-engine has given a new impetus to industry,
+and in a sense an added meaning to life. It has made possible most that
+was ever dreamed of material greatness. It has altered the destiny of
+this nation, and other nations, made greatness out of crude beginnings,
+wealth out of poverty, prosperity upon thousands of square miles of
+uninhabitable wilderness. It was the chiefest instrumentality in the
+widening of civilization, the bringing together of alien peoples, the
+dissemination of ideas. Electricity may carry the idea; steam carries
+the man with the idea. The crude misconceptions of old times existed
+naturally before its time, and have largely vanished since it came.
+Marco Polo and Mandeville and their kind are no longer possibilities.
+Applied to transportation, locomotion alone, its effects have been
+revolutionary. Applied to common life in its minute ramifications these
+effects could not have been believed or foretold, and are incredible.
+The thought might be followed indefinitely, and it is almost impossible
+to compare the world as we know it with the world of our immediate
+ancestors. Only by means of contrasts, startling in their details, can
+we arrive at an adequate estimate, even as a moral farce, of the power
+of steam as embodied in the modern engine in a thousand forms.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Perhaps it might be well to attempt to convey, for the benefit of the
+youngest reader, an idea of the actual working of the machine we call a
+steam-engine. There are hundreds of forms, and yet they are all alike
+in essentials. To know the principle of one is to know that of all.
+There is probably not an engine in the world in effective common
+use--the odd and unusual rotary and other forms never having been
+practical engines--that is not constructed upon the plan of the cylinder
+and piston. These two parts make the engine. If they are understood only
+differences in construction and detail remain.
+
+Imagine a short tube into which you have inserted a pellet, or wad of
+any kind, so that it fits tolerably, yet moves easily back and forth in
+the bore of the tube. If this pellet or wad is at one end of the tube
+you may, by inserting that end in your mouth and putting air-pressure
+upon it, make it slide to the other end. You do not touch it with
+anything; you may push it back and forth with your breath as many times
+as you wish, not by blowing against it, so to speak, but by producing an
+actual air-pressure upon it which is confined by the sides of the tube
+and cannot go elsewhere. The only pressure necessary is enough to move
+the pellet.
+
+Now, if you push this little pellet one way by the air-pressure from
+your mouth, and then, instead of reversing the tube in the mouth and
+pushing it back again in the same way, reverse the process and suck the
+air out from behind it, it comes back by the pressure of the outside
+atmosphere. This was the way the first steam engines worked. Their only
+purpose was to get the piston lifted, and air-pressure did all the
+actual work.
+
+If you turn the tube, and put an air-pressure first at one end and then
+at the other, and pay no attention to vacuum or atmospheric pressure,
+you will have the principle of the later modern, almost universal,
+high-pressure, double-acting steam-engine.
+
+But now you must imagine that the tube is fixed immovably, and that the
+air-pressure is constant in a pipe leading to the tube, and yet must be
+admitted first to one end of the tube and then to the other alternately,
+in order to push the pellet back and forth in it. It seems simple.
+Perhaps the young reader can find a way to do it, but it required about
+a hundred years for ingenious men to find out how to do precisely the
+same thing automatically. It involves the steam-chest and the
+slide-valve, and all other kinds of steam valves that have been
+invented, including the Corliss cut-off, and all others that are akin to
+it in object and action.
+
+But now imagine the tube closed at each end to begin with, and the
+little moving pellet, or plunger, on the inside. To get the air into
+both ends of the tube alternately, and to use its pressure on each side
+of the pellet, we will suppose that the air-pipe is forked, and that one
+end of each fork is inserted into the side of the tube near the end,
+like the figure below, and imagine also that you have put a finger over
+each end of the tube.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 1]
+
+We are now getting the air-pressure through the pipe in both ends of the
+tube alike, and do not move the pellet either way. To make it move we
+must do something more, and open one end of the tube, and close that
+fork of the air-pipe, and thus get all the pressure on one side of the
+pellet. Remove one finger from the end of the tube, and pinch the fork
+of the air-tube that is on that side. The pellet will now move toward
+that end of the tube which is open. Reverse the process, and it can be
+pushed back again with air-pressure to the other end, and so on
+indefinitely.
+
+Let us improve the process. We will close each end of the tube
+permanently, and insert four cocks in the tube and forked pipe.
+
+We have here two tubes inserted at each end of the large tube, and in
+each of these is a cock. We have each cock connected by a rod to the
+lever set on a pin in the middle of the tube. We must have these cocks
+so arranged that when the lever is moved (say) to the right, A. is
+opened and B. is closed, and D. is opened and C. is closed. Now if the
+air-pressure is constant through the forked air-tube, and the cock E. is
+open, if the top of the lever is moved to the right, the pellet will be
+pushed to the left in the large tube. If the lever is moved to the left,
+and the two cocks that were open are closed, and the two that were
+closed are opened again, the pellet will be sent back to the other end
+of the tube. This movement of the pellet in the tube will occur as often
+as the lever is moved and there is any air-pressure in the forked tube.
+There is a _supply_-cock, opened and an _escape_-cock closed,
+and an escape-cock _opened_ and a supply-cock _closed_, at
+each end of the tube, _every time the lever is moved_.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 2]
+
+We are using air instead of steam, and the movement of these four cocks
+all at the same time, and the result of moving them, is precisely that
+of the slide-valve of a steam-engine. The diagrams of this slide-valve
+would be difficult to understand. The action of the cocks can be more
+readily understood, and the result, and even much of the action, is
+precisely the same.
+
+But to make the arrangement entirely efficient we must go a little
+further into the construction of a steam-engine. The pellet in the tube
+has no connection with the outside, and we can get nothing from it. So
+we give it a stem, thus: and when we do so we change it into a piston
+and its rod. Where it passes through the stopper at the end of the tube
+it must pass air- (or steam-) tight. Then as we push the piston back and
+forth we have a movement that we can attach to machinery at the end of
+the rod, and get a result from. We also move the cocks, or valves,
+automatically by the movement of the rod.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 3]
+
+Turning now to Fig. 3 again let us imagine a connection made between the
+rod and the end of the lever in Fig. 2. Now put on the air (or steam)
+pressure, and when the piston has reached the right-hand end of the tube
+it automatically, by its connections, closes B. and opens A., and opens
+D. and closes C. The pellet will be pushed back in the tube and go to
+the other end of it, through the pressure coming against the piston
+through the part of the air tube where the cock D. is open. It reaches
+the left-hand end of the tube, and we must imagine that when it gets
+there it, in the same manner and by the proper connections, closes D.,
+opens C., closes A. and opens B. If these mechanical movements are
+completed it must be plain that so long as the air (or steam) pressure
+is continued in the forked pipe the piston will automatically cut off
+its supply and open its escape at each alternate end, and move back and
+forth. Any boy can see how a backward and forward movement may be made
+to give motion to a crank. All other details in an engine are questions
+of convenience in construction, and not questions of principle or manner
+of action.
+
+Of older readers, I might request the supposition that, in Fig. 2, only
+the valves A. and B. were automatically and invariably opened and closed
+by the action of the piston-rod of Fig. 3, and that C. and D. were
+controlled solely by the governor, before mentioned, which we will
+suppose to be located at E. Then the escape of the steam ahead of the
+piston must always come at the same time with reference to the stroke,
+but the supply will depend upon the requirements of each individual
+stroke, and the work it has to do, and afford to the piston a greater or
+less push, as the emergencies of that particular instant may require.
+This arrangement would be one of regularity of movement and of economy
+in the use of steam. That which is needed is supplied, and no more. This
+is the principle and the object of the Corliss cut-off, and of all
+others similar to it in purpose. Their principle is that _only the
+escape is automatically controlled by the movements of the
+piston-rod_, occurring always at the same time with reference to the
+stroke, while _the supply is under control of the movement of the
+governor_, and regulated according to the emergencies of the
+movement. The governor, in any of its forms, as ordinarily applied,
+performs only half of this function. It regulates the general supply of
+steam to the cylinder, but the supply-valve continues to be opened,
+always to full width, and always at the same moment with reference to
+the stroke. With the two separate sets of automatic machinery required
+by engines of the Corliss type, the piston does not always receive its
+steam at the beginning of the stroke, and the supply may be cut off
+partially or entirely at any point in its passage along the cylinder, as
+the work to be done requires. The economic value of such an arrangement
+is manifest. No attempt is made here to explain by means of elaborate
+diagrams. It is believed that if the reason of things, and the principle
+of action, is clear, the particulars may be easily studied by any reader
+who is disposed to master mechanical details.
+
+
+
+
+THE AGE OF STEEL
+
+
+In very recent times the processes of civilization have had a strong and
+almost unnoted tendency toward the increased use of the _best_.
+Thus, most that iron once was, in use and practice, steel now is. This
+use, growing daily, widens the scope that must be taken in discussing
+the features of an Age of Steel. One name has largely supplanted the
+other. In effect iron has become steel. Had this chapter been written
+twenty, or perhaps ten, years earlier, it should have been more
+appropriately entitled the Age of Iron. A separation of the two great
+metals in general description would be merely technical, and I shall
+treat the subject very much as though, in accordance with the practical
+facts of the case, the two metals constituted one general subject, one
+of them gradually supplanting the other in most of the fields of
+industry where iron only was formerly used.
+
+The greatest progresses of the race are almost always unappreciated at
+the time, and are certainly undervalued, except by contrast and
+comparison. We must continually turn backward to see how far we have
+gone. An individual who is born into a certain condition thinks it as
+hard as any other until by experience and comparison he discovers what
+his times might have been. As for us, in the year 1894, we are not
+compelled to look backward very far to observe a striking contrast.
+
+[Illustration: IN OLD TIMES. PRYING OUT A "BLOOM."]
+
+All the wealth of today is built upon the forests and prairies and
+swamps of yesterday, and we must take a wider and more comprehensive
+glance backward if we should wish to institute those comparisons which
+make contrasts startling.
+
+We are accustomed to read and to hear of the "Age" of this or that.
+There was a "Stone" Age, beginning with the tribes to whom it came
+before the beginnings of their history, or even of tradition, and if we
+look far backward we may contrast our own time with the times of men who
+knew no metals. They were men. They lived and hoped and died as we do,
+even in what is now our own country. Often they were not even
+barbarians. They builded houses and forts, and dug drains and built
+aqueducts, and tilled the soil. They knew the value of those things we
+most value now, home and country; and they organized armies, and fought
+battles, and died for an idea, as we do. Yet all the time, a time ages
+long, the utmost help they had found for the bare and unaided hand was
+the serrated edge of a splintered flint, or the chance-found fragment
+beside a stream that nature, in a thousand or a million years of
+polishing, had shaped into the rude semblance of a hammer or a pestle.
+All men have in their time burned and scraped and fashioned all they
+needed with an astonishing faculty of making it answer their needs. They
+once almost occupied the world. Such were those who, so far as we know,
+were once the exclusive owners of this continent. They were an
+agricultural, industrious and home-loving people. [Footnote: The Mound
+Builders and Cave Dwellers. They knew only lead and copper.]
+
+Then came, with a strange leaving out of the plentiful and easily worked
+metals which are the subject of this chapter, the great Age of Bronze.
+This next stage of progress after stone was marked by a skillful alloy,
+requiring even now some scientific knowledge in its compounding of
+copper and tin. A thousand theories have been brought forward to account
+for this hiatus in the natural stages of human progress, the truth
+probably being that both tin and copper are more fusible than iron-ores,
+and that both are found as natural metals. Some accident such as
+accounts for the first glass, [Footnote: The story is told by Pliny.
+Some sailors, landing on the eastern coast of Spain, supported their
+cooking utensils on the sand with stones, and built a fire under them.
+When they had finished their meal, glass was found to have been made
+from the niter and sea-sand by the heat of their fire. The same thing
+has been done, by accident, in more recent times, and may have been done
+before the incident recounted. It is also done by the lightning striking
+into sand and making those peculiar glass tubes known as
+_Fulmenites_, found in museums and not very uncommon.] some
+camp-fire unintended fusion, produced the alloy that became the metal of
+all the arms and arts, and so remained for uncounted centuries. In this
+connection it is declared that the Age of Bronze knew something that we
+cannot discover; the art of tempering the alloy so that it would bear an
+edge like fine steel. If this be true and we could do it, we should by
+choice supplant the subject of this chapter for a thousand uses. As the
+matter stands, and in our ignorance of a supposed ancient secret, the
+tempering of bronze has an effect precisely opposite to that which the
+process has upon steel.
+
+Nevertheless, the old Age of Bronze had its vicissitudes. Those men knew
+nothing that we consider knowledge now. It was a time when some of the
+most splendid temples, palaces and pyramids were constructed, and these
+now lie ruined yet indestructible in the nooks and corners of a desert
+world. Perhaps the hard rock was chiselled with tools of tempered
+copper. The fact is of little importance now since the object of the art
+is almost unknown, and the scattered capitals and columns of Baalbeck
+are like monuments without inscriptions; the commemorating memorials of
+a memory unknown. The Age of Bronze and all other ages that have
+preceded ours lacked the great essentials that insure perpetuity. The
+Age of Steel, that came last, that is ours now; a degenerate time by all
+ancient standards; has for its crowning triumph a single machine which
+is alone enough to satisfy the union of two names that are to us what
+Caster and Pollux were to the bronze-armed Roman legions of the heroic
+time--the modern power printing-press.
+
+It may be well to ask and answer the question that at the first view may
+seem to the reader almost absurd. What is steel? The answer must, in the
+majority of instances, be given in accordance with the common
+conception; which is that it is not iron, yet very like it. The old
+classification of the metal, even familiarly known, needs now to be
+supplemented, since it does not describe the modern cast and malleable
+compounds of iron, carbon and metalloids used for structural purposes,
+and constituting at least three-fourths of the metal now made under the
+name of steel. The old term, steel, meant the cast, but malleable,
+product of iron, containing as much carbon as would cause the metal to
+harden when heated to redness and quenched in water. It must also be
+included in the definition that the product must be as free as possible
+from all admixtures except the requisite amount of carbon. This is
+"tool" steel. [Footnote: It must not be understood that tool steel was
+always a cast metal. In manufacturing, iron bars were laid together in
+a box or retort, together with powdered charcoal, and heated to a
+certain degree for a certain time. The carbon from the charcoal was
+absorbed by the iron, and from the blistered appearance of the bars when
+taken out this product was, and is known as "blister" steel.]
+
+And here occurs a strange thing. A skill in chemistry, the successor of
+alchemy, is the educational product of the highest form of civilization.
+
+[Illustration: ANCIENT SMELTING. A RUDE WALL ENCLOSING ALTERNATE LAYERS
+OF IRON ORE AND CHARCOAL.]
+
+Metallurgy is the highest and most difficult branch of chemistry. Steel
+is the best result of metallurgy. Yet steel is one of the oldest
+products of the race, and in lands that have been asleep since written
+history began. Wendell Phillips in a lecture upon "The Lost
+Arts,"--celebrated at the date of its delivery, but now obsolete because
+not touching upon advances made in science since Phillips's day,--states
+that the first needle ever made in England, in the time of Henry VIII,
+was made by a Negro, and that when he died the art died with him. They
+did not know how to prepare the steel or how to make the needle. He adds
+that some of the earliest travelers in Africa found a tribe in the
+interior who gave them better razors than the explorers had. Oriental
+steel has been celebrated for ages as an inimitable product. It is
+certainly true that by the simple processes of semi-barbarism the finest
+tool-steel has been manufactured, perhaps from the days of Tubal Cain
+downward. The keenness of edge, the temper whose secret is now unknown,
+the marvelous elasticity of the tools of ancient Damascus, are familiar
+by repute to every reader and have been celebrated for thousands of
+years. The swords and daggers made in central Asia two thousand years
+ago were more remarkable than any similar product of the present for
+elaborate and beautiful finish as well as for a cutting quality and a
+tenacity of edge unknown to modern days. All the tests and experiments
+of a modern government arsenal, with all the technical knowledge of
+modern times, do not produce such tool-steel. It is also alleged that
+the ancient weapons did not rust as ours do, and that the oldest are
+bright to this day. The steel tools and arms that are made in the
+strange country of India do not rust there, while in the same climate
+ours are eaten away. Besides the secret of tempering bronze, it would
+seem that among the lost arts [Footnote: Modern science dates from three
+discoveries. That of Copernicus, the effect of which was to separate
+scientific astronomy, the astronomy of natural law and defined cause,
+from astrology, or the astronomy of assertion and tradition. That of
+Torricelli and Paschal of the actual and measurable weight of the
+atmosphere, which was the beginning for us of the science of physics,
+and that of Lavoisier who suspected, and Priestly who demonstrated,
+oxygen and destroyed the last vestiges of the theory of alchemy. Stahl
+was the last of these, and Lavoisier the first of the new school in that
+which I have stated is the highest development of modern science,
+chemistry. In all these departments we have no adequate reason to assert
+that we are not ourselves mere students. Some of the functions of
+oxygen, and the simplest, were unknown within five years before the date
+of these chapters.]--a subject that it is easy to make too much
+of--there was a chemical ingredient or proportion in steel that we now
+know nothing of. The old lands of sameness and slumber have kept their
+secrets.
+
+The definition of the word "steel" has been the subject of a scientific
+quarrel on account of new processes. The grand distinguishing trait of
+steel, to which it owes all the qualities that make it valuable for the
+uses to which no other metal can be put, is _homogeneity due to
+fusion_. Wrought iron, while having similar chemical qualities, and
+often as much carbon, is _laminated in structure_. Structural
+qualities are largely increasing in importance, and as the structural
+compounds came gradually to be produced more and more by the casting
+processes; as they ceased to be laminated in structure and became
+homogeneous, they were called by the name of steel. The name has been
+based upon the structure of the material rather than upon its chemical
+ingredients as heretofore. There is now a disposition to call all
+compounds of iron that are crystalline in structure, made homogeneous by
+casting, by the general name of steel, and to distinguish all those
+whose structural quality is due to welding by the name of iron.
+[Footnote: It should be understood that the shapes of structural and
+other forms of what we now call steel are given by rolling the ingot
+after casting, and that the crystalline composition of the metal
+remains.] This is an outline of the controversy about the differences
+which should be expressed by a name, between tool steel and structural
+steel. In tool steel there is an almost infinite variety as to quality.
+The best is a high product of practical science, and how to make the
+best seems now, as hinted above, a lost art. It has, besides, a great
+variety. These varieties are only produced after thousands of
+experiments directed to finding out what ingredients and processes make
+toward the desired result. These processes, were they all known outside
+the manufactories of certain specialists, would little interest the
+general reader. All machinists know of certain brands of tool steel
+which they prefer. Tool steel is made especially for certain purposes;
+as for razors and surgical instruments, for saws, for files, for
+springs, for cutting tools generally. In these there may be little
+actual difference of quality or manufacture. The tempering of steel
+after it has been forged into shape is a specialty, almost a natural
+gift. The manufacture of tool steel, is, as stated, one of the most
+technical of the arts, and one of the most complicated of the
+applications of long experience and experiment.
+
+Cast steel was first made in 1770 by Huntsman, who for the first time
+melted the "blistered" steel, which until that time had been the tool
+steel of commerce, in a crucible. Since that time the process of melting
+wrought iron has become practical and cheap, and results in
+_crystalline_, instead of a laminated structure for all steels. The
+definition of steel now is that it is _a compound of iron which has
+been cast from a fluid state into a malleable mass._
+
+The ordinary test applied to distinguish wrought iron from steel is to
+ascertain whether the metal hardens with heating and suddenly cooling in
+cold water, becoming again softened on reheating and cooling slowly. If
+it does this it is steel of some quality, good or bad; if not, it is
+iron.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first mention of iron-ore in America is by Thomas Harriot, an
+English writer of the time of Raleigh's first colonies. He wrote a
+history of the settlement on Roanoke Island, in which he says: "In two
+places in the countrey specially, one about foure score and the other
+six score miles from the port or place where wee dwelt, wee founde neere
+the water side the ground to be rockie, which by the triall of a
+minerall man, was found to hold iron richly. It is founde in manie
+places in the countrey else." Harriot speaks further of "the small
+charge for the labour and feeding of men; the infinite store of wood;
+the want of wood and the deerness thereof in England." It was before the
+day of coal and coke, or of any of the processes known now. The iron
+mines of Roanoke Island were never heard of again.
+
+Iron-ore in the colonies is again heard of in the history of Jamestown,
+in 1607. A ship sailed from there in 1608 freighted with "iron-ore,
+sassafras, cedar posts and walnut boards." Seventeen tons of iron were
+made from this ore, and sold for four pounds per ton. This was the first
+iron ever made from American ores. The first iron-works ever erected in
+this country were, of course almost, burned by the Indians, in 1622, and
+in connection three hundred persons were killed.
+
+[Illustration: EARLY SMELTING IN AMERICA.]
+
+Fire and blood was the end of the beginning of many American industries.
+Ore was plentiful, wood was superabundant, methods were crude. They
+could easily excel the Virginia colonists in making iron in Persia and
+India at the same date. The orientals had certain processes, descended
+to them from remote times, discovered and practiced by the first
+metal-workers that ever lived. The difference in the situation now is
+that here the situation and methods have so changed that the story is
+almost incredible. There, they remain as always. The first instance of
+iron-smelting in America is a text from which might be taken the entire
+vast sermon of modern industrial civilization.
+
+The orientals lacked the steam-engine. So did we in America. The blast
+was impossible everywhere except by hand, and contrivances for this
+purpose are of very great antiquity. The bellows was used in Egypt three
+thousand years ago. It may be that the very first thought by primitive
+man was of how to smelt the metals he wanted so much and needed so
+badly. His efforts to procure a means of making his fire burn under his
+little dump of ore led him first into the science which has attained a
+new importance in very recent times, pneumatics. The first American
+furnaces were blown by the ordinary leather bellows, or by a contrivance
+they had which was called a "blowing tub," or by a very ancient machine
+known as a _"trompe"_ in which water running through a wooden pipe
+was very ingeniously made to furnish air to a furnace. It is when the
+means are small that ingenuity is actually shown. If the later man is
+deprived of the use of the latest machinery he will decline to undertake
+an enterprise where it is required. The same man in the woods, with
+absolute necessity for his companion, will show an astonishing capacity
+for persevering invention, and will live, and succeed.
+
+[Illustration: WATER-POWER BLOWING TUB.]
+
+In the lack of steam they learned, as stated, to use water-power for
+making the blast. The "blowing-tub" was such a contrivance. It was built
+of wood, and the air-boxes were square. There were two of these, with
+square pistons and a walking-beam between them. A third box held the air
+under a weighted piston and fed it to the furnace. Some of these were
+still in effective use as late as 1873. They were still used long after
+steam came. The entire machine might be called, correctly, a very large
+piston-bellows. A smaller machine with a single barrel may be found now,
+reduced, in the hands of men who clean the interior of pianos, and tune
+them.
+
+The first iron works built in the present United States that were
+commercially successful, were established in Massachusetts, in the town
+of Saugus, a few miles from Boston. The company had a monopoly of
+manufacture under grant for ten years. [Footnote: Some quaint records
+exist of the incidents of manufacturing in those times.
+
+In 1728, Samuel Higley and Joseph Dewey, of Connecticut, represented to
+the Legislature that Higley had, "with great pains and cost, found out
+and obtained a curious art by which to convert, change, or transmute,
+common iron into good steel sufficient for any use, and was the first
+that ever performed such an operation in America." A certificate, signed
+by Timothy Phelps and John Drake, blacksmiths, states that, in June,
+1725, Mr. Higley obtained from the subscribers several pieces of iron,
+so shaped that they could be known again, and that a few days later "he
+brought the same pieces which we let him have, and we proved them and
+found them good steel, which was the first steel that ever was made in
+this country, that we ever saw or heard of." But this remarkable
+transmuting process was not heard of again unless it be the process of
+"case-hardening," re-invented some years ago, and known now to mechanics
+as a recipe.
+
+The smallness of things may be inferred from the fact that, in 1740, the
+Connecticut Legislature granted to Messrs. Fitch, Walker & Wyllys "the
+sole privilege of making steel for the term of fifteen years, upon this
+condition that they should, in the space of two years, make half a ton
+of steel." Even this condition was not complied with and the term was
+extended.] They began in 1643, twenty-three years after the landing,
+which is one of the evidences of the anxiety of those troublesome people
+to be independent, and of how well men knew, even in those early times,
+how much the production of iron at home has to do with that
+independence. This new industry was, at all times, controlled and
+regulated by law.
+
+The very first hollow-ware casting made in America is said to be still
+in existence. It was a little kettle holding less than a quart.
+
+[Illustration: THE FIRST CASTING MADE IN AMERICA.]
+
+The beginnings of the iron industry in America were none too early.
+There came a need for them very soon after they had extended into other
+parts of New England, and into New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and
+Maryland. In 1775, there were a large number of small furnaces and
+foundries. But coal and iron, the two earth-born servants of national
+progress which are now always twins, were not then coupled. The first of
+them was out of consideration. The early iron men looked for water-falls
+instead, and for the wood of the primeval forest. [Footnote: It is now
+easy to learn that a coal-mine may be a more valuable possession than a
+gold-mine, and that iron is better as an industry than silver. There are
+mountains of iron in Mexico, but no coal, and silver-mines so rich that
+silver, smelted with expensive wood fuel, is the staple product of the
+country. Yet the people are among the poorest in Christendom. There is a
+ceaseless iron-famine, so that the chiefest form of railway robbery is
+the stealing of the links and pins from trains. There are almost no
+metal industries. A barbaric agriculture prevails for the want of
+material for the making of tools. The actual means of progress are not
+at hand, notwithstanding the product of silver, which goes by weight as
+a commodity to purchase most that the country needs.] They became very
+necessary to the country in 1755--when the "French" war came, and they
+then began the making of the shot and guns used in that struggle, and
+became accustomed to the manufacture in time for the Revolution. Looking
+back for causes conducive to momentous results, we may here find one not
+usually considered in the histories. But for the advancement of the iron
+industry in America, great for the time and circumstances, independence
+could not have been won, and even the _feeling_ and desire of
+independence would have been indefinitely delayed.
+
+The industry was slow, painful, and uncertain, only because the mechanic
+arts were pursued only to an extent possible with the skill and muscular
+energy of men. There were none of the wonderful automatic mechanisms
+that we know as machine-tools. There was only the almost unaided human
+arm with which to subdue the boundless savagery of a continent, and win
+independence and form a nation besides. The demand for huge masses of
+the most essential of the factors of civilization has grown since,
+because the ironclad and the big gun have come, and those inadequate
+forces and crude methods supplied for a time the demand that was small
+and imperative. The largest mass made then, and frequently spoken of in
+colonial records, was a piece called a "sow;" spelled then "sowe." It
+was a long, triangular mass, cast by being run into a trench made in
+sand. [Footnote: When, later, little side-trenches were made beside the
+first, with little channels to carry the metal into them, the smaller
+castings were naturally called "pigges." Hence our "pig-iron."]
+
+[Illustration: MAKING A TRENCH TO CAST A "SOWE."]
+
+Those were the palmy days of the "trip hammer." Nasmyth was not born
+until 1808, and no machine inventor had yet come upon the scene. The
+steam-hammer that bears his name, which means a ponderous and powerful
+machine in which the hammer is lifted by the direct action of steam in a
+piston, the lower end of whose rod is the hammer-head, has done more for
+the development of the iron industry than any other mechanical
+invention. It was not actually used until 1842, or '43. It finally, with
+many improvements in detail, grew into a monster, the hammer-head, or
+"tup," being a mass of many tons. And they of modern times were not
+content merely to let this great mass fall. They let in steam above the
+piston, and jammed it down upon the mass of glowing metal, with a shock
+that jars the earth. The strange thing about this Titanic machine is
+that it can crack an egg, or flatten out a ton or more of glowing iron.
+Hundreds of the forgings of later times, such as the wrought iron or
+steel frames of locomotives, and the shafts of steamers, and the forged
+modern guns, could not be made by forging without this steam hammer.
+
+[Illustration: THE STEAM HAMMER.]
+
+Then slowly came the period of all kinds of "machine tools." During the
+period briefly described above they could not make sheet metal. The
+rolling mill must have come, not only before the modern steam-boiler,
+but even before the modern plow could be made. Can the reader imagine a
+time in the United States when sheet metal could not be rolled, and even
+tin plates were not known? If so, he can instantly transport himself to
+the times of the wooden "trencher," and the "pewter" mug and pitcher, to
+the days when iron rails for tramways were unknown, and when even the
+"strap-iron," always necessary, was rudely and slowly hammered out on an
+anvil. [Footnote: About 1720, nails were the most needed of all the
+articles of a new country. Farmers made them for themselves, at home.
+The secret of how to roll out a sheet and split it into nail-rods was
+stolen from the one shop that knew how, at Milton, Mass., to give to
+another at Mlddleboro. The thief had the Biblical name of Hashay H.
+Thomas. He stole the secret while the hands of the Milton mill were gone
+to dinner, and served his country and broke up a small monopoly in so
+doing.]
+
+Shears came with the "rolls;" vast engines of gigantic biting capacity,
+that cut sheets of iron as a lady's scissors cut paper. This cut the
+squares of metal used for boiler plates, and the steam-engine having
+come, was turned to the manufacture of materials for its own
+construction. Others were able to bite off great bars.
+
+The first mill in which iron was rolled in America, was built in 1817
+near Connellsville, in Fayette county, Penn. Until 1844, the rolling
+mills of this country produced little more than bar-iron, hoops, and
+plates. All the early attempts at railroads used the "strap" rail;
+unless cast "fish-bellies" were used; which was flat bar-iron provided
+with counter sunk holes, in which to drive nails for holding the iron to
+long stringers of wood laid upon ties. When actual rail-making for
+railroads began, the rolling mill raised its powers to meet the
+emergency. The "T" rail, universally now used, was invented by Robert
+Stevens, president and chief engineer of the Camden and Amboy railroad,
+and the first of them were laid as track for that road in 1832. From
+this time until 1850, rolling mills for making "U" and "T" rails rapidly
+increased in number, but in that year all but two had ceased to be
+operated because of foreign competition.
+
+[Illustration: SHEARS FOR CUTTING BAR-IRON.]
+
+During some five years previous to this writing a revolution has taken
+place in the construction of buildings which has resulted in what is
+known as the "sky-scraper." This was, in many respects, the most
+startling innovation of times that are startling in most other respects,
+and was begun in that metropolis of surprises and successes, the city of
+Chicago. This innovation was really such in the matter of using steel in
+the entire framing of a commercial building, but it was not the first
+use of metal as a building material. The first iron beams used in
+buildings were made in 1854, in a rolling mill at Trenton, N. J., and
+were used in the construction of the Cooper Institute, and the building
+of Harper & Brothers. For these special rolls, of a special invention,
+were made. These have now become obsolete, and a new arrangement is used
+for what are known as "structural shapes."
+
+[Illustration: HYDRAULIC SHEARS. THE KNIFE HAS A PRESSURE OF 3,000 TONS,
+CLIPPING PIECES OF IRON TWO BY FOUR FEET.]
+
+I have spoken of the use of wood-fuel in the early stages of iron
+manufacture in this country, followed by the adoption exclusively of
+coal and its products. Then, many years later, came the departure from
+this in the use of gas for fuel. The first use of this kind is said to
+date as far back as the eighth century, and modifications of the idea
+had been put in practice in this country, in which gas was first made
+from coal and then used as fuel. Then came "natural gas." This product
+has been known for many centuries. It was the "eternal" fuel of the
+Persian fire-worshippers, and has been used as fuel in China for ages.
+Its earliest use in this country was in 1827, when it was made to light
+the village of Fredonia, N. Y. Probably its first use for manufacturing
+purposes was by a man named Tompkins, who used it to heat salt-kettles
+in the Kenawha valley in 1842. Its next use for manufacturing purposes
+was made in a rolling mill in Armstrong county, Penn., in 1874,
+forty-seven years after it had been used at Fredonia, and twenty-nine
+years after it had been used to boil salt.
+
+Now the use of natural gas as manufacturing fuel is universal, not alone
+over the spot where the gas is found, but in localities hundreds of
+miles away. It is one of the strangest developments of modern scientific
+ingenuity. That enormous battery of boilers, which was one of the most
+imposing spectacles of the Columbian Exhibition of 1893, whose roar was
+like that of Niagara, was fed by invisible fuel that came silently in
+pipes from a state outside of that where the great fair was held. We are
+left to the conclusion that the making of the coal into gas at the mine,
+and the shipping of it to the place of consumption through pipes, is
+more certain of realization than were a hundred of the early problems of
+American progress that have now been successful for so long that the
+date of their beginning is almost forgotten.
+
+THE STEEL OF THE PRESENT.--The story of steel has now almost been told,
+in that general outline which is all that is possible without an
+extensive detail not interesting to the general reader. In it is
+included, of necessity, a resume of the progress, from the earliest
+times in this country, of the great industry which is more indicative
+than any other of the material growth of a nation. I now come to that
+time when steel began to take the place that iron had always held in
+structural work of every class. The differences between this structural
+steel and that which men have known by the name exclusively from remote
+ages, I have so far indicated only by reference to the well-known
+qualities of the latter. It now remains to describe the first.
+
+In 1846 an American named William Kelley was the owner of an iron-works
+at Eddyville, Ky. It was an early era in American manufactures of all
+kinds, and the district was isolated, the town not having five hundred
+inhabitants, and the best mechanical appliances were remote.
+
+In 1847, Kelley began, without suggestion or knowledge of any
+experiments going on elsewhere, to experiment in the processes now known
+as the "Bessemer," for the converting of iron into steel. To him
+occurred, as it now appears first, the idea that in the refining process
+fuel would be unnecessary after the iron was melted if _powerful
+blasts of air were forced into the fluid metal_. This is the basic
+principle of the Bessemer process. The theory was that the heat
+generated by the union of the oxygen of the air with the carbon of the
+metal, would accomplish the refining. Kelley was trying to produce
+malleable iron in a new, rapid and effective way. It was merely an
+economy in manufacture he was endeavoring to attain.
+
+To this end he made a furnace into which passed an air-blast pipe,
+through which a stream of air was forced into the mass of melted metal.
+He produced refined iron. Following this he made what is now called a
+"converter," in which he could refine fifteen hundred pounds of metal in
+five minutes, effecting a great saving in time and fuel, and in his
+little establishment the old processes were thenceforth dispensed with.
+It was locally known as "Kelley's air-boiling process." It proved
+finally to be the most important, in large results, ever conceived in
+metallurgy. I refer to it hurriedly, and do not attempt to follow the
+inventor's own description of his constructions and experiments. When he
+heard that others in England were following the same line of experiment,
+he applied for a patent. He was decided to be the first inventor of the
+process, and a patent was granted him over Bessemer, who was a few days
+before him. There is no question that others were more skillful, and
+with better opportunities and scientific associations, in carrying out
+the final details, mechanical and chemical, which have completed the
+Kelley process for present commercial uses. Neither is there any
+question that this back-woods iron-making American was the first to
+refine iron by passing through it, while fluid, a stream of air, which
+is the process of making that steel which is not tool steel, and yet is
+steel, the now almost universal material for the making of structures;
+the material of the Ferris wheel, the wonderful palaces of the Columbian
+exposition, the sky-scrapers of Chicago, the rails, the tacks,
+[Footnote: In the history of Rhode Island, by Arnold, it is claimed that
+the first cold cut nails in the world were made by Jeremiah Wilkinson,
+in 1777. The process was to cut them from an old chest-lock with a pair
+of shears, and head them in a smith's vise. Then small nails were cut
+from old Spanish hoops, and headed in a vise by hand. Needles and pins
+were made by the same person from wire drawn by himself. Supposing this
+to be the beginning of the cut-nail idea, _the machine for making
+them_ would still remain the actual and practical invention, since it
+would mark the beginning of the industry as such. The importance of the
+latter event may be measured by the fact that about the end of the last
+century there began a strong demand. In the homely farm-houses, or the
+little contracted shops of New England villages, the descendants of the
+Pilgrims toiled providently, through the long winter months, at beating
+into shape the little nails which play so useful a part in modern
+industry. A small anvil served to beat the wire or strip of iron into
+shape and point it; a vise worked by the foot clutched it between jaws
+furnished with a gauge to regulate the length, leaving a certain portion
+projecting, which, when beaten flat by a hammer, formed the head. This
+was industry, but not manufacture, for in 1890 the manufacturers of this
+country produced over _eight hundred million pounds_ of iron,
+steel, and wire nails, representing a consumption of this absolutely
+indispensable manufacture for that year, at the rate of over _twelve
+pounds_ for each individual inhabitant of the United States.] the
+fence-wire, the sheet-metal, the rails of the steam-railroads and the
+street-lines, the thousand things that cannot be thought of without a
+list, and which is a material that is furnished more cheaply than the
+old iron articles were for the same purposes.
+
+[Illustration: SECTIONAL VIEW OF A BESSEMER "CONVERTER."]
+
+The technical detail of steel-making is exceedingly interesting to
+students of applied science, but it _is_ detail, the key to which
+is in the process mentioned; the forcing of a stream of air through a
+molten mass of iron. The "converter" is a huge pitcher-shaped vessel,
+hung upon trunnions so as to be tilted, and it is usual to admit through
+these trunnions, by means of a continuing pipe, the stream of air. The
+converters may contain ten tons or more of liquid metal at one time,
+which mass is converted from iron into steel at one operation.
+
+Forty-five years ago, or less, works that could turn out fifty tons of
+iron in a day were very large. Now there are many that make _five
+hundred tons_ of steel in the same time. Then, nearly all the work
+was done by hand, and men in large numbers handled the details of all
+processes. Now it would be impossible for human hands and strength to do
+the work. The steel-mill is, indeed, the most colossal combination of
+Steam and Steel. There are tireless arms, moved by steam, insensible
+alike to monstrous strains and white heat, which seize the vast ingots
+and carry them to and fro, handling with incredible celerity the masses
+that were unknown to man before the invention of the Bessemer process.
+And all these operations are directed and controlled by a man who stands
+in one place, strangely yet not inappropriately named a "pulpit," by
+means of the hand-gear that gives them all to him like toys.
+
+No one who has seen a steel-mill in operation, can go away and really
+write a description of it; no artist or camera has ever made its
+portrait, yet it is the most impressive scene of the modern, the
+industrial, world. There is a "fervent heat," surpassing in its
+impressions all the descriptions of the Bible, and which destroys all
+doubt of fire with capacity to burn a world and "roll the heavens
+together as a scroll." There is a clang and clatter accompanying a
+marvelous order. There are clouds of steam. There are displays of sparks
+and glow surpassing all the pyrotechnics of art. Monstrous throats gasp
+for a draught of white-hot metal and take it at a gulp. Glowing masses
+are trundled to and fro. There are mountains of ore, disappearing in a
+night, and ever renewed. There is a railway system, and the huge masses
+are conveyed from place to place by locomotive engines. There is a water
+system that would supply a town. There may be miles of underground pipes
+bringing gas for fuel. Amid these scenes flit strong men, naked to the
+waist, unharmed in the red pandemonium, guiding every process,
+superintending every result; like other men, yet leading a life so
+strange that it is apparently impossible. The glowing rivers they
+escape; corruscating showers of flying white-hot metal do not fall upon
+them; the leaping, roaring, hungry, annihilating flames do not touch
+them; the gurgling streams of melted steel are their familiar
+playthings; yet they are but men.
+
+The "rolling" of these slabs and ingots into rails is a following
+operation still. The continuous rail is often more than a hundred feet
+in length, which is cut into three or four rails of thirty feet each,
+and it goes through every operation that makes it a "T" rail weighing
+ninety pounds to the yard with the single first heat. There are trains
+of rolls that will take in a piece of white-hot metal weighing six tons,
+and send it out in a long sheet three thirty-seconds of an inch thick
+and nearly ten feet wide. The first steel rails made in this country
+were made by the Chicago Rolling Mill Company, in May, 1865. Only six
+rails were then made, and these were laid in the tracks of the Chicago
+and North Western Railroad. It is said they lasted over ten years. The
+first nails, or tacks, were made of steel at Bridgewater, Mass., at
+about the same date.
+
+[Illustration: ROLLING INGOTS.]
+
+Some thirty years ago there were but two Bessemer converters in the
+United States, and the manufacture of steel did not reach then five
+hundred tons per annum. In 1890 the product was more than five million
+tons.
+
+In 1872 the price of steel was one hundred and eighty-six dollars per
+gross ton. It can be purchased now at varying prices less than thirty
+dollars per ton. The consumption of seventy millions of people is so
+great that it is difficult to imagine how so enormous a mass of almost
+imperishable material can be absorbed, and the latest figures show a
+consumption greatly in excess of those mentioned as the sum of
+manufactures.
+
+We turn again for the comparison without which all figures are valueless
+to the good year 1643, when the "General court" passed a resolve
+commending the great progress made in the manufacture of iron which they
+had licensed two years before, and granted the company still further
+privileges and immunities upon condition that it should furnish the
+people "with barre iron of all sorts for their use at not exceedynge
+twenty pounds per ton." We recall the first little piece of hollow ware
+made in America. We remember how old the old world is said to be and how
+long the tribes of men have plodded upon it, and then the picture
+appears of the progress that has grown almost under our eyes. The real
+Age of Steel began in 1865. It is not yet thirty years old. By
+comparison we are impressed with the fact that the real history of the
+metal is compressed into less than half an ordinary lifetime.
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF ELECTRICITY
+
+
+[Illustration: ERIPUIT CAELO FULMEN, SCEPTRUMQUE TYRANNIS.]
+
+There is a sense in which electricity may be said to be the youngest of
+the sciences. Its modern development has been startling. Its phenomena
+appear on every hand. It is almost literally true that the lighting has
+become the servant of man.
+
+But it is also the oldest among modern sciences. Its manifestations have
+been studied for centuries. So old is its story that it has some of the
+interest of a mediaeval romance; a romance that is true. Steam is gross,
+material, understandable, noisy. Its action is entirely comprehensible.
+The explosives, gunpowder, begriming the nations in all the wars since
+1350, nitroglycerine, oxygen and hydrogen in all the forms of their
+combination, seem to be gross and material, the natural, though
+ferocious, servants of mankind. But electricity floats ethereal, apart,
+a subtle essence, shining in the changing splendors of the aurora yet
+existent in the very paper upon which one writes; mysteriously
+everywhere; silent, unseen, odorless, untouchable, a power capable of
+exemplifying the highest majesty of universal nature, or of lighting the
+faint glow of the fragile insect that flies in the twilight of a summer
+night. Obedient as it has now been made by the ingenuity of modern man,
+docile as it may seem, obeying known laws that were discovered, not
+made, it yet remains shadowy, mysterious, impalpable, intangible,
+dangerous. It is its own avenger of the daring ingenuity that has
+controlled it. Touch it, and you die.
+
+Electricity was as existent when the splendid scenes described in
+Genesis were enacted before the poet's eye as it is now, and was
+entirely the same. Its very name is old. Before there were men there
+were trees. Some of these exuded gum, as trees do now, and this gum
+found a final resting place in the sea, either by being carried thither
+by the currents of the streams beside which those trees grew, or by the
+land on which they stood being submerged in some of the ancient changes
+and convulsions to which the world has been frequently subject. In the
+lapse of ages this gum, being indestructible in water, became a fossil
+beneath the waves, and being in later times cast up by storms on the
+shores of the Baltic and other seas, was found and gathered by men, and
+being beautiful, finally came to be cut into various forms and used as
+jewelry. One has but to examine his pipe-stem, or a string of yellow
+beads, to know it even now. It is amber. The ancient Greeks knew and
+used it as we do, and without any reference to what we now call
+"electricity" their name for it was ELEKTRON. The earliest mention of it
+is by Homer, a poet whose personality is so hidden in the mists of far
+antiquity that his actual existence as a single person has been doubted,
+and he mentions it in connection with a necklace made of it.
+
+But very early in human history, at least six hundred years before
+Christ, this elektron had been found to possess a peculiar property that
+was imagined to belong to it alone. It mysteriously attracted light
+bodies to it after it had been rubbed. Thales, the Franklin of his
+remote time, was the man who is said to have discovered this peculiar
+and mysterious quality of the yellow gum, and if it be true, to him must
+be conceded the unwitting discovery of electricity. It was the first
+step in a science that usurps all the prerogatives of the ancient gods.
+He recorded his discovery, and was impressed with awe by it, and
+accounted for the phenomenon he had observed by ascribing to the dull
+fossil a living soul. That is the unconscious impression still, after
+twenty-five hundred years have passed since Thales died; that hidden in
+the heart of electrical phenomena there is a weird sentience; what a
+Greek would consider something divine and immortal apart from matter.
+But neither Thales, nor Theophrastus, nor Pliny the elder, nor any
+ancient, could conceive of a fact but dimly guessed until the day of
+Franklin; that this secret of the silent amber was also that of the
+thunder-cloud, that the essence that drew to it a floating filament is
+also that which rends an oak, that had splintered their temples and
+statues, and had not spared even the image of Jupiter Tonans himself.
+The spectral lights which hung upon the masts of the ancient galleys of
+the Mediterranean were named Castor and Pollux, not electricity.
+Absolutely no discovery was made, though the religion of ancient Etruria
+was chiefly the worship of a spirit by them seen, but unknown; to us
+electrical science; a science chained, yet really unknown and still
+feared though chained. It is the story of this servitude only that is
+capable of being told, and the first weak bands were a hundred and
+forty-six years in forging; from the Englishman Gilbert's "_De
+Magnete_," to Franklin's Kite.
+
+During all this time, and to a great degree long after, electricity was
+a scientific toy. Experiences in the sparkling of the fur of cats, the
+knowledge that there were fishes that possessed a mysterious paralyzing
+power, and various common phenomena all attributable to some unknown
+common cause, did not greatly increase the sum of actual knowledge of
+the subject. There was no divination of what the future would bring, and
+not the least conception of actual and impending possibilities. When,
+finally, the greatest thinkers of their times began to investigate; when
+Boyle began to experiment, and even the transcendent genius of Newton
+stooped to enquiry; from the days of those giants down to those of the
+American provincial postmaster, Benjamin Franklin, a period of some
+seventy years, almost all the knowledge obtained was only useful in
+indicating how to experiment still further. So small was the knowledge,
+so aimless the long experimenting, that the discovery that not amber
+only, but other substances as well, possessed the electric quality when
+rubbed, was a notable advance in knowledge. Later, in 1792, it was found
+by Gray that certain substances possessed the power of carrying;
+"conducting" as we now term it; the mysterious fluid from one substance
+to another; from place to place. This discovery constituted an actual
+epoch in the history of the science, and justly, since this small
+beginning with a wet string and a cylinder of glass or a globe of
+sulphur was the first unwitting illustration of the net-work of wires
+now hanging all over the world. The next step was to find that all
+substances were not alike in a power to conduct a current; _i.e._,
+that there were "conductors" and "non-conductors," and all varying
+grades and powers between. The next discovery was that there were, as
+was then imagined, several kinds of electricity. This conclusion was
+incorrect, and its use was to lead at last to the discovery, by
+Franklin, that the many kinds were but two, and even these not kinds,
+but qualities, present always in the unchanging essence that is
+everywhere, and which are known to us now by the names that Franklin
+gave them; the _positive_ and _negative_ currents; one always
+present with the other, and in every phenomenon known to electrical
+science.
+
+Probably the first machine ever contrived for producing an electric
+current was made by a monk, a Scotch Benedictine named Gordon who lived
+at Erfurt, in Saxony. I shall have occasion, hereafter, to describe
+other machines for the same purpose, and this first contrivance is of
+interest by comparison. It was a cylinder of glass about eight inches
+long, with a wooden shaft in the center, the ends of which were passed
+through holes in side-pieces, and it is said to have been operated by
+winding a string around the shaft and drawing the ends of the string
+back and forth alternately.
+
+[Illustration: THE FIRST ELECTRICAL MACHINE.]
+
+The Franklinic machine, the modern glass disc fitted with combs,
+rubbers, bands and cranks, is nothing more in principle or manner of
+action than the first crude arrangement of the monk of Erfurt.
+
+All these experiments, and all that for many years followed, were made
+in electricity produced by friction; by rubbing some body like glass,
+sulphur or rosin. Many men took part in producing effects that were
+almost meaningless to them--the preliminaries to final results for us.
+Improved electrical machines were made, all seeming childish and
+inadequate now, and all wonderful in their day. There is a long list of
+immortal names connected with the slow development of the science, and
+among their experiments the seventeenth century passed away. Dufaye and
+the Abbe Nollet worked together about 1730, and mutually surprised each
+other daily. Guericke, better known as the inventor of the air-pump,
+made a sulphur-ball machine, often claimed to have been the first.
+Hawkesbee constructed a glass machine that was an improvement over that
+of Guericke. Stephen Gray unfolded the leading principles of the
+science, but without any understanding of their results as we now
+understand them. The next advance was made in finding a way to hold some
+of the electricity when gathered, and the toy which we know as the
+Leyden Jar surprised the scientific world. Its inventor, Professor
+Muschenbrock, wrote an account of it to Reaumur, and lacks language to
+express the terror into which his own experiments had thrown him. He had
+unwittingly accumulated, and had accidentally discharged, and had, for
+the first time in human experience, felt something of the shock the
+modern lineman dreads because it means death. He had toiled until he
+held the baleful genie in a glass vessel partially filled with water,
+and the sprite could not be seen. Accidentally he made a connection
+between the two surfaces of the jar, and declared that he did not
+recover from the experience for two days, and that nothing could induce
+him to repeat it. He had been touched by the lightning, and had not
+known it. [Footnote: The Leyden Jar has little place in the usefulness
+of modern electricity, and has no relationship with the modern so-called
+"Storage" Battery.]
+
+Then began the fakerism which attached itself to the science of
+electricity, and that has only measurably abandoned it in very late
+times. Itinerant electricians began to infest the cities of Europe,
+claiming medicinal and almost supernatural virtues for the mysterious
+shock of the Leyden Vial, and showing to gaping multitudes the quick and
+flashing blue spark which was, though no man knew it then, a miniature
+imitation of the bolt of heaven. That fact, verging as closely upon the
+sublimest power of nature as a man may venture to and live, was not even
+suspected until Franklin had invented a battery of such jars, and had
+performed hundreds of experiments therewith that finally established in
+his acute, though prosaic, mind the identity of his puny spark with that
+terrific flash that, until that time, had been regarded by all mankind
+as a direct and intentional expression of the power of Almighty God.
+
+Thus Franklin came into the field. He was an investigator who brought to
+his aid a singular capacity possessed by the very few; the capacity for
+an unbiased looking for the hidden reasons of things. There was no field
+too sacred or too old for his prying investigations and his private
+conclusions. He was, as much as any man ever is, an original thinker. He
+knew of all the electrical experiments of others, and they produced in
+his mind conclusions distinctly his own. He was, upon topics pertaining
+to the field of reason, experience and common sense, the clearest and
+most vigorous writer of his time save one, and such conclusions as he
+arrived at he knew how to promulgate and explain. All that Franklin
+discovered would but add to the tedium of the subject of electricity
+now, but from his time definitely dates the knowledge that of
+electricity, in all its developments, there is really but one kind,
+though for convenience sake we may commonly speak of two, or even more.
+He first gave the names by which they are still known to the two
+qualities of one current; a name of convenience only. He knew first a
+fact that still puzzles inquiry, and is still largely unknown--that
+electricity is not _created_, produced, manufactured, by any human
+means, and that all we may do, then or now, is to gather it from its
+measureless diffusion in the air, the world, or the spaces of the wide
+creation, and that, like "heat" and "cold," it is a relative term. He
+demonstrated that any body which has electricity gives it to any other
+body that has at the moment less. Before he had actually tried that
+celebrated experiment which is alone sufficient to give him place among
+the immortals, he had declared the theory upon which he made it to be
+true, and by reasoning, in an age that but dimly understood the force
+and conditions of inductive reason, had proved that lightning is but an
+electric spark. It seems hardly necessary to add that his theories were
+ridiculed by the most intelligent scientists of his time, and scoffed at
+even by the countrymen of Newton and Davy, the members of the Royal
+Society of England. Franklin was a provincial American, and had, in
+other fields than electricity, troubled the British placidity.
+
+[Illustration: B. FRANKLIN]
+
+Only one of these, a man named Collinson, saw any value in these
+researches of the provincial in the wilds of America. He published
+Franklin's letters to him. Buffon read them, and persuaded a friend to
+translate them into French. They were translated afterwards into many
+languages, and when in his isolation he did not even know it, the
+obscure printer, the country postmaster who kept his official accounts
+with his own hands, was the bearer of a famous name. He was assailed by
+the Nollet previously mentioned, and by a party of French philosophers,
+yet there arose, in his absence and without his knowledge, a party who
+called themselves distinctively "Franklinists."
+
+Then came the personal test of the truth of these theories that had been
+promulgated over Europe in the name of the unknown American. He was then
+forty-five years old, successful in his walk and well-known in his
+immediate locality, but by no means as prominent or famous among his
+neighbors as he was in Europe. He was not so fertile in resources as to
+be in any sense inspired, and had privately waited for the finishing of
+a certain spire in the little town of Philadelphia so that he might use
+it to get nearer to the clouds to demonstrate his theory of lightning.
+It was in June, 1752, that this great exemplar of the genius of
+common-sense descended to the trial of the experiment that was the
+simplest and the most ordinary and the most sublime; the commonest in
+conception and means yet the most famous in results; ever tried by man.
+He had grown impatient of delay in the matter of the spire, and hastily,
+as by a sudden thought, made a kite. It was merely a silk handkerchief
+whose four corners were attached to the points of two crossed sticks. It
+was only the idea that was great; the means were infantile. A thunder
+shower came over, and in an interval between sprinklings he took with
+him his son, and went by back ways and alleys to a shed in an open
+field. The two raised the kite as boys did then and do now, and stood
+within the shelter. There was a hempen string, and on this, next his
+hand, he had tied a bit of ribbon and an ordinary iron key. A cloud
+passed over without any indications of anything whatever. But it began
+to rain, and as the string became wet he noticed that the loose
+filaments were standing out from it, as he had often seen them do in his
+experiments with the electrical machine. He drew a spark from the key
+with his finger, and finally charged a Leyden jar from this key, and
+performed all the then known proof-experiments with the lightning drawn
+from heaven.
+
+It is manifest that the slightest indication of the presence of the
+current in the string was sufficient to have demonstrated the fact which
+Franklin sought to fix. But it would have been insufficient to the
+general mind. The demonstration required was absolute. Even among
+scientists of the first class less was then known about electricity and
+its phenomena, and the causes of them, than now is known by every child
+who has gone to school. No estimate of the boldness and value of
+Franklin's renowned experiment can be made without a full appreciation
+of his times and surroundings. He demonstrated that which was undreamed
+before, and is undoubted now. The wonders of one age have been the toys
+and tools of the next through the entire history of mankind. The meaning
+of the demonstration was deep; its results were lasting The
+experimenters thereafter worked with a knowledge that their
+investigations must, in a sense, include the universe. Perhaps the
+obscure man who had toyed with the lightnings himself but vaguely
+understood the real meaning of his temerity. For he had, as usual, an
+intensely practical purpose in view. He wished to find a way of "drawing
+from the heavens their lightnings, and conducting them harmless to the
+earth." He was the first inventor of a practical machine, for a useful
+purpose, with which electricity had to do. That machine was the
+lightning-rod. Whatever its purpose, mankind will not forget the simple
+greatness of the act. At this writing the statue of Franklin stands
+looking upward at the sky, a key in his extended hand, in the portico of
+a palace which contains the completest and most beautiful display of
+electrical appliances that was ever brought together, at the dawn of
+that Age of Electricity which will be noon with us within one decade.
+The science and art of the civilized world are gathered about him, and
+on the frieze above his head shines, in gold letters, that sentence
+which is a poem in a single line. "ERIPUIT CAELO FULMEN, SCEPTRUMQUE
+TYRANNIS." [Footnote: "He snatched the lightning from heaven, and the
+sceptre from tyrants."]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE MAN FRANKLIN.--Benjamin Franklin was born at Boston, Mass., Jan.
+17th, 1706. His father was a chandler, a trade not now known by that
+term, meaning a maker of soaps and candles. Benjamin was the fifteenth
+of a family of seventeen children. He was so much of the same material
+with other boys that it was his notion to go to sea, and to keep him
+from doing so he was apprenticed to his brother, who was a printer. To
+be apprenticed then was to be absolutely indentured; to belong to the
+master for a term of years. Strangely enough, the boy who wanted to be a
+sailor was a reader and student, captivated by the style of the
+_Spectator_, a model he assiduously cultivated in his own extensive
+writings afterwards. He was not assisted in his studies, and all he ever
+knew of mathematics he taught himself. Being addicted to literature by
+natural proclivity he inserted his own articles in his brother's
+newspaper, and these being very favorably commented upon by the local
+public, or at least noticed and talked about, his authorship of them was
+discovered, and this led to a quarrel between the two brothers.
+Nevertheless, when James, the elder brother, was imprisoned for alleged
+seditious articles printed by him, the paper was for a time issued in
+young Benjamin's name. But the quarrel continued, the boy was imposed
+upon by his master, and brother, as naturally as might have been
+expected under the circumstances of the younger having the monopoly of
+all the intellectual ability that existed between the two, and in 1723,
+being then only seventeen, he broke his indentures, a heinous offense in
+those times, and ran away, first to New York and then to Philadelphia,
+where he found employment as a journeyman printer. He had attained a
+skill in the business not usual at the time.
+
+The boy had, up to this time, read everything that came into his hands.
+A book of any kind had a charm for him. His father observing this had
+intended him for the ministry, that being the natural drift of a pious
+father's mind in the time of Franklin's youth, when he discovered any
+inclination to books on the part of a son. But, later, he would neglect
+the devotions of the Sabbath if he had found a book, notwithstanding the
+piety of his family. Sometimes he distressed them further by neglecting
+his meals, or sitting up at night, for the same reason. There is no
+question that young Franklin was a member of that extensive fraternity
+now known as "cranks." [Footnote: Most people, then and now, can point
+to people of their acquaintance whom they hold in regard as originals or
+eccentrics. It is a somewhat dubious title for respect, even with us who
+are reckoned so eccentric a nation. And yet all the great inventions
+which have done so much for civilization have been discovered by
+eccentrics--that is, by men who stepped out of the common groove; who
+differed more or less from other men in their habits and ideals.] He
+read a book advocating exclusive subsistence upon a vegetable diet and
+immediately adopted the idea, remaining a disciple of vegetarianism for
+several years. But there is another reason hinted. He saved money by the
+vegetable scheme, and when his printer's lunch had consisted of
+"biscuits (crackers) and water" for some days, he had saved money enough
+to buy a new book.
+
+This young printer, who, at school, in the little time he attended one,
+had "failed entirely in mathematics," could assimilate "Locke on the
+Understanding," and appreciate a translation of the Memorabilia of
+Xenophon. Even after his study of this latter book he had a fondness for
+the calm reasoning of Socrates, and wished to imitate him in his manner
+of reasoning and moralizing. There is no question but that the great
+heathen had his influence across the abyss of time upon the mind of a
+young American destined also to fill, in many respects, the foremost
+place in his country's history. There was one, at least, who had no
+premonition of this. His brother chastised him before he had been
+imprisoned, and after he had begun to attract attention as a writer in
+one of the only two newspapers then printed in America, and beat him
+again after he was released, having meantime been vigorously defended by
+his apprentice editorially while he languished. To have beaten Benjamin
+Franklin with a stick, when he was seventeen years old, seems an absurd
+anti-climax in American history. But it is true, and when the young man
+ran away there was still another odd episode in a great career.
+
+Upon his first arrival in Philadelphia as a runaway apprentice, with one
+piece of money in his pocket, occurs the one gleam of romance in
+Franklin's seemingly Socratic life. He says he walked in Market Street
+with a baker's loaf under each arm, with all his shirts and stockings
+bulging in his pockets, and eating a third piece of bread as he walked,
+and this on a Sunday morning. Under these circumstances he met his
+future wife, and he seems to have remembered her when next he met her,
+and to have been unusually prepossessed with her, because on the first
+occasion she had laughed at him going by. He was one of those whose
+sense of humor bears them through many difficulties, and who are even
+attracted by that sense in others. He was, at this period, absurd
+without question. Having eaten all the bread he could, and bestowed the
+remainder upon another voyager, he drank out of the Delaware and went to
+church; that is, he sat down upon a bench in a Quaker meeting-house and
+went to sleep, and was admonished thence by one of the brethren at the
+end of the service.
+
+Franklin had, in the time of his youth, the usual experiences in
+business. He made a journey to London upon promises of great advancement
+in business, and was entirely disappointed, and worked at his trade in
+London. Afterwards, during the return voyage to America, he kept a
+journal, and wrote those celebrated maxims for his own guidance that are
+so often quoted. The first of these is the gem of the collection: "I
+resolve to be extremely frugal for some time, until I pay what I owe." A
+second resolve is scarcely less deserving of imitation, for it declares
+it to be his intention "to speak all the good I know of everybody." It
+must be observed that Franklin was afterwards the great maximist of his
+age, and that his life was devoted to the acquisition of worldly wisdom.
+In his body of philosophy there is included no word of confidence in the
+condemnation of offenses by the act or virtue of another, no promise of,
+or reference to, the rewards of futurity.
+
+When about twenty-one years of age, we find this old young man tired of
+a drifting life and many projects, and desiring to adopt some occupation
+permanently. He had courted the girl who had laughed at him, and then
+gone to England and forgotten her. She had meantime married another man,
+and was now a widow. In 1730 he married her. Meantime, entering into the
+printing business on his own account, he often trundled his paper along
+the streets in a wheelbarrow, and was intensely occupied with his
+affairs. His acquisitive mind was never idle, and in 1732 he began the
+publication of the celebrated "Poor Richard's Almanac." This was among
+the most successful of all American publications, was continued for
+twenty-five years, and in the last issue, in 1757, he collected the
+principal matter of all preceding numbers, and the issue was extensively
+republished in Great Britain, was translated into several foreign
+languages, and had a world-wide circulation. He was also the publisher
+of a newspaper, _The Pennsylvania Gazette_, which was successful
+and brought him into high consideration as a leader of public opinion in
+times which were beginning to be troubled by the questions that finally
+brought about a separation from the mother country.
+
+Time and space would fail in anything like a detailed account of the
+life of this remarkable man. His only son, the boy who was with him at
+the flying of the kite, was an illegitimate child, and it is a
+remarkable instance of unlikeness that this only son became a royalist
+governor of New Jersey, was never an American in feeling, and removed to
+England and died there. The sum of Franklin's life is that he was a
+statesman, a financier of remarkable ability, a skillful diplomat, a
+law-maker, a powerful and felicitous writer though without imagination
+or the literary instinct, and a controversialist who seldom, if ever,
+met his equal. He was always a printer, and at no period of his great
+career did he lose his affection for the useful arts and common
+interests of mankind. He is the founder of the American Philosophical
+Society, and of a college which grew into the present University of
+Pennsylvania. To him is due the origin of a great hospital which is
+still doing beneficent work. He raised, and caused to be disciplined,
+ten thousand men for the defense of the country. He was a successful
+publisher of the literature of the common people, yet a literature that
+was renowned. He could turn his attention to the improvement of
+chimneys, and invented a stove still in use, and still bearing his name
+as the author of its principle. [Footnote: The stove was not used in
+Franklin's time to any extent. The "Franklin Stove" was a fireplace so
+far as the advantages were concerned, such as ventilation and the
+pleasure of an open fire. But it also radiated heat from the back and
+sides as well as the front, and was intended to sit further out into a
+room; to be both fireplace and stove.] He organized the postal system of
+the United States before the Union existed. He was a signer of the
+Declaration of Independence. He sailed as commissioner to France at the
+age of seventy-one, and gave all his money to his country on the eve of
+his departure, yet died wealthy for his time. Serene, even-tempered,
+philosophical, he was yet far-seeing, care-taking, sagacious, and
+intensely industrious. He acquired a knowledge of the Italian and
+Spanish languages, and was a proficient French speaker and writer. He
+possessed, in an extraordinary degree, the power of gaining the regard,
+even the affection, of his fellow-men. He was even a competent musician,
+mastering every subject to which his attention was turned; and
+province-born and reared in the business of melting tallow and setting
+types, without collegiate education, he shone in association with the
+men and women who had place in the most brilliant epoch of French
+intellectual history. At fourscore years he performed the work that
+would have exhausted a man of forty, and at the same time wrote, for
+mere amusement, sketches such as the "Dialogue between Franklin and the
+Gout," and added, with the cool philosophy of all his life still
+lingering about his closing hours: "When I consider how many terrible
+diseases the human body is liable to, I think myself well off that I
+have only three incurable ones, the gout, the stone, and old age."
+
+[Illustration: THE FRANKLIN STOVE.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Franklin, electrical experiments went on with varying results,
+confined within what now seems to have been a very narrow field, until
+1790. The great facts outside of the startling disclosure made by
+Franklin's experiments remained unknown. It was another forty years of
+amused and interested playing with a scientific toy. But in that year
+the key to the _utility_ of electricity was found by one Galvani.
+He was not an electrician at all, but a professor of anatomy in the
+university of Bologna. It may be mentioned in passing that he never knew
+the weight or purport of his own discovery, and died supposing and
+insisting that the electric fluid he fancied he had discovered had its
+origin in the animal tissues. Misapprehending all, he was yet
+unconsciously the first experimenter in what we, for convenience,
+designate _dynamic_ electricity. He knew only of _animal_
+electricity, and called it by that name; a misnomer and a mistake of
+fact, and the cause of an early scientific quarrel the promoting of
+which was the actual reason of the advance that was made in the science
+following his accidental and enormously important discovery.
+
+There are many stories of the details of the ordinarily entirely
+unimportant circumstances that led to _Galvanism_ and the
+_Galvanic Battery_. Volta actually made this battery, then known as
+the Voltaic Pile, but he made it because of Galvani's discovery. The
+reader is requested to bear these names in mind; Galvani and Volta. They
+have a unique claim upon us. With others that will follow, they have
+descended to all posterity in the immortal nomenclature of the science
+of electricity. It is through the accidental discovery of the plodding
+demonstrator of anatomy in a medical college, a man who died at last in
+poverty and in ignorance of the meaning of his own work, that we have
+now the vast web of telegraph and telephone wires that hangs above the
+paths of men in every civilized country, and the cables that lie in the
+ooze of the oceans from continent to continent. His discovery was the
+result of one of the commonest incidents of domestic life. Variously
+described by various writers, the actual circumstance seems reducible to
+this.
+
+In Galvani's kitchen there was an iron railing, and immediately above
+the railing some copper hooks, used for the purpose of hanging thereon
+uncooked meats. His wife was an invalid, and wishing to tempt her
+appetite he had prepared a frog by skinning it, and had hung it upon one
+of the copper hooks. The only use intended to be asked of this renowned
+batrachian was the making of a little broth. Another part of the skinned
+anatomy touched the iron rail below, and the anatomist observed that
+this casual contact produced a convulsive twitching of the dead
+reptile's legs. He groped about this fact for many years. He fancied he
+had discovered the principle of life. He made the phenomenon to hang
+upon the facts clustering about his own profession, familiar to him, and
+about which it was natural for him to think. He promulgated theories
+about it that are all now absurd, however tenable then. His was an
+instance of how the fatuities of men in all the fields of science, faith
+or morals, have often led to results as extraordinary as they have been
+unexpected. That he died in poverty in 1798 is a mere human fact. That
+in this life he never knew is merely another. It is but a part of that
+sadness that, through life, and, indeed, through all history, hangs over
+the earthly limitations of the immortal mind.
+
+Volta, his contemporary and countryman, finally solved the problem as to
+the reason why. and made that "Voltaic Pile" which came to be our modern
+"battery." Acting upon the hint given by Galvani's accident, this pile
+was made of thin sheets of metal, say of copper and zinc, laid in series
+one above the other, with a piece of cloth wet with dilute acid
+interposed between each sheet and the next. The sheets were connected at
+the edges in pairs, a sheet of zinc to a sheet of copper, and the pile
+began with a sheet of one metal and ended with one of the other. It is
+to be noted that a single pair would have produced the same result as a
+hundred pairs, only more feebly. A single large pair is, indeed, the
+modern electric battery of one cell. The beginning and the ending sheets
+of the Voltaic pile were connected by a wire, through which the current
+passed. We, in our commonest industrial battery, use the two pieces of
+metal with the fluid between. The metals are usually copper and zinc,
+and the fluid is water in which is dissolved sulphate of copper. The
+wire connection we make hundreds of miles long, and over this wire
+passes the current. If we part this wire the current ceases. If we join
+it again we instantly renew it. There are many forms of this battery.
+The two metals, the _electrodes_, are not necessarily zinc and
+copper and no others. The acidulated fluid is not invariably water with
+sulphate of copper dissolved in it. Yet in all modifications the same
+thing is done in essentially the same way, and the Voltaic pile, and a
+little back of that Galvani's frog, is the secret of the telegraph, the
+telephone, the telautograph, the cable message. In the case of Galvani's
+frog, the fluids of the recently killed body furnished the liquid
+containing the acid, the copper hook and the iron railing furnished the
+dissimilar metals, and the nerves and muscles of the frog's body,
+connecting the two metals, furnished the wire. They were as good as
+Franklin's wet string was. The effect of the passage of a current of
+electricity through a muscle is to cause it to spasmodically contract,
+as everyone knows who has held the metallic handles of an ordinary small
+battery. Many years passed before the mystery that has long been plain
+was solved by acute minds. Galvani thought he saw the electric quality
+_in the tissues of the_ frog. Volta came to see them as produced
+_by chemical action upon two dissimilar metals_. The first could
+not maintain his theories against facts that became apparent in the
+course of the investigations of several years, yet he asserted them with
+all the pertinacious conservatism of his profession, which it has
+required ages to wear away, and died poor and unhonored. The other
+became a nobleman and a senator, and wore medals and honors. It is a
+world in which success alone is seen, and in which it may be truthfully
+said that the contortions of an eviscerated and unconscious frog upon a
+casual hook were the not very remote cause of the greatest advancements
+and discoveries of modern civilization.
+
+Yet the mystery is not yet entirely explained. In the study of
+electricity we are accustomed to accept demonstrated facts as we find
+them. When it is asked _how_ a battery acts, what produces the
+mysterious current, the only answer that can now be given is that it is
+_by the conversion of the energy of chemical affinity into the energy
+of electrical vibrations_. Many mixtures produce heat. The
+explanation can be no clearer than that for electricity. Electricity and
+heat are both _forms of energy_, and, indeed, are so similar that
+one is almost synonymous with the other. The enquiry into the original
+sources of energy, latent but present always, will, when finally
+answered, give us an insight into mysteries that we can only now infer
+are reserved for that hereafter, here or elsewhere, which it is part of
+our nature to believe in and hope for. The theory of electrical
+vibrations is explained elsewhere as the only tenable one by which to
+account for electrical action. One may also ask how fire burns, or,
+rather, why a burning produces what we call "heat," and the actual
+question cannot be answered. The action of fire in consuming fuel, and
+the action of chemicals in consuming metals, are similar actions. They
+each result in the production of a new form of energy, and of energy in
+the form of vibrations. In the action of fire the vibrations are
+irregular and spasmodic; in electricity they are controlled by a certain
+rhythm or regularity. Between heat and electricity there is apparently
+only this difference, and they are so similar, and one is so readily
+converted into the other, that it is a current scientific theory that
+one is only a modified form of the other. Many acute minds have
+reflected upon the problem of how to convert the latent energy of coal
+into the energy of electricity without the interposition of the steam
+engine and machinery. There apparently exist reasons why the problem
+will never be solved. There is no intelligence equal to answering the
+question as to precisely where the heat came from, or how it came, that
+instantly results upon the striking of a common match. It was
+_evolved_ through friction. The means were necessary. Friction, or
+its precise equivalent in energy, must occur. The result is as strange,
+and in the same manner strange, as any of the phenomena of electricity.
+Precisely here, in the beginning of the study of these phenomena, the
+student should be warned that an attitude of wonder or of awe is not one
+of enquiry. The demonstrations of electricity are startling chiefly for
+three reasons: newness, silence, and inconceivable rapidity of action.
+Let one hold a wire in one's hand six or eight inches from the end, and
+then insert that end into the flame of a gas-jet. It is as old as human
+experience that that part of the wire which is not in the flame finally
+grows hot, and burns one's fingers. A change has taken place in the
+molecules of the wire that is not visible, is noiseless, and that has
+_traveled along the wire_. It excites neither wonder nor remark. No
+one asks the reason why. Yet it cannot be explained except by some
+theory more or less tenable, and the phenomenon, in kind though not in
+degree, is as unaccountable as anything in the magic of electricity. In
+a true sense there is, nothing supernatural, or even wonderful, in all
+the vast universe of law. If we would learn the facts in regard to
+anything, it must be after we have passed the stage of wonder or of
+reverence in respect to it. That which was the "Voice of God"--as truly,
+in a sense, it was and is--until Franklin's day, has since been a
+concussion of the air, an echo among the clouds, the passage of an
+electric discharge. It is the first lesson for all those who would
+understand.
+
+The time had now come when that which had seemed a lawless wonder should
+have its laws investigated, formulated and explained. A man named
+Coulomb, a Frenchman, is the author of a system of measurements of the
+electric current, and he it was who discovered that the action of
+electricity varies, not with the distance, but, like gravity, _in the
+inverse ratio of the square of the distance_. Coulomb was the maker
+of the first instrument for measuring a current, which was known as the
+_torsion balance_. The results of his practical investigations made
+easier the practical application of electrical power as we now use it,
+though he foresaw nothing of that application; and the engineer of
+to-day applies his laws, and those of his fellow scientists, as those
+which do not fail. Volta was one of these, and he also furnished, as
+will hereafter be seen, a name for one of the units of electrical
+measurement.
+
+Both Galvani and Volta passed into shadow, when, in 1820, Professor H.
+C. Oersted, of Copenhagen, discovered the law upon which were afterwards
+slowly built the electrical appliances of modern life. It was the great
+principle of INDUCTION. The student of electricity may begin here if he
+desires to study only results, and is not interested in effects, causes,
+and the pains and toils which led to those results. The term may seem
+obscure, and is, doubtless, as a name, the result of a sudden idea; but
+upon induction and its laws the simplest as well as the most complicated
+of our modern electrical appliances depend for a reason for action. Its
+discovery set Ampere to work. They had all imagined previously that
+there was some connection between electricity and magnetism, and it was
+this idea that instigated the investigations of Ampere. It was imagined
+that the phenomena of electricity were to be explained by magnetism.
+This was not untrue, but it was only a part of the truth. Ampere proved
+that _magnetism could also readily be produced by a current of
+electricity_. From this idea, practically carried out, grew the
+ELECTRO MAGNET, and to Ampere we are indebted for the actual discovery
+of the elementary principles of what we now call electrodynamics, or
+dynamic electricity, [Footnote: In all science there is a continual
+going back to the past for a means of expression for things whose
+application is most modern. _Dynamic_; DYNAMO, is the Greek word
+for power; to be able. Once established, these names are seldom
+abandoned. There is no more reason for calling our electrical
+power-producing machine a "Dynamo" than there would be in so designating
+a steam engine or a water-wheel. But, a term of general significance if
+used at all, it has come to be the special designation of that one
+machine. It is brief, easily said, and to the point, but is in no way
+necessarily connected with _electrical_ power distinctively.] in
+which are included the Dynamo, and its twin and indispensable, the
+Motor. Ampere is also the author of the _molecular theory_, by
+which alone, with our present knowledge, can the action of electricity
+be explained in connection with the iron core which is made a magnet by
+the current, and left again a mere piece of iron when the current is
+interrupted. Ten years later Faraday explained and applied the laws of
+Induction, basing them upon the demonstrations of Ampere. The use of a
+core of soft iron, magnetized by the passage of a current through a
+helix of wire wrapping it as the thread does a spool, is the
+indispensable feature, in some form meaning the same thing, with the
+same results, in all machines that are given movement to by an electric
+current. This is the electro-magnet. It is made a magnet not by actual
+contact, or by being made the conductor of a current, but by being
+placed in the "electrical field" and temporarily magnetized by
+induction.
+
+Faraday began his brilliant series of experiments in 1831. To express
+briefly the laws of action under which he worked, he wrote the
+celebrated statement of the Law of Magnetic Force. He proved that the
+current developed by induction is the same in all its qualities with
+other currents, and, indeed, demonstrated Franklin's theory that all
+electricity is the same; that, as to _kind_, there is but one. All
+electrical action is now viewed from the Faradic position.
+
+The story of electricity, as men studied it in the primary school of the
+science, ends where Faraday began. Under the immutable laws he
+discovered and formulated we now enter the field of result, of action,
+of commercial interest and value. We might better say the field of
+usefulness, since commercial value is but another expression for
+usefulness. A revolution has been wrought in all the ways and thoughts
+of men since a date which a man less than sixty years old can recall.
+The laws under which the miracle has been wrought existed from all
+eternity. They were discovered but yesterday. Progress, the destiny of
+man, has kept pace in other fields. We live our time in our predestined
+day, learning and knowing, like grown-up children, what we may. In a
+future whose distance we may not even guess, the children of men shall
+reap the full fruition of the prophesy that has grown old in waiting,
+and "shall be as gods, knowing good from evil."
+
+
+
+
+MODERN ELECTRICITY
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+Electricity, in all its visible exhibitions, has certain unvarying
+qualities. Some of these have been mentioned in the preceding chapter.
+Others will appear in what is now to follow. These qualities or habits,
+invariable and unchangeable, are, briefly:
+
+(1) It has the unique power of drawing, "attracting" other objects at a
+distance.
+
+(2) For all human uses it is instantaneous in action, through a
+conductor, at any distance. A current might be sent around the world
+while the clock ticked twice.
+
+(3) It has the power of decomposing chemicals (Electrolysis), and it
+should be remembered that even water is a chemical, and that substances
+composed of one pure organic material are very rare.
+
+(4) It is readily convertible into heat in a wire or other conductor.
+
+These four qualities render its modern uses possible, and should be
+remembered in connection with what is presently to be explained.
+
+These uses are, in application, the most startling in the entire history
+of civilization. They have come about, and their applications have been
+made effective, within twenty years, and largely within ten. This
+subtlest and most elusive essence in nature, not even now entirely
+understood, is a part of common life. Some years ago we began to spell
+our thoughts to our fellow-men across land and sea with dots and dashes.
+Within the memory of the present high school boy we began to talk with
+each other across the miles. Now there is no reason why we shall not
+begin to write to each other letters of which the originals shall never
+leave our hands, yet which shall stand written in a distant place in our
+own characters, indisputably signed by us with our own names. We
+apparently produce out of nothing but the whirling of a huge bobbin of
+wire any power we may wish, and send it over a thin wire to where we
+wish to use it, though every adult can remember when the difficulty of
+distance, in the propelling of machinery, was thought to have been
+solved to the satisfaction of every reasonable man by the making of wire
+cables that would transmit power between grooved wheels a distance of
+some hundreds of feet. We turn night into day with the glow of lamps
+that burn without flame, and almost without heat, whose mysterious glow
+is fed from some distant place, that hang in clusters, banners, letters,
+in city streets, and that glow like new stars along the treeless prairie
+horizon where thirty years ago even the beginnings of civilization were
+unknown. Yet the mysterious agent has not changed. It is as it was when
+creation began to shape itself out of chaos and the abyss. Men have
+changed in their ability to reason, to deduce, to discover, and to
+construct. To know has become a part of the sum of life; to understand
+or to abandon is the rule. When the ages of tradition, of assertion
+without the necessity for proof, of content with all that was and was
+right or true because it was a standard fixed, went by, the age not
+necessarily of steam, or of steel, or of electricity, but the age of
+thought, came in. Some of the results of this thought, in one of the
+most prominent of its departments, I shall attempt to describe.
+
+A wire is the usual concomitant in all electrical phenomena. It is
+almost the universally used conductor of the current. In most cases it
+is of copper, as pure as it can be made in the ordinary course of
+manufacture. There are other metals that conduct an electrical current
+even better than copper does, but they happen to be expensive ones, such
+as silver. The usual telegraph-line is efficient with only iron wire.
+
+We habitually use the words "conductor" and "conduct" in reference to
+the electric current. A definition of that common term may be useful. It
+is a relative one. _A conductor is any substance whose atoms, or
+molecules, have the power of conveying to each other quickly their
+electricities_. Before the common use of electricity we were
+accustomed to commonly speak of conductors of heat; good, or poor. The
+same meaning is intended in speaking of conductors of electricity.
+_Non-conductors are those whose molecules only acquire this power
+under great pressure_. Electricity always takes the _easiest_
+road, not necessarily the shortest. This is the path that electricians
+call that of "least resistance." There are no absolutely perfect
+conductors, and there are no substances that may be called absolutely
+non-conductors. A non-conductor is simply a reluctant, an excessively
+slow, conductor. In all electrical operations we look first for these
+two essentials: a good conductor and a good non-conductor. We want the
+latter as supports and attachments for the first. If we undertake to
+convey water in a pipe we do not wish the pipe to leak. In conveying
+electricity upon a wire we have a little leak wherever we allow any
+other conductor to come too near, or to touch, the wire carrying the
+current. These little electrical leaks constantly exist. All nature is
+in a conspiracy to take it wherever it can find it, and from everything
+which at the moment has more than some other has, or more than its share
+with reference to the air and the world, of the mysterious essence that
+is in varying quantities everywhere. Glass is the usual non-conductor in
+daily use. A glance at the telegraph poles will explain all that has
+just been said. Water in large quantity or widely diffused is a fair
+conductor. Therefore, the glass insulators on the telegraph-poles are
+cup-shaped usually on the under side where the pin that holds them is
+inserted, so that the rain may not actually wet this pin, and thus make
+a water-connection between the wire, glass, pin, pole and ground.
+
+We are accustomed to things that are subject to the law of gravity.
+Water will run through a pipe that slants downward. It will pass through
+a pipe that slants upward only by being pushed. But electricity, in its
+far journeys over wires, is not subject to gravity. It goes
+indifferently in any direction, asking only a conductor to carry it.
+There is also a trait called _inertia_; that property of all matter
+by which it tends when at rest to remain so, and when in motion to
+continue in motion, which we meet at every step we take in the material
+world. Electricity is again an exception. It knows neither gravity, nor
+inertia, nor material volume, nor space. It cannot be contained or
+weighed. Nothing holds it in any ordinary sense. It is difficult to
+express in words the peculiar qualities that caused the early
+experimenters to believe it had a soul. It is never idle, and in its
+ceaseless journeyings it makes choice of its path by a conclusion that
+is unerring and instantaneous.
+
+We find that it is the constant endeavor of electricity to _equalize
+its quantities and its two qualities, in all substances that are near it
+that are capable of containing it_. To this end, seemingly by
+definite intention, it is found on the outsides of things containing it.
+It gathers on the surfaces of all conductors. If there are knobs or
+points it will be found in them, ready to leap off. When any electrified
+body is approached by a conductor, the fluid will gather on the side
+where the approach is made. If in any conductor the current is weak,
+very little of it, if any, will go off into the conductor before actual
+contact is made. If it is strong, it will often leap across the space
+with a spark. One body may be charged with positive, and another with
+negative, electricity. There is then a disposition to equalize that
+cannot be easily repressed. The positive and the negative will assume
+their dual functions, their existence together, in spite of obstacles.
+So as to quantity. That which has most cannot be restrained from
+imparting to that which has less. The demonstration of these facts
+belongs to the field of experimental, or laboratory, electricity. The
+most common of the visible experiments is on a vast scale. It is the
+thunder-storm. Mother Earth is the great depository of the fluid. The
+heavy clouds, as they gather, are likewise full. Across the space that
+lies between the exchange takes place--the lightning-flash.
+
+In the preceding chapter I have hastily alluded to the phenomenon known
+as the key to electricity as a utilitarian science; a means of material
+usefulness. These uses are all made possible under the laws of what we
+term INDUCTION. To comprehend this remarkable feature of electric
+action, it must first be understood that all electrical phenomena occur
+in what has been termed an "_Electrical Field_" This field may be
+illustrated simply. A wire through which a current is passing _is
+always surrounded by a region of attractive force_. It is
+scientifically imagined to exist in the form of rings around the wire.
+In this field lie what are termed "lines of force." The law as stated is
+that the lines in which the magnetism produced by electricity acts
+_are always at right angles with the direction in which the current is
+passing_. Let us put this in ordinary phrase, and say that in a wire
+through which a current is passing there is a magnetic attraction, and
+that the "pull" is always _straight toward the wire_. This
+magnetism in a wire, when it is doubled up and multiplied sufficiently,
+has strong powers of attraction. This multiplying is accomplished by
+winding the wire into a compact coil and passing a current through it.
+If one should wind insulated wire around a core, or cylinder, and should
+then pull out the cylinder and attach the two ends of the wire to the
+opposite poles of a battery, when the current passed through the coil
+the hollow interior of it would be a strong magnetic field. The air
+inside might be said to be a magnet, though if there were no air there,
+and the coil were under the exhausted receiver of an air-pump, the
+effect would be the same, and the _vacuum_ would be magnetized. A
+piece of iron inserted where the core was, would instantly become a
+magnet, and when the insulated wire is wound around a soft iron core,
+and the core is left in place, we have at once what is known as an
+_Electro-Magnet_.
+
+The wire windings of an electro-magnet are always insulated; wound with
+a non-conductor, like silk or cotton; so that the coils may not touch
+each other in the winding and thus permit the current to run off through
+contact by the easiest way, and cut across and leave most of the coil
+without a current. For it may as well be stated now that no matter how
+good a conductor a wire may be, two qualities of it cause what is called
+"_resistance_"--the current does not pass so easily. These two
+qualities are _thinness_ and _length_. The current will not
+traverse all the length of a long coil if it can pass straight through
+the same mass, and it is made to go the long way _by keeping the wires
+from touching each other_--preventing "contact," and lessening the
+opportunity to jump off which electricity is always looking for.
+
+When this coil is wound in layers, like the thread upon a spool, it
+increases the intensity of the magnetism in the core by as many times as
+there are coils, up to a certain point. If the core is merely soft iron,
+and not steel, it becomes magnetized instantly, as stated, and will draw
+another piece of iron to it with a snap, and hold it there as long as
+there is a current passing through the coil. But as instantly, when the
+current is stopped, this soft iron core ceases to be a magnet, and
+becomes as it was before--an inert and ordinary piece of iron. What has
+just been described is always, in some form, one of the indispensable
+parts of the electromagnetic machines used in industrial electricity,
+and in all of them except the appliances of electric lighting, and even
+in that case it is indispensable in producing the current which consumes
+the points of the carbon, or heats the filament to a white glow. The
+current may traverse the wire for a hundred miles to reach this little
+coil. But, instantly, at a touch a hundred miles away that forms a
+contact, there is a continuous "circuit;" the core becomes a magnet, and
+the piece of iron near it is drawn suddenly to it. Remove the distant
+finger from the button, the contact is broken, and the piece of iron
+immediately falls away again. It is the wonder of _the production of
+instant movement at any distance, without any movement of any connecting
+part_. It is a mysterious and incredible transmission of force not
+included among human possibilities forty years ago. It is now common,
+old, familiar. Conceive of its possibilities, of its annihilation of
+time and space, of its distant control, and of that which it is made to
+mean and represent in the spelled-out words of language, and it still
+remains one of the wonders of the world: the Electric Telegraph.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+MAGNETS AND MAGNETISM.--Having described a magnet that is made and
+unmade at will, it may be appropriate to describe magnets generally. The
+ordinary, permanent magnet, natural or artificial, has little place in
+the arts. It cannot be controlled. In common phrase, it cannot be made
+to "let go" at will. The greatest value of magnetism, as connected with
+electricity, consists in the fact of the intimate relationship of the
+two. A magnet may be made at will with the electric current, as
+described above. A little later we shall see how the process may be
+reversed, and the magnet be made to produce the most powerful current
+known, and yet owe its magnetism to the same current.
+
+The word _Magnet_ comes from the country of _Magnesia_, where
+"loadstone" (magnetic iron ore) seems first to have been found. The
+artificial magnet, as made and used in early experiments and still
+common as a toy or as a piece in some electrical appliances, is a piece
+of fine steel, of hard temper, which has been magnetized, usually by
+having had a current passed through or around it, and sometimes by
+contact with another magnet. For the singular property of a magnet is
+that it may continually impart its quality, yet never lose any of its
+own. Steel alone, of all the metals, has the decided quality of
+retaining its property of being a magnet. A "bar" magnet is a straight
+piece of steel magnetized. A "horseshoe" magnet is a bar magnet bent
+into the form of the letter "U."
+
+Every magnet has two "poles"--the positive, or North pole, and the
+negative, or South pole. If any magnet, of any size, and having as one
+piece two poles only, be cut into two, or a hundred pieces, each
+separate piece will be like the original magnet and have its two poles.
+The law is arbitrary and invariable under all circumstances, and is a
+law of nature, as unexplainable and as invariable as any in that
+mysterious code. All bar magnets, when suspended by their centers, turn
+their ends to the North and South, a familiar example of this being the
+ordinary compass. But in magnetism, _like repels like_. The world
+is a huge magnet. The pole of the magnet which points to the North is
+not the North pole of the needle as we regard it, but the opposite, the
+South.
+
+No one can explain precisely why iron, the purer and softer the better,
+becomes a powerful and effective magnet under the influence of the
+current, and instantly loses that character when the current ceases, and
+why steel, the purer and harder the better, at first rejects the
+influence, and comes slowly under it, but afterwards retains it
+permanently. Iron and steel are the magnetic metals, but there is a
+considerable list of metals not magnetic that are better than they as
+_conductors_ of the electric current. In a certain sense they are
+also the electric metals. A Dynamo, or Motor, made of brass or copper
+entirely would be impossible. All the phenomena of combined magnetism
+and electricity, all that goes to make up the field of industrial
+electric action, would be impossible without the indispensable of
+ordinary iron, and for the sole reason that it possesses the peculiar
+qualities, the affinities, described.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is now an understanding of the electro-magnet, with some idea of
+the part it may be made to play in the movement of pieces, parts, and
+machines in which it is an essential. It has been explained how soft
+iron becomes a magnet, not necessarily by any actual contact with any
+other magnet, or by touching or rubbing, but by being placed in an
+electric field. It acquired its magnetism by induction; by _drawing
+in_ (since that is the meaning of the term) the electricity that was
+around it. But induction has a still wider field, and other
+characteristics than this alone. Some distinct idea of these may be
+obtained by supposing a simple case, in which I shall ask the reader to
+follow me.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM THEORY OF INDUCTION]
+
+Let us imagine a wire to be stretched horizontally for a little space,
+and its two ends to be attached to the two poles of an ordinary battery
+so that a current may pass through it. Another wire is stretched beside
+the first, not touching it, and not connected with any source of
+electricity. Now, if a current is passed through the first wire a
+current will also show in the second wire, passing in an _opposite
+direction_ from the first wire's current. But this current in the
+second wire does not continue. It is a momentary impulse, existing only
+at the moment of the first passing of the current through the wire
+attached to the poles of the battery. After this first instantaneous
+throb there is nothing more. But now cut off the current in the first
+wire, and the second wire will show another impulse, this time in the
+_same direction_ with the current in the first wire. Then it is all
+over again, and there is nothing more. The first of these wires and
+currents, the one attached to the battery poles, is called the
+_Primary_. The second unattached wire, with its impulses, is called
+the _Secondary_.
+
+Let us now imagine the primary to be attached to the battery-poles
+permanently. We will not make or break the circuit, and we can still
+produce currents, "impulses," in the secondary. Let us imagine the
+primary to be brought nearer to the secondary, and again moved away from
+it, the current passing all the time through it. Every time it is moved
+nearer, an impulse will be generated in the secondary which will be
+opposite in direction to the current in the primary. Every time it is
+moved away again, an impulse in the secondary will be in the same
+direction as the primary current. So long, as before, as the primary
+wire is quiet, there will be no secondary current at all.
+
+There is still a third effect. If the current in the primary be
+_increased or diminished_ we shall have impulses in the secondary.
+
+This is a supposed case, to render the facts, the laws of induction,
+clear to the understanding. The experiment might actually be performed
+if an instrument sufficiently delicate were attached to the terminals of
+the secondary to make the impulses visible. The following facts are
+deduced from it in regard to all induced currents. They are the primary
+laws of induction:--
+
+A current which begins, which approaches, or which increases in strength
+in the primary, induces, with these movements or conditions, a momentary
+current in the _opposite direction_ in the secondary.
+
+A current which stops, which retires, or which decreases in strength in
+the primary, induces a momentary current _in the same direction_
+with the current in the primary.
+
+To make the results of induction effective in practice, we must have
+great length of wire, and to this end, as in the case of the
+electro-magnet, we will adopt the spool form. We will suppose two wires,
+insulated so as to keep them from actually touching, held together side
+by side, and wound upon a core in several layers. There will then be two
+wires in the coil, and the opposite ends of one of these wires we will
+attach to the poles of a battery, and send a current through the coil.
+This would then be the primary, and the other would be the secondary, as
+described above. But, since the power and efficiency of an induced
+current depends upon the length of the secondary wire that is exposed to
+the influence of the current carried by the primary, we fix two separate
+coils, one small enough to slip inside of the other. This smaller, inner
+coil is made with coarser wire than the outer, and the latter has an
+immense length of finer wire. The current is passed through the smaller,
+inside coil, and each time that it is stopped, or started, there will be
+an impulse, and a very strong one, through the outer--the secondary
+coil. Leave the current uninterrupted, and move the outer coil, or the
+inner one, back and forth, and the same series of strong impulses will
+be observed in the coil that has no connection with any source of
+electricity.
+
+What I have just described as an illustration of the laws governing the
+production of induced currents, is, in fact, what is known as the
+_Induction Coil_. In the old times of a quarter of a century ago it
+was extensively used as an illustrator of the power of the electric
+current. Sometimes the outer coil contained fifty miles of wire, and the
+spark, a close imitation of a flash of lightning, would pass between the
+terminals of the secondary coil held apart for a distance of several
+feet, and would pierce sheets of plate glass three inches thick. Before
+the days of practical electric lighting the induction-coil was used for
+the simultaneous lighting of the gas-jets in public buildings, and is
+still so used to a limited extent. Its description is introduced here as
+an illustration of the laws of induction which the reader will find
+applied hereafter in newer and more effective ways. The commonest
+instance now of the use of the induction-coil is in the very frequent
+small machine known as a medical battery. There must be a means of
+making and breaking the current (the circuit) as described above. This,
+in the medical battery, is automatic, and it is that which produces the
+familiar buzzing sound. The mechanism is easily understood upon
+examination.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At some risk of tediousness with those who have already made an
+examination of elementary electricity, I have now endeavored to convey
+to the reader a clear idea of (1), what electricity is, so far as known.
+(2) Of how the current is conducted, and its influence in the field
+surrounding the conductor. (3) The nature of the induced current, and
+the manner in which it is produced. The sum of the information so far
+may be stated in other words to be how to make an electromagnet, and how
+to produce an induced current. Such information has an end in view. A
+knowledge of these two items, an understanding of the details, will be
+found, collectively or separately, to underlie an understanding of all
+the machines and appliances of modern electricity, and in all
+probability, of all those that are yet to come.
+
+But in the prominent field of electric lighting (to which presently we
+shall come), there is still another principle involved, and this
+requires some explanation (as well given here as elsewhere) of the
+current theory as to what electricity is. [Footnote: There are several
+"schools" among scientists, those who pursue pure science, irrespective
+of practical applications, and who are rather disposed to narrow the
+term to include that field alone, that are divided among themselves upon
+the question of what electricity is. The "Substantialists" believe that
+it is a kind of matter. Others deny that, and insist that it is a "form
+of Energy," on which point there can be no serious question. Still
+others reject both these views. Tesla has said that "nothing stands in
+the way of our calling electricity 'ether associated with matter, or
+bound ether.'" Professor Lodge says it is "a form, or rather a mode of
+manifestation, of the ether" The question is still in dispute whether we
+have only one electricity or two opposite electricities. The great field
+of chemistry enters into the discussion as perhaps having the solution
+of the question within its possibilities. The practical electrician acts
+upon facts which he knows are true without knowing their cause;
+empirically; and so far adheres to the molecular hypothesis. The
+demonstrations and experiments of Tesla so far produce only new
+theories, or demonstrate the fallacies of the old, but give us nothing
+absolute. Nevertheless, under his investigations, the possibilities of
+the near future are widely extended. By means of currents alternating
+with very high frequency, he has succeeded in passing by induction,
+through the glass of 1 lamp, energy sufficient to keep a filament in a
+state of incandescence _without the use of any connecting wires_.
+He has even lighted a room by producing in it such a condition that an
+illuminating appliance may be placed anywhere and lighted without being
+electrically connected with anything. He has produced the required
+condition by creating in the room a powerful electrostatic field
+alternating very rapidly. He suspends two sheets of metal, each
+connected with one of the terminals of the coil. If an exhausted tube is
+carried anywhere between these sheets, or placed anywhere, it remains
+always luminous.
+
+Something of the unquestionable possibilities are shown in the following
+quotation from _Nature_, as expressed in a lecture by Prof. Crookes
+upon the implied results of Tesla's experiments.
+
+The extent to which this method of illumination may be practically
+available, experiments alone can decide. In any case, our insight into
+the possibilities of static electricity has been extended, and the
+ordinary electric machine will cease to be regarded as a mere toy.
+
+Alternating currents have, at the best, a rather doubtful reputation.
+But it follows from Tesla's researches that, is the rapidity of the
+alternation increases, they become not more dangerous but less so. It
+further appears that a true flame can now be produced without chemical
+aid--a flame which yields light and heat without the consumption of
+material and without any chemical process. To this end we require
+improved methods for producing excessively frequent alternations and
+enormous potentials. Shall we be able to obtain these by tapping the
+ether? If so, we may view the prospective exhaustion of our coal-fields
+with indifference; we shall at once solve the smoke question, and thus
+dissolve all possible coal rings.
+
+Electricity seems destined to annex the whole field, not merely of
+optics, but probably also of thermotics.
+
+Rays of light will not pass through a wall, nor, as we know only too
+well, through a dense fog. But electrical rays of a foot or two
+wave-length, of which we have spoken, will easily pierce such mediums,
+which for them will be transparent.
+
+Another tempting field for research, scarcely yet attacked by pioneers,
+awaits exploration. I allude to the mutual action of electricity and
+life. No sound man of science indorses the assertion that "electricity
+is life." nor can we even venture to speak of life as one of the
+varieties or manifestations of energy. Nevertheless, electricity has an
+important influence upon vital phenomena, and is in turn set in action
+by the living being--animal or vegetable. We have electric fishes--one
+of them the prototype of the torpedo of modern warfare. There is the
+electric slug which used to be met with in gardens and roads about
+Hoinsey Rise; there is also an electric centipede. In the study of such
+facts and such relations the scientific electrician has before him an
+almost infinite field of inquiry.
+
+The slower vibrations to which I have referred reveal the bewildering
+possibility of telegraphy without wires, posts, cables, or any of our
+present costly appliances. It is vain to attempt to picture the marvels
+of the future. Progress, as Dean Swift observed, may be "too fast for
+endurance."] As to this, all we may be said to know, as has been
+remarked, is that it is one of the _forms of energy_, and its
+manifestations are in the form of _motion_ of the minute and
+invisible atoms of which it is composed. This movement is
+instantaneously communicated along the length of a conductor. There
+must, of course, be an end to this process in theory, because all the
+molecules once moved must return to rest, or to a former condition,
+before being moved again. Therefore it is necessary to add that when
+the motion of the last molecule has been absorbed by some apparatus
+for applying it to utility, the last particles, atoms, molecules, are
+restored to rest, and may again receive motion from infringing particles,
+and this transmission of energy along a conductor is
+continuous--continually absorbed and repeated. This is _dynamic_
+electricity; not differing in kind, in essence, from any other, but only
+in application.
+
+If the conductor is entirely insulated, so that no molecular movements
+can be communicated by it to contiguous bodies, all its particles become
+energized, and remain so as long as the conductor is attached to a
+source of electricity. In such a case an additional charge is required
+only when some of the original charge is taken away, escapes. This is
+_Static_ electricity; the same as the other, but in theory
+differing in application.
+
+The molecular theory is, unquestionably, tenable under present
+conditions. It is that to which science has attained in its inquiries to
+the present date. The electric light is scarcely explainable upon any
+other hypothesis. The remaining conclusions may be left in abeyance, and
+without argument.
+
+Science began with static electricity, so called, because its sources
+were more readily and easily discovered in the course of scientific
+accidents, as in the original discovery of the property of rubbed amber,
+etc., and the long course of investigations that were suggested by that
+antique, accidental discovery. What we know as the dynamic branch of the
+subject was created by the investigations of Faraday; induction was its
+mother. It is the practically important branch, but its investigation
+required the invention of machinery to perform its necessary operations.
+Between the two branches the sole difference--a difference that may be
+said not actually to exist--is in _quantity and pressure_.
+
+To the department of static electricity all those industrial appliances
+first known belong, as the telegraph, electro-plating, etc. I shall
+first consider this class of appliances and machines. The most important
+of the class is
+
+[Illustration]
+
+THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH.--The word is Greek, meaning, literally, "to
+write from a distance." But long since, and before Morse's invention, it
+had come to mean the giving of any information, by any means, from afar.
+The existence of telegraphs, not electric, is as old as the need of
+them. The idea of quickness, speedy delivery, is involved. If time is
+not an object, men may go or send. The means used in telegraphing, in
+ancient and modern times, have been sound and sight. Anything that can
+be expressed so as to be read at a distance, and that conveys a meaning,
+is a telegram. [Footnote: This word is of American coinage, and first
+appeared in the _Albany Evening Journal_, in 1852. It avoids the
+use of two words, as "Telegraphic Message," or "Telegraphic Dispatch,"
+and the ungrammatical use of "Telegraph," for a message by telegraph.
+The new word was at once adopted.] Our plains Indians used columns of
+smoke, or fires, and are the actual inventors of the _heliograph_,
+now so called, though formerly meaning the making of a picture by the
+aid of the sun--photography. The vessels of a squadron at sea have long
+used telegraphic signals. Some of the celebrated sentences of our
+history have been written by visual signals, such as "Hold the fort, for
+I am coming," "Don't give up the ship," etc. Order of showing,
+positions, and colors are arbitrarily made to mean certain words. The
+sinking of the "_Victoria_" in 1893, was brought about by the
+orders conveyed by marine signals. Bells and guns signal by sound. So
+does the modern electric telegraph, contrary to original design. It is
+all telegraphy, but it all required an agreed and very limited code, and
+comparative nearness. None of the means in ancient use were available
+for the multifarious uses of modern commerce.
+
+As soon as it was known that electricity could be sent long distances
+over wires, human genius began to contrive a way of using it as a means
+of conveying definite intelligence. The first idea of the kind was
+attempted to be put into effect in 1774. This was, however, before the
+discovery of the electro-magnet (about 1800), or even the Galvanic
+battery, and it was seriously proposed to have as many wires as there
+were letters; each wire to have a frictional battery for generating
+electricity at one end of the circuit, and a pith-ball electroscope at
+the other. The modern reader may smile at the idea of the hurried sender
+of a message taking a piece of cat-skin, or his silk handkerchief, and
+rubbing up the successive letter-balls of glass or sulphur until he had
+spelled out his telegram. Later a man named Dyer, of New York, invented
+a system of sending messages by a single wire, and of causing a record
+to be made at the receiving office by means of a point passing over
+litmus paper, which the current was to mark by chemical action, the
+paper passing over a roller or drum during the operation. The battery
+for this arrangement was also frictional. They knew of no other. Then
+came the deflected-needle telegraph, first suggested by Ampere, and a
+few such lines were constructed, and to some extent operated. In one of
+the original telegraph lines the wires were bound in hemp and laid in
+pipes on the surface of the ground. The expedient of poles and
+atmospheric insulation was not thought of until it was adopted as a last
+resort during the construction of Morse's first line between Washington
+and Baltimore.
+
+In the year 1832, an American named Samuel F. B. Morse was making a
+voyage home from Havre to New York in the sailing packet _Sully_.
+He was an educated man, a graduate of Yale, and an artist, being the
+holder of a gold medal awarded him for his first work in sculpture, and
+no want of success drove him to other fields. But during this tedious
+voyage of the old times in a sailing vessel he seems to have conceived
+the idea which thenceforth occupied his life. It was the beginning of
+the present Electric Telegraph. During this same voyage he embodied his
+notions in some drawings, and they were the beginnings of vicissitudes
+among the most long-continued and trying for which life affords any
+opportunity. He abandoned his studies. He paid attention to no other
+interest. He passed years in silent and lonesome endeavors that seemed
+to all others useless. He subjected himself to the reproaches of all his
+friends, lost the confidence of business men, gained the reputation of
+being a monomaniac, and was finally given over to the following of
+devices deemed the most useless and unpromising that up to that time had
+occupied the mind of any man.
+
+The rank and file of humanity had no definite idea of the plan, or of
+the results that would follow if it were successful. In reality no one
+cared. It was Morse's enterprise exclusively--a crank's fad alone. There
+has been no period in the history of society when the public, as a body,
+was interested in any great change in the systems to which it was
+accustomed. There is always enmity against an improver. In reality, the
+question of how much money Morse should make by inventing the electric
+telegraph was the question of least importance. Yet it was regarded as
+the only one. He is dead. His profits have gone into the mass, his
+honors have become international. The patents have long expired. The
+public, the entire world, are long since the beneficiaries, and the
+benefits continue to be inconceivably vast. Nothing in all history
+exceeds in moral importance the invention of the telegraph except the
+invention of printing with movable types.
+
+[Illustration: AN ELECTRO-MAGNET OF MORSE'S TIME.]
+
+After eight years of waiting, and the repeated instruction of the entire
+Congress of the United States in the art of telegraphy, that body was
+finally induced to make an appropriation of thirty thousand dollars to
+be expended in the construction of an experimental line between
+Washington and Baltimore. And now begins the actual strangeness of the
+story of the Telegraph. After many years of toil, Morse still had
+learned nothing of the efficient construction of an electro-magnet. The
+magnet which he attempted to use unchanged was after the pattern of the
+first one ever made--a bent U-shaped bar, around which were a few turns
+of wire not insulated. The bar was varnished for insulation, and the
+turns of wire were so few that they did not touch each other. The
+apparatus would not work at a distance of more than a few feet, and not
+invariably then. Professor Leonard D. Gale suggested the cause of the
+difficulty as being in the sparseness of the coils of wire on the magnet
+and the use of a single-cell battery. He furnished an electro-magnet and
+battery out of his own belongings, with which the efficiency of the
+contrivance was greatly increased. The only insulated wire then known
+was bonnet-wire, used by milliners for shaping the immense flaring
+bonnets worn by our grandmothers, and when it finally came to
+constructing the instruments of the first telegraphic system the entire
+stock of New York was exhausted. The immense stocks of electrical
+supplies now available for all purposes was then, and for many years
+afterwards, unknown. Previous to the investigations of Professor Henry,
+in 1830, only the theory of causing a core of soft iron to become a
+magnet was known, and the actual magnet, as we make it, had not been
+made. Morse, in his beginnings, had not money enough to employ a
+competent mechanic, and was himself possessed of but scant mechanical
+skill or knowledge of mechanical results. Persistency was the quality by
+which he succeeded.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF MORSE'S INSTRUMENT, 1830, WITH ITS WRITING.]
+
+The battery used first by Morse, as stated, was a single cell. The one
+made later by his partner, Alfred Vail, the real author of all the
+workable features of the Morse telegraph, and of every feature which
+identifies it with the telegraph of the present, was a rectangular
+wooden box divided into eight compartments, and coated inside with
+beeswax so that it might resist the action of acids. The telegraphic
+instrument as made by Morse was a rectangular frame of wood, now in the
+cabinet of the Western Union Telegraph Company, at New York, which was
+intended to be clamped to the edge of a table when in use. He knew
+nothing of the splendid invention since known as the "Morse Alphabet,"
+and the spelling of words in a telegram was not intended by him. His
+complicated system, as described in his caveat filed by him in 1837,
+consisted in a system of signs, by which numbers, and consequently words
+and sentences, were to be indicated. There was then a set of type
+arranged to regulate and communicate the signs, and rules in which to
+set this type. There was a means for regulating the movement forward of
+the rule containing the types. This was a crank to be turned by the
+hand. The marking or writing apparatus at the receiving instrument was a
+pendulum arranged to be swung _across_ the slip of paper, as it was
+unwound from the drum, making a zig-zag mark the points of which were to
+be counted, a certain number of points meaning a certain numeral, which
+numeral meant a word. A separate type was used to represent each
+numeral, having a corresponding number of projections or teeth. A
+telegraphic dictionary was necessary, and one was at great pains
+prepared by Morse. His process was, therefore, to translate the message
+to be sent into the numerals corresponding to the words used, to set the
+types corresponding to those numerals in the rule, and then to pass the
+rule through the appliance arranged for the purpose in connection with
+the electric current. The receiver must then translate the message by
+reference to the telegraphic dictionary, and write out the words for the
+person to whom the message was sent. This was all changed by Vail, who
+invented the "dot-and-dash" alphabet, and modified the mechanical action
+of the instrument necessary for its use. The arrangement of a steel
+embossing-point working upon a grooved roller--a radical difference--was
+a portion of this change. The invention of the axial magnet, also
+Vail's, was another. Morse had regarded a mechanical arrangement for
+transmitting signals as necessary. Vail, in the practice of the first
+line, grew accustomed to sending messages by dipping the end of the wire
+in the mercury cup,--the beginning of the present transmitting
+instrument, which is also his invention--and Morse's "port-rule," types,
+and other complicated arrangements, went into the scrap-heap.
+
+[Illustration: MODERN TRANSMITTER.]
+
+Yet there were some strange things still left. The receiving relay
+weighed 185 pounds. An equally efficient modern one need not weigh more
+than half a pound. Morse had intended to make a _recording_
+telegraph distinctively; it was to his mind its chiefest value. Almost
+in the beginning it ceased to be such, and the recording portion of the
+instrument has for many years been unknown in a telegraph office, being
+replaced by the "sounder." This was also the invention of Vail. The more
+expert of the operators of the first line discovered that it was
+possible to read the signals _by the sound_ made by the armature
+lever. In vain did the managers prohibit it as unauthorized. The
+practice was still carried on wherever it could be without detection.
+Morse was uncompromising in his opposition to the innovation. The
+wonderful alphabet of the telegraph, the most valuable of the separate
+inventions that make up the system, was not his conception. The
+invention of this alphabetical code, based on the elements of time and
+space, has never met with the appreciation it has deserved. It has been
+found applicable everywhere. Flashes of light, the raising and lowering
+of a flag, the tapping of a finger, the long and short blasts of a steam
+whistle, spell out the words of the English language as readily as does
+the sounder in a telegraph-office. It may be interpreted by sight,
+touch, taste, hearing. With a wire, a battery and Vail's alphabet,
+telegraphy is entirely possible without any other appliances.
+
+[Illustration: MODERN "SOUNDER."]
+
+A brief sketch of the difficulties attending the making of the first
+practical telegraph line will be interesting as showing how much and how
+little men knew of practical electricity in 1843. [Footnote: There was
+no possibility of their knowing more, notwithstanding that, viewed from
+the present, their inexperienced struggles seem almost pathetic. So,
+also, do the ideas of Galvani and the experiments and conclusions of all
+except Franklin, until we come to Faraday. It is one of the features of
+the time in which we live that, regardless of age, we are all scholars
+of a new school in which mere diligence and behavior are not rewarded,
+and in which it is somewhat imperative that we should keep up with our
+class in an understanding of _what are now the facts of daily
+life_, wonders though they were in the days of our youth.] To begin
+with, it was a "metallic circuit;" that is, two wires were to be used
+instead of one wire and a "ground connection." They knew nothing of this
+last. Vail discovered and used it before the line was finished. The two
+wires, insulated, were inclosed in a pipe, lead presumably, and the pipe
+was placed in the ground. Ezra Cornell, afterwards the founder of
+Cornell University, had been engaged in the manufacture and sale of a
+patent plow, and undertook to make a pipe-laying machine for this new
+telegraph line. After the work had been begun Vail tested and united the
+conductors as each section was laid. When ten miles were laid the
+insulation, which had been growing weaker, failed altogether. There was
+no current. Probably every schoolboy now knows what the trouble was. The
+earth had stolen the current and absorbed it. The modern boy would
+simply remark "Induction," and turn his attention to some efficient
+remedy. Then, there was consternation. Cornell dexterously managed to
+break the pipe-laying machine, so as to furnish a plausible excuse to
+the newspapers and such public as there may be said to have been before
+there was any telegraph line. Days were spent in consultation at the
+Relay House, and in finding the cause of the difficulty and the remedy.
+Of the congressional appropriation nearly all had been spent. The
+interested parties even quarreled, as mere men will under such
+circumstances, and the want of a little knowledge which is now
+elementary about electricity came near wrecking forever an enterprise
+whose vast importance could not be, and was not then, even approximately
+measured.
+
+[Illustration: ALFRED VAIL.]
+
+Finally, after some weeks delay, it was decided to introduce what has
+become the most familiar feature of the landscape of civilization, and
+string the wires on poles. There is little need to follow the enterprise
+further. Morse stayed with one instrument in the Capitol at Washington,
+and Vail carried another with him at the end of the line. Already the
+type-and-rule and all the symbols and dictionaries had been discarded,
+and the dot-and-dash alphabet was substituted. On April 23d, 1844, Vail
+substituted the earth for the metallic circuit as an experiment, and
+that great step both in knowledge and in practice was taken.
+
+Within an incredibly brief space the Morse Electric Telegraph had spread
+all over the world. No man's triumph was ever more complete. He passed
+to those riches and honors that must have been to him almost as a
+fulfilled dream. In Europe his progresses were like those of a monarch.
+He was made a member of almost all of the learned societies of the
+world, and on his breast glittered the medals and orders that are the
+insignia of human greatness. A congress of representatives of ten of the
+governments of Europe met in Paris in 1858, and it was unanimously
+decided that the sum of four hundred thousand francs--about a hundred
+thousand dollars--should be presented to him. He died in New York in
+1872.
+
+[Illustration: PROF. HENRY'S ELECTROMAGNET AND ARMATURE]
+
+Yet not a single feature of the invention of Morse, as formulated in his
+caveat and described in his original patent, is to be found among the
+essentials of modern telegraphy. They had mostly been abandoned before
+the first line had been completed, and the arrangements of his
+associate, Vail, were substituted. Professor Joseph Henry had, in 1832,
+constructed an electromagnetic telegraph whose signals were made by
+sound, as all signals now are in the so-called Morse system. He hung a
+bar-magnet on a pivot in its center as a compass-needle is hung. He
+wound a U-shaped piece of soft iron with insulated wire, and made it an
+electro-magnet, and placed the north end of the magnetized bar between
+the two legs of this electro-magnet. When the latter was made a magnet
+by the current the end of the bar thus placed was attracted by one leg
+of the magnet and repelled by the other, and was thus caused to swing in
+a horizontal plane so that the opposite end of it struck a bell. Thus
+was an electric telegraph made as an experimental toy, and fulfilling
+all the conditions of such an one giving the signals by sound, as the
+modern telegraph does. It lacked one thing--the essential. [Footnote:
+The details of the construction of the modern telegraph line are not
+here stated. There are none that change, in principle, the outline above
+given.]
+
+The Vail telegraphic alphabet had not been thought of. Had such an idea
+been conceived previously a message could have been read as it is read
+now, and with the toy of Professor Henry which he abandoned without an
+idea of its utility or of the possibilities of any telegraph as we have
+long known them. Morse knew these possibilities. He was one of the
+innumerable eccentrics who have been right, one of the prophets who have
+been in the beginning without honor, not only in respect to their own
+country, but in respect to their times.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF TELEGRAPH SYSTEM.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+THE OCEAN CABLE.--The remaining department of Telegraphy is embodied in
+the startling departure from ancient ideas of the possible which we know
+as cable telegraphy, the messages by such means being _cablegrams_.
+About these ocean systems there are many features not applying to lines
+on land, though they are intended to perform the same functions in the
+same way, with the same object of conveying intelligence in language,
+instantly and certainly, but under the sea.
+
+The marine cables are not simple wires. There is in the center a strand
+of usually seven small copper wires, intended as the conductor of the
+current. These, twisted loosely into a small cable, are surrounded by
+repeated layers of gutta-percha, which is, in turn, covered with jute.
+Outside of all there is an armor of wires, and the entire cable appears
+much like any other of the wire cables now in common use with elevators,
+bridges, and for many purposes. In the shallow waters of bays and
+harbors, where anchors drag and the like occurrences take place, the
+armor of a submarine cable is sometimes so heavy as to weigh more than
+twenty tons to the mile.
+
+There are peculiar difficulties encountered in sending messages by an
+ocean cable, and some of these grow out of the same induction whose laws
+are indispensable in other cases. The inner copper core sets up
+induction in the strands of the outer armor, and that again with the
+surrounding water. There is, again, a species of re-induction affecting
+the core, so that faint impulses may be received at the terminals that
+were never sent by the operators. All of these difficulties combined
+result in what electricians term "retardation." It is one of the
+departments of telegraphy that, like the unavoidable difficulties in all
+machines and devices, educates men to their special care, and keeps them
+thinking. It is one of the natural features of all the mechanical
+sciences that results in the continual making of improvements.
+
+The first impression in regard to ocean cables would be that very strong
+currents are used in sending impulses so far. The opposite is true. The
+receiving instrument is not the noisy "sounder" of the land lines. There
+was, until recently, a delicate needle which swung to and fro with the
+impulses, and reflected beams of light which, according to their number
+and the space between them spelled out the message according to the Vail
+dot-and-dash alphabet. Now, however, a means still more delicate has
+been devised, resulting in a faint wavy ink-line on a long, unwinding
+slip of paper, made by a fountain pen. This strange manuscript may be
+regarded as the latest system of writing in the world, having no
+relationship to the art of Cadmus, and requiring an expert and a special
+education to decipher it. Those faint pulsations, from a hand three
+thousand miles away across the sea, are the realization of a magic
+incredible. The necromancy and black art of all antiquity are childish
+by comparison. They give but faint indications of what they often
+are--the messages of love and death; the dictations of statesmanship;
+the heralds of peace or war; the orders for the disposition of millions
+of dollars.
+
+The story of the laying of the first ocean cable is worthy of the
+telling in any language, but should be especially interesting to the
+American boy and girl. It is a story of native enterprise and
+persistence; perhaps the most remarkable of them all.
+
+The earliest ocean telegraph was that laid by two men named Brett,
+across the English Channel. For this cable, a pioneer though crossing
+only a narrow water, the conservative officials of the British
+government refused a charter. In August, 1850, they laid a single copper
+wire covered with gutta-percha from Dover in England to the coast of
+France. The first wire was soon broken, and a second was made consisting
+of several strands, and this last was soon imitated in various short
+reaches of water in Europe.
+
+But the Atlantic had always been considered unfathomable. No line had
+ever sounded its depths, and its strong currents had invariably swept
+away the heaviest weights before they reached its bed. Its great
+feature, so far as known, was that strange ocean river first noted and
+described by Franklin, and known to us as the Gulf Stream. In 1853 a
+circumstance occurred which again turned the attention of a few men to
+the question of an Atlantic cable. Lieutenant Berryman, of the Navy,
+made a survey of the bottom of the Atlantic from Newfoundland to
+Ireland, and the wonderful discovery was made that the floor of the
+ocean was a vast plain, not more than two miles below the surface,
+extending from one continent to the other. This plain is about four
+hundred miles wide and sixteen hundred long, and there are no currents
+to disturb the mass of broken shells and unknown fishes that lie on its
+oozy surface. It was named the "Telegraphic Plateau," with a view to its
+future use. At either edge of this plateau huge mountains, from four to
+seven thousand feet high, rise out of the depths. There are precipices
+of sheer descent down which the cable now hangs. The Azores and Bermudas
+are peaks of ocean mountains. The warm river known as the Gulf Stream,
+coming northward meets the ice-bergs and melts them, and deposits the
+shells, rocks and sand they carry on this plain. When it was discovered
+the difficulty in the way of an Atlantic cable seemed no longer to
+exist, and those who had been anxious to engage in the enterprise began
+to bestir themselves.
+
+Of these the most active was the American, Cyrus W. Field. He began life
+as a clerk in New York City. When thirty-five years old he became
+engaged in the building of a land line of telegraph across Newfoundland,
+the purpose of which was to transmit news brought by a fast line of
+steamers intended to be established, and the idea is said to have
+occurred to him of making a line not only so far, but across the sea. In
+November, 1856, he had succeeded in forming a company, and the entire
+capital, amounting to 350,000 pounds, was subscribed. The governments of
+England and the United States promised a subsidy to the stockholders.
+The cable was made in England. The _Niagara_ was assigned by the
+United States, and the _Agamemnon_ by England, each attended by
+smaller vessels, to lay the cable. In August, 1857, the Niagara left the
+coast of Ireland, dropping her cable into the sea. Even when it dropped
+suddenly down the steep escarpment to the great plateau the current
+still flowed. But through the carelessness of an assistant the cable
+parted. That was the beginning of mishaps. The task was not to be so
+easily done, and the enterprise was postponed until the following year.
+
+That next year was still more memorable for triumph and disappointment.
+It was now designed that the two vessels should meet in mid-ocean, unite
+the ends of the cable, and sail slowly to opposite shores. There were
+fearful storms. The huge _Agamemnon_, overloaded with her half of
+the cable, was almost lost. But finally the spot in the waste and middle
+of the Atlantic was reached, the sea was still, and the vessels steamed
+away from each other slowly uncoiling into the sea their two halves of
+the second cable. It parted again, and the two ships returned to
+Ireland.
+
+In July they again met in mid-ocean. Europe and America were both
+charitably deriding the splendid enterprise. All faith was lost. It was
+known, to journalism especially, that the cable would never be laid and
+that the enterprise was absurd. But it was like the laying of the first
+land line. There was a way to do it, existing in the brains and faith of
+men, though at first that way was not known. From this third meeting the
+two ships again sailed away, the _Niagara_ for America, the
+_Agamemnon_ for Valencia Bay. This time the wire did not part, and
+on August 29th, 1858, the old world and the new were bound together for
+the first time, and each could read almost the thoughts of the other.
+The queen saluted America, and the president replied. There were salutes
+of cannon and the ringing of bells. But the messages by the cable grew
+indistinct day by day, and finally ceased. The Atlantic cable had been
+laid, and--had failed.
+
+Eight years followed, and the cable lay forgotten at the bottom of the
+sea. The reign of peace on earth and good will to men had so far failed
+to come and they were years of tumult and bitterness. The Union of the
+United States was called upon to defend its integrity in a great war. A
+bitter enmity grew up between us and England. The telegraph, and all its
+persevering projectors, were almost absolutely forgotten. Electricians
+declared the project utterly impracticable, and it began, finally, to be
+denied that any messages had ever crossed the Atlantic at all, and Field
+and his associates were discredited. It was said that the current could
+not be made to pass through so long a circuit. New routes were spoken
+of--across Bering's Strait, and overland by way of Siberia--and
+measures began to be taken to carry this scheme into effect.
+
+Amid these discouragements, Field and his associates revived their
+company, made a new cable, and provided everything that science could
+then suggest to aid final success. This new cable was more perfect than
+any of the former ones, and there was a mammoth side-wheel steamer known
+as the _Great Eastern_, unavailable as it proved for the ordinary
+uses of commerce, and this vessel was large enough to carry the entire
+cable in her hold. In July, 1865, the huge steamer left Ireland,
+dropping the endless coil into the sea. The same men were engaged in
+this last attempt that had failed in all the previous ones. It is one of
+the most memorable instances of perseverance on record. But on August
+6th a flaw occurred, and the cable was being drawn up for repairs. The
+sound of the wheel suddenly stopped; the cable broke and sunk into the
+depths. The _Great Eastern_ returned unsuccessful to her port.
+
+Field was present on board on this occasion, and had been present on
+several similar ones. There was, so far as known, no record made by him
+of his thoughts. There were now five cables in the bed of the Atlantic,
+and each one had carried down with it a large sum of money, and a still
+larger sum of hopes. Yet the Great Eastern sailed again in July, 1866,
+her tanks filled with new cable and Field once more on her decks. It was
+the last, and the successful attempt. The cable sank steadily and
+noiselessly into the sea, and on July 26th the steamer sailed into
+Trinity Bay. The connection was made at Heart's Content, a little New
+Foundland fishing village, and one for this occasion admirably named.
+Then the lost cable of 1865 was found, raised and spliced.
+
+In these later times, if a flaw should occur, science would locate it,
+and go and repair it. Even if this were not true, the fact remains that
+this last cable, and that of 1865, have been carrying their messages
+under the sea for nearly thirty years. The lesson is that repeated
+failures do not mean _final_ failure. There is often said to be a
+malice, a spirit of rebellion, in inanimate things. They refuse to
+become slaves until they are once and for all utterly subdued, and then
+they are docile forever. Yet the malice truly lies in the inaptitude and
+inexperience of men. Had Field and his associates known how to make and
+lay an Atlantic cable in the beginning as well as they did in the end,
+the first one laid would have been successful. The years were passed in
+the invention of machinery for laying, and in improving the construction
+of each successive cable. Many have been laid since then, certainly and
+without failure. Men have learned how. [Footnote: At present the total
+mileage of submarine cables is about 152,000 miles, costing altogether
+$200,000,000. The length of land wires throughout the world is over
+2,000,000 miles, costing $225,000,000. The capital invested in all
+lines, land and sea, is about $530,000,000.]
+
+Thirteen years were passed in this succession of toils, expenditures,
+trials and failures. Field crossed the Atlantic more than fifty times in
+these years, in pursuit of his great idea. At last, like Morse, he was
+crowned with wealth, success, medals and honors. He was acquainted with
+all the difficulties. It is now known that he knew through them all that
+an ocean cable could finally be laid.
+
+THE TELEPHONE.--The telegraph had become old. All nations had become
+accustomed to its use. More than thirty years had elapsed--a long time
+in the last half of the nineteenth century--before mankind awoke to a
+new and startling surprise; the telegraph had been made to transmit not
+only language, but the human voice in articulate speech. [Footnote: It
+has been noted that Morse's idea was a _recording_ telegraph, that
+being in his mind its most valuable point, and that this idea has long
+been obsolete. In like manner, when the Telephone was invented there was
+a general business opinion that it was perhaps an instrument useful in
+colleges for demonstrating the wonders of electricity, but not useful
+for commercial purposes _because it made no record_. "Business will
+always be done in black and white" was the oracular verdict of prominent
+and experienced business men. It may be true, but a little conversation
+across space has been found indispensable. The telephone is a remarkable
+business success.] The fact first became known in 1873, and was the
+invention of Alexander G. Bell, of Chicago.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF TELEPHONE.--THE BLAKE TRANSMITTER.]
+
+There were several, no one knows how many, attempts to accomplish this
+remarkable feat previous to the success of Professor Bell. One of these
+was by Reis, of Frankfort, in 1860. It did not embrace any of the most
+valuable principles involved in what we know as the telephone, since it
+could not transmit _speech_. Professor Bell's first operative
+apparatus was accompanied by simultaneous inventions by Gray, Edison,
+and others. This remarkable instance of several of the great
+electricians of the country evolving at nearly the same time the same
+principal details of a revolutionary invention, has never been fully
+explained. The first rather crude and ineffective arrangements were
+rapidly improved by these men, and by others, prominent among whom is
+Blake, whose remarkable transmitter will be described presently. The
+best devices of these inventors were finally embodied, and in the
+resulting instrument we have one of the chiefest of those modern wonders
+whose first appearance taxed the credulity of mankind. [Footnote: There
+were, until a recent period, a line of statements, alleged facts and
+reasonings, that were incredible in proportion to intelligence. The
+occurrences of recent times have reversed this rule with regard to all
+things in the domain of applied science. It is the ignorant and narrow
+only who are incredulous, and the ears of intelligence are open to every
+sound. All that is not absurd is possible, and all that is possible is
+sure to be accomplished. The telephone, as a statement, _was_
+absurd, but not to the men who worked for its accomplishment and finally
+succeeded. The lines grow narrow. It requires now a high intelligence to
+decide even upon the fact of absurdity within the domain of natural
+law.]
+
+In reality the telephone is simple in construction. Workmen who are not
+accomplished electricians constantly erect, correct and repair the lines
+and instruments. The machine is not liable to derangement. Any person
+may use it the first time of trying, and this use is almost universal.
+Yet it is, from the view of any hour in all the past, an
+incomprehensible mystery. A moment of reflection drifts the mind
+backward and renders it almost incredible in the present. The human
+voice, recognizable, in articulate words, is apparently borne for miles,
+now even for some hundreds of miles, upon an attenuated wire which hangs
+silent in the air carrying absolutely nothing more than thousands of
+little varying impulses of electricity. Not a word that is spoken at one
+end of it is ever heard at the other, and the conclusion inevitable to
+the reason of even twenty years ago would be that if one person does not
+actually hear the other talk there is a miracle. Probably this idea that
+the voice is actually carried is not very uncommon. The facts seem
+incomprehensible otherwise, and it is not considered that if that idea
+were correct it _would_ be a miracle.
+
+The entire explanation of the magic of the telephone lies in electrical
+induction. To the brief explanation of that phenomenon previously given
+the reader is again referred for a better understanding of what now
+follows.
+
+But, first, a moment's consideration may be given to the results
+produced by the use of this appliance, which, as an illustration of the
+way of the world was an innovation that, had it remained uninvented or
+impossible, would never have been even desired. One third more business
+is said now to be transacted in the average day than was possible
+previously. Since many things can now go on together which previously
+waited for direction, authority and personal arrangement, a man's
+business life is lengthened one-third, while his business may mostly be
+done, to his great convenience, from one place. It has given employment
+to a large number of persons, a large proportion of whom are young
+women. The status of woman in the business world has been, fortunately
+or unfortunately, by so much changed. It has introduced a new necessity,
+never again to be dispensed with. It has changed the ancient habits, and
+with them, unconsciously, _the habit of thought_. Contact not
+personal between man and man has increased. The _thought_ of others
+is quickly arrived at. It has caused us to become more appreciative of
+the absolute meanings and values of words, without assistance from face,
+manner or gesture. Laughter may be heard, but tears are unseen. It has
+induced caution in speech and enforces brevity. While none of its
+conveniences are now noted, and all that it gives is expected, the
+telephone, with all its effects, has entered--into the sum of life.
+
+On the wall or table there is a box, and beside this box projects a
+metal arm. In a fork of this arm hangs a round, black, trumpet-shaped,
+hard rubber tube. This last is the receiving instrument. It is taken
+from its arm and held close to the ear. The answers are heard in it as
+though the person speaking were there concealed in an impish embodiment
+of himself. Meantime the talking is done into a hole in the side of the
+box, while the receiver is held to the ear. This is all that appears
+superficially. An operation incredible has its entire machinery
+concealed in these simplicities. It is difficult to explain the mystery
+of the telephone in words--though it has been said to be simple--and it
+is almost impossible unless the reader comprehends, or will now
+undertake to comprehend, what has been previously said on the subject of
+the production of magnetism by a current of electricity, as in the case
+of the electro-magnet, and on the subject of induction and its laws.
+
+It has been shown that electricity produces magnetism; that the current,
+properly managed as described, creates instantly a powerful magnet out
+of a piece of soft iron, and leaves it again a mere piece of iron at the
+will of the operator. This process also will work backwards. An electric
+current produces a magnet, and _a magnet also may be made to produce
+an electric current_. It is one more of the innumerable, almost
+universal, cases where scientific and mechanical processes may be
+reversed. When the dynamo is examined this process is still further
+exemplified, and when we examine the dynamo and the motor together we
+have a striking example of the two processes going on together.
+
+The application of this making of a current, or changing its intensity,
+in the telephone, is apparently totally unlike the continuous
+manufacture of the induced current for daily use by means of the steam
+engine and dynamo. But it is in exact accord with the same laws. It
+will, perhaps, be more readily understood by recalling the results of
+the experiment of the two wires, where it was found that an _approach
+to_, or a _receding from_, a wire carrying a current, produces
+an impulse over the wire that has by itself no current at all. Now, it
+must be added to that explanation that if the battery were detached from
+that conducting wire, and if, instead of its being a wire for the
+carrying of a battery current _it were itself a permanent magnet_,
+the same results would happen in the other wire if it were rapidly moved
+toward and away from this permanent magnet. If the reader should stretch
+a wire tightly between two pegs on a table, and should then hold the
+arms of a common horseshoe magnet very near it, and should twang the
+stretched wire with his finger, as he would a guitar string, the
+electrometer would show an induced alternate current in the wire. Since
+this is an illustration of the principle of the dynamo, stated in its
+simplest form, it may be well to remember that in this manner--with the
+means multiplied and in all respects made the most of--a very strong
+current of electricity may be evolved without any battery or other
+source of electricity except a magnet. In connection with this
+substitution of a magnet for a current-carrying wire, it must be
+remembered that moving the magnet toward or from the wire has the same
+result as moving the wire instead. It does not matter which piece is
+moved.
+
+In addition to the above, it should be stated that not only will an
+induced current be set up in the wire, but also _the magnetism in the
+magnet will be increased or diminished as the tremblings of the wire
+cause it to approach or recede from it_. Therefore if a wire be led
+away from each pole of a permanent magnet, and the ends united to form a
+circuit, an induced current will appear in this wire if a piece of soft
+iron is passed quickly near the magnet.
+
+There is an essential part of the telephone that it is necessary to go
+outside of the field of electricity to describe. It is undoubtedly
+understood by the reader that all sound is produced by vibrations, or
+rapid undulations, of the surrounding air. If a membrane of any kind is
+stretched across a hoop, and one talks against it, so to speak, the
+diaphragm or membrane will be shaken, will vibrate, with the movement of
+the air produced by the voice. If a cannon be fired all the windows
+rattle, and are often broken. A peal of thunder will cause the same jar
+and rattle of window panes, manifestly by what we call
+"sound"--vibrations of the air. The window frame is a "diaphragm." The
+ear is constructed on the same principle, its diaphragm being actually
+moved by the vibrations of air, being what we call hearing. With these
+facts about sound understood in connection with those given in
+connection with the substitution of a magnet for a battery current, it
+is entirely possible for any non-expert to understand the theory of the
+construction of the telephone.
+
+In the Bell telephone, now used with the Blake transmitter [which
+differs somewhat from the arrangement I shall now describe] a bar magnet
+has a portion of its length wound with very fine insulated wire. Across
+the opposite end of this polarized [Footnote: "Polarized" means
+magnetized; having the two poles of a permanent magnet. The term is
+frequently used in descriptions of electrical appliances. Instead of
+using the terms _positive_ and _negative_, it is also
+customary to speak of the "North" or the "South" of a magnet, battery or
+circuit.] magnet, crosswise to it, and very close, there is placed a
+diaphragm of thin sheet iron. This is held only around its edge, and its
+center is free to vibrate toward and from the end of this polarized
+magnet. This thin disc of iron, therefore, follows the movements, the
+"soundwaves," of the air against it, which are caused by the human
+voice. We have an instance of apiece of soft iron moving toward, and
+away from, a magnet. It moves with a rapidity and violence precisely
+proportioned to the tones and inflections of the voice. Those movements
+are almost microscopic, not perceptible to the eye, but sufficient.
+
+The approaching and receding have made a difference, in the quality of
+the magnet. Its magnetism has been increased and diminished, and the
+little coil of insulated wire around it has felt these changes, and
+carried them as impulses over the circuit of which it is a part. In that
+circuit, at the other end, there is a precisely similar little insulated
+coil, upon a precisely similar polarized magnet. These impulses pass
+through this second coil, and increase or diminish the magnetism in the
+magnet round which it is coiled. That, in turn, affects by magnetic
+attraction the diaphragm that is arranged in relation to its magnet
+precisely as described for the first. The first being controlled as to
+the extent and rapidity of its movements by the loudness and other
+modifications of the voice, the impulses sent over the circuit vary
+accordingly. As a consequence, so does the strength of the magnet whose
+coil is also in the circuit. So, therefore, does its power of attraction
+over its diaphragm vary. The result is that the movements that are
+caused in the first diaphragm by the voice, are caused in the second by
+an _attraction_ that varies in strength in proportion to the
+vibrations of the voice speaking against the first diaphragm.
+
+This is the theory of the telephone. The sounds are not carried, but
+_mechanically produced_ again by the rattle of a thin piece of iron
+close to the listener's ear. The voice is full, audible, distinct, as we
+hear it naturally, and as it impinges upon the transmitting diaphragm.
+In reproduction at the receiving instrument it is small in volume;
+almost microscopic, if the phrase may be applied to sound. We hear it
+only by placing the ear close to the diaphragm. It will be seen that
+this is necessarily so. No attempts to remedy the difficulty have so far
+been successful. There is no means of reproducing the volume of the
+voice with the minute vibrations of a little iron disc.
+
+In actual service an electro-magnet is used instead of, or in addition
+to, the bar magnets described above. A steady flow from a battery is
+passed through an instrument which throws this current into proper
+vibrations by stopping the flow of the current at each interval between
+impulses. There is a piece of carbon between the diaphragm and its
+support. The wires are connected with the diaphragm and its support, and
+the current passes through the carbon. When the diaphragm vibrates, the
+carbon is slightly compressed by it. Pressure reduces its resistance,
+and a greater current passes through it and over the wires of the
+circuit for the instant during which the touch remains. This is the
+Blake transmitter. It should be explained that carbon stands low on the
+list of conductors of electricity. The more dense it is, the better
+conductor. The varying pressures of the diaphragm serve to produce this
+varying density and the consequent varying impulses of the current which
+effect the receiving diaphragm.
+
+The transmitter, as above described, is in the square box, and its round
+black diaphragm may be seen behind the round hole into which one talks.
+[Footnote: Shouting into a telephone doubtless comes of the idea,
+unconscious, that one is speaking to a person at a distance. To speak
+distinctly is better, and in an ordinary tone.] The receiver is the
+trumpet-shaped tube which hangs on its side, and is taken from its hook
+to be used. The call-bell has nothing to do with the telephone. It is
+operated by a small magneto-generator,--a very near relative of the
+dynamo-the current from which is sent over the telephone circuit (the
+same wires) when the small crank is turned. Sometimes the question
+occurs: "Why ring one's own bell when one desires to ring only that at
+the central office?" The answer is that both bells are in the same
+circuit. If the circuit is uninterrupted your bell will ring when you
+ring the other, and a bell at each end of your circuit is necessary in
+any case, else you could not yourself be called.
+
+When the receiving instrument is on its hook its weight depresses the
+lever slightly. This slight movement _connects_ the bell circuit
+and _disconnects_ the telephone circuit. Take it off the hook and
+the reverse is effected.
+
+The long-distance telephone differs from the ordinary only in larger
+conductors, improved instruments, and a metallic circuit--two wires
+instead of the ordinary single wire and ground connections.
+
+[Illustration: TELEAUTOGRAPH TRANSMITTING INSTRUMENT.]
+
+THE TELAUTOGRAPH.--This, the latest of modern miracles in the field of
+electricity, comes naturally after the telegraph and telephone, since it
+supplements them as a means of communication between individuals. It
+also is the invention of Prof. Elisha Gray, who seems to be as well the
+author of the name of his extraordinary achievement. It is not the first
+instrument of the kind attempted. The desire to find a means of writing
+at a distance is old. Bain, of Edinburgh, made a machine partially
+successful fifty years ago. Like the telegraph as intended by Morse,
+there was the interposition of typesetting before a message could be
+sent. It did not write, or follow the hand of the operator in writing,
+though it did reproduce at the other end of the circuit in facsimile the
+faces of the types that had been set by the sender. It was a process by
+electrolysis, well understood by all electricians. Several of this
+variety of writing telegraphs have been made, some of them almost
+successful, but all lacking the vital essential. [Footnote: The lack of
+_one vital essential_ has been fatal to hundreds of inventions.
+Inventors unconsciously follow paths made by predecessors. The entire
+class of transmitting instruments must dispense with tedious
+preliminaries, and must use _words_. Vail accomplished this in
+telegraphy. Bell and others in the telephone, and Gray has borne the
+same fact in mind in the present development of the telautograph.] In
+1856 Casselli, of Florence, made a writing telegraph which had a
+pendulum arrangement weighing fourteen pounds. Only one was ever made,
+but it resulted in many new ideas all pertaining to the facsimile
+systems--the following of the faces of types--and all were finally
+abandoned.
+
+The invention of Gray is a departure. The sender of a message sits down
+at a small desk and takes up a pencil, writing with it on ordinary paper
+and in his usual manner. A pen at the other end of the circuit follows
+every movement of his hand. The result is an autograph letter a hundred
+miles or more away. A man in Chicago may write and sign a check payable
+in Indianapolis. Personal directions may be given authoritatively and
+privately. As in the case of the telephone, no intervening operator is
+necessary. No expertness is required. Even the use of the alphabet is
+not necessary. A drawing of any description, anything that can be traced
+with a pen or pencil, is copied precisely by the pen at the receiving
+desk. The possibilities of this instrument, the uses it may develop, are
+almost inconceivable. It might be imagined that the lines drawn would be
+continuous. On the contrary, when the pen is lifted by the writer at the
+sending desk it also lifts itself from the paper at that of the
+receiver.
+
+The action of the telautograph depends upon the variations in magnetic
+strength between two small electro-magnets. It has been seen that an
+electro-magnet exerts its attractive force in proportion to the current
+which passes through its coil. To use a phrase entirely non-technical,
+it will "pull" hard or easy in proportion to the strength of the passing
+current. This fact has been observed as the cause of action in the
+telephone, where one diaphragm, moved by the air-vibrations caused by
+the voice, causes a varying current to pass over the wire, attracting
+the other diaphragm less or more as the first is moved toward or away
+from its magnet. In the telautograph the varying currents are caused not
+by the diaphragm influenced by the voice, but _by a pencil moved by
+the hand_.
+
+To show how these movements may be caused let us imagine a case that may
+occur in nature. It is an interesting mechanical study. There is an
+upright rush or reed growing in the middle of a running stream. The stem
+of this rush has elasticity naturally; it has a tendency to stand
+upright; but it bends when there is a current against it. It is easy
+enough to imagine it bending down stream more or less as the current is
+more or less strong.
+
+Imagine now another stream entering the first at right angles to it, and
+that the rush stands in the center of both currents. It will then bend
+to the force of the second stream also, and the direction in which it
+will lean will be a compromise between the forces of the two. Lessen the
+flow of the current in one of the streams, and the rush will bend a
+little less before that current and swing around to the side from which
+it receives less pressure. Cut off either of the currents entirely, and
+it will bend in the direction of the other current only. In a word,
+_if the quantity or strength of the current of both streams can be
+controlled at will, the rush can be made to swing in any direction
+between the two, and its tip will describe any figure desired, aided, of
+course, by its own disposition to stand upright when there is no
+pressure_.
+
+Let us imagine the rush to be a pen or pencil, and the two streams of
+water to be two currents of electricity having power to sway and move
+this pencil in proportion to their relative strength, as the streams did
+the rush. Imagine further that these two currents are varied and changed
+with reference to each other by the movements of a pen in a man's hand
+at another place. It is an essential part of the mechanism of the
+telautograph, and the movement is known among mechanicians as
+"compounding a point."
+
+Gray, while using the principles involved in compounding a point, seems
+to have discarded the ways of transmitting magnetic impulses of varying
+strength commonly in use. His method he calls the "step-by-step"
+principle, and it is a striking example of what patience and ingenuity
+may accomplish in the management of what is reputedly the most elusive
+and difficult of the powers of nature. The machine was some six years in
+being brought into practical form, and was perfected only after a long
+series of experiments. In its operation it deals with infinitesimal
+measurements and quantities. The first attempts were on the "variable
+current" system, which was later discarded for the "step-by-step" plan
+mentioned.
+
+In writing an ordinary lead pencil may be used. From the point of this
+two silk cords are extended diagonally, their directions being at right
+angles to each other, and the ends of these cords enter openings made
+for them in the cast iron case of the instrument on each side of the
+small desk on which the writing is done.
+
+Inside the case each cord is wound on a small drum which is mounted on a
+vertical shaft. Now if the pencil-point is moved straight upward or
+downward it is manifest that both shafts will move alike. If the
+movement is oblique in any direction, one of the shafts will turn more
+than the other, and the degree of all these turnings of each shaft in
+reference to the other will be precisely governed by the direction in
+which the pencil-point is moved.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF MECHANICAL TELAUTOGRAPH. BOW-DRILL
+ARRANGEMENT.]
+
+Now, suppose each shaft to carry a small, toothed wheel, and that upon
+these teeth a small arm rests. As the wheel turns this arm will move as
+a pawl does on a ratchet. Imagine that at each slight depression between
+the ratchet-teeth it breaks a contact and cuts off a current, and at
+each slight rise renews the contact and permits a current to pass. This
+current affects an electro-magnet--one for each shaft--at the receiving
+end, and each of these magnets, when the current is on, attracts an
+armature bearing a pawl, which, being lifted, allows the notched wheel,
+upon which it bears, to turn _to the extent of one notch_. The
+arrangement may be called an electric clutch, that may be arranged in
+many ways, and the detail of its action is unimportant in description,
+so that it be borne in mind that _each time a notch is passed in
+turning the shaft by drawing upon or relaxing the cords attached to the
+pencil-point_, an impulse of electricity is sent to an electro-magnet
+and armature which allows _a corresponding wheel and its shaft to turn
+one notch, or as many notches, as are passed at the transmitting
+shaft_. In moving the pencil one inch to one side, we will suppose it
+permits the shaft on which the cord is wound to turn forty notches. Then
+forty impulses of electricity have been sent over the wire, the clutch
+has been released forty times, and the shaft to which it is attached has
+turned precisely as much as the shaft has which was turned, or was
+allowed to turn, by the cord wound upon it and attached to the pencil.
+
+It will be remembered that the arrangement is double. There are two
+shafts operated by the writer's pencil--one on each side of it. Two
+corresponding shafts occupy relative positions in respect to the
+automatic pen of the receiving instrument. There are two circuits, and
+two wires are at present necessary for the operation of the instrument.
+It remains to describe the manner of operating the automatic pen by
+connection with its two shafts which are turned by the step-by-step
+arrangement described, precisely as much and at the same time as those
+of the transmitting instrument are.
+
+[Illustration: WORK OF THE TELAUTOGRAPH. COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION, 1893.]
+
+To each shaft of the receiving instrument is attached an aluminum
+pen-arm by means of cords, each arm being fixed, in regard to its shaft,
+as a bow drill is in regard to its drill. These arms meet in the center
+of the writing tablet, V-shaped, as the cords are with relation to the
+writer's pencil in the sending instrument. A small tube conveys ink from
+a reservoir along one of the pen-arms, and into a glass tube upright at
+the junction of the arms. This tube is the pen. Now, let us imagine the
+pencil of the writer pushed straight upward from the apex of the
+V-shaped figure the cords and pencil-point make on the writing desk.
+Then both the shafts at the points of the arms of the V will rotate
+equally. [Footnote: See diagram of mechanical Telautograph, and of bow
+drill. In the latter, in ordinary use, the stick and string; rotate the
+spool. Rotating the spool will, in turn, move the stick and string, and
+this is its action in the pen-arms of the Telautograph.] The number of
+impulses sent from each of these shafts, by the means explained, will be
+equal. Each of the shafts of the receiving instrument will rotate alike,
+and each draw up its arm of the automatic pen precisely as though one
+took hold of the points of the two legs of the V, and drew them apart to
+right and left in a straight line. This moves the apex of the V, with
+its pen, in a straight line upward at the same time the writer at the
+sending instrument pushed his pencil upward. If this one movement,
+considered alone, is understood, all the rest follow by the same means.
+This is, as nearly as it may be described without the use of technical
+mechanical terms, the principle of the telautograph. It must be seen
+that all that is necessary to describe any movement of the sender's
+pencil upon the paper under the receiving pen is that the rotating
+upright shafts of the latter should move precisely as much, and at the
+same time, with those two which get their movement from the wound cords
+and attached pencil-points in the hand of the writer.
+
+Only one essential item of the movement remains. The shafts of both
+instruments must be rotated by some separate mechanical agency, capable
+of being automatically reversed. By an arrangement unnecessary to
+explain in detail, the pencil of the writer lifted from the paper
+resting on the metallic table which forms the desk; results in the
+automatic lifting of the pen from the paper at the receiving desk.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Prof. Elisha Gray was born in 1835, in Ohio. He was a blacksmith, and
+later, a carpenter. But he was given to chemical and mechanical
+experiments rather than to the industries. When twenty-one, he entered
+Oberlin College, remaining there five years, and earning all the money
+he spent. He devoted his time chiefly to studies of the physical
+sciences. As a young man he was an invalid. Later he was not remarkably
+successful in business, failing several times in his beginnings. His
+first invention was a telegraph self-adjusting relay. It was not
+practically successful. Afterwards he was employed with an electrical
+manufacturing company at Cleveland and Chicago. Most of his earlier
+inventions in the line of electrical utility are not distinctively
+known. He has never been idle, and they all possessed practical merit.
+For many years before he was known as the wizard of the telautograph, he
+was foremost in the ranks of physicists and electricians. He is not a
+discoverer of great principles, but is professionally skillful and
+accomplished, and eminently practical. His every effort is exerted to
+avoid intricacy and clumsiness in machinery. In 1878 he was awarded the
+grand prize at the Paris Exposition, and was given the degree of
+Chevalier and the decorations of the Legion of Honor by the French
+Government, and again in 1881, at the Electrical Exposition at Paris, he
+was honored with the gold medal for his inventions. He secured the
+degree of A.M. at Oberlin College, and was the recipient of the degree
+of Ph.D. from the Ripon (Wis.) College. For years he was connected with
+those institutions as non-resident Lecturer in Physics. Another
+University gave him the degree of LL.D. He is a member of the American
+Philosophical Society, the Society of Electrical Engineers of England,
+and the Society of Telegraph Engineers of London. He received an award
+and a certificate from the Centennial Exposition for his inventions in
+electricity.
+
+The same lesson is to be gathered from his career, so far, that is given
+by the life of every noted American. It means that money, family,
+prestige, have no place as leverages of success in any field. The rule
+is toward the opposite. The qualities and capacities that win do so
+without these early advantages, and all the more surely because there is
+an inducement to use them. There is no "luck."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE ELECTRIC LIGHT.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It has been stated that modern theory recognizes two classes of
+electricity, the _Static_ and the _Dynamic_. The difference
+is, however, solely noticeable in operation. Of the dynamic class there
+can be no more common and striking example than the now almost universal
+electric light. Yet, with a sufficient expenditure of chemicals and
+electrodes, and a sufficient number of cells, electric lighting, either
+arc or incandescent, can be as effectively accomplished as with the
+current evolved by a powerful dynamo. [Footnote: As an illustration of
+the day of beginnings, a few years ago the _thalus_, or lantern,
+the pride of the rural Congressman, on the dome of the Capitol at
+Washington was lighted by electricity, and an immense circular chamber
+beneath the dome was occupied by hundreds of cells of the ordinary form
+of battery. The lamps were of the incandescent variety, and what we now
+know as the filament was platinum wire. Vacuum bulb, filament, carbon,
+dynamo, were all unknown. But the current, and the heat of resistance,
+and every fact now in use in electric lighting, were there in
+operation.]
+
+The reader will understand that modern dynamic electricity owes its
+development to the principle of economy in production. Practical science
+most effectively awakens from its lethargy at the call of commerce.
+Nevertheless, from the earliest moment in which it became known that
+electricity was akin to heat--that an interruption of the easy passage
+of a current produced heat--the minds of men were busy with the question
+of how to turn the tremendous fact to everyday use. Progress was slow,
+and part of it was accidental. The great servant of modern mankind was
+first an untrained one. It was a marked advance when the gaslights in a
+theater could be all lighted at once by means of batteries and the spark
+of an induction coil. The bottom of Hell Gate, in New York harbor, was
+blown out by Gen. Newton by the same means, and would have been
+impossible otherwise. But these were only incidents and suggestions.
+The question was how to make this instantaneous spark _continuous_.
+There was pondering upon the fact that the only difference between heat
+and electricity is one of molecular arrangement. Heat is a molecular
+motion like that of electricity, without the symmetry and harmony of
+action electricity has. The vibrations of electricity are accomplished
+rapidly, and without loss. Those of heat are slow, and greatly
+radiated. _When a current of electricity reaches a place in the
+conductor where it cannot pass easily, and the orderly vibrations of its
+molecules are disturbed, they are thrown into the disorderly motion
+known as heat._ So, when the conductor is not so good; when a large
+wire is reduced suddenly to a small one; when a good conductor, such as
+copper, has a section of resisting conduction, such as carbon; heat and
+light are at once evolved at that point, and there is produced what we
+know as the electric light. However concealed by machinery and devices,
+and all the arrangements by which it is made more lasting, steady,
+economical and automatic, it is no more nor less than this. _The
+difference between heat and electricity is only a difference in the
+rates of vibration of their molecules._ Whatever the theory as to
+molecules, or essence, or actual nature and origin, the practical fact
+that heat and light are the results of the circumstances described above
+remains. This has long been known, and the question remained how to
+produce an adequate current economically. The result was the machine we
+know as the Dynamo.
+
+The first electric light was very brief and brilliant and was made by
+accident. Sir Humphrey Davy, in 1809, in pulling apart the two ends of
+wires attached to a battery of two thousand small cells, the most
+powerful generator that had been made to that time, produced a brief and
+brilliant spark, the result of momentarily _imperfect contact._
+Every such spark, produced since then innumerable times by accident, is
+an example of electric lighting. There are now in use in the United
+States some two million arc lights and nearly double that number of
+incandescent.
+
+There are two principal systems of electric lighting; one is by actually
+burning away the ends of carbon-points in the open air. This is the
+"arc." The other is by heating to a white heat a filament of carbon, or
+some substance of high resistance, in a glass bulb from which the air
+has been exhausted. This is the "incandescent."
+
+[Illustration: THE INCANDESCENT LIGHT]
+
+In the arc light the current passes across an _imperfect contact_,
+and this imperfection consists in a gap of about one-sixteenth of an
+inch between the extremities of two rods of carbon carrying a current.
+This small gap is a place of bad conduction and of the piling up of
+atoms, producing heat, burning, light. In the body of the lamp there are
+appliances for the automatic holding apart of the two points of the
+carbon, and the causing of them to continually creep together, yet never
+touch. Many devices have been contrived to this end. With all theories
+and reasons well known, and all effects accurately calculated, upon this
+small arrangement depends the practical utility of the arc light. The
+best arrangement is the invention of Edison, and is controlled most
+ingeniously by the current itself, acting through the increased
+difficulty of its passage when the two carbon-points are too far apart,
+and the increased ease with which it flows when they are too near
+together. The current, in leaping the small gap between the
+carbon-points, takes a _curved_ path, hence the name "arc" light.
+In passing from the positive to the negative carbon it carries small
+particles of incandescent carbon with it, and consequently the end of
+the positive carbon is hollowed out, while the end of the negative is
+built up to a point.
+
+The incandescent light is in principle the same as the arc, produced by
+the same means and based upon the same principle of impediment to the
+free passage of the current. It was first produced by heating with the
+current to incandescence a fine platinum wire. As stated above,
+electricity that quietly traverses a large wire will suddenly develop
+great heat upon reaching a point where it is called upon to traverse, a
+smaller one. Platinum was attempted for this place of greater resistance
+because of its qualities. It does not rust, has a low specific heat, and
+is therefore raised to a higher temperature with less heat imparted. But
+it was a scarce and expensive material, and so long as it was heated to
+incandescence in the open air, that is, so long as its heat was fed as
+other heat is, by oxygen, it was slowly consumed. Platinum is no longer
+in the field of electric lighting, and the substitute which takes its
+place in the present incandescent lamp, and which is known as a
+"filament," is not heated in contact with the air. The experiments and
+endeavors that brought this result constitute the story of the
+incandescent lamp.
+
+The result is due to the patient intelligence of the American scientist
+and inventor, Thomas A. Edison. After all the absolute essentials of a
+practical incandescent lamp had been thought out; after the qualities
+and characteristics of the current were all known under the
+circumstances necessary to its use in lighting, the practical
+accomplishment still remained. Edison is said to have once worked for
+several weeks in the making of a single loop-shaped carbon filament that
+would bear the most delicate handling. This was then carefully carried
+to a glass-worker to be inclosed in a bulb, and at the first movement he
+broke it, and the work must be done over and done better. It finally
+was. The little pear-shaped bulb with its delicate loop of filament,
+which cost months of toil and experiment at first, is now a common
+article, manufactured at an absurdly small cost, packed in barrelfuls
+and shipped everywhere, and consumed by the million. A means has been
+found for producing the vacuum of its interior rapidly, cheaply and
+thoroughly, and the beautiful incandescent glow hangs in lines and
+clusters over the civilized world. The phenomenon of incandescence
+without oxygen seems peculiar to these lights alone. [Footnote: The
+"electric field," previously explained, seemed to exist by giving a
+magnetic quality to the surrounding air. It would be as true if one
+should speak of a magnetized vacuum, since the same field would exist in
+that as in surrounding air.]
+
+So simple are great facts when finally accomplished that there remains
+little to add on the subject of the mechanism of the electric light. The
+two varieties, arc and incandescent, are used together as most
+convenient, the large and very brilliant arc being especially adapted to
+out-of-doors situations, and the gentler, steadier and more permanent
+glow of the incandescent to interiors. The latter is also capable of a
+modification not applicable to the arc. It can, in theaters and other
+buildings, be "turned down" to a gentle, blood-red glow. The means by
+which this is accomplished is ingenious and surprising, since it means
+that the supply of electricity over a wire--seemingly the most subtle
+and elusive essence on earth--may be controlled like a stream from a
+cock, or the gas out of a burner. But this reduction of the current that
+makes the red glow in the clusters in a theater is by no means the only
+instance. The trolley-car, and even the common motor, may be made to
+start very slowly, and the unseen current whose touch kills is fed to
+its consumer at will.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+THE DYNAMO.--To the man who has been all his life thinking of the steam
+engine as the highest and almost only embodiment of controlled
+mechanical power, another machine, both supplementary to the steam
+engine and far excelling it, whose familiar _burring_ sound is now
+heard in almost every village in the United States and has become the
+characteristic sound of modern civilization, must constitute a source of
+continual question and surprise. To be accustomed to the dynamo, to look
+upon it as a matter of course and a conceded fact, one must have come to
+years of maturity and found it here.
+
+Its practical existence dates back at furthest to 1870. Yet it is based
+upon principles long since known, and can scarcely be said to be the
+invention of any one mind or man. Its lineal ancestor was the
+_magneto-electric machine_, in the early construction of which
+figure the names of Siemens, Wilde, Ladd, and earlier and later
+electricians. Kidder's medical battery used forty years ago or more, and
+still used and purchasable in its first form, was a dynamo. A footnote
+in a current encyclopedia states that: "An account of the
+Magneto-electric machine of M. Gramme, in the London _Standard_ of
+April 9th, 1873, confirmed by other information, leads to the belief
+that a decided improvement has been made in these machines." The word
+"dynamo" was then unknown. Later, Edison, Weston, Thompson, Hopkinson,
+Ferranti and others appear as improvers in the mechanism necessary for
+best developing a well-known principle, and many of these improvements
+may be classed among original inventions. As soon as the
+magneto-electric machine attained a size in the hands of experimenters
+that took it out of the field of scientific toys it began to be what we
+now know as a dynamo. A paragraph in the encyclopedia referred to says,
+in speaking of Ladd, of London, "These developments of electric action
+are not obtained without corresponding expenditure of force. The armatures
+are powerfully attracted by the magnets, and must be forcibly pulled away.
+Indeed, one of Wilde's machines, when producing a very intense electric
+light, required about five horse power to drive it."
+
+[Illustration: MAGNETO-ELECTRIC MACHINE. THE PREDECESSOR OF THE DYNAMO.]
+
+Thus was the secret in regard to electric power unconsciously divulged
+some twenty years ago.
+
+In all nature there is no recipe for getting something for nothing. The
+modern dynamo, apparently creating something out of nothing, like all
+other machines _gives back only what is given to it_, minus a fair
+percentage for waste, loss, friction, and common wear. Its advantages
+amount to a miracle of convenience only. So far as power is concerned,
+it merely transfers it for long distances over a single wire. So far as
+light is considered, it practically creates it where wanted, in new and
+convenient forms, with a new intensity and beauty, but with the same
+expenditure of transmitted energy in the form of burned coal as would be
+used in manufacturing the gas that was new, wonderful, and a luxury at
+the beginning of the century.
+
+The dynamo is the most prominent instance of actual mechanical utility
+in the field of electrical induction. It seems almost incredible that
+the apparently small facts discovered by Faraday, the bookbinder, the
+employe of Sir Humphrey Davy at weekly wages the struggling experimenter
+in the subtleties of an infant giant, should have produced such results
+within sixty years. [Footnote: Faraday was not entirely alone in his
+life of physical research. He was associated with Davy, and quarreled
+with him about the liquefaction of chlorine and other gases, and was the
+companion of Wallaston, Herschel, Brand, and others. In connection with
+Stodart, he experimented with steel, with results still considered
+valuable. The scientific world still speaks of his quarrel with Davy
+with regret, since the personalities of great men should be free from
+ordinary weaknesses. But Lady Davy was not a scientist, and while the
+brilliant young mechanic was in her husband's employment for scientific
+purposes she insisted upon treating him as a servant, whereat the
+independence of thinking which made him capable of wandering in fields
+unknown to conventionality and routine blazed into natural resentment.
+The quarrel of 1823 must have been greatly augmented, in the lady's
+eyes, in 1824, for in that year Faraday was made a member of the Royal
+Society.
+
+In his lectures and public experiments he was greatly assisted by a man
+now almost forgotten, an "intelligent artilleryman" named Andersen. This
+unknown soldier with a taste for natural science doubtless had his
+reward in the exquisite pleasure always derived from the personal
+verification of facts hitherto unknown. There is often a pecuniary
+reward for the servant of science. Just as often there is not, and the
+work done has been the same.
+
+It was on Christmas morning, 1821, that Faraday first succeeded in
+making a magnetic needle rotate around a wire carrying an electric
+current. He was the discoverer of benzole, the basis of our modern
+brilliant aniline dyes. In 1831 he made the discovery he had been
+leading to for many years--that of magneto-electric induction. All we
+have of electricity that is now a part of our daily life is the result
+of this discovery.
+
+Faraday was born in 1791, and died August, 1867, in a house presented to
+him by Victoria, who had not the same opinion of his relations to the
+aristocracy that Lady Davy seems to have had. His insight into science
+was something explainable only on the supposition that he was gifted
+with a kind of instinct. He was a scientific prophet. A man who could,
+in 1838, foresee the ocean cable, and describe those minute difficulties
+in its working that all in time came true, must be classed as one of the
+great, clear, intuitive intellects of his race. He was in youth
+apprenticed to a bookbinder, "and many of the books he bound he read." A
+line in his indentures says: "In consideration of his faithful service,
+no premium is to be given." When these words were written there was no
+dream that the "faithful service" should be for all posterity.]
+
+[Illustration: Faraday's Spark. Striking the leg of a horseshoe magnet
+with an iron bar wound with insulated wire causes a contact between
+loose end of wire and small disc, and a spark.
+
+Faraday's First Magneto-Electric Experiment. A horseshoe magnet passed
+near a bent soft iron wound with insulated wire caused an induced
+current in the wire.
+
+TWO OF FARADAY'S EARLY EXPERIMENTS IN INDUCTION.]
+
+He who made the first actual machine to evolve a current in compliance
+with Faraday's formulated laws was an Italian named Pixue, in 1832. His
+machine consisted of a horseshoe magnet set on a shaft, and made to
+revolve in front of two cores of, soft iron wound with wire, and having
+their ends opposite the legs of the magnet. Shortly after Pixue, the
+inventors of the times ceased to turn the magnet on a shaft, and turned
+the iron cores instead, because they were lighter. In like manner, the
+huge field magnets of a modern dynamo are not whirled round a stationary
+armature, but the armature is whirled within the legs of the magnet with
+very great rapidity. The next step was to increase the number of magnets
+and the number of wire-wound iron cores--bobbins. The magnets were made
+compound, laminated; a large number of thin horseshoe magnets were laid
+together, with opposite poles touching. These were all comparatively
+small machines--what we now, with some reason, regard as having been
+toys whose present results were rather long in coming.
+
+[Illustration: THE SIEMENS' ARMATURE AND WINDING. THE FIRST STEP TOWARD
+THE MODERN DYNAMO.]
+
+Then came Siemens, of Berlin, in 1857. He was probably the first to wind
+the iron core, what we now call the _armature_, with wire from end
+to end, _lengthwise_, instead of round and round as a spool. This
+resulted, of course, in the shaft of the armature being also placed
+crosswise to the legs of the magnet, as it is in the modern dynamo. One
+of the ends of the wire used in this winding was fastened to the axle of
+the armature, and the other to a ring insulated from the shaft, but
+turning with it. Two springs, one bearing on the shaft and the other on
+the ring, carried away the current through wires attached to them.
+Siemens also originated the mechanical idea of hollowing out the legs of
+the magnet on the inside for the armature to turn in close to the
+magnet, almost fitting. It was the first time any of these things had
+been done, and their author probably had no idea that they would be
+prominent features of the dynamo of a little later time, in all
+essentials closely imitated.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF SHAFT, SPLIT RING AND "BRUSHES."]
+
+It will be guessed from what has been previously said on the subject of
+induction that the currents from such an electro-magnetic machine would
+be alternating currents, the impulses succeeding each other in alternate
+directions. To remedy this and cause the currents to flow always in the
+same direction, the "_commutator_" was devised. The ring mentioned
+above was split, and the two springs both bore upon it, one on each
+side. The ends of the wires were both fastened to this ring. The springs
+came to be known as "brushes." The effect was that one of them was in
+the insulated space between the split halves of the ring while the other
+was bearing on the metal to which the wire was attached. This action was
+alternate, and so arranged that the current carried away was always
+direct. When an armature has a winding of more than one wire, as the
+practical dynamo always has, the insulated ring is divided into as many
+pieces as there are wires, and the two brushes act as above for the
+entire series.
+
+Pacinotti, of Florence, constructed a magneto-electric machine in which
+the current flows always in one direction without a commutator. It has
+what is known as a _ring armature_, and is the mother of all
+dynamos built upon that principle. It is exceedingly ingenious in
+construction, and for certain purposes in the arts is extensively used.
+A description of it is too technical to interest others than those
+personally interested in the class of dynamo it represents.
+
+Wilde, of Manchester, England, improved the Siemens machine in 1866 by
+doing that which is the feature that makes possible the huge "field
+magnet" of the modern dynamo, which is not a magnet at all, strictly
+speaking. He caused the current, after it had been rectified by the
+commutator, to return again into coils of wire round the legs of his
+field magnets, as shown in the diagram. This induced in them a new
+supply of magnetism, and this of course intensified the current from the
+armature. It is true he had a separate smaller magneto-electric machine,
+with which he evolved a current for the coil around the legs of the
+field magnet of a greatly larger machine upon which he depended for his
+actual current, and that he did not know, although he was practically
+doing the same thing, that if he should divert this current made by the
+larger machine itself back through the coils of its field magnet, he
+would not need the extra small machine at all, and would have a much
+more powerful current.
+
+[Illustration: SIMPLEST FORM OF DYNAMO]
+
+And here arises a difference and a change of name. All generating
+machines to this date had been called "_Magneto-electric_" because
+they used _permanent_ steel magnets with which to generate a
+current by the whirling of the bobbin which we now call an armature. The
+time came, led to by the improvement of Wilde, in which those steel
+permanent magnets were no longer used. Then the machine became the
+"_dynamo-electric_" machine, and leaving off one word, according to
+our custom, "_dynamo_."
+
+Siemens and Wheatstone almost simultaneously invented so much of the
+dynamo as was yet incomplete. It has "cores"--the parts that answer to
+the legs of a horseshoe magnet--of soft iron, sometimes now even of cast
+iron. These, at starting, possess very little magnetism--practically
+none at all--yet sufficient to generate a very weak current in the
+coils, windings, of the armature when it begins to turn. This weak
+current, passing through the windings of the field magnet, makes these
+still stronger magnets, and the effect is to evolve a still stronger
+current in the armature. Soon the full effect is reached. The big iron
+field magnet, often weighing some thousands of pounds, is then the same
+as a permanent steel horseshoe magnet, which would hardly be possible at
+all. One who has watched the installation of a dynamo, knowing that
+there is nowhere near any ordinary source of electricity, and has seen
+its armature begin to whirl and hum, and then in a few moments the
+violet sparklings of the brushes and the evident presence of a powerful
+current of electricity, is almost justified in the common opinion that
+the genius of man has devised a machine to _create_ something out
+of nothing. It is true that a _starting_ quantity of electricity is
+required. It exists in almost every piece of iron. Sometimes, to hasten
+first action, some cells of a galvanic battery are used to pass a
+current through the coils of the field magnet. After the first use there
+is always enough magnetism remaining in them during rest or stoppage to
+make a dynamo efficient after a few moments operation.
+
+[Illustration: PACINOTTI'S RING-ARMATURE DYNAMO.]
+
+This is the dynamo in principle of action. The varieties in construction
+now in use number scores, perhaps hundreds. Some of them are monsters in
+size, and evolve a current that is terrific. They are all essentially
+the same, depending for action upon the laws illustrated in the simplest
+experiment in induced electricity. One of the best known of the modern
+machines is Edison's, represented in the picture at the head of this
+article. In it the field magnet--answering to the horseshoe magnet of
+the magneto-electric machine--is plainly distinguishable to the
+unskilled observer. It is not even solid, but is made of several pieces
+bolted together. Its legs are hollowed at the ends to admit closely the
+armature which turns there. There are valuable peculiarities in its
+construction, which, while complying in all respects with the dynamo
+principle, utilize those principles to the best mechanical advantage. So
+do others, in other respects that did not occur even to Edison, or were
+not adopted by him. Probably the modern dynamo is the most efficient,
+the most accurately measurable, the least wasteful of its power, and the
+most manageable, of any power-machine so far constructed by man for
+daily use.
+
+The motor.--This is the twin of the dynamo. In all essentials the two
+are of the same construction. A difference in the arrangement of the
+terminals of the wire coils or the wrappings of armature and field
+magnet, makes of the one a dynamo and of the other a motor.
+Nevertheless, they are separate studies in electrical science. Practice
+has brought about modified constructions, as in the case of the dynamo.
+The differences between the two machines, and their similarities as
+well, may be explained by a general brief statement.
+
+_It is the work of the dynamo to convert mechanical energy into the
+form of electrical energy. The motor, in turn, changes this electrical
+energy back again into mechanical energy._
+
+Where the electric light is produced by the dynamo current no motor
+intervenes. The current is converted into heat and light by merely
+having an impediment, a restriction, a narrowness, interposed to its
+free passage on a conducting wire, as heretofore explained, very much as
+water in a pipe foams and struggles at a narrow place or an obstruction.
+Where mechanical movements are to be produced by the dynamo current the
+motor is always the intermediate machine. In the dynamo the armature is
+rotated by steam power, producing an electrical energy in the form of a
+powerful current transmitted by a wire. In the motor the armature, in
+turn, _is rotated by_ this current. It is but another instance of
+that ability to work backwards--to reverse a process--that seems to
+pervade all machines, and almost all processes. I have mentioned steam
+power, and, consequently, the necessary burning of coal and expenditure
+of money in producing the dynamo current. The dynamo and motor are not
+necessarily economical inventions, but the opposite when the force
+produced is to be transmitted again, with some loss, into the same
+mechanical energy that has already been produced by the burning of coal
+and the making of steam. Across miles of space, and into places where
+steam would not be possible, the power is invisibly carried. Suggestions
+of this convenience--stated cases--it is not necessary to cite. The
+fact is a prominent one, to be noted everywhere.
+
+And it may be made a mechanical economy. The most prominent instance of
+this is the new utilization of Niagara as a turbine water-power with
+which to whirl the armatures of gigantic dynamos, using the power thus
+obtained upon motors, and in the production of light and the
+transmission of power to neighboring cities.
+
+The discovery of the possibility of transmitting power by a wire, and
+converting it again into mechanical energy, is a strange story of the
+human blindness that almost always attends an acuteness, a thinking
+power, a prescience, that is the characteristic of humanity alone, but
+which so often stops short of results. This discovery has been
+attributed to accident alone; the accident of an employe mistaking the
+uses of wires and fastening their ends in the wrong places. But a French
+electrician thus describes the occurrence as within his own experience.
+His name is Hypolyte Fontaine.
+
+But let us first advert to the forgetfulness of the man who really
+invented the machine that was capable of the opposite action of both
+dynamo and motor. This was the Italian, Pacinotti. [Footnote: Moses G.
+Farmer, an American, and celebrated in his day for intelligent
+electrical researches, is claimed to have made the first reversible
+motor ever contrived. A small motor made by Farmer in 1847, and
+embodying the electro-dynamic principle was exhibited at the great
+exposition at Chicago in 1893. If the genealogy of this machine remains
+undisputed it fixes the fact that the discovery belongs to this country,
+and to an American.] He mentioned that his machine could be used either
+to generate a current of electricity on the application of motive power
+to its armature, or to produce motive power on connecting it with a
+source of electricity. Yet it did not occur to him to definitely
+experiment with two of his machines for the purpose of accomplishing
+that which in less than twenty years has revolutionized our ideas and
+practice in transmitted force. He did not suggest that two of his
+machines could be run together, one as a generator and the other as a
+motor. He did not think of its advantages with the facilities for it, of
+his own creation, in his hands.
+
+M. Fontaine states that at the Vienna Exposition of 1873 there was a
+Gramme machine intended to be operated by a primary battery, to show
+that the Gramme was capable of being worked by a current, and, as there
+was also a second machine of the same kind there, of also generating
+one. These two machines were to demonstrate this range of capacity as
+_separately worked_, one by power, the other with a battery. There
+was, then, no intention of coupling them together as late as 1873, with
+the means at hand and the suggestion almost unavoidable. The dynamo and
+motor had not occurred to any one. But M. Fontaine states that he failed
+to get the primary (battery) current in time for the opening, and was
+troubled by the dilemma. Then the idea occurred to him, as he could do
+no better, to work one of the machines with a current "deprived," partly
+stolen, from the other, as a temporary measure. A friend lent him the
+necessary piece of wire, and he connected the two machines. The machine
+used as a motor was connected with a pumping apparatus, and when the
+machine intended as a generator started, and this make-shift,
+temporarily-stolen current was carried to the acting motor, the action
+of the last was so much more vigorous than was intended that the water
+was thrown over the sides of the tank. Fontaine was forced to remedy
+this excessive action by procuring an additional wire of such length
+that its resistance permitted the motor to work more mildly and throw
+less water. This accidentally established the fact of distance,
+convenience, a revolution in the power of the industrial world. Fontaine
+states that Gramme had previously told him that he had done the same
+thing with his machines. The idea was never patented. Neither Pacinotti,
+who invented the machine originally, nor Gramme, one of the great names
+of modern electricity, nor this skilled practical electrician, Fontaine,
+who had charge of the exhibit of the Gramme system at Vienna, considered
+the fact of the transmission of concentrated power over a thin wire to a
+great distance as one of value to its inventor or to the industries of
+mankind. With the motor and the dynamo already made, it was an accident
+that brought them together after all.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may be amusing, if not useful, to spend a moment in reviewing of the
+efforts of men to utilize the power of the electrical current in
+mechanics before the day of the dynamo and a motor, and while yet the
+electric light was an infant in the nursery of the laboratory. They knew
+then, about 1835 to 1870, of the laws of induction as applied to the
+electro-magnet, or in small machines the generating power, so called, of
+the magneto-electric arrangement embodied, as a familiar example, in
+Kidder's medical battery. There is a long list of those inventors,
+American and European. The first patent issued for an American
+electro-motor was in 1837, to a man named Thomas Davenport, of Brandon,
+Vt. He was a man far ahead of his times. He built the first electric
+railroad ever seen, at Springfield, Mass., in 1835, and considering the
+means, whose inadequacy is now better understood by any reader of these
+lines than it then was by the deepest student of electricity, this first
+railroad was a success. Davenport came as near to solving the problem of
+an electric motor as was possible without the invention of Pacinotti.
+Following this there were many patents issued for electro-magnetic
+motors to persons residing in all parts of the country, north and south.
+One was made by C. G. Page, of the Smithsonian Institute, in which the
+motive power consisted in a round rod, acting as a plunger, being pulled
+into the space where the core would be in an ordinary electro-magnet,
+and thereby working a crank. [Footnote: The _National
+Intelligencer_, a prominent Washington newspaper, said with reference
+to Page's motor "He has shown that before long electro-magnetic action
+will have dethroned steam and will be the adopted motor," etc. This was
+an enthusiasm not based upon any fact then known about a machine not
+even in the line of the present facts of electro-dynamics.] A large
+motor of this kind is alleged, in 1850, to have developed ten horse
+power. It was actually applied to outdoor experiment as a car-motor on
+an actual railroad track, and was efficient for several miles. But it
+carried with it its battery-cells, and they were disarranged and stirred
+by the jolting, and being made of crockeryware were broken. The
+chemicals cost much more than fuel for steam, and there could be no
+economical motive for further experiment. It was a huge toy, as the
+entire sum of electrical science was until it was made useful first in
+the one instance of the telegraph, and long after that date the use of
+the electro-magnet, with a cam to cut off and turn on again the current
+at proper intervals, which was the one principle of all attempts, was a
+repeated and invariable failure. That which was wanted and lacking was
+not known, and was finally discovered and successively developed as has
+been described.
+
+Electric railroads.--There was an instance of almost simultaneous
+invention in the case of the first practical electric railroads. S. D.
+Field, Dr. Siemens, and Thomas A. Edison all applied for patents in
+1880. Of these, Field was first in filing, and was awarded patents. The
+combined dynamo and motor were, of course, the parents of the practical
+idea. Field's patents covered a motor in or under the car, operated by a
+current from a stationary source of electricity--of course a dynamo.
+These first electric roads had the current carried on the rail. They
+were partially successful, but there was something wrong in the plan,
+and that something was induction by the earth. Later came, as a remedy
+for this, the "Trolley" system; the trolley being a small, grooved wheel
+running upon a current-carrying wire overhead. The question of how best
+to convey a current to the car-motor is a serious one, doubtless at this
+moment occupying the attention of highly-trained intelligence
+everywhere. The motor current is one of high power, and as such
+intractable; and it is in the character of this current, rather than in
+methods of insulation, that the remedy for the much-objected-to overhead
+wire is to be found. It will be remembered that all the phenomena of
+induction are _unhindered by insulation_.
+
+Aside from the current-carrying problem, the electric road is
+explainable in all its features upon the theory and practice of the
+dynamo and motor. It is merely an application of the two machines. The
+last is, in usual practice, under the car, and geared to the truck-axle.
+A more modern mechanical improvement is to make the axle the shaft of
+the motor armature. When the motor has used the current it passes by
+most systems into the rail and the ground. By others there is a
+"metallic circuit"--two wires. Many men whose interest and occupation
+leads them to a study of such matters know that the use of electricity,
+instead of steam locomotion, is merely a question of time on all
+railroads. I have said elsewhere that the actual age of electricity had
+not yet fully come. It seems to us now that we have attained the end;
+that there is little more to know or to do. But so have all the
+generations thought in their day. In the field of electricity there are
+yet to come practical results of which one may have some foreshadowings
+in the experiments of men like Tesla, which will make our present times
+and knowledge seem tame and slow.
+
+Electrolysis.--In all history, fire has been the universal practical
+solvent. It has been supplanted by the electrical current in some of the
+most beautiful and useful phenomena of our time. Electrolysis is the
+name of the process by which fluid chemicals are decomposed by the
+current.
+
+A familiar early experiment in electrolysis is the decomposition of
+water--a chemical composed of oxygen and hydrogen, though always thought
+of and used as a simple, pure fluid. If the poles of a galvanic battery
+are immersed in water slightly mixed with sulphuric acid to favor
+electrical action, these poles will become covered with bubbles of gas
+which presently rise to the surface and pass off. These bubbles are
+composed of the two constituents of water, the oxygen rising from the
+positive and the hydrogen from the negative pole. Particles of the
+substance decomposed are transferred, some to one pole and some to the
+other; and, therefore, electrolysis is always practiced in a fluid in
+order that this transference may more readily occur.
+
+The quantity of _electrolyte_--the substance decomposed--that is
+transferred in a given time is in proportion to the strength of the
+current. When this electrolyte is composed of many substances a current
+will act a little on all of them, and the quantity in which the
+elementary bodies appear at the poles of the current depends upon the
+quantities of the compounds in the liquid, and on the relative ease with
+which they yield to the electrical action.
+
+The electrolytic processes are not the mere experiments a brief
+description of them would indicate, but are among the important
+processes for the mechanical products of modern times. The extensive
+nickel-plating that became a permanent fad in this country on the
+discovery of a special process some years ago, is all done by
+electrolysis. The silver plating of modern tableware and table cutlery,
+as beautiful and much less expensive than silver, and the fine finish of
+the beautiful bronze hardware now used in house-furnishing, are the
+results of the same process. Some use for it enters into almost every
+piece of fine machinery, and into the beautifying or preserving of
+innumerable small articles that are made and used in unlimited quantity.
+
+The process and its principle is general, but there are many details
+observed in the actual work of electroplating which interest only those
+engaged. One of the most usual of these is that of making an
+electrotype. This may mean the making of an exact impression of a medal,
+coin, or other figure, or a depositing of a coating of the same on any
+metallic surface. Formerly the faces of the types used in printing were
+very commonly faced with copper to give them finish and a wearing
+quality. Even fresh, natural fruits that have been evenly coated with
+plumbago may be covered with a thin shell of metal. A silver head may be
+placed on the wood of a walking stick, precisely conforming on the
+outside to the form of the wood within.
+
+The deposit of metal in the electrotyping process always takes place at
+the negative pole--the pole by which the current passes out of the fluid
+into its conductor. This is the "_cathode_." The other is the
+"_anode_." The "bath," as the fluid in which the process is
+accomplished is called, for silver, gold or platinum contains one
+hundred parts of water, ten of potassium cyanide, and one of the cyanide
+of whichever of those metals is to be deposited. The articles to be
+plated are suspended in this bath and the battery-power, varying in
+intensity according to circumstances, is applied. After removal they are
+buffed and finished. A varying detail is practiced for different metals,
+and the current now commonly used is from a dynamo. [Footnote: Among
+modern modifications of the dynamic current, is its use, modified by
+proper appliances, for the telegraph and the telephone circuits of
+cities and the larger towns. Every electric current may now be safely
+attributed to that source, and from the same circuit and generator all
+modifications may be produced at once.]
+
+The origin of electrolysis is said to be with Daniell, who noticed the
+deposit of copper while experimenting with the battery that bears his
+name. Jacobi, at St. Petersburg, first published a description of the
+process in 1839. The Elkingtons were the first to actually put the
+process into commercial practice.
+
+It would be interesting now, were it apropos, to describe the seemingly
+very ancient processes by which our ancestors gilded, plated, were
+deceived and deceived others, previous to about 1845. For those things
+were done, and the genuineness of life has by no means been destroyed by
+the modern ease with which a precious metal may be deposited upon one
+utterly base. A contemplation of the moral side of the subject might
+lead at once to the conclusion that we could now spare one of the least
+in actual importance of the processes of the all-pervading and wonderful
+essence that alike makes the lightning-stroke and gilds the plebeian pin
+that fastens a baby's napkin. But from any other view we could not now
+dispense with anything electricity does.
+
+General facts.--The names of many of the original investigators of
+electrical phenomena are perpetuated in the familiar names of electrical
+measurements. For, notwithstanding its seeming subtlety, there is no
+force in use, or that has ever been used by men, capable of being so
+definitely calculated, measured, determined beforehand, as electricity
+is. As time passes new measurements are adopted and named, some of them
+being proposed as lately as 1893. An instance of the value of some of
+these old determinations of a time when all we now know of electrical
+science was unknown, may be given in what is known as Ohm's Law. Ohm was
+a native of Erlangen, in Bavaria, and was Professor of Physics at
+Munich, where he died in 1874. He formulated this Law in 1827, and it
+was translated into English in 1847. He was recognized at the time, and
+was given the Copley medal of the Royal Society of London. The Law--for
+by that distinctive name is it still called, though the name "Ohm," also
+expresses a unit of measurement--is that _the quantity of current that
+will pass through a conductor is proportional to the pressure and
+inversely proportional to the distance_. That is:
+
+Current = Pressure / Resistance.
+
+Transposing the terms of the equation we may get an expression for
+either of those elements, current, pressure, or resistance, in the terms
+of the other two. This relation holds true and is accurate in every
+possible case and condition of practical work. This remarkable precision
+and definiteness of action has made possible the creation of an
+extensive school of electrical testing, by which we are not only enabled
+to make accurate measurement of electrical apparatus and appliances, but
+also to make determinations in _other_ fields by the agency of
+electricity. When an ocean cable is injured or broken the precise
+location of the trouble is made _by measuring the electrical
+resistance of the parts on each side of the injury_.
+
+The magnitudes of measurements of electricity are expressed in the
+following convenient electrical units:
+
+The VOLT (named from Volta) equals a unit of _pressure_ that is
+equal to one cell of a gravity battery.
+
+The OHM, as a unit of measurement, equals a unit of _resistance_
+that is equivalent to the resistance of a hundred feet of copper wire
+the size of a pin.
+
+The AMPERE (named from Ampere, 1775-1836, author of a "Collection of
+Observations on Electro-Dynamics" and other works, and a profound
+practical investigator) equals a unit of _current_ equivalent to
+the current which one Volt of pressure will produce through one Ohm of
+wire (or resistance).
+
+The Coulomb (1736--inventor of the means of measuring electricity called
+the "Torsion balance," and general early investigator) equals a unit of
+_quantity_ of one Ampere flowing for one second.
+
+The Farad (from Faraday, the discoverer of the laws of Induction, see
+_ante_), equals that unit of _capacity_ which is the capacity
+for holding one Coulomb. Death current.--What is now spoken of as the
+"Death Current" is one that will instantly overcome the "resistance" of
+the human, or animal, body. It is a current of from one to two thousand
+Volts--about the same as that used in maintaining the large arc lights.
+This question of the killing capacity of the current became officially
+prominent some years ago, upon the passage by the legislature of the
+State of New York of a statute requiring the death penalty to be
+inflicted by means of electricity. The object was to deter evildoers by
+surrounding the penalty with scientific horror, [Footnote: Hence also
+the new lingual atrocity, the word "electrocute," derived from "execute"
+by decapitation and the addition of "electro"] and the idea had its
+origin in the accidents which formerly occurred much more frequently
+than now. The "death current" is now almost everywhere, though the care
+of the men who continually work about "live" wires has grown to be much
+like that of men who continually handle firearms or explosives, and
+accidents seldom happen. At first it was apparently difficult for the
+general public to appreciate the fact that the silent and
+harmless-looking wires must be avoided. There was suddenly a new and
+terrific power in common use, and it was as slender, silent and
+unobtrusive as it was fatal.
+
+Insulation of the hands by the use of rubber gloves, and extreme care,
+are the means by which those who are called "linemen"--a new
+industry--protect themselves in their occupation. But there is a new
+commandment added to the list of those to be memorized by the
+body-politic. "Do not tread upon, drive over, or touch _any_ wire."
+It may be, and probably is, harmless. But you cannot positively
+know. [Footnote: It is a common trait of general human nature to refuse
+to learn save by the hardest of experiences, and so far as the crediting
+of statements is concerned, to at first believe everything that is not
+true, and reject most that is. The supernatural, the phenomena of
+alleged witchcraft and diabolism, and of "luck," "hoodoo," "fate," etc.,
+find ready disciples among those who reject disdainfully the results of
+the working of natural law. When the railroads were first built across
+the plains the Indians repeatedly attempted to stop moving trains by
+holding the ends of a rope stretched across the track in front of the
+engine, and with results which greatly surprised them When the lines
+were first constructed in northern Mexico the Mexican peasant could not
+be induced to refrain from trying personal experiments with the new
+power, and scores of him were killed before he learned that standing on
+the track was dangerous. In the United States the era of accidents
+through indifference to common-looking wires has almost passed, but for
+some years the fatality was large because people are always governed by
+appearances connected with _previous_ notions, until _new_
+experiences teach them better.]
+
+INSTRUMENTS OF MEASUREMENT.--Some of the most costly and beautiful of
+modern scientific instruments are those used in the measurements and
+determinations of electrical science. There are many forms and varieties
+for every specific purpose. Electrical measurement has become a
+department of physical science by itself, and a technical, extensive and
+varied one. Already the electrical specialist, no more an original
+experimenter or investigator than the average physician is, has become
+professional. He makes plans, submits facts, estimates cost, and states
+results with almost certainty.
+
+ELECTRICITY AS AN INDUSTRY.--Immense factories are now devoted to the
+manufacture of electrical goods exclusively. Large establishments in
+cities are filled with them. The installation of the electric plant in a
+dwelling house is done in the same way, and as regularly, as the
+plumbing is. Soon there must be still another enlargement, since the
+heating of houses through a wire, and the kitchen being equipped with
+cooking utensils whose heat is for each vessel evolved in its own
+bottom, is inevitable.
+
+The following are some of the facts, in figures, of the business side of
+electricity in the United States at the present writing. In 1866, about
+twenty years after the establishment of the telegraph, but with a
+population of only a little more than half the present, there were
+75,686 miles of telegraph wire in use, and 2,520 offices. In 1893 there
+were 740,000 miles of wire, and more than 20,000 offices. The receipts
+for the year first named are unknown, but for 1893 they were about
+$24,000,000. The expenses of the system for the same year were
+$16,500,000.
+
+The telephone, an industry now about sixteen years old, had in 1893, for
+the Bell alone, over 200,000 miles of wire on poles, and over 90,000
+miles of wire under ground. The instruments were in 15,000 buildings.
+There were 10,000 employes, and 233,000 subscribers. All companies
+combined had 441,000 miles of wire. Ninety-two millions of dollars were
+invested in telephone _fixtures_.
+
+In 1893, the average cost of a telegram was thirty-one and one
+six-tenths cents, and the average alleged cost of sending the same to
+the companies was twenty-two and three-tenths cents, leaving a profit of
+nine and three-tenths cents on every message. It must be remembered that
+with mail facilities and cheapness that are unrivalled, the telegraph
+message is always an extraordinary mode of communication; an emergency.
+These few figures may serve to give the reader a dim idea of the
+importance to which the most ordinary and general of the branches of
+electrical industry have grown in the United States.
+
+MEDICAL ELECTRICITY.--For more than fifty years the medical fraternity
+in regular practice persisted in disregarding all the claims made for
+the electric current as a therapeutic agent. In earlier times it was
+supposed to have a value that supplanted all other medical agencies.
+Franklin seems to have been one of the earliest experimenters in this
+line, and to have been successful in many instances where his brief
+spark from the only sources of the current then known were applicable to
+the case. The medical department of the science then fell into the hands
+of charlatans, and there is a natural disposition to deal in the
+wonderful, the miraculous or semi-miraculous, in the cure of disease.
+Divested of the wonder-idea through a wider study and greater knowledge
+of actual facts, electricity has again come forward as a curative agent
+in the last ten years. Instruction in its management in disease is
+included in the curriculum of almost every medical school, and most
+physicians now own an outfit, more or less extensive, for use in
+ordinary practice. To decry and utterly condemn is no longer the custom
+of the steady-going physician, the ethics of whose cloth had been for
+centuries to condemn all that interfered with the use of drugs, and
+everything whose action could not be understood by the examples of
+common experience, and without special study outside the lines of
+medical knowledge as prescribed.
+
+Perhaps the developments based upon the discoveries of Faraday have had
+much to do with the adoption of electricity as a curative agent. The
+current usually used is the Faradic; the induced alternate current from
+an induction coil. This is, indeed, the current most useful in the
+majority of the nervous derangements in the treatment of which the
+current is of acknowledged utility.
+
+In surgery the advance is still greater. "Galvano-cautery" is the
+incandescent light precisely; the white-hot wire being used to cut off,
+or burn off, and cauterize at the same time, excrescences and growths
+that could not be easily reached by other means than a tube and a small
+loop of platinum wire. A little incandescent lamp with a bulb no bigger
+than a pea is used to light up and explore cavities, and this advance
+alone, purely mechanical and outside of medical science, is of immense
+importance in the saving of life and the avoidance of human suffering.
+
+It may be added that there is nothing magical, or by the touch, or
+mysterious, in the treatment of disease by the electrical current. The
+results depend upon intelligent applications, based upon reason and
+experience, a varied treatment for varying cases. Nor is it a remedy to
+be applied by the patient himself more than any other is. On the
+contrary, he may do himself great injury. The pills, potions, powders
+and patent medicines made to be taken indiscriminately, and which he
+more or less understands, may be still harmful yet much safer. Even the
+application of one or the other of the two poles with reference to the
+course of a nerve, may result in injury instead of good.
+
+INCOMPLETE POSSIBILITIES.--There are at least two things greatly desired
+by mankind in the field of electrical science and not yet attained. One
+of these, that may now be dismissed with a word, is the resolving of the
+latent energy of, say a ton of coal, into electrical energy without the
+use of the steam engine; without the intervention of any machine. For
+electricity is not manufactured; not created by men in any case. It
+exists, and is merely gathered, in a measure and to a certain extent
+confined and controlled, and sent out as a _concentrated form of
+energy_ on its various errands. Should a means for the concentration
+of this universally diffused energy be found whereby it could be made to
+gather, by the new arrangement of some natural law such as places it in
+enormous quantities in the thundercloud, a revolution that would
+permeate and visibly change all the affairs of men would take place,
+since the industrial world is not a thing apart, but affects all men,
+and all institutions, and all thought.
+
+The other desideratum, more reasonable apparently, yet far from present
+accomplishment, is a means of storing and carrying a supply of
+electricity when it has been gathered by the means now used, or by any
+means.
+
+THE STORAGE BATTERY is an attempt in this last direction. The name is
+misleading, since even in this attempt electricity is in no sense
+"stored," but a chemical action producing a current takes place in the
+machine. The arrangement is in its infancy. Instances occur in which,
+under given circumstances, it is more or less efficient, and has been
+improved into greater efficiency. But many difficulties intervene, one
+of which is the great weight of the appliances used, and another,
+considerable cost. The term "storage battery" is now infrequently used,
+and the name "secondary" battery is usually substituted. The principle
+of its action is the decomposing of combined chemicals by the action of
+a current applied from a stationary generator or dynamo, and that these
+chemicals again unite as soon as they are allowed to do so by the
+completing of a circuit, _and in re-combining give off nearly as much
+electricity as was first used in separating them._ The action of the
+secondary, "storage," battery, once charged, is like that of a primary
+battery. The current is produced by chemical action. Two metals outside
+of the solution contained in a primary battery cell, but under differing
+physical conditions from each other, will yield a current. A piece of
+polished iron and a piece of rusty iron, connected by a wire, will yield
+a small current. Rusty lead, so to speak, so connected with bright lead,
+has a high electromotive force. Oxygen makes lead rusty, and hydrogen
+makes it bright. Oxygen and hydrogen are the two gases cast off when
+water is subjected to a current. (See _ante_ under
+_Electrolysis_) So Augustin Plante, the inventor of as much as we
+yet have of what is called a storage or secondary battery, suspended two
+plates of lead in water, and when a current of electricity was passed
+through it hydrogen was thrown off at one plate, making it bright, and
+oxygen at the other plate, peroxydizing its surface. When the current
+was removed the altered plates, connected by a wire, would send off a
+current which was in the opposite direction from the first, and this
+would continue until the plates were again in their original condition.
+This is the principle and mode of action of the storage battery. So far
+it has assumed many forms. Scores of modifications have been invented
+and patented. The leaden plates have taken a variety of forms, yet have
+remained leaden plates, one cleaned and the other fouled by the
+electrolytic action of a current, and giving off an almost equivalent
+current again by the return process. The arrangement endures for several
+repetitions of the process, but is finally expensive and always
+inconvenient. The secondary battery, in its infancy, as stated, presents
+now much the same obstacles to commercial use the galvanic, or primary,
+battery did before the induced current had become the servant of man.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+ELECTRICAL INVENTION IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+
+A list of the electrical inventors of this country would be very long.
+Many of the names are, in the mass and number of inventions, almost
+lost. It happens that many of the practical applications described in
+this volume, indeed most of them, are the work of citizens of this
+country.
+
+In previous chapters I have referred briefly to Franklin, Morse, Field,
+and others. These men have left names that, without question, may be
+regarded as permanent. Their chiefest distinguishing trait was
+originality of idea, and each one of them is a lesson to the American
+boy. In a sense the greatest of all these, and in the same sense, the
+greatest American, was Benjamin Franklin. A sketch of his career has
+been given, but to that may be added the following: He had arrived at
+conclusions that were vast in scope and startling in result by applying
+the reasoning faculty upon observations of phenomena that had been
+recurring since the world was made, and had been misunderstood from the
+beginning. He used the simplest means. His experiment was in a different
+way daily performed for him by nature. He was philosophically daring,
+indifferently a tinker with nature's terrific machinery; a knocker at
+the door of an august temple that men were never known to have entered;
+a mortal who smiled in the face of inscrutable and awful mystery, and
+who defied the lightning in a sense not merely moral. [Footnote:
+Professor Richmann, of St. Petersburg, was instantly killed by lightning
+while repeating Franklin's experiment.]
+
+His genius lay in a power of swift inductive reasoning. His common sense
+and his sense of humor never forsook him. He uttered keen apothegms that
+have lived like those of Solon. He was a philosopher like Diogenes,
+lacking the bitterness. He wrote the "Busy-Body," and annually made the
+plebeian and celebrated "Almanac," and the "Ephemera" that were not
+ephemeral, and is the author of the story of "The Whistle," that
+everybody knows, and everybody reads with shamefacedness because it is a
+brief chapter out of his own history.
+
+He was apparently an adept in the art of caring for himself, one of the
+most successful worldings of his time, yet he wrote, thought, toiled
+incessantly, for his fellow men. He had little education obtained as it
+is supposed an education must be obtained. He was commonplace. No one
+has ever told of his "silver tongue," or remembered a brilliant
+after-dinner speech that he has made. Yet he finally stood before
+mankind the companion of princes, the darling of splendid women, covered
+with the laurels of a brilliant scientific renown. But he was a printer,
+a tinkerer with stoves, the inventor of the lightning rod, the man who
+had spent one-half his life in teaching apprentices, such as he himself
+had been when his jealous and common-minded brother had whipped him,
+that "time is money," that "credit is money"--which is the most
+prominent fact in the commercial world of 1895--and that honor and
+self-respect are better than wealth, pleasure, or any other good.
+
+Yet clear, keen, cold and inductive as was Franklin's mind, no vision
+reached him, in the moment of that triumph when he felt the lightning
+tingling in his fingers from a hempen string, of those wonders which
+were to come. He knew absolutely nothing of that necromancy through
+which others of his countrymen were to girdle the world with a common
+intelligence, and yet others were to use in sprinkling night with
+clusters as innumerable and mysterious as the higher stars.
+
+The story of the Morse telegraph has been repeatedly told, and I have
+briefly sketched it in connection with the subject of the telegraph.
+But, unlike the original, scientifically lonely and independent
+Franklin, Morse had the best assistance of his times in the persons of
+men more skilled than himself and almost as persistent. The chief of
+these was Alfred Vail, a name until lately almost unknown to scientific
+fame, who eliminated the clumsy crudities of Morse's conception, remade
+his instruments, and was the inventor of that renowned alphabet which
+spells without letters or writing or types, that may be seen or heard or
+felt or tasted, that is adapted to any language and to all conditions,
+and that performs to this day, and shall to all time, the miracle of
+causing the inane rattle of pieces of metal against each other to speak
+to even a careless listener the exact thoughts of one a thousand miles
+away.
+
+Another of the men who might be appropriately included in any
+comprehensive list of aiders and abettors of the present telegraph
+system were Leonard D. Gale, then Professor of Chemistry in the
+University of New York, and Professor Joseph Henry, who had made, and
+was apparently indifferent to the importance of it because there was no
+alphabet to use it with, the first electric telegraph ever constructed
+to be read, or used, _by sound_. Last, though hardly least if all
+facts are understood, might be included a skillful youth named William
+Baxter, afterwards known as the inventor of the "Baxter Engine," who,
+shut in a room with Vail in a machine shop in New Jersey, made in
+conjunction with the author of the alphabet the first telegraphic
+instrument that, with Henry's magnet and battery cells, sent across
+space the first message ever read by a person who did not know what the
+words of the message would say or mean until they had been received.
+
+After the telegraph the state of electrical knowledge was for a long
+time such that electrical invention was in a sense impossible. The
+renowned exploit of Field was not an invention, but a heroic and
+successful extension of the scope and usefulness of an invention. But
+thought was not idle, and filled the interval with preparations for
+final achievements unequaled in the history of science. Two of these
+results are the electric light and the telephone. For the various
+"candles," such as that of Jablochkoff, exhibited at Paris in 1870, only
+served to stimulate investigation of the alluring possibilities of the
+subject. The details of these great inventions are better known than
+those of any others. The telegraph and the newspaper reporter had come
+upon the field as established institutions. Every process and progress
+was a piece of news of intense interest. When the light glowed in its
+bulb and sparkled and flashed at the junction points of its
+chocolate-colored sticks it had been confidently expected. There was
+little surprise. The practical light of the world was considered
+probable, profitable, and absolutely sure. The real story will never be
+told. The thoughts, which phrase may also include the inevitable
+disappointments of the inventor, are never written down by him. That
+variety of brain which, with a few great exceptions, was not known until
+modern, very recent times, which does not speculate, contrive, imagine
+only, but also reduces all ideas to _commercial_ form, has yet to
+have its analysis and its historian, for it is to all intents a new
+phase of the evolution of mind.
+
+[Illustration: THOMAS A. EDISON.]
+
+A typical example of this class of intellect is Mr. Thomas A. Edison. It
+may be doubted if such a man could, in the qualities that make him
+remarkable, be the product of any other country than ours. In common
+with nearly all those who have left a deep impression upon our country,
+Edison was the child of that hackneyed "respectable poverty" which here
+is a different condition from that existing all over Europe, where the
+phrase was coined. There, the phrase, and the condition it describes,
+mean a dull content, an incapacity to rise, a happy indifference to all
+other conditions, a dullness that does not desire to learn, to change,
+to think. To respectable poverty in other civilizations there are strong
+local associations like those of a cat, not arising to the dignity of
+love of country. In the United States, without a word, without argument
+or question, a young man becomes a pioneer--not necessarily one of
+locality or physical newness, but a pioneer in mind--in creed, politics,
+business--in the boundless domain of hope and endeavor. In America no
+man is as his father was except in physical traits. No man there is a
+volunteer soldier fighting his country's battles except from a
+conviction that he ought to be. A man is an inventor, a politician, a
+writer, first because he knows that valuable changes are possible, and,
+second, because he can make such changes profitable to himself. It is
+the great realm of immutable steadfastness combined with constant
+change; unique among the nations.
+
+Edison never had more than two months regular schooling in his entire
+boyhood. There is, therefore, nothing trained, "regular," technical,
+about him. If there had been it is probable that we might never have
+heard of him. He is one of the innumerable standing arguments against
+the old system advocated by everybody's father, and especially by the
+older fathers of the church, and which meant that every man and woman
+was practically cut by the same pattern, or cast in the same general
+mould, and was to be fitted for a certain notch by training alone. No
+more than thirty years ago the note of preparation for the grooves of
+life was constantly sounded. Natural aptitude, "bent," inclination, were
+disregarded. The maxim concocted by some envious dull man that "genius
+is only another name for industry," was constantly quoted and believed.
+
+But Edison's mother had been trained, practically, as an instructor of
+youth. He had hints from her in the technical portions of a boy's
+primary training. He is not an ignorant man, but, on the contrary, a
+very highly educated one. But it is an education he has constructed for
+himself out of his aptitudes, as all other actual educations have really
+been. When he was ten years old he had read standard works, and at
+twelve is stated to have struggled, ineffectually perhaps, with Newton's
+_Principia_. At that age he became a train-boy on the Grand Trunk
+railroad for the purpose of earning his living; only another way of
+pioneering and getting what was to be got by personal endeavor. While in
+that business he edited and printed a little newspaper; not to please an
+amateurish love of the beautiful art of printing, but for profit. He was
+selling papers, and he wanted one of his own to sell because then he
+would get more out of it in a small way. He never afterwards showed any
+inclination toward journalism, and did not become a reporter or
+correspondent, or start a rural daily. While he was a train-boy,
+enjoying every opportunity for absorbing a knowledge of human nature,
+and of finally becoming a passenger conductor or a locomotive engineer,
+something called his attention to the telegraph as a promoter of
+business, as a great and useful institution, and he resolved to become
+an "operator." This was his electrical beginning. Yet before he took
+this step he was accused of a proclivity toward extraordinary things. In
+the old "caboose" where he edited, set up, and printed his newspaper he
+had established a small chemical laboratory, and out of these chemicals
+there is said to have been jolted one day an accident which caused him
+some unpopularity with the railroad people. He was all the time a
+business man. He employed four boy helpers in his news and publishing
+business. It took him a long time to learn the telegraph business under
+the circumstances, and when he was at last installed on a "plug" circuit
+he began at once to do unusual things with the current and its machines
+and appliances. This is what he tells of his first electrical invention.
+
+There was an operator at one end of the circuit who was so swift that
+Edison and his companion could not "take" fast enough to keep up with
+him. He found two old Morse registers--the machines that printed with a
+steel point the dots and dashes on a paper slip wound off of a reel.
+These he arranged in such a way that the message written, or indented,
+on them by the first instrument were given to him by the second
+instrument at any desired rate of speed or slowness.
+
+This gave to him and his friend time to catch up. This, in Morse's time,
+would have been thought an achievement. Edison seems to regard it as a
+joke. There was no time for prolonged experiment. It was an emergency,
+and the idea must necessarily have been supplemented by a quick
+mechanical skill.
+
+It was this same automatic recorder, the idea embodied in it, that by
+thought and logical deduction afterwards produced that wonderful
+automaton, the phonograph. He rigged a hasty instrument that was based
+upon the idea that if the indentations made in a slip of paper could be
+made to repeat the ticking sound of the instrument, similar indentations
+made by a point on a diaphragm that was moved by the _voice_ might
+be made to repeat the voice. His rude first instrument gave back a sound
+vaguely resembling the single word first shouted into it and supposed to
+be indented on a slip of paper, and this was enough to stimulate further
+effort. He finally made drawings and took them to a machinist whom he
+knew, afterwards one of his assistants, who laughed at the idea but made
+the model. Previously he bet a friend a barrel of apples that he could
+do it. When the model was finished he arranged a piece of tin foil and
+talked into it, and when it gave back a distinct sound the machinist was
+frightened, and Edison won his barrel of apples, "which," he says, "I
+was very glad to get."
+
+The "Wizard" is a man evidently pertaining to the class of human
+eccentrics who excite the interest of their fellow-men "to see what they
+will do next," but without any idea of the final value of that which may
+come by what seems to them to be mere unbalanced oddity. Such people are
+invariably misunderstood until they succeed. When he invented the
+automatic repeating telegraph he was discharged, and walked from Decatur
+to Nashville, 150 miles, with only a dollar or two as his entire
+possessions. With a pass thence to Louisville, he and a friend arrived
+at that place in a snowstorm, and clad in linen "dusters." This does not
+seem scientific or professor-like, but it has not hindered; possibly it
+has immensely helped. It reminds one of the Franklinic episodes when
+remembered in connection with future scientific renown and the court of
+France.
+
+One of the secrets of Edison's great success is the ease with which he
+concentrates his mind. He is said to possess the faculty of leaving one
+thing and taking up another whenever he wills. He even carries on in his
+mind various trains of thought at the same time. The operations of his
+brain are imitated in his daily conduct, which is direct and simple in
+all respects. He is never happier than when engaged in the most
+absorbing and exacting mental toil. He dresses in a machinist's clothes
+when thus employed in his laboratory, and was long accustomed to work
+continuously for as long as he was so inclined without regard to
+regularity, or meals, or day or night. He is willing to eat his food
+from a bench that is littered with filings, chips and tools. To relieve
+strain and take a moment's recreation he is known to have bought a
+"cottage" organ and taught himself to play it, and to go to it in the
+middle of the night and grind out tunes for relaxation. He has a working
+library containing several thousand books. He pores over these volumes
+to inform himself upon some pressing idea, and does so in the midst of
+his work. No man could have made some of his inventions unaided by
+technical science and a knowledge of the results of the investigations
+of many others, and it has often been wondered how a man not technically
+educated could have seemed so well to know. There was a mistake. He
+_is_ educated; a scientific investigator of remarkable attainments.
+
+In thinking of the inventions of Edison and their value, a dozen of the
+first class, that would each one have satisfied the ambition or taken
+the time of an ordinary man, can be named. The mimeograph and the
+electric pen are minor. Then there are the stock printer, the automatic
+repeating telegraph, quadruplex telegraphy, the phono-plex, the
+ore-milling process, the railway telegraph, the electric engine, the
+phonograph. Some of these inventions seem, in the glow of his
+incandescent light, or with one's ear to the tube of the telephone he
+improved in its most essential part, to be too small for Edison. But
+nothing was too small for Franklin, or for the boy who played idly with
+the lid of his mother's tea-kettle and almost invented the steam-engine
+of today, or for Hero of Alexandria, who dreamed a thousand years before
+its time of the power that was to come. So was Henry's first electric
+telegraph the merest toy, and his electro-magnet was supported upon a
+pile of books, his signal bell was that with which one calls a servant,
+and his idea was a mere experiment without result. There was a boy
+Edison needed there then, whose toys reap fortunes and light, and
+enlighten, the world. The electric pen was in its day immensely useful
+in the business world, because it was the application of the stencil to
+ordinary manuscript, and caused the making of hundreds of copies upon
+the stencil idea, and with a printer's roller instead of a brush. The
+mimeograph was the same idea in a totally different form. It was writing
+upon a tablet that is like a bastard-file, with a steel-pointed stylus.
+Each slight projection makes a hole in the paper, and then the stencil
+idea begins again.
+
+Something has been previously said of the difficulties attending the
+making of the filament for the incandescent light. It is a little thing,
+smaller than a thread, frail, delicate, sealed in a bulb almost
+absolutely exhausted of air, smooth without a flaw, of absolutely even
+caliber from end to end. The world was searched for substances out of
+which to make it, and experiments were endlessly and tediously tried;
+all for this one little part of a great invention, which, like all other
+inventions, would be valueless in the want of a single little part.
+
+There are hundreds, an unknown number, of inventions in electricity in
+this country whose authors are unknown, and will never be known to the
+general public. The patent office shows many thousands of such in the
+aggregate. Many useful improvements in the telephone alone have come
+under the eye of every casual reader of the newspapers. These are now
+locked up from the world, with many other patented changes in existing
+machines, because of the great expense attending their substitution for
+those arrangements now in use.
+
+All the principles--the principles that, finally demonstrated, become
+laws--upon which electrical invention is based, are old. It seems
+impossible, during the entire era of modern thought, to have found a new
+trait, a development, a hitherto unsuspected quality. Tesla, in some of
+his most wonderful experiments, seems almost to have touched the
+boundaries of an unexplored realm, yet not quite, not yet, and most
+likely absolute discovery can no farther go. To play upon those known
+laws--to twist them to new utilities and give them new developments--has
+been the work of the creators of all the modern electrical miracles.
+There is scarcely a field in which men work in which the results are not
+more apparent, yet all we have, and undoubtedly most we shall ever have,
+of electricity we shall continue to owe to the infant period of the
+science.
+
+It may be truthfully claimed that most of these extraordinary
+applications of electricity have been made by American inventors.
+Wherever there is steam, on sea or land, there, intimately associated
+with American management, will be found the dynamic current and all its
+uses. The science of explosive destruction has almost entirely changed,
+and with a most extraordinary result. But one of the factors of this
+change has been the electric current, a something primarily having
+nothing to do with guns, ships or sailing. The modern man-of-war,
+beginning with those of our own navy, is lighted by the electric light,
+signalled and controlled by the current, and her ponderous guns are
+loaded, fired, and even _sighted_ by the same means. Her officers
+are a corps of electrical experts. A large part of her crew are trained
+to manipulate wires instead of ropes, and her total efficiency is
+perhaps three times what it would be with the same tonnage under the old
+regime. There is a new sea life and sea science, born full grown within
+ten years from a service encrusted with traditions like barnacles, and
+that could not have come by any other agency. A big gun is no longer
+merely that, but also an electrical machine, often with machinery as
+complicated as that of a chronometer and much more mysterious in
+operation.
+
+I have said that the huge piece was even sighted by electricity. There
+is really nothing strange in the statement, though it may read like a
+fairy tale or a metaphor to whoever has never had his attention called
+to the subject. In a small way, with the name of its inventor almost
+unknown except to his messmates, it is one of the most wonderful, and
+one of the simplest, of the modern miracles. As a mere instance of the
+wide extent of modern ideas of utility, and of the possibilities of
+application of the laws that were discovered and formulated by those
+whose names the units of electrical measurements bear, it may be briefly
+stated how a group of gunners may work behind an iron breastwork, and
+never see the enemy's hull, and yet aim at him with a hundred times the
+accuracy possible in the day of the _Old Ironsides_ and the
+_Guerriere_.
+
+And first it may be stated that the _range-finder_ is largely a
+measure of mere economy. A two-million-dollar cruiser is not sailed, or
+lost, as a mere pastime. Whoever aims best will win the fight. Ten years
+ago the way of finding distance, or range, which is the same thing, was
+experimental. If a costly shot was fired over the enemy the next one was
+fired lower, and possibly between the two the range might be got, both
+vessels meantime changing positions and range. To change this, to either
+injure an antagonist quickly or get away, the "range-finder" was
+invented, as a matter not of business profit, by Lieutenant Bradley A.
+Fiske, of the U. S. Navy, in 1889. It has its reason in the familiar
+mathematical proposition that if two angles and one side of a triangle
+are known, the other sides of the triangle are easily found. That is,
+that it can be determined how far it is to a distant object without
+going to it. But Fiske's range-finder makes no mathematical
+calculations, nor requires them to be made, and is automatic. A base
+line permanently fixed on the ship is the one side of a triangle
+required. The distance of the object to be hit is determined by its
+being the apex of an imaginary triangle, and at each of the other
+angles, at the two ends of the base line, is fixed a spyglass. These are
+directed at the object.
+
+So far electricity has had nothing to do with the arrangement, but now
+it enters as the factor without which the device could have no
+adaptation. As the telescopes are turned to bear upon the target they
+move upon slides or wires bent into an arc, and these carry an electric
+current. The difference in length of the slide passed over in turning
+the telescopes upon the object causes a greater or less resistance to
+the current, precisely as a short wire carries a current more easily;
+with less "resistance;" than a long one. A contrivance for measuring the
+current, amounting to the same thing that other instruments do of the
+same class that are used every day, allows of this resistance being
+measured and read, not now in units of electricity, but _in distance
+to the apex of the triangle where the target is_; in yards. The man
+at each telescope has only to keep it pointed at the target as it moves,
+or as the vessel moves which wishes to hit it. And now even the
+telephone enters into the arrangement. Elsewhere in the ship another man
+may stand with the transmitter at his ear. He will hear a buzzing sound
+until the telescopes stop moving, and at the same time there will be
+under his eye a pointer moving over a graduated scale. The instant the
+sound ceases he reads the range denoted by the index and scale. The
+information is then conveyed in any desired way to the men at the guns;
+these, of course, being aimed by a scale corresponding to that under the
+eye of the man at the telephone. The plan is not here detailed as
+technical information valuable to the casual reader, but as showing the
+wide range of electrical applications in fields where possible
+usefulness would not have been so much as suspected a few years ago. The
+same gentleman, Lieut. Fiske, is also the author of ingenious electrical
+appliances for the working of those immense gun-carriages that have
+grown too big for men to move, and for the hoisting into their cavernous
+breeches of shot and shell. The men who work these guns now do not need
+to see the enemy, even through the porthole or the embrasure. They can
+attend strictly to the business of loading and firing, assisted by
+machines nearly or quite automatic, and can cant and lay the piece by an
+index, and fire with an electric lanyard. The genius of science has
+taken the throne vacated by the goddess of glory. The sailor has gone,
+and the expert mechanician has taken his place. The tar and his training
+have given way to the register, the gauge and the electrometer. The big
+black guns are no longer run backward amid shouts and flying splinters,
+and rammed by men stripped to the waist and shrouded in the smoke of the
+last discharge, but swing their long and tapering muzzles to and fro out
+of steel casemates, and tilt their ponderous breeches like huge
+grotesque animals lying down. The grim machinery of naval battle is
+moved by invisible hands, and its enormous weight is swayed and tilted
+by a concealed and silent wire.
+
+This strange slave, that toils unmoved in the din of battle, has been
+reduced to domestic servitude of the plainest character. The
+demonstrations made of cooking by electricity at the great fair of 1893
+leave that service possible in the future without any question.
+Electrical ovens, models of neatness, convenience and _coolness_,
+were shown at work. They were made of wood, lined with asbestos, and
+were lighted inside with an incandescent lamp. The degree of temperature
+was shown by a thermometer, and mica doors rendered the baking or
+roasting visible. There could be no question of too much heat on one
+side and too little on another, because switches placed at different
+points allowed of a cutting off, or a turning on, whenever needed.
+Laundry irons had an insulated pliable connection attached, so that heat
+was high and constant at the bottom of the iron and not elsewhere. There
+were all the appliances necessary for the broiling of steaks, the making
+of coffee and the baking of cakes, and the same mystery, which is no
+longer a mystery, pervaded it all. Woman is also to become an
+electrician, at least empirically, and in time soon to come will
+understand her voltage and her Amperes as she now does her drafts and
+dampers and the quality of her fuel.
+
+It is a practical fact that chickens are hatched by the thousand by the
+electrical current, and that men have discovered more than nature knew
+about the period of incubation, and have reduced it by electricity from
+twenty-one to nineteen days. The proverb about the value of the time of
+the incubating hen has passed into antiquity with all things else in the
+presence of electrical science.
+
+Whenever an American mechanician, a manufacturer or an inventor, is
+confronted by a difficulty otherwise insolvable he turns to electricity.
+Its laws and qualities are few. They seem now to be nearly all known,
+but the great curiosity of modern times is the almost infinite number of
+applications which these laws and qualities may be made to serve. One
+may turn at a single glance from the loading and firing of naval guns to
+the hatching of chickens and the cooking of chocolate by precisely the
+same means, silently used in the same way. Most of these applications,
+and all the most extraordinary ones, are of American origin. Their
+inventors are largely unknown. There is no attempt made here to more
+than suggest the possibilities of the near future by a glimpse of the
+present. The generation that is rising, the boy who is ten years old,
+should easily know more of electrical science than Franklin did. There
+are certain primal laws by which all explanations of all that now is,
+and most probably of almost all that is to come so far as principles go,
+may be readily understood, and these I have endeavored, in this and
+preceding chapters, to explain.
+
+There are in the United States new applications of electricity literally
+every day. Before the written page is printed some startling application
+is likely to be made that gives to that page at once an incompleteness
+it is impossible to guard against or avoid. There is a strong
+inclination to prophesy; to tell of that which is to come; to picture
+the warmed and illuminated future, smokeless and odorless, and the homes
+in which the children of the near future shall be reared. Some of those
+few apprehended things, suggested as being possible or desirable in
+these chapters, have been since done and the author has seen them. This
+American facility of electrical invention has one great cause, one
+specific reason for its fruitfulness. It is because so many acute minds
+have mastered the simple laws of electrical action. This knowledge not
+only fosters intelligent and fruitful experiment but it prevents the
+doing of foolish things. No man who has acquired a knowledge of
+mechanical forces, who understands at least that great law that for all
+force exerted there is exacted an equivalent, ever dreams upon the folly
+of the perpetual motion. In like manner does a knowledge, purely
+theoretical, of the laws of electricity prevent that waste of time in
+gropings and dreams of which the story of science and the long human
+struggle in all ages and in all departments is full.
+
+Finally, I would, if possible dispell all ideas of strangeness and
+mystery and semi-miracle as connected with electrical phenomena. There
+is no mystery; above all, there is no caprice. There are, in electricity
+and in all other departments of science, still many things undiscovered.
+It is certain that causes lead far back into that realm which is beyond
+present human investigation. _Force_ has innumerable manifestations
+that are visible, that are understood, that are controlled. Its
+_origin_ is behind the veil. A thousand branching threads of
+argument may be taken up and woven into the single strand that leads
+into the unknown. Out of the thought that is born of things has already
+arisen a new conception of the universe, and of the Eternal Mind who is
+its master. Among these things, these daily manifestations of a seeming
+mystery, the most splendid are the phenomena of electricity. They court
+the human understanding and offer a continual challenge to that faculty
+which alone distinguishes humanity from the beasts. The assistance given
+in the preceding pages toward a clear understanding of the reason why,
+so far as known, is perhaps inadequate, but is an attempt offered for
+what of interest or value may be found.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Steam Steel and Electricity, by James W. Steele
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+Project Gutenberg's Steam Steel and Electricity, by James W. Steele
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+Title: Steam Steel and Electricity
+
+Author: James W. Steele
+
+Release Date: April, 2005 [EBook #7886]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on May 30, 2003]
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+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STEAM STEEL AND ELECTRICITY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Tonya Allen
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+STEAM STEEL AND ELECTRICITY
+
+By
+
+JAMES W. STEELE
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+THE STORY OF STEAM.
+
+    What Steam is.--Steam in Nature.--The Engine in its earlier
+    forms.--Gradual explosion.--The Hero engine.--The Temple-door
+    machine.--Ideas of the Middle Ages.--Beginnings of the modern
+    engine.--Branca's engine.--Savery's engine.--The Papin engine
+    using cylinder and piston.--Watt's improvements upon the
+    Newcomen idea.--The crank movement.--The first use of steam
+    expansively.--The "Governor."--First engine by an American
+    Inventor.--Its effect upon progress in the United
+    States.--Simplicity and cheapness of the modern engine.--Actual
+    construction of the modern engine.--Valves, piston, etc., with
+    diagrams.
+
+THE AGE OF STEEL.
+
+    The various "Ages" in civilization.--Ancient knowledge of the
+    metals.--The invention and use of Bronze.--What Steel is.--The
+    "Lost Arts."--Metallurgy and chemistry.--Oriental Steel.--Modern
+    definition of Steel.--Invention of Cast Steel.--First iron-ore
+    discoveries in America.--First American Iron-works.--Early
+    methods without steam.--First American casting.--Effect of iron
+    industry upon independence.--Water-power.--The trip-hammer.--The
+    steam-hammer of Nasmyth.--Machine-tools and their
+    effects.--First rolling-mill.--Product of the iron industry in
+    1840-50.--The modern nail, and how it came.--Effect of iron upon
+    architecture.--The "Sky-Scraper."--Gas as fuel in iron
+    manufactures.--The Steel of the present.--The invention of
+    Kelley.--The Bessemer process.--The "Converter."--Present
+    product of Steel.--The Steel-mill.
+
+THE STORY OF ELECTRICITY.
+
+    The oldest and the youngest of the sciences.--Origin of the
+    name.--Ancient ideas of Electricity.--Later experiments.--Crude
+    notions and wrong conclusions.--First Electric
+    Machine.--Frictional Electricity.--The Leyden Jar.--Extreme
+    ideas and Fakerism.--Franklin, his new ideas and their
+    reception.--Franklin's Kite.--The Man Franklin.--Experiments
+    after Franklin, leading to our present modern uses.--Galvani and
+    his discovery.--Volta, and the first "Battery."--How a battery
+    acts.--The laws of Electricity, and how they were
+    discovered.--Induction, and its discoverer.--The line at which
+    modern Electricity begins.--Magnetism and Electricity.--The
+    Electro-Magnet.--The Molecular theory.--Faraday, and his Law of
+    Magnetic Force.
+
+MODERN ELECTRICITY.
+
+    CHAPTER I. The Four great qualities of Electricity which make
+    its modern uses possible.--The universal wire.--Conductors and
+    non conductors.--Electricity an exception in the ordinary Laws
+    of Nature.--A dual nature: "Positive" and "Negative."--All
+    modern uses come under the law of Induction.--Some of the laws
+    of this induction.--Magnets and Magnetism.--Relationship between
+    the two.--Magnetic "poles."--Practical explanation of the action
+    of induction.--The Induction Coil.--Dynamic and Static
+    Electricity.--The Electric Telegraph.--First attempts.--Morse,
+    and his beginnings.--The first Telegraph Line.--Vail, and the
+    invention of the dot-and-dash alphabet.--The old instruments and
+    the new.--The final simplicity of the telegraph.
+
+    CHAPTER II. The Ocean Cable.--Differences between land lines and
+    cables.--The story of the first cable.--Field and his final
+    success.--The Telephone.--Early attempts.--Description of Bell's
+    invention.--The Telautograph.--Early attempts and the idea upon
+    which they were based.--Description of Gray's invention.--How a
+    Telautograph may be made mechanically.
+
+    CHAPTER III. The Electric Light.--Causes of heat and light in
+    the conductor of a current.--The first Electric Light.--The Arc
+    Light, and how constructed.--The Incandescent.--The
+    Dynamo.--Date of the invention.--Successive steps.--Faraday the
+    discoverer of its principle.--Pixu's
+    machine.--Pacinatti.--Wilde.--Siemens' and Wheatstone.--The
+    Motor.--How the Dynamo and Motor came to be coupled.--Review of
+    first attempts.--Kidder's battery.--Page's machine.--Electric
+    Railroads.--Electrolysis.--General facts.--Electrical
+    Measurements.--"Death Current."--Instruments of
+    Measurement.--Electricity as an Industry.--Medical
+    Electricity.--Incomplete possibilities.--What the "Storage
+    Battery" is.
+
+    CHAPTER IV. Electrical Invention in the United States.--Review
+    of the careers of Franklin, Morse, Field, Edison and
+    others.--Some of the surprising applications of
+    Electricity.--The Range-Finder.--Cooking and heating by
+    Electricity.
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF STEAM
+
+
+That which was utterly unknown to the most splendid civilizations of the
+past is in our time the chief power of civilization, daily engaged in
+making that history of a new era that is yet to be written in words. It
+has been demonstrated long since that men's lives are to be influenced
+not by theory, or belief, or argument and reason, so much as by that
+course of daily life which is not attempted to be governed by argument
+and reason, but by great physical facts like steam, electricity and
+machinery in their present applications.
+
+The greatest of these facts of the present civilization are expressed in
+the phrase, Steam and Steel. The theme is stupendous. Only the most
+prominent of its facts can be given in small space, and those only in
+outline. The subject is also old, yet to every boy it must be told
+again, and the most ordinary intelligence must have some desire to know
+the secrets, if such they are, of that which is unquestionably the
+greatest force that ever yielded to the audacity of humanity. It is now
+of little avail to know that all the records that men revere, all the
+great epics of the world, were written in the absence of the
+characteristic forces of modern life. A thousand generations had lived
+and died, an immense volume of history had been enacted, the heroes of
+all the ages, and almost those of our own time, had fulfilled their
+destinies and passed away, before it came about that a mere physical
+fact should fill a larger place in our lives than all examples, and that
+the evanescent vapor which we call steam should change daily, and
+effectively, the courses and modes of human action, and erect life upon
+another plane.
+
+It may seem not a little absurd to inquire now "what is steam?"
+Everybody knows the answer. The non-technical reader knows that it is
+that vapor which, for instance, pervades the kitchen, which issues from
+every cooking vessel and waste-pipe, and is always white and visible,
+and moist and warm. We may best understand an answer to the question,
+perhaps, by remembering that steam is one of the three natural
+conditions of water: ice, fluid water, and steam. One or the other of
+these conditions always exists, and always under two others: pressure
+and heat. When the air around water reaches the temperature of
+thirty-two degrees by the scale of Fahrenheit, or   or zero by the
+Centigrade scale, and is exposed to this temperature for a time, it
+becomes ice. At two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit it becomes
+steam. Between these two temperatures it is water. But the change to
+steam which is so rapid and visible at the temperature above mentioned
+is taking place slowly all the time when water, in any situation, is
+exposed to the air. As the temperature rises the change becomes more
+rapid. The steam-making of the arts is merely that of all nature,
+hastened artificially and intentionally.
+
+The element of pressure, mentioned above, enters into the proposition
+because water boils at a lower temperature, with less heat, when the
+weight of the atmosphere is less than normal, as it is at great
+elevations, and on days when, as we now express it, there is a low
+barometer. Long before any cook could explain the fact it was known that
+the water boiling quickly was a sign of storm. It has often been found
+by camping-parties on mountains that in an attempt to boil potatoes in a
+pot the water would all "boil away," and leave the vegetables uncooked.
+The heat required to evaporate it at the elevation was less than that
+required to cook in boiling water. It is one of the instances where the
+problems of nature intrude themselves prominently into the affairs of
+common life without previous notice.
+
+This universal evaporation, under varying circumstances, is probably the
+most important agency in nature, and the most continuous and potent.
+There was only so much water to begin with. There will never be any less
+or any more. The saltness of the sea never varies, because the loss by
+evaporation and the new supply through condensation of the
+steam--rain--necessarily remain balanced by law forever. The surface of
+our world is water in the proportion of three to one. The extent of
+nature's steam-making, silent, and mostly invisible, is immeasurable and
+remains an undetermined quantity. The three forms of water combine and
+work together as though through intentional partnership, and have, thus
+combined, already changed the entire land surface of the world from what
+it was to what it is, and working ceaselessly through endless cycles
+will change it yet more. The exhalations that are steam become the water
+in a rock-cleft. It changes to ice with a force almost beyond
+measurement in the orderly arrangement of its crystals in compliance
+with an immutable law for such arrangement, and rends the rock. The
+process goes on. There is no high mountain in any land where water will
+not freeze. The water of rain and snow carries away the powdered remains
+from year to year, and from age to age. The comminuted ruins of
+mountains have made the plains and filled up and choked the mouth of the
+Mississippi. The soil that once lay hundreds of miles away has made the
+delta of every river that flows into the sea. The endless and resistless
+process goes on without ceasing, a force that is never expended, and but
+once interrupted within the knowledge of men, then covered a large area
+of the world with a sea of ice that buried for ages every living thing.
+
+The common idea of the steam that we make by boiling water is that it is
+all water, composed of that and nothing else, and this conception is
+gathered from apparent fact. Yet it is not entirely true. Steam is an
+invisible vapor in every boiler, and does not become what we know by
+sight as steam until it has become partly cooled. As actual steam
+uncooled, it is a gas, obeying all the laws of the permanent gases. The
+creature of temperature and pressure, it changes from this gaseous form
+when their conditions are removed, and in the change becomes visible to
+us. Its elasticity, its power of yielding to compression, are enormous,
+and it gives back this elasticity of compression with almost
+inconceivable readiness and swiftness. To the eye, in watching the
+gliding and noiseless movements of one of the great modern engines, the
+power of which one has only a vague and inadequate conception seems not
+only inexplicable, but gentle. The ponderous iron pieces seem to weigh
+nothing. There is a feeling that one might hinder the movement as he
+would that of a watch. There is an inability to realize the fact that
+one of the mightiest forces of nature is there embodied in an easy,
+gliding, noiseless impulse. Yet it is one that would push aside massy
+tons of dead weight, that would almost unimpeded crush a hole through
+the enclosing wall, that whirls upon the rails the drivers of a
+locomotive weighing sixty tons as though there were no weight above
+them, no bite upon the rails. There is an enormous concentration of
+force somewhere; of a force which perhaps no man can fairly estimate;
+and it is under the thin shell we call a boiler. Were it not elastic it
+could not be so imprisoned, and when it rebels, when this thin shell is
+torn like paper, there is a havoc by which we may at last inadequately
+measure the power of steam.
+
+We have in modern times applied the word "engine" almost exclusively to
+the machine which is moved by the pressure of steam. Yet we might go
+further, since one of the first examples of a pressure engine, older
+than the steam machine by nearly four hundred years, is the gun. Reduced
+to its principle this is an engine whose operation depends upon the
+expansion of gas in a cylinder, the piston being a projectile. The same
+principle applies in all the machines we know as "engines." An
+air-engine works through the expansion of air in a cylinder by heat. A
+gas-engine, now of common use, by the expansion, which is explosion,
+caused by burning a mixture of coal-gas and air, and the steam-engine,
+the universal power generator of modern life, works by the expansion of
+the vapor of water as it is generated by heat. Steam may be considered a
+species of _gradual_ explosion applied to the uses of industry. It
+often becomes a real one, complying with all the conditions, and as
+destructive as dynamite.
+
+It cannot be certainly known how long men have experimented with the
+expansive force of steam. The first feeble attempt to purloin the power
+of the geyser was probably by Hero, of Alexandria, about a hundred and
+thirty years before Christ. His machine was also the first known
+illustration of what is now called the "turbine" principle; the
+principle of _reaction_ in mechanics. [Footnote: This principle is
+often a puzzle to students. There is an old story of the man who put a
+bellows in his boat to make wind against the sail, and the wind did not
+affect the sail, but the boat went backward in an opposite direction
+from the nozzle of the bellows. There is probably no better illustration
+of reaction than the "kick" of a gun, which most persons know about. The
+recoil of a six-pound field piece is usually from six to twelve feet. It
+can be understood by supposing a gun to be loaded with powder and an
+iron rod longer than the barrel to be left on the charge. If the outer
+end of this rod were then placed against a tree, and the gun were fired,
+it is manifest that the gun would become the projectile, and be fired
+off of the rod backward or burst. In ordinary cases the air in the bore,
+and immediately outside of the muzzle, acts comparatively, and in a
+measure, as the supposed rod against the tree would. It gives way, and
+is elastic, but not as quickly as the force of the explosion acts, and
+the gun is pushed backwards. It is the turbine principle, running into
+hundreds of uses in mechanics.] He made a closed vessel from whose
+opposite sides radiated two hollow arms with holes in their sides, the
+holes being on opposite sides of the tubes from each other. This vessel
+he mounted on an upright spindle, and put water in it and heated the
+water. The steam issuing from the holes in the arms drove them backward.
+The principle of the action of Hero's machine has been accepted for two
+thousand years, though never in a steam-engine. It exists under all
+circumstances similar to his. In water, in the turbine wheel, it has
+been made most efficacious. The power applied now for the harnessing of
+Niagara for the purpose of sending electric currents hundreds of miles
+is the turbine wheel.
+
+[Illustration: THE SUPPOSED HERO ENGINE.]
+
+Hero appears to the popular imagination as the greatest inventor of the
+past. Every school boy knows him. Archimedes, the Greek, was the
+greater, and a hundred and fifty years the earlier, and was the author
+of the significance of the word "Eureka," as we use it now. But Hero was
+the pioneer in steam. He made the first steam-engine, and is immortal
+through a toy.
+
+The first _practical_ device in which expansion was used seems to
+have been for the exploiting of an ecclesiastical trick intended to
+impress the populace. There is a saying by an antique wit that no two
+priests or augurs could ever meet and look at each other without a
+knowing wink of recognition. Hero is said to have been the author of
+this contrivance also. The temple doors would open by themselves when
+the fire burned on the altar, and would close again when that fire was
+extinguished, and the worshippers would think it a miracle. It is
+interesting because it contained the principle upon which was afterwards
+attempted to be made the first working low-pressure or atmospheric
+steam-engine. Yet it was not steam, but air, that was used. A hollow
+altar containing air was heated by the fire being kindled upon it. The
+air expanded and passed through a pipe into a vessel below containing
+water. It pressed the water out through another pipe into a bucket
+which, being thereby made heavier, pulled open the temple doors. When
+the fire went out again there was a partial vacuum in the vessel that
+had held the water at first, and the water was sucked back through the
+pipe out of the bucket. That became lighter again and allowed the doors
+to close with a counter-weight. All that was then necessary to convince
+the populace of the genuineness of the seeming miracle was to keep them
+from understanding it. The machinery was under the floor. There have
+been thousands of miracles since then performed by natural agencies, and
+there have passed many ages since Hero's machine during which not to
+understand a thing was to believe it to be supernatural.
+
+[Illustration: THE TEMPLE-DOOR TRICK.]
+
+From the time of Hero until the seventeenth century there is no record
+of any attempt being made to utilize steam-pressure for a practical
+purpose. The fact seems strange only because steam-power is so prominent
+a fact with ourselves. The ages that intervened were, as a whole, times
+of the densest superstition. The human mind was active, but it was
+entirely occupied with miracle and semi-miracle; in astrology, magic and
+alchemy; in trying to find the key to the supernatural. Every thinker,
+every educated man, every man who knew more than the rest, was bent upon
+finding this key for himself, so that he might use it for his own
+advantage. During all those ages there was no idea of the natural
+sciences. The key they lacked, and never found, that would have opened
+all, is the fact that in the realm of science and experiment there is no
+supernatural, and only eternal law; that cause produces its effect
+invariably. Even Kepler, the discoverer of the three great laws that
+stand as the foundation of the Copernican system of the universe, was in
+his investigations under the influence of astrological and cabalistic
+superstitions. [Footnote: Kepler, a German, lived between 1571 and 1630.
+His life was full of vicissitudes, in the midst of which he performed an
+astonishing Even the science of amount of intellectual labor, with
+lasting results. He was the personal friend of Galileo and Tycho Brahe,
+and his life may be said to have been spent in finding the abstract
+intelligible reason for the actual disposition of the solar system, in
+which physical cause should take the place of arbitrary hypothesis. He
+did this.] medicine was, during those ages, a magical art, and the idea
+of cure by medicine, that drugs actually _cure_, is existent to
+this day as a remnant of the Middle Ages. A man's death-offense might be
+that he knew more than he could make others understand about the then
+secrets of nature. Yet he himself might believe more or less in magic.
+No one was untouched; all intellect was more or less enslaved.
+
+And when experiments at last began to be made in the mechanisms by which
+steam might be utilized they were such as boys now make for amusement;
+such as throwing a steam-jet against the vanes of a paddle-wheel. Such
+was Branca's engine, made nine years after the landing of our
+forefathers at Plymouth, and thought worthy of a description and record.
+The next attempt was much more practical, but cannot be accurately
+assigned. It consisted of two chambers, from each of which alternately
+water was forced by steam, and which were filled again by cooling off
+and the forming of a vacuum where the steam had been. One chamber worked
+while the other cooled. It was an immense advance in the direction of
+utility.
+
+About 1698, we begin to encounter the names that are familiar to us in
+connection with the history of the steam-engine. In that year Thomas
+Savery obtained a patent for raising water by steam. His was a
+modification of the idea described above. The boilers used would be of
+no value now, nevertheless the machine came into considerable use, and
+the world that learned so gradually became possessed with the idea that
+there was a utility in the pressure of steam. Savery's engine is said to
+have grown out of the accident of his throwing a flask containing a
+little wine on the fire at a tavern. Concluding immediately afterwards
+that he wanted it, he snatched it off of the fender and plunged it into
+a basin of water to cool it. The steam inside instantly condensing, the
+water rushed in and filled it as it cooled.
+
+We now come to the beginning of the steam engine as we understand the
+term; the machine that involves the use of the cylinder and piston.
+These two features had been used in pumps long before, the atmospheric
+pump being one of the oldest of modern machines. The vacuum was known
+and utilized long before the cause of it was known. [Footnote: The
+discoverer was an Italian, Torricelli, about 1643. Gallileo, his tutor
+and friend, did not know why water would not rise in a tube more than
+thirty-three feet. No one knew of the _weight of the atmosphere_,
+so late as the early days of this republic. Many did not believe the
+theory long after that time. Torricelli, by his experiments, demonstrated
+the fact and invented the mercurial barometer, long known as the
+"Torricellian Tube." This last instrument led to another discovery; that
+the weight of the atmosphere varied from time to time in the same
+locality, and that storms and weather changes were indicated by a rising
+and falling of the column of mercury in the tube of the
+siphon-barometer. That which we call the "weather-bureau," organized by
+General Albert J. Myer, United States Army, in 1870, and growing out of
+the army signal service, of which he was chief, makes its "forecasts" by
+the use of the telegraph and the barometer. The "low pressure area"
+follows a path, which means a change of weather on that path. Notices by
+telegraph define the route, and the coming storm is not foretold, but
+_foreknown;_ not prophesied, but _ascertained._ If we have
+been led from the crude pump of Gallileo's time directly to the weather
+bureau of the present with its invaluable signals to sailors and
+convenience to everybody, it is no more than is continually to be traced
+even to the beginning of the wonderful school of modern science.]
+
+But in the beginning it was not proposed to use steam in connection with
+the cylinder and piston which now really constitutes the steam-engine.
+Reverting again to the example of the gun, it was suggested to push a
+piston forward in a tube by the explosion of gunpowder behind it, or to
+repeat the Savery experiment with powder instead of steam. These ideas
+were those of about 1678-1685. The very earliest cylinder and piston
+engine was suggested by Denis Papin in 1690. These early inventors only
+went a portion of the way, and almost the entire idea of the
+steam-engine is of much later date. Mankind had then a singular gift of
+beginning at the wrong end. Every inventor now uses facts that seem to
+him to have been always known, and that are his by a kind of intuition.
+But they were all acquired by the tedious experience of a past that is
+distinguished by a few great names whose owners knew in their time
+perhaps one-tenth part as much as the modern inventor does, who is
+unconsciously using the facts learned by old experience. But the others
+began at the beginning.
+
+[Illustration: EARLY NEWCOMEN PUMPING ENGINE. STEAM-COCK, COLD WATER
+COCK AND WASTE-SPIGOT ALL WORKED BY HAND.]
+
+In 1711, almost a hundred years after the arrival at Jamestown and
+Plymouth of the fathers of our present civilization, the steam-engine
+that is called Newcomen's began to be used for the pumping of water out
+of mines. This engine, slightly modified, and especially by the boy who
+invented the automatic cut-off for the steam valves, was a most rude and
+clumsy machine measured by our ideas. There appears to have been
+scarcely a single feature of it that is now visible in a modern engine.
+The cylinder was always vertical. It had the upper end open, and was a
+round iron vessel in which a plunger moved up and down. Steam was let in
+below this plunger, and the walking-beam with which it was connected by
+a rod had that end of it raised. When raised the steam was cut off, and
+all that was then under the piston was condensed by a jet of cold water.
+The outside air-pressure then acted upon it and pushed it down again. In
+this down-stroke by air-pressure the work was done. The far end of the
+walking-beam was even counter-weighted to help the steam-pressure. The
+elastic force of compressed steam was not depended upon, was hardly even
+known, in this first working and practical engine of the world. Every
+engine of that time was an experimental structure by itself. The boiler,
+as we use it, was unknown. Often it was square, stayed and braced
+against pressure in a most complicated way. Yet the Newcomen engine held
+its place for about seventy-five years; a very long time in our
+conception, and in view of the vast possibilities that we now know were
+before the science. [Footnote: As late as 1880, the steam-engine
+illustrated and described in the "natural philosophy" text books was
+still the Newcomen, or Newcomen-Watt engine, and this while that engine
+was almost unknown in ordinary circumstances, and double-acting
+high-pressure engines were in operation everywhere. This last, without
+which not much could be done that is now done, was evidently for a long
+time after it came into use regarded as a dangerous and unphilosophical
+experiment, hardly scientific, and not destined to be permanently
+adopted.]
+
+In the year 1760, James Watt, who was by occupation what is now known as
+a model-maker, and who lived in Glasgow, was called upon to repair a
+model of a Newcomen engine belonging to the university. While thus
+engaged he was impressed with the great waste of steam, or of time and
+fuel, which is the same thing, involved in the alternate heating and
+cooling of Newcomen's cylinder. To him occurred the idea of keeping the
+cylinder as hot as the steam used in it. Watt was therefore the inventor
+of the first of those economies now regarded as absolute requirements in
+construction. He made the first "steam-jacket," and was, as well, the
+author of the idea of covering the cylinder with a coat of wood, or
+other non-conductor. He contrived a second chamber, outside of the
+cylinder, where the then indispensable condensation should take place.
+Then he gave this cylinder for the first time two heads, and let out the
+piston-rod through a hole in the upper head, with packing. He used steam
+on the upper side of the piston as well as the lower, and it will be
+seen that he came very near to making the modern engine.
+
+Yet he did not make it. He was still unable to dispense with the
+condensing and vacuum and air-pressure ideas. Acting for the first time
+in the line of real efficiency, he failed to go far enough to attain it.
+He made a double-acting engine by the addition of many new parts; he
+even attained the point of applying his idea to the production of
+circular motion. But he merely doubled the Newcomen idea. His engine
+became the Newcomen-Watt. He had a condensing chamber at each end of the
+stroke and could therefore command a reciprocating movement. The
+walking-beam was retained, not for the purpose for which it is often
+used now, but because it was indispensable to his semi-atmospheric
+engine.
+
+[Illustration: THE PERFECTED NEWCOMEN-WATT ENGINE.]
+
+It may seem almost absurd that the universal crank-movement of an engine
+was ever the subject of a patent. Yet such was the case. A man named
+Pickard anticipated Watt, and the latter then applied to his engines the
+"sun-and-planet" movement, instead of the crank, until the patent on the
+latter expired. The steam-engine marks the beginning of a long series of
+troubles in the claims of patentees.
+
+In 1782 came Watt's last steam invention, an engine that used steam
+_expansively_. This was an immense stride. He was also at the same
+time the inventor of the "throttle," or choke valve, by which he
+regulated the supply of steam to the piston. It seems a strange thing
+that up to this time, about 1767, an engine in actual use was started by
+getting up steam enough to make it go, and waiting for it to begin, and
+stopped by putting out the fire.
+
+Then he invented the "governor," a contrivance that has scarcely changed
+in form, and not at all in action, since it was first used, and is one
+of the few instances of a machine perfect in the beginning. Two balls
+hang on two rods on each side of an upright shaft, to which the rods are
+hinged. The shaft is rotated by the engine, and the faster it turns the
+more the two balls stand out from it. The slower it turns the more they
+hang down toward it. Any one can illustrate this by whirling in his
+hands a half-open umbrella. There is a connection between the movement
+of these balls and the throttle; as they swing out more they close it,
+as they fall closer to the shaft they open it. The engine will therefore
+regulate its own speed with reference to the work it has to do from
+moment to moment.
+
+[Illustration: THE GOVERNOR.]
+
+Through all these changes the original idea remained of a vacuum at the
+end of every stroke, of indispensable assistance from atmospheric
+pressure, of a careful use of the direct expansive power of steam, and
+of the avoidance of the high pressures and the actual power of which
+steam is now known to be safely capable. [Footnote: In a reputable
+school "philosophy" printed in 1880, thus: "In some engines" (describing
+the modern high-pressure engine, universal in most land service) "the
+apparatus for condensing steam alternately above and below the piston is
+dispensed with, and the steam, after it has moved the piston from one
+end of the cylinder to the other, is allowed to escape, by the opening
+of a valve, directly into the air. To accomplish this it is evident that
+the steam must have an elastic force greater than the pressure of the
+air, _or it could not expand and drive out the waste steam on the
+other side of the piston, in opposition to the pressure of the air_."
+According to this teaching, which the young student is expected to
+understand and to entirely believe, a pressure of steam of, say eighty
+to a hundred and twenty pounds to the inch on one side of the piston is
+accompanied by an absolute vacuum there, which permits the pressure of
+the outside air to exert itself against the opposite side of the piston
+through the open port at the other end of the cylinder. That is, a state
+of things which would exist if the steam behind the piston _were
+suddenly condensed_, exists anyway. If it be true the facts should be
+more generally known; if not, most of the school "philosophies" need
+reviewing.] Then an almost unknown American came upon the scene. In
+English hands the story at once passes from this point to the
+experiments of Trevethick and George Stevenson with steam as applied to
+railway locomotion. But as Watt left it and Trevethick found it, the
+steam engine could never have been applied to locomotion. It was slow,
+ponderous, complicated and scientific, worked at low pressures, and Watt
+and his contemporaries would have run away in affright from the
+innovation that came in between them and the first attempts of the
+pioneers of the locomotive. This innovation was that of Evans, the
+American, of whom further presently.
+
+The first steam-engine ever built in the United States was probably of
+the Watt pattern, in 1773. In 1776, the year of beginning for ourselves,
+there were only two engines of any kind in the colonies; one at Passaic,
+N. J., the other at Philadelphia. We were full of the idea of the
+independence we had won soon afterwards, but in material respects we had
+all before us.
+
+In 1787, Oliver Evans introduced improvements in grain mills, and was
+generally efficient as one of the beginners in the field of American
+invention. Soon afterwards he is known to have made a steam-engine which
+was the first high-pressure double-acting engine ever made. The engine
+that used steam at each end of the cylinder with a vacuum and a
+condenser, was in this first instance, so far as any record can be
+found, supplanted by the engine of to-day. The reason of the delay it is
+difficult to account for on any other grounds than lack of boldness, for
+unquestionably the early experimenters knew that such an engine could be
+made. They were afraid of the power they had evoked. Such a machine may
+have seemed to them a willful toying with disaster. Their efforts were
+bent during many years toward rendering a treacherous giant useful, yet
+entirely harmless. Their boilers, greatly improved over those I have
+mentioned, never were such as were afterwards made to suit the high
+pressures required by the audacity of Hopkins. This audacity was the
+mother of the locomotive, and of that engine which almost from that date
+has been used for nearly every purpose of our modern life that requires
+power. The American innovation may have passed unnoticed at the time,
+but intentionally or otherwise it was imitated as a preliminary to all
+modern engines. Nearly a century passed between the making of the first
+practical engine and that one which now stands as the type of many
+thousands. But now every little saw-mill in the American woods could
+have, and finally did have, its little cheap, unscientific, powerful and
+non-vacuum engine, set up and worked without experience, and maintained
+in working order by an unskilled laborer. A thousand uses for steam grew
+out of this experiment of a Yankee who knew no better than to tempt fate
+with a high-pressure and speed and recklessness that has now become
+almost universal.
+
+There was with Watt and his contemporaries apparently a fondness for
+cost and complications. Most likely the finished Watt engine was a
+handsome and stately machine, imposing in its deliberate movements.
+There is apparently nothing simpler than the placing of the head of the
+piston-rod between two guide-pieces to keep it in line and give it
+bearing. Yet we have only to turn back a few years and see the elaborate
+and beautiful geometrical diagram contrived by Watt to produce the same
+simple effect, and known as a "parallel motion." It kept its place until
+the walking-beam was cast away, and the American horizontal engine came
+into almost universal use.
+
+The object of this chapter so far has been to present an idea of
+beginnings; of the evolution of the universal and indispensable machine
+of civilization. The steam-engine has given a new impetus to industry,
+and in a sense an added meaning to life. It has made possible most that
+was ever dreamed of material greatness. It has altered the destiny of
+this nation, and other nations, made greatness out of crude beginnings,
+wealth out of poverty, prosperity upon thousands of square miles of
+uninhabitable wilderness. It was the chiefest instrumentality in the
+widening of civilization, the bringing together of alien peoples, the
+dissemination of ideas. Electricity may carry the idea; steam carries
+the man with the idea. The crude misconceptions of old times existed
+naturally before its time, and have largely vanished since it came.
+Marco Polo and Mandeville and their kind are no longer possibilities.
+Applied to transportation, locomotion alone, its effects have been
+revolutionary. Applied to common life in its minute ramifications these
+effects could not have been believed or foretold, and are incredible.
+The thought might be followed indefinitely, and it is almost impossible
+to compare the world as we know it with the world of our immediate
+ancestors. Only by means of contrasts, startling in their details, can
+we arrive at an adequate estimate, even as a moral farce, of the power
+of steam as embodied in the modern engine in a thousand forms.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Perhaps it might be well to attempt to convey, for the benefit of the
+youngest reader, an idea of the actual working of the machine we call a
+steam-engine. There are hundreds of forms, and yet they are all alike
+in essentials. To know the principle of one is to know that of all.
+There is probably not an engine in the world in effective common
+use--the odd and unusual rotary and other forms never having been
+practical engines--that is not constructed upon the plan of the cylinder
+and piston. These two parts make the engine. If they are understood only
+differences in construction and detail remain.
+
+Imagine a short tube into which you have inserted a pellet, or wad of
+any kind, so that it fits tolerably, yet moves easily back and forth in
+the bore of the tube. If this pellet or wad is at one end of the tube
+you may, by inserting that end in your mouth and putting air-pressure
+upon it, make it slide to the other end. You do not touch it with
+anything; you may push it back and forth with your breath as many times
+as you wish, not by blowing against it, so to speak, but by producing an
+actual air-pressure upon it which is confined by the sides of the tube
+and cannot go elsewhere. The only pressure necessary is enough to move
+the pellet.
+
+Now, if you push this little pellet one way by the air-pressure from
+your mouth, and then, instead of reversing the tube in the mouth and
+pushing it back again in the same way, reverse the process and suck the
+air out from behind it, it comes back by the pressure of the outside
+atmosphere. This was the way the first steam engines worked. Their only
+purpose was to get the piston lifted, and air-pressure did all the
+actual work.
+
+If you turn the tube, and put an air-pressure first at one end and then
+at the other, and pay no attention to vacuum or atmospheric pressure,
+you will have the principle of the later modern, almost universal,
+high-pressure, double-acting steam-engine.
+
+But now you must imagine that the tube is fixed immovably, and that the
+air-pressure is constant in a pipe leading to the tube, and yet must be
+admitted first to one end of the tube and then to the other alternately,
+in order to push the pellet back and forth in it. It seems simple.
+Perhaps the young reader can find a way to do it, but it required about
+a hundred years for ingenious men to find out how to do precisely the
+same thing automatically. It involves the steam-chest and the
+slide-valve, and all other kinds of steam valves that have been
+invented, including the Corliss cut-off, and all others that are akin to
+it in object and action.
+
+But now imagine the tube closed at each end to begin with, and the
+little moving pellet, or plunger, on the inside. To get the air into
+both ends of the tube alternately, and to use its pressure on each side
+of the pellet, we will suppose that the air-pipe is forked, and that one
+end of each fork is inserted into the side of the tube near the end,
+like the figure below, and imagine also that you have put a finger over
+each end of the tube.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 1]
+
+We are now getting the air-pressure through the pipe in both ends of the
+tube alike, and do not move the pellet either way. To make it move we
+must do something more, and open one end of the tube, and close that
+fork of the air-pipe, and thus get all the pressure on one side of the
+pellet. Remove one finger from the end of the tube, and pinch the fork
+of the air-tube that is on that side. The pellet will now move toward
+that end of the tube which is open. Reverse the process, and it can be
+pushed back again with air-pressure to the other end, and so on
+indefinitely.
+
+Let us improve the process. We will close each end of the tube
+permanently, and insert four cocks in the tube and forked pipe.
+
+We have here two tubes inserted at each end of the large tube, and in
+each of these is a cock. We have each cock connected by a rod to the
+lever set on a pin in the middle of the tube. We must have these cocks
+so arranged that when the lever is moved (say) to the right, A. is
+opened and B. is closed, and D. is opened and C. is closed. Now if the
+air-pressure is constant through the forked air-tube, and the cock E. is
+open, if the top of the lever is moved to the right, the pellet will be
+pushed to the left in the large tube. If the lever is moved to the left,
+and the two cocks that were open are closed, and the two that were
+closed are opened again, the pellet will be sent back to the other end
+of the tube. This movement of the pellet in the tube will occur as often
+as the lever is moved and there is any air-pressure in the forked tube.
+There is a _supply_-cock, opened and an _escape_-cock closed,
+and an escape-cock _opened_ and a supply-cock _closed_, at
+each end of the tube, _every time the lever is moved_.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 2]
+
+We are using air instead of steam, and the movement of these four cocks
+all at the same time, and the result of moving them, is precisely that
+of the slide-valve of a steam-engine. The diagrams of this slide-valve
+would be difficult to understand. The action of the cocks can be more
+readily understood, and the result, and even much of the action, is
+precisely the same.
+
+But to make the arrangement entirely efficient we must go a little
+further into the construction of a steam-engine. The pellet in the tube
+has no connection with the outside, and we can get nothing from it. So
+we give it a stem, thus: and when we do so we change it into a piston
+and its rod. Where it passes through the stopper at the end of the tube
+it must pass air- (or steam-) tight. Then as we push the piston back and
+forth we have a movement that we can attach to machinery at the end of
+the rod, and get a result from. We also move the cocks, or valves,
+automatically by the movement of the rod.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 3]
+
+Turning now to Fig. 3 again let us imagine a connection made between the
+rod and the end of the lever in Fig. 2. Now put on the air (or steam)
+pressure, and when the piston has reached the right-hand end of the tube
+it automatically, by its connections, closes B. and opens A., and opens
+D. and closes C. The pellet will be pushed back in the tube and go to
+the other end of it, through the pressure coming against the piston
+through the part of the air tube where the cock D. is open. It reaches
+the left-hand end of the tube, and we must imagine that when it gets
+there it, in the same manner and by the proper connections, closes D.,
+opens C., closes A. and opens B. If these mechanical movements are
+completed it must be plain that so long as the air (or steam) pressure
+is continued in the forked pipe the piston will automatically cut off
+its supply and open its escape at each alternate end, and move back and
+forth. Any boy can see how a backward and forward movement may be made
+to give motion to a crank. All other details in an engine are questions
+of convenience in construction, and not questions of principle or manner
+of action.
+
+Of older readers, I might request the supposition that, in Fig. 2, only
+the valves A. and B. were automatically and invariably opened and closed
+by the action of the piston-rod of Fig. 3, and that C. and D. were
+controlled solely by the governor, before mentioned, which we will
+suppose to be located at E. Then the escape of the steam ahead of the
+piston must always come at the same time with reference to the stroke,
+but the supply will depend upon the requirements of each individual
+stroke, and the work it has to do, and afford to the piston a greater or
+less push, as the emergencies of that particular instant may require.
+This arrangement would be one of regularity of movement and of economy
+in the use of steam. That which is needed is supplied, and no more. This
+is the principle and the object of the Corliss cut-off, and of all
+others similar to it in purpose. Their principle is that _only the
+escape is automatically controlled by the movements of the
+piston-rod_, occurring always at the same time with reference to the
+stroke, while _the supply is under control of the movement of the
+governor_, and regulated according to the emergencies of the
+movement. The governor, in any of its forms, as ordinarily applied,
+performs only half of this function. It regulates the general supply of
+steam to the cylinder, but the supply-valve continues to be opened,
+always to full width, and always at the same moment with reference to
+the stroke. With the two separate sets of automatic machinery required
+by engines of the Corliss type, the piston does not always receive its
+steam at the beginning of the stroke, and the supply may be cut off
+partially or entirely at any point in its passage along the cylinder, as
+the work to be done requires. The economic value of such an arrangement
+is manifest. No attempt is made here to explain by means of elaborate
+diagrams. It is believed that if the reason of things, and the principle
+of action, is clear, the particulars may be easily studied by any reader
+who is disposed to master mechanical details.
+
+
+
+
+THE AGE OF STEEL
+
+
+In very recent times the processes of civilization have had a strong and
+almost unnoted tendency toward the increased use of the _best_.
+Thus, most that iron once was, in use and practice, steel now is. This
+use, growing daily, widens the scope that must be taken in discussing
+the features of an Age of Steel. One name has largely supplanted the
+other. In effect iron has become steel. Had this chapter been written
+twenty, or perhaps ten, years earlier, it should have been more
+appropriately entitled the Age of Iron. A separation of the two great
+metals in general description would be merely technical, and I shall
+treat the subject very much as though, in accordance with the practical
+facts of the case, the two metals constituted one general subject, one
+of them gradually supplanting the other in most of the fields of
+industry where iron only was formerly used.
+
+The greatest progresses of the race are almost always unappreciated at
+the time, and are certainly undervalued, except by contrast and
+comparison. We must continually turn backward to see how far we have
+gone. An individual who is born into a certain condition thinks it as
+hard as any other until by experience and comparison he discovers what
+his times might have been. As for us, in the year 1894, we are not
+compelled to look backward very far to observe a striking contrast.
+
+[Illustration: IN OLD TIMES. PRYING OUT A "BLOOM."]
+
+All the wealth of today is built upon the forests and prairies and
+swamps of yesterday, and we must take a wider and more comprehensive
+glance backward if we should wish to institute those comparisons which
+make contrasts startling.
+
+We are accustomed to read and to hear of the "Age" of this or that.
+There was a "Stone" Age, beginning with the tribes to whom it came
+before the beginnings of their history, or even of tradition, and if we
+look far backward we may contrast our own time with the times of men who
+knew no metals. They were men. They lived and hoped and died as we do,
+even in what is now our own country. Often they were not even
+barbarians. They builded houses and forts, and dug drains and built
+aqueducts, and tilled the soil. They knew the value of those things we
+most value now, home and country; and they organized armies, and fought
+battles, and died for an idea, as we do. Yet all the time, a time ages
+long, the utmost help they had found for the bare and unaided hand was
+the serrated edge of a splintered flint, or the chance-found fragment
+beside a stream that nature, in a thousand or a million years of
+polishing, had shaped into the rude semblance of a hammer or a pestle.
+All men have in their time burned and scraped and fashioned all they
+needed with an astonishing faculty of making it answer their needs. They
+once almost occupied the world. Such were those who, so far as we know,
+were once the exclusive owners of this continent. They were an
+agricultural, industrious and home-loving people. [Footnote: The Mound
+Builders and Cave Dwellers. They knew only lead and copper.]
+
+Then came, with a strange leaving out of the plentiful and easily worked
+metals which are the subject of this chapter, the great Age of Bronze.
+This next stage of progress after stone was marked by a skillful alloy,
+requiring even now some scientific knowledge in its compounding of
+copper and tin. A thousand theories have been brought forward to account
+for this hiatus in the natural stages of human progress, the truth
+probably being that both tin and copper are more fusible than iron-ores,
+and that both are found as natural metals. Some accident such as
+accounts for the first glass, [Footnote: The story is told by Pliny.
+Some sailors, landing on the eastern coast of Spain, supported their
+cooking utensils on the sand with stones, and built a fire under them.
+When they had finished their meal, glass was found to have been made
+from the niter and sea-sand by the heat of their fire. The same thing
+has been done, by accident, in more recent times, and may have been done
+before the incident recounted. It is also done by the lightning striking
+into sand and making those peculiar glass tubes known as
+_Fulmenites_, found in museums and not very uncommon.] some
+camp-fire unintended fusion, produced the alloy that became the metal of
+all the arms and arts, and so remained for uncounted centuries. In this
+connection it is declared that the Age of Bronze knew something that we
+cannot discover; the art of tempering the alloy so that it would bear an
+edge like fine steel. If this be true and we could do it, we should by
+choice supplant the subject of this chapter for a thousand uses. As the
+matter stands, and in our ignorance of a supposed ancient secret, the
+tempering of bronze has an effect precisely opposite to that which the
+process has upon steel.
+
+Nevertheless, the old Age of Bronze had its vicissitudes. Those men knew
+nothing that we consider knowledge now. It was a time when some of the
+most splendid temples, palaces and pyramids were constructed, and these
+now lie ruined yet indestructible in the nooks and corners of a desert
+world. Perhaps the hard rock was chiselled with tools of tempered
+copper. The fact is of little importance now since the object of the art
+is almost unknown, and the scattered capitals and columns of Baalbeck
+are like monuments without inscriptions; the commemorating memorials of
+a memory unknown. The Age of Bronze and all other ages that have
+preceded ours lacked the great essentials that insure perpetuity. The
+Age of Steel, that came last, that is ours now; a degenerate time by all
+ancient standards; has for its crowning triumph a single machine which
+is alone enough to satisfy the union of two names that are to us what
+Caster and Pollux were to the bronze-armed Roman legions of the heroic
+time--the modern power printing-press.
+
+It may be well to ask and answer the question that at the first view may
+seem to the reader almost absurd. What is steel? The answer must, in the
+majority of instances, be given in accordance with the common
+conception; which is that it is not iron, yet very like it. The old
+classification of the metal, even familiarly known, needs now to be
+supplemented, since it does not describe the modern cast and malleable
+compounds of iron, carbon and metalloids used for structural purposes,
+and constituting at least three-fourths of the metal now made under the
+name of steel. The old term, steel, meant the cast, but malleable,
+product of iron, containing as much carbon as would cause the metal to
+harden when heated to redness and quenched in water. It must also be
+included in the definition that the product must be as free as possible
+from all admixtures except the requisite amount of carbon. This is
+"tool" steel. [Footnote: It must not be understood that tool steel was
+always a cast metal. In manufacturing, iron bars were laid together in
+a box or retort, together with powdered charcoal, and heated to a
+certain degree for a certain time. The carbon from the charcoal was
+absorbed by the iron, and from the blistered appearance of the bars when
+taken out this product was, and is known as "blister" steel.]
+
+And here occurs a strange thing. A skill in chemistry, the successor of
+alchemy, is the educational product of the highest form of civilization.
+
+[Illustration: ANCIENT SMELTING. A RUDE WALL ENCLOSING ALTERNATE LAYERS
+OF IRON ORE AND CHARCOAL.]
+
+Metallurgy is the highest and most difficult branch of chemistry. Steel
+is the best result of metallurgy. Yet steel is one of the oldest
+products of the race, and in lands that have been asleep since written
+history began. Wendell Phillips in a lecture upon "The Lost Arts,"--
+celebrated at the date of its delivery, but now obsolete because not
+touching upon advances made in science since Phillips's day,--states
+that the first needle ever made in England, in the time of Henry VIII,
+was made by a Negro, and that when he died the art died with him. They
+did not know how to prepare the steel or how to make the needle. He adds
+that some of the earliest travelers in Africa found a tribe in the
+interior who gave them better razors than the explorers had. Oriental
+steel has been celebrated for ages as an inimitable product. It is
+certainly true that by the simple processes of semi-barbarism the finest
+tool-steel has been manufactured, perhaps from the days of Tubal Cain
+downward. The keenness of edge, the temper whose secret is now unknown,
+the marvelous elasticity of the tools of ancient Damascus, are familiar
+by repute to every reader and have been celebrated for thousands of
+years. The swords and daggers made in central Asia two thousand years
+ago were more remarkable than any similar product of the present for
+elaborate and beautiful finish as well as for a cutting quality and a
+tenacity of edge unknown to modern days. All the tests and experiments
+of a modern government arsenal, with all the technical knowledge of
+modern times, do not produce such tool-steel. It is also alleged that
+the ancient weapons did not rust as ours do, and that the oldest are
+bright to this day. The steel tools and arms that are made in the
+strange country of India do not rust there, while in the same climate
+ours are eaten away. Besides the secret of tempering bronze, it would
+seem that among the lost arts [Footnote: Modern science dates from three
+discoveries. That of Copernicus, the effect of which was to separate
+scientific astronomy, the astronomy of natural law and defined cause,
+from astrology, or the astronomy of assertion and tradition. That of
+Torricelli and Paschal of the actual and measurable weight of the
+atmosphere, which was the beginning for us of the science of physics,
+and that of Lavoisier who suspected, and Priestly who demonstrated,
+oxygen and destroyed the last vestiges of the theory of alchemy. Stahl
+was the last of these, and Lavoisier the first of the new school in that
+which I have stated is the highest development of modern science,
+chemistry. In all these departments we have no adequate reason to assert
+that we are not ourselves mere students. Some of the functions of
+oxygen, and the simplest, were unknown within five years before the date
+of these chapters.]--a subject that it is easy to make too much
+of--there was a chemical ingredient or proportion in steel that we now
+know nothing of. The old lands of sameness and slumber have kept their
+secrets.
+
+The definition of the word "steel" has been the subject of a scientific
+quarrel on account of new processes. The grand distinguishing trait of
+steel, to which it owes all the qualities that make it valuable for the
+uses to which no other metal can be put, is _homogeneity due to
+fusion_. Wrought iron, while having similar chemical qualities, and
+often as much carbon, is _laminated in structure_. Structural
+qualities are largely increasing in importance, and as the structural
+compounds came gradually to be produced more and more by the casting
+processes; as they ceased to be laminated in structure and became
+homogeneous, they were called by the name of steel. The name has been
+based upon the structure of the material rather than upon its chemical
+ingredients as heretofore. There is now a disposition to call all
+compounds of iron that are crystalline in structure, made homogeneous by
+casting, by the general name of steel, and to distinguish all those
+whose structural quality is due to welding by the name of iron.
+[Footnote: It should be understood that the shapes of structural and
+other forms of what we now call steel are given by rolling the ingot
+after casting, and that the crystalline composition of the metal
+remains.] This is an outline of the controversy about the differences
+which should be expressed by a name, between tool steel and structural
+steel. In tool steel there is an almost infinite variety as to quality.
+The best is a high product of practical science, and how to make the
+best seems now, as hinted above, a lost art. It has, besides, a great
+variety. These varieties are only produced after thousands of
+experiments directed to finding out what ingredients and processes make
+toward the desired result. These processes, were they all known outside
+the manufactories of certain specialists, would little interest the
+general reader. All machinists know of certain brands of tool steel
+which they prefer. Tool steel is made especially for certain purposes;
+as for razors and surgical instruments, for saws, for files, for
+springs, for cutting tools generally. In these there may be little
+actual difference of quality or manufacture. The tempering of steel
+after it has been forged into shape is a specialty, almost a natural
+gift. The manufacture of tool steel, is, as stated, one of the most
+technical of the arts, and one of the most complicated of the
+applications of long experience and experiment.
+
+Cast steel was first made in 1770 by Huntsman, who for the first time
+melted the "blistered" steel, which until that time had been the tool
+steel of commerce, in a crucible. Since that time the process of melting
+wrought iron has become practical and cheap, and results in
+_crystalline_, instead of a laminated structure for all steels. The
+definition of steel now is that it is _a compound of iron which has
+been cast from a fluid state into a malleable mass._
+
+The ordinary test applied to distinguish wrought iron from steel is to
+ascertain whether the metal hardens with heating and suddenly cooling in
+cold water, becoming again softened on reheating and cooling slowly. If
+it does this it is steel of some quality, good or bad; if not, it is
+iron.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first mention of iron-ore in America is by Thomas Harriot, an
+English writer of the time of Raleigh's first colonies. He wrote a
+history of the settlement on Roanoke Island, in which he says: "In two
+places in the countrey specially, one about foure score and the other
+six score miles from the port or place where wee dwelt, wee founde neere
+the water side the ground to be rockie, which by the triall of a
+minerall man, was found to hold iron richly. It is founde in manie
+places in the countrey else." Harriot speaks further of "the small
+charge for the labour and feeding of men; the infinite store of wood;
+the want of wood and the deerness thereof in England." It was before the
+day of coal and coke, or of any of the processes known now. The iron
+mines of Roanoke Island were never heard of again.
+
+Iron-ore in the colonies is again heard of in the history of Jamestown,
+in 1607. A ship sailed from there in 1608 freighted with "iron-ore,
+sassafras, cedar posts and walnut boards." Seventeen tons of iron were
+made from this ore, and sold for four pounds per ton. This was the first
+iron ever made from American ores. The first iron-works ever erected in
+this country were, of course almost, burned by the Indians, in 1622, and
+in connection three hundred persons were killed.
+
+[Illustration: EARLY SMELTING IN AMERICA.]
+
+Fire and blood was the end of the beginning of many American industries.
+Ore was plentiful, wood was superabundant, methods were crude. They
+could easily excel the Virginia colonists in making iron in Persia and
+India at the same date. The orientals had certain processes, descended
+to them from remote times, discovered and practiced by the first
+metal-workers that ever lived. The difference in the situation now is
+that here the situation and methods have so changed that the story is
+almost incredible. There, they remain as always. The first instance of
+iron-smelting in America is a text from which might be taken the entire
+vast sermon of modern industrial civilization.
+
+The orientals lacked the steam-engine. So did we in America. The blast
+was impossible everywhere except by hand, and contrivances for this
+purpose are of very great antiquity. The bellows was used in Egypt three
+thousand years ago. It may be that the very first thought by primitive
+man was of how to smelt the metals he wanted so much and needed so
+badly. His efforts to procure a means of making his fire burn under his
+little dump of ore led him first into the science which has attained a
+new importance in very recent times, pneumatics. The first American
+furnaces were blown by the ordinary leather bellows, or by a contrivance
+they had which was called a "blowing tub," or by a very ancient machine
+known as a _"trompe"_ in which water running through a wooden pipe
+was very ingeniously made to furnish air to a furnace. It is when the
+means are small that ingenuity is actually shown. If the later man is
+deprived of the use of the latest machinery he will decline to undertake
+an enterprise where it is required. The same man in the woods, with
+absolute necessity for his companion, will show an astonishing capacity
+for persevering invention, and will live, and succeed.
+
+[Illustration: WATER-POWER BLOWING TUB.]
+
+In the lack of steam they learned, as stated, to use water-power for
+making the blast. The "blowing-tub" was such a contrivance. It was built
+of wood, and the air-boxes were square. There were two of these, with
+square pistons and a walking-beam between them. A third box held the air
+under a weighted piston and fed it to the furnace. Some of these were
+still in effective use as late as 1873. They were still used long after
+steam came. The entire machine might be called, correctly, a very large
+piston-bellows. A smaller machine with a single barrel may be found now,
+reduced, in the hands of men who clean the interior of pianos, and tune
+them.
+
+The first iron works built in the present United States that were
+commercially successful, were established in Massachusetts, in the town
+of Saugus, a few miles from Boston. The company had a monopoly of
+manufacture under grant for ten years. [Footnote: Some quaint records
+exist of the incidents of manufacturing in those times.
+
+In 1728, Samuel Higley and Joseph Dewey, of Connecticut, represented to
+the Legislature that Higley had, "with great pains and cost, found out
+and obtained a curious art by which to convert, change, or transmute,
+common iron into good steel sufficient for any use, and was the first
+that ever performed such an operation in America." A certificate, signed
+by Timothy Phelps and John Drake, blacksmiths, states that, in June,
+1725, Mr. Higley obtained from the subscribers several pieces of iron,
+so shaped that they could be known again, and that a few days later "he
+brought the same pieces which we let him have, and we proved them and
+found them good steel, which was the first steel that ever was made in
+this country, that we ever saw or heard of." But this remarkable
+transmuting process was not heard of again unless it be the process of
+"case-hardening," re-invented some years ago, and known now to mechanics
+as a recipe.
+
+The smallness of things may be inferred from the fact that, in 1740, the
+Connecticut Legislature granted to Messrs. Fitch, Walker & Wyllys "the
+sole privilege of making steel for the term of fifteen years, upon this
+condition that they should, in the space of two years, make half a ton
+of steel." Even this condition was not complied with and the term was
+extended.] They began in 1643, twenty-three years after the landing,
+which is one of the evidences of the anxiety of those troublesome people
+to be independent, and of how well men knew, even in those early times,
+how much the production of iron at home has to do with that
+independence. This new industry was, at all times, controlled and
+regulated by law.
+
+The very first hollow-ware casting made in America is said to be still
+in existence. It was a little kettle holding less than a quart.
+
+[Illustration: THE FIRST CASTING MADE IN AMERICA.]
+
+The beginnings of the iron industry in America were none too early.
+There came a need for them very soon after they had extended into other
+parts of New England, and into New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and
+Maryland. In 1775, there were a large number of small furnaces and
+foundries. But coal and iron, the two earth-born servants of national
+progress which are now always twins, were not then coupled. The first of
+them was out of consideration. The early iron men looked for water-falls
+instead, and for the wood of the primeval forest. [Footnote: It is now
+easy to learn that a coal-mine may be a more valuable possession than a
+gold-mine, and that iron is better as an industry than silver. There are
+mountains of iron in Mexico, but no coal, and silver-mines so rich that
+silver, smelted with expensive wood fuel, is the staple product of the
+country. Yet the people are among the poorest in Christendom. There is a
+ceaseless iron-famine, so that the chiefest form of railway robbery is
+the stealing of the links and pins from trains. There are almost no
+metal industries. A barbaric agriculture prevails for the want of
+material for the making of tools. The actual means of progress are not
+at hand, notwithstanding the product of silver, which goes by weight as
+a commodity to purchase most that the country needs.] They became very
+necessary to the country in 1755--when the "French" war came, and they
+then began the making of the shot and guns used in that struggle, and
+became accustomed to the manufacture in time for the Revolution. Looking
+back for causes conducive to momentous results, we may here find one not
+usually considered in the histories. But for the advancement of the iron
+industry in America, great for the time and circumstances, independence
+could not have been won, and even the _feeling_ and desire of
+independence would have been indefinitely delayed.
+
+The industry was slow, painful, and uncertain, only because the mechanic
+arts were pursued only to an extent possible with the skill and muscular
+energy of men. There were none of the wonderful automatic mechanisms
+that we know as machine-tools. There was only the almost unaided human
+arm with which to subdue the boundless savagery of a continent, and win
+independence and form a nation besides. The demand for huge masses of
+the most essential of the factors of civilization has grown since,
+because the ironclad and the big gun have come, and those inadequate
+forces and crude methods supplied for a time the demand that was small
+and imperative. The largest mass made then, and frequently spoken of in
+colonial records, was a piece called a "sow;" spelled then "sowe." It
+was a long, triangular mass, cast by being run into a trench made in
+sand. [Footnote: When, later, little side-trenches were made beside the
+first, with little channels to carry the metal into them, the smaller
+castings were naturally called "pigges." Hence our "pig-iron."]
+
+[Illustration: MAKING A TRENCH TO CAST A "SOWE."]
+
+Those were the palmy days of the "trip hammer." Nasmyth was not born
+until 1808, and no machine inventor had yet come upon the scene. The
+steam-hammer that bears his name, which means a ponderous and powerful
+machine in which the hammer is lifted by the direct action of steam in a
+piston, the lower end of whose rod is the hammer-head, has done more for
+the development of the iron industry than any other mechanical
+invention. It was not actually used until 1842, or '43. It finally, with
+many improvements in detail, grew into a monster, the hammer-head, or
+"tup," being a mass of many tons. And they of modern times were not
+content merely to let this great mass fall. They let in steam above the
+piston, and jammed it down upon the mass of glowing metal, with a shock
+that jars the earth. The strange thing about this Titanic machine is
+that it can crack an egg, or flatten out a ton or more of glowing iron.
+Hundreds of the forgings of later times, such as the wrought iron or
+steel frames of locomotives, and the shafts of steamers, and the forged
+modern guns, could not be made by forging without this steam hammer.
+
+[Illustration: THE STEAM HAMMER.]
+
+Then slowly came the period of all kinds of "machine tools." During the
+period briefly described above they could not make sheet metal. The
+rolling mill must have come, not only before the modern steam-boiler,
+but even before the modern plow could be made. Can the reader imagine a
+time in the United States when sheet metal could not be rolled, and even
+tin plates were not known? If so, he can instantly transport himself to
+the times of the wooden "trencher," and the "pewter" mug and pitcher, to
+the days when iron rails for tramways were unknown, and when even the
+"strap-iron," always necessary, was rudely and slowly hammered out on an
+anvil. [Footnote: About 1720, nails were the most needed of all the
+articles of a new country. Farmers made them for themselves, at home.
+The secret of how to roll out a sheet and split it into nail-rods was
+stolen from the one shop that knew how, at Milton, Mass., to give to
+another at Mlddleboro. The thief had the Biblical name of Hashay H.
+Thomas. He stole the secret while the hands of the Milton mill were gone
+to dinner, and served his country and broke up a small monopoly in so
+doing.]
+
+Shears came with the "rolls;" vast engines of gigantic biting capacity,
+that cut sheets of iron as a lady's scissors cut paper. This cut the
+squares of metal used for boiler plates, and the steam-engine having
+come, was turned to the manufacture of materials for its own
+construction. Others were able to bite off great bars.
+
+The first mill in which iron was rolled in America, was built in 1817
+near Connellsville, in Fayette county, Penn. Until 1844, the rolling
+mills of this country produced little more than bar-iron, hoops, and
+plates. All the early attempts at railroads used the "strap" rail;
+unless cast "fish-bellies" were used; which was flat bar-iron provided
+with counter sunk holes, in which to drive nails for holding the iron to
+long stringers of wood laid upon ties. When actual rail-making for
+railroads began, the rolling mill raised its powers to meet the
+emergency. The "T" rail, universally now used, was invented by Robert
+Stevens, president and chief engineer of the Camden and Amboy railroad,
+and the first of them were laid as track for that road in 1832. From
+this time until 1850, rolling mills for making "U" and "T" rails rapidly
+increased in number, but in that year all but two had ceased to be
+operated because of foreign competition.
+
+[Illustration: SHEARS FOR CUTTING BAR-IRON.]
+
+During some five years previous to this writing a revolution has taken
+place in the construction of buildings which has resulted in what is
+known as the "sky-scraper." This was, in many respects, the most
+startling innovation of times that are startling in most other respects,
+and was begun in that metropolis of surprises and successes, the city of
+Chicago. This innovation was really such in the matter of using steel in
+the entire framing of a commercial building, but it was not the first
+use of metal as a building material. The first iron beams used in
+buildings were made in 1854, in a rolling mill at Trenton, N. J., and
+were used in the construction of the Cooper Institute, and the building
+of Harper & Brothers. For these special rolls, of a special invention,
+were made. These have now become obsolete, and a new arrangement is used
+for what are known as "structural shapes."
+
+[Illustration: HYDRAULIC SHEARS. THE KNIFE HAS A PRESSURE OF 3,000 TONS,
+CLIPPING PIECES OF IRON TWO BY FOUR FEET.]
+
+I have spoken of the use of wood-fuel in the early stages of iron
+manufacture in this country, followed by the adoption exclusively of
+coal and its products. Then, many years later, came the departure from
+this in the use of gas for fuel. The first use of this kind is said to
+date as far back as the eighth century, and modifications of the idea
+had been put in practice in this country, in which gas was first made
+from coal and then used as fuel. Then came "natural gas." This product
+has been known for many centuries. It was the "eternal" fuel of the
+Persian fire-worshippers, and has been used as fuel in China for ages.
+Its earliest use in this country was in 1827, when it was made to light
+the village of Fredonia, N. Y. Probably its first use for manufacturing
+purposes was by a man named Tompkins, who used it to heat salt-kettles
+in the Kenawha valley in 1842. Its next use for manufacturing purposes
+was made in a rolling mill in Armstrong county, Penn., in 1874,
+forty-seven years after it had been used at Fredonia, and twenty-nine
+years after it had been used to boil salt.
+
+Now the use of natural gas as manufacturing fuel is universal, not alone
+over the spot where the gas is found, but in localities hundreds of
+miles away. It is one of the strangest developments of modern scientific
+ingenuity. That enormous battery of boilers, which was one of the most
+imposing spectacles of the Columbian Exhibition of 1893, whose roar was
+like that of Niagara, was fed by invisible fuel that came silently in
+pipes from a state outside of that where the great fair was held. We are
+left to the conclusion that the making of the coal into gas at the mine,
+and the shipping of it to the place of consumption through pipes, is
+more certain of realization than were a hundred of the early problems of
+American progress that have now been successful for so long that the
+date of their beginning is almost forgotten.
+
+THE STEEL OF THE PRESENT.--The story of steel has now almost been told,
+in that general outline which is all that is possible without an
+extensive detail not interesting to the general reader. In it is
+included, of necessity, a resume of the progress, from the earliest
+times in this country, of the great industry which is more indicative
+than any other of the material growth of a nation. I now come to that
+time when steel began to take the place that iron had always held in
+structural work of every class. The differences between this structural
+steel and that which men have known by the name exclusively from remote
+ages, I have so far indicated only by reference to the well-known
+qualities of the latter. It now remains to describe the first.
+
+In 1846 an American named William Kelley was the owner of an iron-works
+at Eddyville, Ky. It was an early era in American manufactures of all
+kinds, and the district was isolated, the town not having five hundred
+inhabitants, and the best mechanical appliances were remote.
+
+In 1847, Kelley began, without suggestion or knowledge of any
+experiments going on elsewhere, to experiment in the processes now known
+as the "Bessemer," for the converting of iron into steel. To him
+occurred, as it now appears first, the idea that in the refining process
+fuel would be unnecessary after the iron was melted if _powerful
+blasts of air were forced into the fluid metal_. This is the basic
+principle of the Bessemer process. The theory was that the heat
+generated by the union of the oxygen of the air with the carbon of the
+metal, would accomplish the refining. Kelley was trying to produce
+malleable iron in a new, rapid and effective way. It was merely an
+economy in manufacture he was endeavoring to attain.
+
+To this end he made a furnace into which passed an air-blast pipe,
+through which a stream of air was forced into the mass of melted metal.
+He produced refined iron. Following this he made what is now called a
+"converter," in which he could refine fifteen hundred pounds of metal in
+five minutes, effecting a great saving in time and fuel, and in his
+little establishment the old processes were thenceforth dispensed with.
+It was locally known as "Kelley's air-boiling process." It proved
+finally to be the most important, in large results, ever conceived in
+metallurgy. I refer to it hurriedly, and do not attempt to follow the
+inventor's own description of his constructions and experiments. When he
+heard that others in England were following the same line of experiment,
+he applied for a patent. He was decided to be the first inventor of the
+process, and a patent was granted him over Bessemer, who was a few days
+before him. There is no question that others were more skillful, and
+with better opportunities and scientific associations, in carrying out
+the final details, mechanical and chemical, which have completed the
+Kelley process for present commercial uses. Neither is there any
+question that this back-woods iron-making American was the first to
+refine iron by passing through it, while fluid, a stream of air, which
+is the process of making that steel which is not tool steel, and yet is
+steel, the now almost universal material for the making of structures;
+the material of the Ferris wheel, the wonderful palaces of the Columbian
+exposition, the sky-scrapers of Chicago, the rails, the tacks,
+[Footnote: In the history of Rhode Island, by Arnold, it is claimed that
+the first cold cut nails in the world were made by Jeremiah Wilkinson,
+in 1777. The process was to cut them from an old chest-lock with a pair
+of shears, and head them in a smith's vise. Then small nails were cut
+from old Spanish hoops, and headed in a vise by hand. Needles and pins
+were made by the same person from wire drawn by himself. Supposing this
+to be the beginning of the cut-nail idea, _the machine for making
+them_ would still remain the actual and practical invention, since it
+would mark the beginning of the industry as such. The importance of the
+latter event may be measured by the fact that about the end of the last
+century there began a strong demand. In the homely farm-houses, or the
+little contracted shops of New England villages, the descendants of the
+Pilgrims toiled providently, through the long winter months, at beating
+into shape the little nails which play so useful a part in modern
+industry. A small anvil served to beat the wire or strip of iron into
+shape and point it; a vise worked by the foot clutched it between jaws
+furnished with a gauge to regulate the length, leaving a certain portion
+projecting, which, when beaten flat by a hammer, formed the head. This
+was industry, but not manufacture, for in 1890 the manufacturers of this
+country produced over _eight hundred million pounds_ of iron,
+steel, and wire nails, representing a consumption of this absolutely
+indispensable manufacture for that year, at the rate of over _twelve
+pounds_ for each individual inhabitant of the United States.] the
+fence-wire, the sheet-metal, the rails of the steam-railroads and the
+street-lines, the thousand things that cannot be thought of without a
+list, and which is a material that is furnished more cheaply than the
+old iron articles were for the same purposes.
+
+[Illustration: SECTIONAL VIEW OF A BESSEMER "CONVERTER."]
+
+The technical detail of steel-making is exceedingly interesting to
+students of applied science, but it _is_ detail, the key to which
+is in the process mentioned; the forcing of a stream of air through a
+molten mass of iron. The "converter" is a huge pitcher-shaped vessel,
+hung upon trunnions so as to be tilted, and it is usual to admit through
+these trunnions, by means of a continuing pipe, the stream of air. The
+converters may contain ten tons or more of liquid metal at one time,
+which mass is converted from iron into steel at one operation.
+
+Forty-five years ago, or less, works that could turn out fifty tons of
+iron in a day were very large. Now there are many that make _five
+hundred tons_ of steel in the same time. Then, nearly all the work
+was done by hand, and men in large numbers handled the details of all
+processes. Now it would be impossible for human hands and strength to do
+the work. The steel-mill is, indeed, the most colossal combination of
+Steam and Steel. There are tireless arms, moved by steam, insensible
+alike to monstrous strains and white heat, which seize the vast ingots
+and carry them to and fro, handling with incredible celerity the masses
+that were unknown to man before the invention of the Bessemer process.
+And all these operations are directed and controlled by a man who stands
+in one place, strangely yet not inappropriately named a "pulpit," by
+means of the hand-gear that gives them all to him like toys.
+
+No one who has seen a steel-mill in operation, can go away and really
+write a description of it; no artist or camera has ever made its
+portrait, yet it is the most impressive scene of the modern, the
+industrial, world. There is a "fervent heat," surpassing in its
+impressions all the descriptions of the Bible, and which destroys all
+doubt of fire with capacity to burn a world and "roll the heavens
+together as a scroll." There is a clang and clatter accompanying a
+marvelous order. There are clouds of steam. There are displays of sparks
+and glow surpassing all the pyrotechnics of art. Monstrous throats gasp
+for a draught of white-hot metal and take it at a gulp. Glowing masses
+are trundled to and fro. There are mountains of ore, disappearing in a
+night, and ever renewed. There is a railway system, and the huge masses
+are conveyed from place to place by locomotive engines. There is a water
+system that would supply a town. There may be miles of underground pipes
+bringing gas for fuel. Amid these scenes flit strong men, naked to the
+waist, unharmed in the red pandemonium, guiding every process,
+superintending every result; like other men, yet leading a life so
+strange that it is apparently impossible. The glowing rivers they
+escape; corruscating showers of flying white-hot metal do not fall upon
+them; the leaping, roaring, hungry, annihilating flames do not touch
+them; the gurgling streams of melted steel are their familiar
+playthings; yet they are but men.
+
+The "rolling" of these slabs and ingots into rails is a following
+operation still. The continuous rail is often more than a hundred feet
+in length, which is cut into three or four rails of thirty feet each,
+and it goes through every operation that makes it a "T" rail weighing
+ninety pounds to the yard with the single first heat. There are trains
+of rolls that will take in a piece of white-hot metal weighing six tons,
+and send it out in a long sheet three thirty-seconds of an inch thick
+and nearly ten feet wide. The first steel rails made in this country
+were made by the Chicago Rolling Mill Company, in May, 1865. Only six
+rails were then made, and these were laid in the tracks of the Chicago
+and North Western Railroad. It is said they lasted over ten years. The
+first nails, or tacks, were made of steel at Bridgewater, Mass., at
+about the same date.
+
+[Illustration: ROLLING INGOTS.]
+
+Some thirty years ago there were but two Bessemer converters in the
+United States, and the manufacture of steel did not reach then five
+hundred tons per annum. In 1890 the product was more than five million
+tons.
+
+In 1872 the price of steel was one hundred and eighty-six dollars per
+gross ton. It can be purchased now at varying prices less than thirty
+dollars per ton. The consumption of seventy millions of people is so
+great that it is difficult to imagine how so enormous a mass of almost
+imperishable material can be absorbed, and the latest figures show a
+consumption greatly in excess of those mentioned as the sum of
+manufactures.
+
+We turn again for the comparison without which all figures are valueless
+to the good year 1643, when the "General court" passed a resolve
+commending the great progress made in the manufacture of iron which they
+had licensed two years before, and granted the company still further
+privileges and immunities upon condition that it should furnish the
+people "with barre iron of all sorts for their use at not exceedynge
+twenty pounds per ton." We recall the first little piece of hollow ware
+made in America. We remember how old the old world is said to be and how
+long the tribes of men have plodded upon it, and then the picture
+appears of the progress that has grown almost under our eyes. The real
+Age of Steel began in 1865. It is not yet thirty years old. By
+comparison we are impressed with the fact that the real history of the
+metal is compressed into less than half an ordinary lifetime.
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF ELECTRICITY
+
+
+[Illustration: ERIPUIT CAELO FULMEN, SCEPTRUMQUE TYRANNIS.]
+
+There is a sense in which electricity may be said to be the youngest of
+the sciences. Its modern development has been startling. Its phenomena
+appear on every hand. It is almost literally true that the lighting has
+become the servant of man.
+
+But it is also the oldest among modern sciences. Its manifestations have
+been studied for centuries. So old is its story that it has some of the
+interest of a mediaeval romance; a romance that is true. Steam is gross,
+material, understandable, noisy. Its action is entirely comprehensible.
+The explosives, gunpowder, begriming the nations in all the wars since
+1350, nitroglycerine, oxygen and hydrogen in all the forms of their
+combination, seem to be gross and material, the natural, though
+ferocious, servants of mankind. But electricity floats ethereal, apart,
+a subtle essence, shining in the changing splendors of the aurora yet
+existent in the very paper upon which one writes; mysteriously
+everywhere; silent, unseen, odorless, untouchable, a power capable of
+exemplifying the highest majesty of universal nature, or of lighting the
+faint glow of the fragile insect that flies in the twilight of a summer
+night. Obedient as it has now been made by the ingenuity of modern man,
+docile as it may seem, obeying known laws that were discovered, not
+made, it yet remains shadowy, mysterious, impalpable, intangible,
+dangerous. It is its own avenger of the daring ingenuity that has
+controlled it. Touch it, and you die.
+
+Electricity was as existent when the splendid scenes described in
+Genesis were enacted before the poet's eye as it is now, and was
+entirely the same. Its very name is old. Before there were men there
+were trees. Some of these exuded gum, as trees do now, and this gum
+found a final resting place in the sea, either by being carried thither
+by the currents of the streams beside which those trees grew, or by the
+land on which they stood being submerged in some of the ancient changes
+and convulsions to which the world has been frequently subject. In the
+lapse of ages this gum, being indestructible in water, became a fossil
+beneath the waves, and being in later times cast up by storms on the
+shores of the Baltic and other seas, was found and gathered by men, and
+being beautiful, finally came to be cut into various forms and used as
+jewelry. One has but to examine his pipe-stem, or a string of yellow
+beads, to know it even now. It is amber. The ancient Greeks knew and
+used it as we do, and without any reference to what we now call
+"electricity" their name for it was ELEKTRON. The earliest mention of it
+is by Homer, a poet whose personality is so hidden in the mists of far
+antiquity that his actual existence as a single person has been doubted,
+and he mentions it in connection with a necklace made of it.
+
+But very early in human history, at least six hundred years before
+Christ, this elektron had been found to possess a peculiar property that
+was imagined to belong to it alone. It mysteriously attracted light
+bodies to it after it had been rubbed. Thales, the Franklin of his
+remote time, was the man who is said to have discovered this peculiar
+and mysterious quality of the yellow gum, and if it be true, to him must
+be conceded the unwitting discovery of electricity. It was the first
+step in a science that usurps all the prerogatives of the ancient gods.
+He recorded his discovery, and was impressed with awe by it, and
+accounted for the phenomenon he had observed by ascribing to the dull
+fossil a living soul. That is the unconscious impression still, after
+twenty-five hundred years have passed since Thales died; that hidden in
+the heart of electrical phenomena there is a weird sentience; what a
+Greek would consider something divine and immortal apart from matter.
+But neither Thales, nor Theophrastus, nor Pliny the elder, nor any
+ancient, could conceive of a fact but dimly guessed until the day of
+Franklin; that this secret of the silent amber was also that of the
+thunder-cloud, that the essence that drew to it a floating filament is
+also that which rends an oak, that had splintered their temples and
+statues, and had not spared even the image of Jupiter Tonans himself.
+The spectral lights which hung upon the masts of the ancient galleys of
+the Mediterranean were named Castor and Pollux, not electricity.
+Absolutely no discovery was made, though the religion of ancient Etruria
+was chiefly the worship of a spirit by them seen, but unknown; to us
+electrical science; a science chained, yet really unknown and still
+feared though chained. It is the story of this servitude only that is
+capable of being told, and the first weak bands were a hundred and
+forty-six years in forging; from the Englishman Gilbert's "_De
+Magnete_," to Franklin's Kite.
+
+During all this time, and to a great degree long after, electricity was
+a scientific toy. Experiences in the sparkling of the fur of cats, the
+knowledge that there were fishes that possessed a mysterious paralyzing
+power, and various common phenomena all attributable to some unknown
+common cause, did not greatly increase the sum of actual knowledge of
+the subject. There was no divination of what the future would bring, and
+not the least conception of actual and impending possibilities. When,
+finally, the greatest thinkers of their times began to investigate; when
+Boyle began to experiment, and even the transcendent genius of Newton
+stooped to enquiry; from the days of those giants down to those of the
+American provincial postmaster, Benjamin Franklin, a period of some
+seventy years, almost all the knowledge obtained was only useful in
+indicating how to experiment still further. So small was the knowledge,
+so aimless the long experimenting, that the discovery that not amber
+only, but other substances as well, possessed the electric quality when
+rubbed, was a notable advance in knowledge. Later, in 1792, it was found
+by Gray that certain substances possessed the power of carrying;
+"conducting" as we now term it; the mysterious fluid from one substance
+to another; from place to place. This discovery constituted an actual
+epoch in the history of the science, and justly, since this small
+beginning with a wet string and a cylinder of glass or a globe of
+sulphur was the first unwitting illustration of the net-work of wires
+now hanging all over the world. The next step was to find that all
+substances were not alike in a power to conduct a current; _i.e._,
+that there were "conductors" and "non-conductors," and all varying
+grades and powers between. The next discovery was that there were, as
+was then imagined, several kinds of electricity. This conclusion was
+incorrect, and its use was to lead at last to the discovery, by
+Franklin, that the many kinds were but two, and even these not kinds,
+but qualities, present always in the unchanging essence that is
+everywhere, and which are known to us now by the names that Franklin
+gave them; the _positive_ and _negative_ currents; one always
+present with the other, and in every phenomenon known to electrical
+science.
+
+Probably the first machine ever contrived for producing an electric
+current was made by a monk, a Scotch Benedictine named Gordon who lived
+at Erfurt, in Saxony. I shall have occasion, hereafter, to describe
+other machines for the same purpose, and this first contrivance is of
+interest by comparison. It was a cylinder of glass about eight inches
+long, with a wooden shaft in the center, the ends of which were passed
+through holes in side-pieces, and it is said to have been operated by
+winding a string around the shaft and drawing the ends of the string
+back and forth alternately.
+
+[Illustration: THE FIRST ELECTRICAL MACHINE.]
+
+The Franklinic machine, the modern glass disc fitted with combs,
+rubbers, bands and cranks, is nothing more in principle or manner of
+action than the first crude arrangement of the monk of Erfurt.
+
+All these experiments, and all that for many years followed, were made
+in electricity produced by friction; by rubbing some body like glass,
+sulphur or rosin. Many men took part in producing effects that were
+almost meaningless to them--the preliminaries to final results for us.
+Improved electrical machines were made, all seeming childish and
+inadequate now, and all wonderful in their day. There is a long list of
+immortal names connected with the slow development of the science, and
+among their experiments the seventeenth century passed away. Dufaye and
+the Abbe Nollet worked together about 1730, and mutually surprised each
+other daily. Guericke, better known as the inventor of the air-pump,
+made a sulphur-ball machine, often claimed to have been the first.
+Hawkesbee constructed a glass machine that was an improvement over that
+of Guericke. Stephen Gray unfolded the leading principles of the
+science, but without any understanding of their results as we now
+understand them. The next advance was made in finding a way to hold some
+of the electricity when gathered, and the toy which we know as the
+Leyden Jar surprised the scientific world. Its inventor, Professor
+Muschenbrock, wrote an account of it to Reaumur, and lacks language to
+express the terror into which his own experiments had thrown him. He had
+unwittingly accumulated, and had accidentally discharged, and had, for
+the first time in human experience, felt something of the shock the
+modern lineman dreads because it means death. He had toiled until he
+held the baleful genie in a glass vessel partially filled with water,
+and the sprite could not be seen. Accidentally he made a connection
+between the two surfaces of the jar, and declared that he did not
+recover from the experience for two days, and that nothing could induce
+him to repeat it. He had been touched by the lightning, and had not
+known it. [Footnote: The Leyden Jar has little place in the usefulness
+of modern electricity, and has no relationship with the modern so-called
+"Storage" Battery.]
+
+Then began the fakerism which attached itself to the science of
+electricity, and that has only measurably abandoned it in very late
+times. Itinerant electricians began to infest the cities of Europe,
+claiming medicinal and almost supernatural virtues for the mysterious
+shock of the Leyden Vial, and showing to gaping multitudes the quick and
+flashing blue spark which was, though no man knew it then, a miniature
+imitation of the bolt of heaven. That fact, verging as closely upon the
+sublimest power of nature as a man may venture to and live, was not even
+suspected until Franklin had invented a battery of such jars, and had
+performed hundreds of experiments therewith that finally established in
+his acute, though prosaic, mind the identity of his puny spark with that
+terrific flash that, until that time, had been regarded by all mankind
+as a direct and intentional expression of the power of Almighty God.
+
+Thus Franklin came into the field. He was an investigator who brought to
+his aid a singular capacity possessed by the very few; the capacity for
+an unbiased looking for the hidden reasons of things. There was no field
+too sacred or too old for his prying investigations and his private
+conclusions. He was, as much as any man ever is, an original thinker. He
+knew of all the electrical experiments of others, and they produced in
+his mind conclusions distinctly his own. He was, upon topics pertaining
+to the field of reason, experience and common sense, the clearest and
+most vigorous writer of his time save one, and such conclusions as he
+arrived at he knew how to promulgate and explain. All that Franklin
+discovered would but add to the tedium of the subject of electricity
+now, but from his time definitely dates the knowledge that of
+electricity, in all its developments, there is really but one kind,
+though for convenience sake we may commonly speak of two, or even more.
+He first gave the names by which they are still known to the two
+qualities of one current; a name of convenience only. He knew first a
+fact that still puzzles inquiry, and is still largely unknown--that
+electricity is not _created_, produced, manufactured, by any human
+means, and that all we may do, then or now, is to gather it from its
+measureless diffusion in the air, the world, or the spaces of the wide
+creation, and that, like "heat" and "cold," it is a relative term. He
+demonstrated that any body which has electricity gives it to any other
+body that has at the moment less. Before he had actually tried that
+celebrated experiment which is alone sufficient to give him place among
+the immortals, he had declared the theory upon which he made it to be
+true, and by reasoning, in an age that but dimly understood the force
+and conditions of inductive reason, had proved that lightning is but an
+electric spark. It seems hardly necessary to add that his theories were
+ridiculed by the most intelligent scientists of his time, and scoffed at
+even by the countrymen of Newton and Davy, the members of the Royal
+Society of England. Franklin was a provincial American, and had, in
+other fields than electricity, troubled the British placidity.
+
+[Illustration: B. FRANKLIN]
+
+Only one of these, a man named Collinson, saw any value in these
+researches of the provincial in the wilds of America. He published
+Franklin's letters to him. Buffon read them, and persuaded a friend to
+translate them into French. They were translated afterwards into many
+languages, and when in his isolation he did not even know it, the
+obscure printer, the country postmaster who kept his official accounts
+with his own hands, was the bearer of a famous name. He was assailed by
+the Nollet previously mentioned, and by a party of French philosophers,
+yet there arose, in his absence and without his knowledge, a party who
+called themselves distinctively "Franklinists."
+
+Then came the personal test of the truth of these theories that had been
+promulgated over Europe in the name of the unknown American. He was then
+forty-five years old, successful in his walk and well-known in his
+immediate locality, but by no means as prominent or famous among his
+neighbors as he was in Europe. He was not so fertile in resources as to
+be in any sense inspired, and had privately waited for the finishing of
+a certain spire in the little town of Philadelphia so that he might use
+it to get nearer to the clouds to demonstrate his theory of lightning.
+It was in June, 1752, that this great exemplar of the genius of
+common-sense descended to the trial of the experiment that was the
+simplest and the most ordinary and the most sublime; the commonest in
+conception and means yet the most famous in results; ever tried by man.
+He had grown impatient of delay in the matter of the spire, and hastily,
+as by a sudden thought, made a kite. It was merely a silk handkerchief
+whose four corners were attached to the points of two crossed sticks. It
+was only the idea that was great; the means were infantile. A thunder
+shower came over, and in an interval between sprinklings he took with
+him his son, and went by back ways and alleys to a shed in an open
+field. The two raised the kite as boys did then and do now, and stood
+within the shelter. There was a hempen string, and on this, next his
+hand, he had tied a bit of ribbon and an ordinary iron key. A cloud
+passed over without any indications of anything whatever. But it began
+to rain, and as the string became wet he noticed that the loose
+filaments were standing out from it, as he had often seen them do in his
+experiments with the electrical machine. He drew a spark from the key
+with his finger, and finally charged a Leyden jar from this key, and
+performed all the then known proof-experiments with the lightning drawn
+from heaven.
+
+It is manifest that the slightest indication of the presence of the
+current in the string was sufficient to have demonstrated the fact which
+Franklin sought to fix. But it would have been insufficient to the
+general mind. The demonstration required was absolute. Even among
+scientists of the first class less was then known about electricity and
+its phenomena, and the causes of them, than now is known by every child
+who has gone to school. No estimate of the boldness and value of
+Franklin's renowned experiment can be made without a full appreciation
+of his times and surroundings. He demonstrated that which was undreamed
+before, and is undoubted now. The wonders of one age have been the toys
+and tools of the next through the entire history of mankind. The meaning
+of the demonstration was deep; its results were lasting The
+experimenters thereafter worked with a knowledge that their
+investigations must, in a sense, include the universe. Perhaps the
+obscure man who had toyed with the lightnings himself but vaguely
+understood the real meaning of his temerity. For he had, as usual, an
+intensely practical purpose in view. He wished to find a way of "drawing
+from the heavens their lightnings, and conducting them harmless to the
+earth." He was the first inventor of a practical machine, for a useful
+purpose, with which electricity had to do. That machine was the
+lightning-rod. Whatever its purpose, mankind will not forget the simple
+greatness of the act. At this writing the statue of Franklin stands
+looking upward at the sky, a key in his extended hand, in the portico of
+a palace which contains the completest and most beautiful display of
+electrical appliances that was ever brought together, at the dawn of
+that Age of Electricity which will be noon with us within one decade.
+The science and art of the civilized world are gathered about him, and
+on the frieze above his head shines, in gold letters, that sentence
+which is a poem in a single line. "ERIPUIT CAELO FULMEN, SCEPTRUMQUE
+TYRANNIS." [Footnote: "He snatched the lightning from heaven, and the
+sceptre from tyrants."]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE MAN FRANKLIN.--Benjamin Franklin was born at Boston, Mass., Jan.
+17th, 1706. His father was a chandler, a trade not now known by that
+term, meaning a maker of soaps and candles. Benjamin was the fifteenth
+of a family of seventeen children. He was so much of the same material
+with other boys that it was his notion to go to sea, and to keep him
+from doing so he was apprenticed to his brother, who was a printer. To
+be apprenticed then was to be absolutely indentured; to belong to the
+master for a term of years. Strangely enough, the boy who wanted to be a
+sailor was a reader and student, captivated by the style of the
+_Spectator_, a model he assiduously cultivated in his own extensive
+writings afterwards. He was not assisted in his studies, and all he ever
+knew of mathematics he taught himself. Being addicted to literature by
+natural proclivity he inserted his own articles in his brother's
+newspaper, and these being very favorably commented upon by the local
+public, or at least noticed and talked about, his authorship of them was
+discovered, and this led to a quarrel between the two brothers.
+Nevertheless, when James, the elder brother, was imprisoned for alleged
+seditious articles printed by him, the paper was for a time issued in
+young Benjamin's name. But the quarrel continued, the boy was imposed
+upon by his master, and brother, as naturally as might have been
+expected under the circumstances of the younger having the monopoly of
+all the intellectual ability that existed between the two, and in 1723,
+being then only seventeen, he broke his indentures, a heinous offense in
+those times, and ran away, first to New York and then to Philadelphia,
+where he found employment as a journeyman printer. He had attained a
+skill in the business not usual at the time.
+
+The boy had, up to this time, read everything that came into his hands.
+A book of any kind had a charm for him. His father observing this had
+intended him for the ministry, that being the natural drift of a pious
+father's mind in the time of Franklin's youth, when he discovered any
+inclination to books on the part of a son. But, later, he would neglect
+the devotions of the Sabbath if he had found a book, notwithstanding the
+piety of his family. Sometimes he distressed them further by neglecting
+his meals, or sitting up at night, for the same reason. There is no
+question that young Franklin was a member of that extensive fraternity
+now known as "cranks." [Footnote: Most people, then and now, can point
+to people of their acquaintance whom they hold in regard as originals or
+eccentrics. It is a somewhat dubious title for respect, even with us who
+are reckoned so eccentric a nation. And yet all the great inventions
+which have done so much for civilization have been discovered by
+eccentrics--that is, by men who stepped out of the common groove; who
+differed more or less from other men in their habits and ideals.] He
+read a book advocating exclusive subsistence upon a vegetable diet and
+immediately adopted the idea, remaining a disciple of vegetarianism for
+several years. But there is another reason hinted. He saved money by the
+vegetable scheme, and when his printer's lunch had consisted of
+"biscuits (crackers) and water" for some days, he had saved money enough
+to buy a new book.
+
+This young printer, who, at school, in the little time he attended one,
+had "failed entirely in mathematics," could assimilate "Locke on the
+Understanding," and appreciate a translation of the Memorabilia of
+Xenophon. Even after his study of this latter book he had a fondness for
+the calm reasoning of Socrates, and wished to imitate him in his manner
+of reasoning and moralizing. There is no question but that the great
+heathen had his influence across the abyss of time upon the mind of a
+young American destined also to fill, in many respects, the foremost
+place in his country's history. There was one, at least, who had no
+premonition of this. His brother chastised him before he had been
+imprisoned, and after he had begun to attract attention as a writer in
+one of the only two newspapers then printed in America, and beat him
+again after he was released, having meantime been vigorously defended by
+his apprentice editorially while he languished. To have beaten Benjamin
+Franklin with a stick, when he was seventeen years old, seems an absurd
+anti-climax in American history. But it is true, and when the young man
+ran away there was still another odd episode in a great career.
+
+Upon his first arrival in Philadelphia as a runaway apprentice, with one
+piece of money in his pocket, occurs the one gleam of romance in
+Franklin's seemingly Socratic life. He says he walked in Market Street
+with a baker's loaf under each arm, with all his shirts and stockings
+bulging in his pockets, and eating a third piece of bread as he walked,
+and this on a Sunday morning. Under these circumstances he met his
+future wife, and he seems to have remembered her when next he met her,
+and to have been unusually prepossessed with her, because on the first
+occasion she had laughed at him going by. He was one of those whose
+sense of humor bears them through many difficulties, and who are even
+attracted by that sense in others. He was, at this period, absurd
+without question. Having eaten all the bread he could, and bestowed the
+remainder upon another voyager, he drank out of the Delaware and went to
+church; that is, he sat down upon a bench in a Quaker meeting-house and
+went to sleep, and was admonished thence by one of the brethren at the
+end of the service.
+
+Franklin had, in the time of his youth, the usual experiences in
+business. He made a journey to London upon promises of great advancement
+in business, and was entirely disappointed, and worked at his trade in
+London. Afterwards, during the return voyage to America, he kept a
+journal, and wrote those celebrated maxims for his own guidance that are
+so often quoted. The first of these is the gem of the collection: "I
+resolve to be extremely frugal for some time, until I pay what I owe." A
+second resolve is scarcely less deserving of imitation, for it declares
+it to be his intention "to speak all the good I know of everybody." It
+must be observed that Franklin was afterwards the great maximist of his
+age, and that his life was devoted to the acquisition of worldly wisdom.
+In his body of philosophy there is included no word of confidence in the
+condemnation of offenses by the act or virtue of another, no promise of,
+or reference to, the rewards of futurity.
+
+When about twenty-one years of age, we find this old young man tired of
+a drifting life and many projects, and desiring to adopt some occupation
+permanently. He had courted the girl who had laughed at him, and then
+gone to England and forgotten her. She had meantime married another man,
+and was now a widow. In 1730 he married her. Meantime, entering into the
+printing business on his own account, he often trundled his paper along
+the streets in a wheelbarrow, and was intensely occupied with his
+affairs. His acquisitive mind was never idle, and in 1732 he began the
+publication of the celebrated "Poor Richard's Almanac." This was among
+the most successful of all American publications, was continued for
+twenty-five years, and in the last issue, in 1757, he collected the
+principal matter of all preceding numbers, and the issue was extensively
+republished in Great Britain, was translated into several foreign
+languages, and had a world-wide circulation. He was also the publisher
+of a newspaper, _The Pennsylvania Gazette_, which was successful
+and brought him into high consideration as a leader of public opinion in
+times which were beginning to be troubled by the questions that finally
+brought about a separation from the mother country.
+
+Time and space would fail in anything like a detailed account of the
+life of this remarkable man. His only son, the boy who was with him at
+the flying of the kite, was an illegitimate child, and it is a
+remarkable instance of unlikeness that this only son became a royalist
+governor of New Jersey, was never an American in feeling, and removed to
+England and died there. The sum of Franklin's life is that he was a
+statesman, a financier of remarkable ability, a skillful diplomat, a
+law-maker, a powerful and felicitous writer though without imagination
+or the literary instinct, and a controversialist who seldom, if ever,
+met his equal. He was always a printer, and at no period of his great
+career did he lose his affection for the useful arts and common
+interests of mankind. He is the founder of the American Philosophical
+Society, and of a college which grew into the present University of
+Pennsylvania. To him is due the origin of a great hospital which is
+still doing beneficent work. He raised, and caused to be disciplined,
+ten thousand men for the defense of the country. He was a successful
+publisher of the literature of the common people, yet a literature that
+was renowned. He could turn his attention to the improvement of
+chimneys, and invented a stove still in use, and still bearing his name
+as the author of its principle. [Footnote: The stove was not used in
+Franklin's time to any extent. The "Franklin Stove" was a fireplace so
+far as the advantages were concerned, such as ventilation and the
+pleasure of an open fire. But it also radiated heat from the back and
+sides as well as the front, and was intended to sit further out into a
+room; to be both fireplace and stove.] He organized the postal system of
+the United States before the Union existed. He was a signer of the
+Declaration of Independence. He sailed as commissioner to France at the
+age of seventy-one, and gave all his money to his country on the eve of
+his departure, yet died wealthy for his time. Serene, even-tempered,
+philosophical, he was yet far-seeing, care-taking, sagacious, and
+intensely industrious. He acquired a knowledge of the Italian and
+Spanish languages, and was a proficient French speaker and writer. He
+possessed, in an extraordinary degree, the power of gaining the regard,
+even the affection, of his fellow-men. He was even a competent musician,
+mastering every subject to which his attention was turned; and
+province-born and reared in the business of melting tallow and setting
+types, without collegiate education, he shone in association with the
+men and women who had place in the most brilliant epoch of French
+intellectual history. At fourscore years he performed the work that
+would have exhausted a man of forty, and at the same time wrote, for
+mere amusement, sketches such as the "Dialogue between Franklin and the
+Gout," and added, with the cool philosophy of all his life still
+lingering about his closing hours: "When I consider how many terrible
+diseases the human body is liable to, I think myself well off that I
+have only three incurable ones, the gout, the stone, and old age."
+
+[Illustration: THE FRANKLIN STOVE.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Franklin, electrical experiments went on with varying results,
+confined within what now seems to have been a very narrow field, until
+1790. The great facts outside of the startling disclosure made by
+Franklin's experiments remained unknown. It was another forty years of
+amused and interested playing with a scientific toy. But in that year
+the key to the _utility_ of electricity was found by one Galvani.
+He was not an electrician at all, but a professor of anatomy in the
+university of Bologna. It may be mentioned in passing that he never knew
+the weight or purport of his own discovery, and died supposing and
+insisting that the electric fluid he fancied he had discovered had its
+origin in the animal tissues. Misapprehending all, he was yet
+unconsciously the first experimenter in what we, for convenience,
+designate _dynamic_ electricity. He knew only of _animal_
+electricity, and called it by that name; a misnomer and a mistake of
+fact, and the cause of an early scientific quarrel the promoting of
+which was the actual reason of the advance that was made in the science
+following his accidental and enormously important discovery.
+
+There are many stories of the details of the ordinarily entirely
+unimportant circumstances that led to _Galvanism_ and the
+_Galvanic Battery_. Volta actually made this battery, then known as
+the Voltaic Pile, but he made it because of Galvani's discovery. The
+reader is requested to bear these names in mind; Galvani and Volta. They
+have a unique claim upon us. With others that will follow, they have
+descended to all posterity in the immortal nomenclature of the science
+of electricity. It is through the accidental discovery of the plodding
+demonstrator of anatomy in a medical college, a man who died at last in
+poverty and in ignorance of the meaning of his own work, that we have
+now the vast web of telegraph and telephone wires that hangs above the
+paths of men in every civilized country, and the cables that lie in the
+ooze of the oceans from continent to continent. His discovery was the
+result of one of the commonest incidents of domestic life. Variously
+described by various writers, the actual circumstance seems reducible to
+this.
+
+In Galvani's kitchen there was an iron railing, and immediately above
+the railing some copper hooks, used for the purpose of hanging thereon
+uncooked meats. His wife was an invalid, and wishing to tempt her
+appetite he had prepared a frog by skinning it, and had hung it upon one
+of the copper hooks. The only use intended to be asked of this renowned
+batrachian was the making of a little broth. Another part of the skinned
+anatomy touched the iron rail below, and the anatomist observed that
+this casual contact produced a convulsive twitching of the dead
+reptile's legs. He groped about this fact for many years. He fancied he
+had discovered the principle of life. He made the phenomenon to hang
+upon the facts clustering about his own profession, familiar to him, and
+about which it was natural for him to think. He promulgated theories
+about it that are all now absurd, however tenable then. His was an
+instance of how the fatuities of men in all the fields of science, faith
+or morals, have often led to results as extraordinary as they have been
+unexpected. That he died in poverty in 1798 is a mere human fact. That
+in this life he never knew is merely another. It is but a part of that
+sadness that, through life, and, indeed, through all history, hangs over
+the earthly limitations of the immortal mind.
+
+Volta, his contemporary and countryman, finally solved the problem as to
+the reason why. and made that "Voltaic Pile" which came to be our modern
+"battery." Acting upon the hint given by Galvani's accident, this pile
+was made of thin sheets of metal, say of copper and zinc, laid in series
+one above the other, with a piece of cloth wet with dilute acid
+interposed between each sheet and the next. The sheets were connected at
+the edges in pairs, a sheet of zinc to a sheet of copper, and the pile
+began with a sheet of one metal and ended with one of the other. It is
+to be noted that a single pair would have produced the same result as a
+hundred pairs, only more feebly. A single large pair is, indeed, the
+modern electric battery of one cell. The beginning and the ending sheets
+of the Voltaic pile were connected by a wire, through which the current
+passed. We, in our commonest industrial battery, use the two pieces of
+metal with the fluid between. The metals are usually copper and zinc,
+and the fluid is water in which is dissolved sulphate of copper. The
+wire connection we make hundreds of miles long, and over this wire
+passes the current. If we part this wire the current ceases. If we join
+it again we instantly renew it. There are many forms of this battery.
+The two metals, the _electrodes_, are not necessarily zinc and
+copper and no others. The acidulated fluid is not invariably water with
+sulphate of copper dissolved in it. Yet in all modifications the same
+thing is done in essentially the same way, and the Voltaic pile, and a
+little back of that Galvani's frog, is the secret of the telegraph, the
+telephone, the telautograph, the cable message. In the case of Galvani's
+frog, the fluids of the recently killed body furnished the liquid
+containing the acid, the copper hook and the iron railing furnished the
+dissimilar metals, and the nerves and muscles of the frog's body,
+connecting the two metals, furnished the wire. They were as good as
+Franklin's wet string was. The effect of the passage of a current of
+electricity through a muscle is to cause it to spasmodically contract,
+as everyone knows who has held the metallic handles of an ordinary small
+battery. Many years passed before the mystery that has long been plain
+was solved by acute minds. Galvani thought he saw the electric quality
+_in the tissues of the_ frog. Volta came to see them as produced
+_by chemical action upon two dissimilar metals_. The first could
+not maintain his theories against facts that became apparent in the
+course of the investigations of several years, yet he asserted them with
+all the pertinacious conservatism of his profession, which it has
+required ages to wear away, and died poor and unhonored. The other
+became a nobleman and a senator, and wore medals and honors. It is a
+world in which success alone is seen, and in which it may be truthfully
+said that the contortions of an eviscerated and unconscious frog upon a
+casual hook were the not very remote cause of the greatest advancements
+and discoveries of modern civilization.
+
+Yet the mystery is not yet entirely explained. In the study of
+electricity we are accustomed to accept demonstrated facts as we find
+them. When it is asked _how_ a battery acts, what produces the
+mysterious current, the only answer that can now be given is that it is
+_by the conversion of the energy of chemical affinity into the energy
+of electrical vibrations_. Many mixtures produce heat. The
+explanation can be no clearer than that for electricity. Electricity and
+heat are both _forms of energy_, and, indeed, are so similar that
+one is almost synonymous with the other. The enquiry into the original
+sources of energy, latent but present always, will, when finally
+answered, give us an insight into mysteries that we can only now infer
+are reserved for that hereafter, here or elsewhere, which it is part of
+our nature to believe in and hope for. The theory of electrical
+vibrations is explained elsewhere as the only tenable one by which to
+account for electrical action. One may also ask how fire burns, or,
+rather, why a burning produces what we call "heat," and the actual
+question cannot be answered. The action of fire in consuming fuel, and
+the action of chemicals in consuming metals, are similar actions. They
+each result in the production of a new form of energy, and of energy in
+the form of vibrations. In the action of fire the vibrations are
+irregular and spasmodic; in electricity they are controlled by a certain
+rhythm or regularity. Between heat and electricity there is apparently
+only this difference, and they are so similar, and one is so readily
+converted into the other, that it is a current scientific theory that
+one is only a modified form of the other. Many acute minds have
+reflected upon the problem of how to convert the latent energy of coal
+into the energy of electricity without the interposition of the steam
+engine and machinery. There apparently exist reasons why the problem
+will never be solved. There is no intelligence equal to answering the
+question as to precisely where the heat came from, or how it came, that
+instantly results upon the striking of a common match. It was
+_evolved_ through friction. The means were necessary. Friction, or
+its precise equivalent in energy, must occur. The result is as strange,
+and in the same manner strange, as any of the phenomena of electricity.
+Precisely here, in the beginning of the study of these phenomena, the
+student should be warned that an attitude of wonder or of awe is not one
+of enquiry. The demonstrations of electricity are startling chiefly for
+three reasons: newness, silence, and inconceivable rapidity of action.
+Let one hold a wire in one's hand six or eight inches from the end, and
+then insert that end into the flame of a gas-jet. It is as old as human
+experience that that part of the wire which is not in the flame finally
+grows hot, and burns one's fingers. A change has taken place in the
+molecules of the wire that is not visible, is noiseless, and that has
+_traveled along the wire_. It excites neither wonder nor remark. No
+one asks the reason why. Yet it cannot be explained except by some
+theory more or less tenable, and the phenomenon, in kind though not in
+degree, is as unaccountable as anything in the magic of electricity. In
+a true sense there is, nothing supernatural, or even wonderful, in all
+the vast universe of law. If we would learn the facts in regard to
+anything, it must be after we have passed the stage of wonder or of
+reverence in respect to it. That which was the "Voice of God"--as truly,
+in a sense, it was and is--until Franklin's day, has since been a
+concussion of the air, an echo among the clouds, the passage of an
+electric discharge. It is the first lesson for all those who would
+understand.
+
+The time had now come when that which had seemed a lawless wonder should
+have its laws investigated, formulated and explained. A man named
+Coulomb, a Frenchman, is the author of a system of measurements of the
+electric current, and he it was who discovered that the action of
+electricity varies, not with the distance, but, like gravity, _in the
+inverse ratio of the square of the distance_. Coulomb was the maker
+of the first instrument for measuring a current, which was known as the
+_torsion balance_. The results of his practical investigations made
+easier the practical application of electrical power as we now use it,
+though he foresaw nothing of that application; and the engineer of
+to-day applies his laws, and those of his fellow scientists, as those
+which do not fail. Volta was one of these, and he also furnished, as
+will hereafter be seen, a name for one of the units of electrical
+measurement.
+
+Both Galvani and Volta passed into shadow, when, in 1820, Professor H.
+C. Oersted, of Copenhagen, discovered the law upon which were afterwards
+slowly built the electrical appliances of modern life. It was the great
+principle of INDUCTION. The student of electricity may begin here if he
+desires to study only results, and is not interested in effects, causes,
+and the pains and toils which led to those results. The term may seem
+obscure, and is, doubtless, as a name, the result of a sudden idea; but
+upon induction and its laws the simplest as well as the most complicated
+of our modern electrical appliances depend for a reason for action. Its
+discovery set Ampere to work. They had all imagined previously that
+there was some connection between electricity and magnetism, and it was
+this idea that instigated the investigations of Ampere. It was imagined
+that the phenomena of electricity were to be explained by magnetism.
+This was not untrue, but it was only a part of the truth. Ampere proved
+that _magnetism could also readily be produced by a current of
+electricity_. From this idea, practically carried out, grew the
+ELECTRO MAGNET, and to Ampere we are indebted for the actual discovery
+of the elementary principles of what we now call electrodynamics, or
+dynamic electricity, [Footnote: In all science there is a continual
+going back to the past for a means of expression for things whose
+application is most modern. _Dynamic_; DYNAMO, is the Greek word
+for power; to be able. Once established, these names are seldom
+abandoned. There is no more reason for calling our electrical
+power-producing machine a "Dynamo" than there would be in so designating
+a steam engine or a water-wheel. But, a term of general significance if
+used at all, it has come to be the special designation of that one
+machine. It is brief, easily said, and to the point, but is in no way
+necessarily connected with _electrical_ power distinctively.] in
+which are included the Dynamo, and its twin and indispensable, the
+Motor. Ampere is also the author of the _molecular theory_, by
+which alone, with our present knowledge, can the action of electricity
+be explained in connection with the iron core which is made a magnet by
+the current, and left again a mere piece of iron when the current is
+interrupted. Ten years later Faraday explained and applied the laws of
+Induction, basing them upon the demonstrations of Ampere. The use of a
+core of soft iron, magnetized by the passage of a current through a
+helix of wire wrapping it as the thread does a spool, is the
+indispensable feature, in some form meaning the same thing, with the
+same results, in all machines that are given movement to by an electric
+current. This is the electro-magnet. It is made a magnet not by actual
+contact, or by being made the conductor of a current, but by being
+placed in the "electrical field" and temporarily magnetized by
+induction.
+
+Faraday began his brilliant series of experiments in 1831. To express
+briefly the laws of action under which he worked, he wrote the
+celebrated statement of the Law of Magnetic Force. He proved that the
+current developed by induction is the same in all its qualities with
+other currents, and, indeed, demonstrated Franklin's theory that all
+electricity is the same; that, as to _kind_, there is but one. All
+electrical action is now viewed from the Faradic position.
+
+The story of electricity, as men studied it in the primary school of the
+science, ends where Faraday began. Under the immutable laws he
+discovered and formulated we now enter the field of result, of action,
+of commercial interest and value. We might better say the field of
+usefulness, since commercial value is but another expression for
+usefulness. A revolution has been wrought in all the ways and thoughts
+of men since a date which a man less than sixty years old can recall.
+The laws under which the miracle has been wrought existed from all
+eternity. They were discovered but yesterday. Progress, the destiny of
+man, has kept pace in other fields. We live our time in our predestined
+day, learning and knowing, like grown-up children, what we may. In a
+future whose distance we may not even guess, the children of men shall
+reap the full fruition of the prophesy that has grown old in waiting,
+and "shall be as gods, knowing good from evil."
+
+
+
+
+MODERN ELECTRICITY
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+Electricity, in all its visible exhibitions, has certain unvarying
+qualities. Some of these have been mentioned in the preceding chapter.
+Others will appear in what is now to follow. These qualities or habits,
+invariable and unchangeable, are, briefly:
+
+(1) It has the unique power of drawing, "attracting" other objects at a
+distance.
+
+(2) For all human uses it is instantaneous in action, through a
+conductor, at any distance. A current might be sent around the world
+while the clock ticked twice.
+
+(3) It has the power of decomposing chemicals (Electrolysis), and it
+should be remembered that even water is a chemical, and that substances
+composed of one pure organic material are very rare.
+
+(4) It is readily convertible into heat in a wire or other conductor.
+
+These four qualities render its modern uses possible, and should be
+remembered in connection with what is presently to be explained.
+
+These uses are, in application, the most startling in the entire history
+of civilization. They have come about, and their applications have been
+made effective, within twenty years, and largely within ten. This
+subtlest and most elusive essence in nature, not even now entirely
+understood, is a part of common life. Some years ago we began to spell
+our thoughts to our fellow-men across land and sea with dots and dashes.
+Within the memory of the present high school boy we began to talk with
+each other across the miles. Now there is no reason why we shall not
+begin to write to each other letters of which the originals shall never
+leave our hands, yet which shall stand written in a distant place in our
+own characters, indisputably signed by us with our own names. We
+apparently produce out of nothing but the whirling of a huge bobbin of
+wire any power we may wish, and send it over a thin wire to where we
+wish to use it, though every adult can remember when the difficulty of
+distance, in the propelling of machinery, was thought to have been
+solved to the satisfaction of every reasonable man by the making of wire
+cables that would transmit power between grooved wheels a distance of
+some hundreds of feet. We turn night into day with the glow of lamps
+that burn without flame, and almost without heat, whose mysterious glow
+is fed from some distant place, that hang in clusters, banners, letters,
+in city streets, and that glow like new stars along the treeless prairie
+horizon where thirty years ago even the beginnings of civilization were
+unknown. Yet the mysterious agent has not changed. It is as it was when
+creation began to shape itself out of chaos and the abyss. Men have
+changed in their ability to reason, to deduce, to discover, and to
+construct. To know has become a part of the sum of life; to understand
+or to abandon is the rule. When the ages of tradition, of assertion
+without the necessity for proof, of content with all that was and was
+right or true because it was a standard fixed, went by, the age not
+necessarily of steam, or of steel, or of electricity, but the age of
+thought, came in. Some of the results of this thought, in one of the
+most prominent of its departments, I shall attempt to describe.
+
+A wire is the usual concomitant in all electrical phenomena. It is
+almost the universally used conductor of the current. In most cases it
+is of copper, as pure as it can be made in the ordinary course of
+manufacture. There are other metals that conduct an electrical current
+even better than copper does, but they happen to be expensive ones, such
+as silver. The usual telegraph-line is efficient with only iron wire.
+
+We habitually use the words "conductor" and "conduct" in reference to
+the electric current. A definition of that common term may be useful. It
+is a relative one. _A conductor is any substance whose atoms, or
+molecules, have the power of conveying to each other quickly their
+electricities_. Before the common use of electricity we were
+accustomed to commonly speak of conductors of heat; good, or poor. The
+same meaning is intended in speaking of conductors of electricity.
+_Non-conductors are those whose molecules only acquire this power
+under great pressure_. Electricity always takes the _easiest_
+road, not necessarily the shortest. This is the path that electricians
+call that of "least resistance." There are no absolutely perfect
+conductors, and there are no substances that may be called absolutely
+non-conductors. A non-conductor is simply a reluctant, an excessively
+slow, conductor. In all electrical operations we look first for these
+two essentials: a good conductor and a good non-conductor. We want the
+latter as supports and attachments for the first. If we undertake to
+convey water in a pipe we do not wish the pipe to leak. In conveying
+electricity upon a wire we have a little leak wherever we allow any
+other conductor to come too near, or to touch, the wire carrying the
+current. These little electrical leaks constantly exist. All nature is
+in a conspiracy to take it wherever it can find it, and from everything
+which at the moment has more than some other has, or more than its share
+with reference to the air and the world, of the mysterious essence that
+is in varying quantities everywhere. Glass is the usual non-conductor in
+daily use. A glance at the telegraph poles will explain all that has
+just been said. Water in large quantity or widely diffused is a fair
+conductor. Therefore, the glass insulators on the telegraph-poles are
+cup-shaped usually on the under side where the pin that holds them is
+inserted, so that the rain may not actually wet this pin, and thus make
+a water-connection between the wire, glass, pin, pole and ground.
+
+We are accustomed to things that are subject to the law of gravity.
+Water will run through a pipe that slants downward. It will pass through
+a pipe that slants upward only by being pushed. But electricity, in its
+far journeys over wires, is not subject to gravity. It goes
+indifferently in any direction, asking only a conductor to carry it.
+There is also a trait called _inertia_; that property of all matter
+by which it tends when at rest to remain so, and when in motion to
+continue in motion, which we meet at every step we take in the material
+world. Electricity is again an exception. It knows neither gravity, nor
+inertia, nor material volume, nor space. It cannot be contained or
+weighed. Nothing holds it in any ordinary sense. It is difficult to
+express in words the peculiar qualities that caused the early
+experimenters to believe it had a soul. It is never idle, and in its
+ceaseless journeyings it makes choice of its path by a conclusion that
+is unerring and instantaneous.
+
+We find that it is the constant endeavor of electricity to _equalize
+its quantities and its two qualities, in all substances that are near it
+that are capable of containing it_. To this end, seemingly by
+definite intention, it is found on the outsides of things containing it.
+It gathers on the surfaces of all conductors. If there are knobs or
+points it will be found in them, ready to leap off. When any electrified
+body is approached by a conductor, the fluid will gather on the side
+where the approach is made. If in any conductor the current is weak,
+very little of it, if any, will go off into the conductor before actual
+contact is made. If it is strong, it will often leap across the space
+with a spark. One body may be charged with positive, and another with
+negative, electricity. There is then a disposition to equalize that
+cannot be easily repressed. The positive and the negative will assume
+their dual functions, their existence together, in spite of obstacles.
+So as to quantity. That which has most cannot be restrained from
+imparting to that which has less. The demonstration of these facts
+belongs to the field of experimental, or laboratory, electricity. The
+most common of the visible experiments is on a vast scale. It is the
+thunder-storm. Mother Earth is the great depository of the fluid. The
+heavy clouds, as they gather, are likewise full. Across the space that
+lies between the exchange takes place--the lightning-flash.
+
+In the preceding chapter I have hastily alluded to the phenomenon known
+as the key to electricity as a utilitarian science; a means of material
+usefulness. These uses are all made possible under the laws of what we
+term INDUCTION. To comprehend this remarkable feature of electric
+action, it must first be understood that all electrical phenomena occur
+in what has been termed an "_Electrical Field_" This field may be
+illustrated simply. A wire through which a current is passing _is
+always surrounded by a region of attractive force_. It is
+scientifically imagined to exist in the form of rings around the wire.
+In this field lie what are termed "lines of force." The law as stated is
+that the lines in which the magnetism produced by electricity acts
+_are always at right angles with the direction in which the current is
+passing_. Let us put this in ordinary phrase, and say that in a wire
+through which a current is passing there is a magnetic attraction, and
+that the "pull" is always _straight toward the wire_. This
+magnetism in a wire, when it is doubled up and multiplied sufficiently,
+has strong powers of attraction. This multiplying is accomplished by
+winding the wire into a compact coil and passing a current through it.
+If one should wind insulated wire around a core, or cylinder, and should
+then pull out the cylinder and attach the two ends of the wire to the
+opposite poles of a battery, when the current passed through the coil
+the hollow interior of it would be a strong magnetic field. The air
+inside might be said to be a magnet, though if there were no air there,
+and the coil were under the exhausted receiver of an air-pump, the
+effect would be the same, and the _vacuum_ would be magnetized. A
+piece of iron inserted where the core was, would instantly become a
+magnet, and when the insulated wire is wound around a soft iron core,
+and the core is left in place, we have at once what is known as an
+_Electro-Magnet_.
+
+The wire windings of an electro-magnet are always insulated; wound with
+a non-conductor, like silk or cotton; so that the coils may not touch
+each other in the winding and thus permit the current to run off through
+contact by the easiest way, and cut across and leave most of the coil
+without a current. For it may as well be stated now that no matter how
+good a conductor a wire may be, two qualities of it cause what is called
+"_resistance_"--the current does not pass so easily. These two
+qualities are _thinness_ and _length_. The current will not
+traverse all the length of a long coil if it can pass straight through
+the same mass, and it is made to go the long way _by keeping the wires
+from touching each other_--preventing "contact," and lessening the
+opportunity to jump off which electricity is always looking for.
+
+When this coil is wound in layers, like the thread upon a spool, it
+increases the intensity of the magnetism in the core by as many times as
+there are coils, up to a certain point. If the core is merely soft iron,
+and not steel, it becomes magnetized instantly, as stated, and will draw
+another piece of iron to it with a snap, and hold it there as long as
+there is a current passing through the coil. But as instantly, when the
+current is stopped, this soft iron core ceases to be a magnet, and
+becomes as it was before--an inert and ordinary piece of iron. What has
+just been described is always, in some form, one of the indispensable
+parts of the electromagnetic machines used in industrial electricity,
+and in all of them except the appliances of electric lighting, and even
+in that case it is indispensable in producing the current which consumes
+the points of the carbon, or heats the filament to a white glow. The
+current may traverse the wire for a hundred miles to reach this little
+coil. But, instantly, at a touch a hundred miles away that forms a
+contact, there is a continuous "circuit;" the core becomes a magnet, and
+the piece of iron near it is drawn suddenly to it. Remove the distant
+finger from the button, the contact is broken, and the piece of iron
+immediately falls away again. It is the wonder of _the production of
+instant movement at any distance, without any movement of any connecting
+part_. It is a mysterious and incredible transmission of force not
+included among human possibilities forty years ago. It is now common,
+old, familiar. Conceive of its possibilities, of its annihilation of
+time and space, of its distant control, and of that which it is made to
+mean and represent in the spelled-out words of language, and it still
+remains one of the wonders of the world: the Electric Telegraph.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+MAGNETS AND MAGNETISM.--Having described a magnet that is made and
+unmade at will, it may be appropriate to describe magnets generally. The
+ordinary, permanent magnet, natural or artificial, has little place in
+the arts. It cannot be controlled. In common phrase, it cannot be made
+to "let go" at will. The greatest value of magnetism, as connected with
+electricity, consists in the fact of the intimate relationship of the
+two. A magnet may be made at will with the electric current, as
+described above. A little later we shall see how the process may be
+reversed, and the magnet be made to produce the most powerful current
+known, and yet owe its magnetism to the same current.
+
+The word _Magnet_ comes from the country of _Magnesia_, where
+"loadstone" (magnetic iron ore) seems first to have been found. The
+artificial magnet, as made and used in early experiments and still
+common as a toy or as a piece in some electrical appliances, is a piece
+of fine steel, of hard temper, which has been magnetized, usually by
+having had a current passed through or around it, and sometimes by
+contact with another magnet. For the singular property of a magnet is
+that it may continually impart its quality, yet never lose any of its
+own. Steel alone, of all the metals, has the decided quality of
+retaining its property of being a magnet. A "bar" magnet is a straight
+piece of steel magnetized. A "horseshoe" magnet is a bar magnet bent
+into the form of the letter "U."
+
+Every magnet has two "poles"--the positive, or North pole, and the
+negative, or South pole. If any magnet, of any size, and having as one
+piece two poles only, be cut into two, or a hundred pieces, each
+separate piece will be like the original magnet and have its two poles.
+The law is arbitrary and invariable under all circumstances, and is a
+law of nature, as unexplainable and as invariable as any in that
+mysterious code. All bar magnets, when suspended by their centers, turn
+their ends to the North and South, a familiar example of this being the
+ordinary compass. But in magnetism, _like repels like_. The world
+is a huge magnet. The pole of the magnet which points to the North is
+not the North pole of the needle as we regard it, but the opposite, the
+South.
+
+No one can explain precisely why iron, the purer and softer the better,
+becomes a powerful and effective magnet under the influence of the
+current, and instantly loses that character when the current ceases, and
+why steel, the purer and harder the better, at first rejects the
+influence, and comes slowly under it, but afterwards retains it
+permanently. Iron and steel are the magnetic metals, but there is a
+considerable list of metals not magnetic that are better than they as
+_conductors_ of the electric current. In a certain sense they are
+also the electric metals. A Dynamo, or Motor, made of brass or copper
+entirely would be impossible. All the phenomena of combined magnetism
+and electricity, all that goes to make up the field of industrial
+electric action, would be impossible without the indispensable of
+ordinary iron, and for the sole reason that it possesses the peculiar
+qualities, the affinities, described.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is now an understanding of the electro-magnet, with some idea of
+the part it may be made to play in the movement of pieces, parts, and
+machines in which it is an essential. It has been explained how soft
+iron becomes a magnet, not necessarily by any actual contact with any
+other magnet, or by touching or rubbing, but by being placed in an
+electric field. It acquired its magnetism by induction; by _drawing
+in_ (since that is the meaning of the term) the electricity that was
+around it. But induction has a still wider field, and other
+characteristics than this alone. Some distinct idea of these may be
+obtained by supposing a simple case, in which I shall ask the reader to
+follow me.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM THEORY OF INDUCTION]
+
+Let us imagine a wire to be stretched horizontally for a little space,
+and its two ends to be attached to the two poles of an ordinary battery
+so that a current may pass through it. Another wire is stretched beside
+the first, not touching it, and not connected with any source of
+electricity. Now, if a current is passed through the first wire a
+current will also show in the second wire, passing in an _opposite
+direction_ from the first wire's current. But this current in the
+second wire does not continue. It is a momentary impulse, existing only
+at the moment of the first passing of the current through the wire
+attached to the poles of the battery. After this first instantaneous
+throb there is nothing more. But now cut off the current in the first
+wire, and the second wire will show another impulse, this time in the
+_same direction_ with the current in the first wire. Then it is all
+over again, and there is nothing more. The first of these wires and
+currents, the one attached to the battery poles, is called the
+_Primary_. The second unattached wire, with its impulses, is called
+the _Secondary_.
+
+Let us now imagine the primary to be attached to the battery-poles
+permanently. We will not make or break the circuit, and we can still
+produce currents, "impulses," in the secondary. Let us imagine the
+primary to be brought nearer to the secondary, and again moved away from
+it, the current passing all the time through it. Every time it is moved
+nearer, an impulse will be generated in the secondary which will be
+opposite in direction to the current in the primary. Every time it is
+moved away again, an impulse in the secondary will be in the same
+direction as the primary current. So long, as before, as the primary
+wire is quiet, there will be no secondary current at all.
+
+There is still a third effect. If the current in the primary be
+_increased or diminished_ we shall have impulses in the secondary.
+
+This is a supposed case, to render the facts, the laws of induction,
+clear to the understanding. The experiment might actually be performed
+if an instrument sufficiently delicate were attached to the terminals of
+the secondary to make the impulses visible. The following facts are
+deduced from it in regard to all induced currents. They are the primary
+laws of induction:--
+
+A current which begins, which approaches, or which increases in strength
+in the primary, induces, with these movements or conditions, a momentary
+current in the _opposite direction_ in the secondary.
+
+A current which stops, which retires, or which decreases in strength in
+the primary, induces a momentary current _in the same direction_
+with the current in the primary.
+
+To make the results of induction effective in practice, we must have
+great length of wire, and to this end, as in the case of the
+electro-magnet, we will adopt the spool form. We will suppose two wires,
+insulated so as to keep them from actually touching, held together side
+by side, and wound upon a core in several layers. There will then be two
+wires in the coil, and the opposite ends of one of these wires we will
+attach to the poles of a battery, and send a current through the coil.
+This would then be the primary, and the other would be the secondary, as
+described above. But, since the power and efficiency of an induced
+current depends upon the length of the secondary wire that is exposed to
+the influence of the current carried by the primary, we fix two separate
+coils, one small enough to slip inside of the other. This smaller, inner
+coil is made with coarser wire than the outer, and the latter has an
+immense length of finer wire. The current is passed through the smaller,
+inside coil, and each time that it is stopped, or started, there will be
+an impulse, and a very strong one, through the outer--the secondary
+coil. Leave the current uninterrupted, and move the outer coil, or the
+inner one, back and forth, and the same series of strong impulses will
+be observed in the coil that has no connection with any source of
+electricity.
+
+What I have just described as an illustration of the laws governing the
+production of induced currents, is, in fact, what is known as the
+_Induction Coil_. In the old times of a quarter of a century ago it
+was extensively used as an illustrator of the power of the electric
+current. Sometimes the outer coil contained fifty miles of wire, and the
+spark, a close imitation of a flash of lightning, would pass between the
+terminals of the secondary coil held apart for a distance of several
+feet, and would pierce sheets of plate glass three inches thick. Before
+the days of practical electric lighting the induction-coil was used for
+the simultaneous lighting of the gas-jets in public buildings, and is
+still so used to a limited extent. Its description is introduced here as
+an illustration of the laws of induction which the reader will find
+applied hereafter in newer and more effective ways. The commonest
+instance now of the use of the induction-coil is in the very frequent
+small machine known as a medical battery. There must be a means of
+making and breaking the current (the circuit) as described above. This,
+in the medical battery, is automatic, and it is that which produces the
+familiar buzzing sound. The mechanism is easily understood upon
+examination.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At some risk of tediousness with those who have already made an
+examination of elementary electricity, I have now endeavored to convey
+to the reader a clear idea of (1), what electricity is, so far as known.
+(2) Of how the current is conducted, and its influence in the field
+surrounding the conductor. (3) The nature of the induced current, and
+the manner in which it is produced. The sum of the information so far
+may be stated in other words to be how to make an electromagnet, and how
+to produce an induced current. Such information has an end in view. A
+knowledge of these two items, an understanding of the details, will be
+found, collectively or separately, to underlie an understanding of all
+the machines and appliances of modern electricity, and in all
+probability, of all those that are yet to come.
+
+But in the prominent field of electric lighting (to which presently we
+shall come), there is still another principle involved, and this
+requires some explanation (as well given here as elsewhere) of the
+current theory as to what electricity is. [Footnote: There are several
+"schools" among scientists, those who pursue pure science, irrespective
+of practical applications, and who are rather disposed to narrow the
+term to include that field alone, that are divided among themselves upon
+the question of what electricity is. The "Substantialists" believe that
+it is a kind of matter. Others deny that, and insist that it is a "form
+of Energy," on which point there can be no serious question. Still
+others reject both these views. Tesla has said that "nothing stands in
+the way of our calling electricity 'ether associated with matter, or
+bound ether.'" Professor Lodge says it is "a form, or rather a mode of
+manifestation, of the ether" The question is still in dispute whether we
+have only one electricity or two opposite electricities. The great field
+of chemistry enters into the discussion as perhaps having the solution
+of the question within its possibilities. The practical electrician acts
+upon facts which he knows are true without knowing their cause;
+empirically; and so far adheres to the molecular hypothesis. The
+demonstrations and experiments of Tesla so far produce only new
+theories, or demonstrate the fallacies of the old, but give us nothing
+absolute. Nevertheless, under his investigations, the possibilities of
+the near future are widely extended. By means of currents alternating
+with very high frequency, he has succeeded in passing by induction,
+through the glass of 1 lamp, energy sufficient to keep a filament in a
+state of incandescence _without the use of any connecting wires_.
+He has even lighted a room by producing in it such a condition that an
+illuminating appliance may be placed anywhere and lighted without being
+electrically connected with anything. He has produced the required
+condition by creating in the room a powerful electrostatic field
+alternating very rapidly. He suspends two sheets of metal, each
+connected with one of the terminals of the coil. If an exhausted tube is
+carried anywhere between these sheets, or placed anywhere, it remains
+always luminous.
+
+Something of the unquestionable possibilities are shown in the following
+quotation from _Nature_, as expressed in a lecture by Prof. Crookes
+upon the implied results of Tesla's experiments.
+
+The extent to which this method of illumination may be practically
+available, experiments alone can decide. In any case, our insight into
+the possibilities of static electricity has been extended, and the
+ordinary electric machine will cease to be regarded as a mere toy.
+
+Alternating currents have, at the best, a rather doubtful reputation.
+But it follows from Tesla's researches that, is the rapidity of the
+alternation increases, they become not more dangerous but less so. It
+further appears that a true flame can now be produced without chemical
+aid--a flame which yields light and heat without the consumption of
+material and without any chemical process. To this end we require
+improved methods for producing excessively frequent alternations and
+enormous potentials. Shall we be able to obtain these by tapping the
+ether? If so, we may view the prospective exhaustion of our coal-fields
+with indifference; we shall at once solve the smoke question, and thus
+dissolve all possible coal rings.
+
+Electricity seems destined to annex the whole field, not merely of
+optics, but probably also of thermotics.
+
+Rays of light will not pass through a wall, nor, as we know only too
+well, through a dense fog. But electrical rays of a foot or two
+wave-length, of which we have spoken, will easily pierce such mediums,
+which for them will be transparent.
+
+Another tempting field for research, scarcely yet attacked by pioneers,
+awaits exploration. I allude to the mutual action of electricity and
+life. No sound man of science indorses the assertion that "electricity
+is life." nor can we even venture to speak of life as one of the
+varieties or manifestations of energy. Nevertheless, electricity has an
+important influence upon vital phenomena, and is in turn set in action
+by the living being--animal or vegetable. We have electric fishes--one
+of them the prototype of the torpedo of modern warfare. There is the
+electric slug which used to be met with in gardens and roads about
+Hoinsey Rise; there is also an electric centipede. In the study of such
+facts and such relations the scientific electrician has before him an
+almost infinite field of inquiry.
+
+The slower vibrations to which I have referred reveal the bewildering
+possibility of telegraphy without wires, posts, cables, or any of our
+present costly appliances. It is vain to attempt to picture the marvels
+of the future. Progress, as Dean Swift observed, may be "too fast for
+endurance."] As to this, all we may be said to know, as has been
+remarked, is that it is one of the _forms of energy_, and its
+manifestations are in the form of _motion_ of the minute and
+invisible atoms of which it is composed. This movement is
+instantaneously communicated along the length of a conductor. There
+must, of course, be an end to this process in theory, because all the
+molecules once moved must return to rest, or to a former condition,
+before being moved again. Therefore it is necessary to add that when
+the motion of the last molecule has been absorbed by some apparatus
+for applying it to utility, the last particles, atoms, molecules, are
+restored to rest, and may again receive motion from infringing particles,
+and this transmission of energy along a conductor is
+continuous--continually absorbed and repeated. This is _dynamic_
+electricity; not differing in kind, in essence, from any other, but only
+in application.
+
+If the conductor is entirely insulated, so that no molecular movements
+can be communicated by it to contiguous bodies, all its particles become
+energized, and remain so as long as the conductor is attached to a
+source of electricity. In such a case an additional charge is required
+only when some of the original charge is taken away, escapes. This is
+_Static_ electricity; the same as the other, but in theory
+differing in application.
+
+The molecular theory is, unquestionably, tenable under present
+conditions. It is that to which science has attained in its inquiries to
+the present date. The electric light is scarcely explainable upon any
+other hypothesis. The remaining conclusions may be left in abeyance, and
+without argument.
+
+Science began with static electricity, so called, because its sources
+were more readily and easily discovered in the course of scientific
+accidents, as in the original discovery of the property of rubbed amber,
+etc., and the long course of investigations that were suggested by that
+antique, accidental discovery. What we know as the dynamic branch of the
+subject was created by the investigations of Faraday; induction was its
+mother. It is the practically important branch, but its investigation
+required the invention of machinery to perform its necessary operations.
+Between the two branches the sole difference--a difference that may be
+said not actually to exist--is in _quantity and pressure_.
+
+To the department of static electricity all those industrial appliances
+first known belong, as the telegraph, electro-plating, etc. I shall
+first consider this class of appliances and machines. The most important
+of the class is
+
+[Illustration]
+
+THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH.--The word is Greek, meaning, literally, "to
+write from a distance." But long since, and before Morse's invention, it
+had come to mean the giving of any information, by any means, from afar.
+The existence of telegraphs, not electric, is as old as the need of
+them. The idea of quickness, speedy delivery, is involved. If time is
+not an object, men may go or send. The means used in telegraphing, in
+ancient and modern times, have been sound and sight. Anything that can
+be expressed so as to be read at a distance, and that conveys a meaning,
+is a telegram. [Footnote: This word is of American coinage, and first
+appeared in the _Albany Evening Journal_, in 1852. It avoids the
+use of two words, as "Telegraphic Message," or "Telegraphic Dispatch,"
+and the ungrammatical use of "Telegraph," for a message by telegraph.
+The new word was at once adopted.] Our plains Indians used columns of
+smoke, or fires, and are the actual inventors of the _heliograph_,
+now so called, though formerly meaning the making of a picture by the
+aid of the sun--photography. The vessels of a squadron at sea have long
+used telegraphic signals. Some of the celebrated sentences of our
+history have been written by visual signals, such as "Hold the fort, for
+I am coming," "Don't give up the ship," etc. Order of showing,
+positions, and colors are arbitrarily made to mean certain words. The
+sinking of the "_Victoria_" in 1893, was brought about by the
+orders conveyed by marine signals. Bells and guns signal by sound. So
+does the modern electric telegraph, contrary to original design. It is
+all telegraphy, but it all required an agreed and very limited code, and
+comparative nearness. None of the means in ancient use were available
+for the multifarious uses of modern commerce.
+
+As soon as it was known that electricity could be sent long distances
+over wires, human genius began to contrive a way of using it as a means
+of conveying definite intelligence. The first idea of the kind was
+attempted to be put into effect in 1774. This was, however, before the
+discovery of the electro-magnet (about 1800), or even the Galvanic
+battery, and it was seriously proposed to have as many wires as there
+were letters; each wire to have a frictional battery for generating
+electricity at one end of the circuit, and a pith-ball electroscope at
+the other. The modern reader may smile at the idea of the hurried sender
+of a message taking a piece of cat-skin, or his silk handkerchief, and
+rubbing up the successive letter-balls of glass or sulphur until he had
+spelled out his telegram. Later a man named Dyer, of New York, invented
+a system of sending messages by a single wire, and of causing a record
+to be made at the receiving office by means of a point passing over
+litmus paper, which the current was to mark by chemical action, the
+paper passing over a roller or drum during the operation. The battery
+for this arrangement was also frictional. They knew of no other. Then
+came the deflected-needle telegraph, first suggested by Ampere, and a
+few such lines were constructed, and to some extent operated. In one of
+the original telegraph lines the wires were bound in hemp and laid in
+pipes on the surface of the ground. The expedient of poles and
+atmospheric insulation was not thought of until it was adopted as a last
+resort during the construction of Morse's first line between Washington
+and Baltimore.
+
+In the year 1832, an American named Samuel F. B. Morse was making a
+voyage home from Havre to New York in the sailing packet _Sully_.
+He was an educated man, a graduate of Yale, and an artist, being the
+holder of a gold medal awarded him for his first work in sculpture, and
+no want of success drove him to other fields. But during this tedious
+voyage of the old times in a sailing vessel he seems to have conceived
+the idea which thenceforth occupied his life. It was the beginning of
+the present Electric Telegraph. During this same voyage he embodied his
+notions in some drawings, and they were the beginnings of vicissitudes
+among the most long-continued and trying for which life affords any
+opportunity. He abandoned his studies. He paid attention to no other
+interest. He passed years in silent and lonesome endeavors that seemed
+to all others useless. He subjected himself to the reproaches of all his
+friends, lost the confidence of business men, gained the reputation of
+being a monomaniac, and was finally given over to the following of
+devices deemed the most useless and unpromising that up to that time had
+occupied the mind of any man.
+
+The rank and file of humanity had no definite idea of the plan, or of
+the results that would follow if it were successful. In reality no one
+cared. It was Morse's enterprise exclusively--a crank's fad alone. There
+has been no period in the history of society when the public, as a body,
+was interested in any great change in the systems to which it was
+accustomed. There is always enmity against an improver. In reality, the
+question of how much money Morse should make by inventing the electric
+telegraph was the question of least importance. Yet it was regarded as
+the only one. He is dead. His profits have gone into the mass, his
+honors have become international. The patents have long expired. The
+public, the entire world, are long since the beneficiaries, and the
+benefits continue to be inconceivably vast. Nothing in all history
+exceeds in moral importance the invention of the telegraph except the
+invention of printing with movable types.
+
+[Illustration: AN ELECTRO-MAGNET OF MORSE'S TIME.]
+
+After eight years of waiting, and the repeated instruction of the entire
+Congress of the United States in the art of telegraphy, that body was
+finally induced to make an appropriation of thirty thousand dollars to
+be expended in the construction of an experimental line between
+Washington and Baltimore. And now begins the actual strangeness of the
+story of the Telegraph. After many years of toil, Morse still had
+learned nothing of the efficient construction of an electro-magnet. The
+magnet which he attempted to use unchanged was after the pattern of the
+first one ever made--a bent U-shaped bar, around which were a few turns
+of wire not insulated. The bar was varnished for insulation, and the
+turns of wire were so few that they did not touch each other. The
+apparatus would not work at a distance of more than a few feet, and not
+invariably then. Professor Leonard D. Gale suggested the cause of the
+difficulty as being in the sparseness of the coils of wire on the magnet
+and the use of a single-cell battery. He furnished an electro-magnet and
+battery out of his own belongings, with which the efficiency of the
+contrivance was greatly increased. The only insulated wire then known
+was bonnet-wire, used by milliners for shaping the immense flaring
+bonnets worn by our grandmothers, and when it finally came to
+constructing the instruments of the first telegraphic system the entire
+stock of New York was exhausted. The immense stocks of electrical
+supplies now available for all purposes was then, and for many years
+afterwards, unknown. Previous to the investigations of Professor Henry,
+in 1830, only the theory of causing a core of soft iron to become a
+magnet was known, and the actual magnet, as we make it, had not been
+made. Morse, in his beginnings, had not money enough to employ a
+competent mechanic, and was himself possessed of but scant mechanical
+skill or knowledge of mechanical results. Persistency was the quality by
+which he succeeded.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF MORSE'S INSTRUMENT, 1830, WITH ITS WRITING.]
+
+The battery used first by Morse, as stated, was a single cell. The one
+made later by his partner, Alfred Vail, the real author of all the
+workable features of the Morse telegraph, and of every feature which
+identifies it with the telegraph of the present, was a rectangular
+wooden box divided into eight compartments, and coated inside with
+beeswax so that it might resist the action of acids. The telegraphic
+instrument as made by Morse was a rectangular frame of wood, now in the
+cabinet of the Western Union Telegraph Company, at New York, which was
+intended to be clamped to the edge of a table when in use. He knew
+nothing of the splendid invention since known as the "Morse Alphabet,"
+and the spelling of words in a telegram was not intended by him. His
+complicated system, as described in his caveat filed by him in 1837,
+consisted in a system of signs, by which numbers, and consequently words
+and sentences, were to be indicated. There was then a set of type
+arranged to regulate and communicate the signs, and rules in which to
+set this type. There was a means for regulating the movement forward of
+the rule containing the types. This was a crank to be turned by the
+hand. The marking or writing apparatus at the receiving instrument was a
+pendulum arranged to be swung _across_ the slip of paper, as it was
+unwound from the drum, making a zig-zag mark the points of which were to
+be counted, a certain number of points meaning a certain numeral, which
+numeral meant a word. A separate type was used to represent each
+numeral, having a corresponding number of projections or teeth. A
+telegraphic dictionary was necessary, and one was at great pains
+prepared by Morse. His process was, therefore, to translate the message
+to be sent into the numerals corresponding to the words used, to set the
+types corresponding to those numerals in the rule, and then to pass the
+rule through the appliance arranged for the purpose in connection with
+the electric current. The receiver must then translate the message by
+reference to the telegraphic dictionary, and write out the words for the
+person to whom the message was sent. This was all changed by Vail, who
+invented the "dot-and-dash" alphabet, and modified the mechanical action
+of the instrument necessary for its use. The arrangement of a steel
+embossing-point working upon a grooved roller--a radical difference--was
+a portion of this change. The invention of the axial magnet, also
+Vail's, was another. Morse had regarded a mechanical arrangement for
+transmitting signals as necessary. Vail, in the practice of the first
+line, grew accustomed to sending messages by dipping the end of the wire
+in the mercury cup,--the beginning of the present transmitting
+instrument, which is also his invention--and Morse's "port-rule," types,
+and other complicated arrangements, went into the scrap-heap.
+
+[Illustration: MODERN TRANSMITTER.]
+
+Yet there were some strange things still left. The receiving relay
+weighed 185 pounds. An equally efficient modern one need not weigh more
+than half a pound. Morse had intended to make a _recording_
+telegraph distinctively; it was to his mind its chiefest value. Almost
+in the beginning it ceased to be such, and the recording portion of the
+instrument has for many years been unknown in a telegraph office, being
+replaced by the "sounder." This was also the invention of Vail. The more
+expert of the operators of the first line discovered that it was
+possible to read the signals _by the sound_ made by the armature
+lever. In vain did the managers prohibit it as unauthorized. The
+practice was still carried on wherever it could be without detection.
+Morse was uncompromising in his opposition to the innovation. The
+wonderful alphabet of the telegraph, the most valuable of the separate
+inventions that make up the system, was not his conception. The
+invention of this alphabetical code, based on the elements of time and
+space, has never met with the appreciation it has deserved. It has been
+found applicable everywhere. Flashes of light, the raising and lowering
+of a flag, the tapping of a finger, the long and short blasts of a steam
+whistle, spell out the words of the English language as readily as does
+the sounder in a telegraph-office. It may be interpreted by sight,
+touch, taste, hearing. With a wire, a battery and Vail's alphabet,
+telegraphy is entirely possible without any other appliances.
+
+[Illustration: MODERN "SOUNDER."]
+
+A brief sketch of the difficulties attending the making of the first
+practical telegraph line will be interesting as showing how much and how
+little men knew of practical electricity in 1843. [Footnote: There was
+no possibility of their knowing more, notwithstanding that, viewed from
+the present, their inexperienced struggles seem almost pathetic. So,
+also, do the ideas of Galvani and the experiments and conclusions of all
+except Franklin, until we come to Faraday. It is one of the features of
+the time in which we live that, regardless of age, we are all scholars
+of a new school in which mere diligence and behavior are not rewarded,
+and in which it is somewhat imperative that we should keep up with our
+class in an understanding of _what are now the facts of daily
+life_, wonders though they were in the days of our youth.] To begin
+with, it was a "metallic circuit;" that is, two wires were to be used
+instead of one wire and a "ground connection." They knew nothing of this
+last. Vail discovered and used it before the line was finished. The two
+wires, insulated, were inclosed in a pipe, lead presumably, and the pipe
+was placed in the ground. Ezra Cornell, afterwards the founder of
+Cornell University, had been engaged in the manufacture and sale of a
+patent plow, and undertook to make a pipe-laying machine for this new
+telegraph line. After the work had been begun Vail tested and united the
+conductors as each section was laid. When ten miles were laid the
+insulation, which had been growing weaker, failed altogether. There was
+no current. Probably every schoolboy now knows what the trouble was. The
+earth had stolen the current and absorbed it. The modern boy would
+simply remark "Induction," and turn his attention to some efficient
+remedy. Then, there was consternation. Cornell dexterously managed to
+break the pipe-laying machine, so as to furnish a plausible excuse to
+the newspapers and such public as there may be said to have been before
+there was any telegraph line. Days were spent in consultation at the
+Relay House, and in finding the cause of the difficulty and the remedy.
+Of the congressional appropriation nearly all had been spent. The
+interested parties even quarreled, as mere men will under such
+circumstances, and the want of a little knowledge which is now
+elementary about electricity came near wrecking forever an enterprise
+whose vast importance could not be, and was not then, even approximately
+measured.
+
+[Illustration: ALFRED VAIL.]
+
+Finally, after some weeks delay, it was decided to introduce what has
+become the most familiar feature of the landscape of civilization, and
+string the wires on poles. There is little need to follow the enterprise
+further. Morse stayed with one instrument in the Capitol at Washington,
+and Vail carried another with him at the end of the line. Already the
+type-and-rule and all the symbols and dictionaries had been discarded,
+and the dot-and-dash alphabet was substituted. On April 23d, 1844, Vail
+substituted the earth for the metallic circuit as an experiment, and
+that great step both in knowledge and in practice was taken.
+
+Within an incredibly brief space the Morse Electric Telegraph had spread
+all over the world. No man's triumph was ever more complete. He passed
+to those riches and honors that must have been to him almost as a
+fulfilled dream. In Europe his progresses were like those of a monarch.
+He was made a member of almost all of the learned societies of the
+world, and on his breast glittered the medals and orders that are the
+insignia of human greatness. A congress of representatives of ten of the
+governments of Europe met in Paris in 1858, and it was unanimously
+decided that the sum of four hundred thousand francs--about a hundred
+thousand dollars--should be presented to him. He died in New York in
+1872.
+
+[Illustration: PROF. HENRY'S ELECTROMAGNET AND ARMATURE]
+
+Yet not a single feature of the invention of Morse, as formulated in his
+caveat and described in his original patent, is to be found among the
+essentials of modern telegraphy. They had mostly been abandoned before
+the first line had been completed, and the arrangements of his
+associate, Vail, were substituted. Professor Joseph Henry had, in 1832,
+constructed an electromagnetic telegraph whose signals were made by
+sound, as all signals now are in the so-called Morse system. He hung a
+bar-magnet on a pivot in its center as a compass-needle is hung. He
+wound a U-shaped piece of soft iron with insulated wire, and made it an
+electro-magnet, and placed the north end of the magnetized bar between
+the two legs of this electro-magnet. When the latter was made a magnet
+by the current the end of the bar thus placed was attracted by one leg
+of the magnet and repelled by the other, and was thus caused to swing in
+a horizontal plane so that the opposite end of it struck a bell. Thus
+was an electric telegraph made as an experimental toy, and fulfilling
+all the conditions of such an one giving the signals by sound, as the
+modern telegraph does. It lacked one thing--the essential. [Footnote:
+The details of the construction of the modern telegraph line are not
+here stated. There are none that change, in principle, the outline above
+given.]
+
+The Vail telegraphic alphabet had not been thought of. Had such an idea
+been conceived previously a message could have been read as it is read
+now, and with the toy of Professor Henry which he abandoned without an
+idea of its utility or of the possibilities of any telegraph as we have
+long known them. Morse knew these possibilities. He was one of the
+innumerable eccentrics who have been right, one of the prophets who have
+been in the beginning without honor, not only in respect to their own
+country, but in respect to their times.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF TELEGRAPH SYSTEM.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+THE OCEAN CABLE.--The remaining department of Telegraphy is embodied in
+the startling departure from ancient ideas of the possible which we know
+as cable telegraphy, the messages by such means being _cablegrams_.
+About these ocean systems there are many features not applying to lines
+on land, though they are intended to perform the same functions in the
+same way, with the same object of conveying intelligence in language,
+instantly and certainly, but under the sea.
+
+The marine cables are not simple wires. There is in the center a strand
+of usually seven small copper wires, intended as the conductor of the
+current. These, twisted loosely into a small cable, are surrounded by
+repeated layers of gutta-percha, which is, in turn, covered with jute.
+Outside of all there is an armor of wires, and the entire cable appears
+much like any other of the wire cables now in common use with elevators,
+bridges, and for many purposes. In the shallow waters of bays and
+harbors, where anchors drag and the like occurrences take place, the
+armor of a submarine cable is sometimes so heavy as to weigh more than
+twenty tons to the mile.
+
+There are peculiar difficulties encountered in sending messages by an
+ocean cable, and some of these grow out of the same induction whose laws
+are indispensable in other cases. The inner copper core sets up
+induction in the strands of the outer armor, and that again with the
+surrounding water. There is, again, a species of re-induction affecting
+the core, so that faint impulses may be received at the terminals that
+were never sent by the operators. All of these difficulties combined
+result in what electricians term "retardation." It is one of the
+departments of telegraphy that, like the unavoidable difficulties in all
+machines and devices, educates men to their special care, and keeps them
+thinking. It is one of the natural features of all the mechanical
+sciences that results in the continual making of improvements.
+
+The first impression in regard to ocean cables would be that very strong
+currents are used in sending impulses so far. The opposite is true. The
+receiving instrument is not the noisy "sounder" of the land lines. There
+was, until recently, a delicate needle which swung to and fro with the
+impulses, and reflected beams of light which, according to their number
+and the space between them spelled out the message according to the Vail
+dot-and-dash alphabet. Now, however, a means still more delicate has
+been devised, resulting in a faint wavy ink-line on a long, unwinding
+slip of paper, made by a fountain pen. This strange manuscript may be
+regarded as the latest system of writing in the world, having no
+relationship to the art of Cadmus, and requiring an expert and a special
+education to decipher it. Those faint pulsations, from a hand three
+thousand miles away across the sea, are the realization of a magic
+incredible. The necromancy and black art of all antiquity are childish
+by comparison. They give but faint indications of what they often
+are--the messages of love and death; the dictations of statesmanship;
+the heralds of peace or war; the orders for the disposition of millions
+of dollars.
+
+The story of the laying of the first ocean cable is worthy of the
+telling in any language, but should be especially interesting to the
+American boy and girl. It is a story of native enterprise and
+persistence; perhaps the most remarkable of them all.
+
+The earliest ocean telegraph was that laid by two men named Brett,
+across the English Channel. For this cable, a pioneer though crossing
+only a narrow water, the conservative officials of the British
+government refused a charter. In August, 1850, they laid a single copper
+wire covered with gutta-percha from Dover in England to the coast of
+France. The first wire was soon broken, and a second was made consisting
+of several strands, and this last was soon imitated in various short
+reaches of water in Europe.
+
+But the Atlantic had always been considered unfathomable. No line had
+ever sounded its depths, and its strong currents had invariably swept
+away the heaviest weights before they reached its bed. Its great
+feature, so far as known, was that strange ocean river first noted and
+described by Franklin, and known to us as the Gulf Stream. In 1853 a
+circumstance occurred which again turned the attention of a few men to
+the question of an Atlantic cable. Lieutenant Berryman, of the Navy,
+made a survey of the bottom of the Atlantic from Newfoundland to
+Ireland, and the wonderful discovery was made that the floor of the
+ocean was a vast plain, not more than two miles below the surface,
+extending from one continent to the other. This plain is about four
+hundred miles wide and sixteen hundred long, and there are no currents
+to disturb the mass of broken shells and unknown fishes that lie on its
+oozy surface. It was named the "Telegraphic Plateau," with a view to its
+future use. At either edge of this plateau huge mountains, from four to
+seven thousand feet high, rise out of the depths. There are precipices
+of sheer descent down which the cable now hangs. The Azores and Bermudas
+are peaks of ocean mountains. The warm river known as the Gulf Stream,
+coming northward meets the ice-bergs and melts them, and deposits the
+shells, rocks and sand they carry on this plain. When it was discovered
+the difficulty in the way of an Atlantic cable seemed no longer to
+exist, and those who had been anxious to engage in the enterprise began
+to bestir themselves.
+
+Of these the most active was the American, Cyrus W. Field. He began life
+as a clerk in New York City. When thirty-five years old he became
+engaged in the building of a land line of telegraph across Newfoundland,
+the purpose of which was to transmit news brought by a fast line of
+steamers intended to be established, and the idea is said to have
+occurred to him of making a line not only so far, but across the sea. In
+November, 1856, he had succeeded in forming a company, and the entire
+capital, amounting to 350,000 pounds, was subscribed. The governments of
+England and the United States promised a subsidy to the stockholders.
+The cable was made in England. The _Niagara_ was assigned by the
+United States, and the _Agamemnon_ by England, each attended by
+smaller vessels, to lay the cable. In August, 1857, the Niagara left the
+coast of Ireland, dropping her cable into the sea. Even when it dropped
+suddenly down the steep escarpment to the great plateau the current
+still flowed. But through the carelessness of an assistant the cable
+parted. That was the beginning of mishaps. The task was not to be so
+easily done, and the enterprise was postponed until the following year.
+
+That next year was still more memorable for triumph and disappointment.
+It was now designed that the two vessels should meet in mid-ocean, unite
+the ends of the cable, and sail slowly to opposite shores. There were
+fearful storms. The huge _Agamemnon_, overloaded with her half of
+the cable, was almost lost. But finally the spot in the waste and middle
+of the Atlantic was reached, the sea was still, and the vessels steamed
+away from each other slowly uncoiling into the sea their two halves of
+the second cable. It parted again, and the two ships returned to
+Ireland.
+
+In July they again met in mid-ocean. Europe and America were both
+charitably deriding the splendid enterprise. All faith was lost. It was
+known, to journalism especially, that the cable would never be laid and
+that the enterprise was absurd. But it was like the laying of the first
+land line. There was a way to do it, existing in the brains and faith of
+men, though at first that way was not known. From this third meeting the
+two ships again sailed away, the _Niagara_ for America, the
+_Agamemnon_ for Valencia Bay. This time the wire did not part, and
+on August 29th, 1858, the old world and the new were bound together for
+the first time, and each could read almost the thoughts of the other.
+The queen saluted America, and the president replied. There were salutes
+of cannon and the ringing of bells. But the messages by the cable grew
+indistinct day by day, and finally ceased. The Atlantic cable had been
+laid, and--had failed.
+
+Eight years followed, and the cable lay forgotten at the bottom of the
+sea. The reign of peace on earth and good will to men had so far failed
+to come and they were years of tumult and bitterness. The Union of the
+United States was called upon to defend its integrity in a great war. A
+bitter enmity grew up between us and England. The telegraph, and all its
+persevering projectors, were almost absolutely forgotten. Electricians
+declared the project utterly impracticable, and it began, finally, to be
+denied that any messages had ever crossed the Atlantic at all, and Field
+and his associates were discredited. It was said that the current could
+not be made to pass through so long a circuit. New routes were spoken
+of--across Bering's Strait, and overland by way of Siberia--and
+measures began to be taken to carry this scheme into effect.
+
+Amid these discouragements, Field and his associates revived their
+company, made a new cable, and provided everything that science could
+then suggest to aid final success. This new cable was more perfect than
+any of the former ones, and there was a mammoth side-wheel steamer known
+as the _Great Eastern_, unavailable as it proved for the ordinary
+uses of commerce, and this vessel was large enough to carry the entire
+cable in her hold. In July, 1865, the huge steamer left Ireland,
+dropping the endless coil into the sea. The same men were engaged in
+this last attempt that had failed in all the previous ones. It is one of
+the most memorable instances of perseverance on record. But on August
+6th a flaw occurred, and the cable was being drawn up for repairs. The
+sound of the wheel suddenly stopped; the cable broke and sunk into the
+depths. The _Great Eastern_ returned unsuccessful to her port.
+
+Field was present on board on this occasion, and had been present on
+several similar ones. There was, so far as known, no record made by him
+of his thoughts. There were now five cables in the bed of the Atlantic,
+and each one had carried down with it a large sum of money, and a still
+larger sum of hopes. Yet the Great Eastern sailed again in July, 1866,
+her tanks filled with new cable and Field once more on her decks. It was
+the last, and the successful attempt. The cable sank steadily and
+noiselessly into the sea, and on July 26th the steamer sailed into
+Trinity Bay. The connection was made at Heart's Content, a little New
+Foundland fishing village, and one for this occasion admirably named.
+Then the lost cable of 1865 was found, raised and spliced.
+
+In these later times, if a flaw should occur, science would locate it,
+and go and repair it. Even if this were not true, the fact remains that
+this last cable, and that of 1865, have been carrying their messages
+under the sea for nearly thirty years. The lesson is that repeated
+failures do not mean _final_ failure. There is often said to be a
+malice, a spirit of rebellion, in inanimate things. They refuse to
+become slaves until they are once and for all utterly subdued, and then
+they are docile forever. Yet the malice truly lies in the inaptitude and
+inexperience of men. Had Field and his associates known how to make and
+lay an Atlantic cable in the beginning as well as they did in the end,
+the first one laid would have been successful. The years were passed in
+the invention of machinery for laying, and in improving the construction
+of each successive cable. Many have been laid since then, certainly and
+without failure. Men have learned how. [Footnote: At present the total
+mileage of submarine cables is about 152,000 miles, costing altogether
+$200,000,000. The length of land wires throughout the world is over
+2,000,000 miles, costing $225,000,000. The capital invested in all
+lines, land and sea, is about $530,000,000.]
+
+Thirteen years were passed in this succession of toils, expenditures,
+trials and failures. Field crossed the Atlantic more than fifty times in
+these years, in pursuit of his great idea. At last, like Morse, he was
+crowned with wealth, success, medals and honors. He was acquainted with
+all the difficulties. It is now known that he knew through them all that
+an ocean cable could finally be laid.
+
+THE TELEPHONE.--The telegraph had become old. All nations had become
+accustomed to its use. More than thirty years had elapsed--a long time
+in the last half of the nineteenth century--before mankind awoke to a
+new and startling surprise; the telegraph had been made to transmit not
+only language, but the human voice in articulate speech. [Footnote: It
+has been noted that Morse's idea was a _recording_ telegraph, that
+being in his mind its most valuable point, and that this idea has long
+been obsolete. In like manner, when the Telephone was invented there was
+a general business opinion that it was perhaps an instrument useful in
+colleges for demonstrating the wonders of electricity, but not useful
+for commercial purposes _because it made no record_. "Business will
+always be done in black and white" was the oracular verdict of prominent
+and experienced business men. It may be true, but a little conversation
+across space has been found indispensable. The telephone is a remarkable
+business success.] The fact first became known in 1873, and was the
+invention of Alexander G. Bell, of Chicago.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF TELEPHONE.--THE BLAKE TRANSMITTER.]
+
+There were several, no one knows how many, attempts to accomplish this
+remarkable feat previous to the success of Professor Bell. One of these
+was by Reis, of Frankfort, in 1860. It did not embrace any of the most
+valuable principles involved in what we know as the telephone, since it
+could not transmit _speech_. Professor Bell's first operative
+apparatus was accompanied by simultaneous inventions by Gray, Edison,
+and others. This remarkable instance of several of the great
+electricians of the country evolving at nearly the same time the same
+principal details of a revolutionary invention, has never been fully
+explained. The first rather crude and ineffective arrangements were
+rapidly improved by these men, and by others, prominent among whom is
+Blake, whose remarkable transmitter will be described presently. The
+best devices of these inventors were finally embodied, and in the
+resulting instrument we have one of the chiefest of those modern wonders
+whose first appearance taxed the credulity of mankind. [Footnote: There
+were, until a recent period, a line of statements, alleged facts and
+reasonings, that were incredible in proportion to intelligence. The
+occurrences of recent times have reversed this rule with regard to all
+things in the domain of applied science. It is the ignorant and narrow
+only who are incredulous, and the ears of intelligence are open to every
+sound. All that is not absurd is possible, and all that is possible is
+sure to be accomplished. The telephone, as a statement, _was_
+absurd, but not to the men who worked for its accomplishment and finally
+succeeded. The lines grow narrow. It requires now a high intelligence to
+decide even upon the fact of absurdity within the domain of natural
+law.]
+
+In reality the telephone is simple in construction. Workmen who are not
+accomplished electricians constantly erect, correct and repair the lines
+and instruments. The machine is not liable to derangement. Any person
+may use it the first time of trying, and this use is almost universal.
+Yet it is, from the view of any hour in all the past, an
+incomprehensible mystery. A moment of reflection drifts the mind
+backward and renders it almost incredible in the present. The human
+voice, recognizable, in articulate words, is apparently borne for miles,
+now even for some hundreds of miles, upon an attenuated wire which hangs
+silent in the air carrying absolutely nothing more than thousands of
+little varying impulses of electricity. Not a word that is spoken at one
+end of it is ever heard at the other, and the conclusion inevitable to
+the reason of even twenty years ago would be that if one person does not
+actually hear the other talk there is a miracle. Probably this idea that
+the voice is actually carried is not very uncommon. The facts seem
+incomprehensible otherwise, and it is not considered that if that idea
+were correct it _would_ be a miracle.
+
+The entire explanation of the magic of the telephone lies in electrical
+induction. To the brief explanation of that phenomenon previously given
+the reader is again referred for a better understanding of what now
+follows.
+
+But, first, a moment's consideration may be given to the results
+produced by the use of this appliance, which, as an illustration of the
+way of the world was an innovation that, had it remained uninvented or
+impossible, would never have been even desired. One third more business
+is said now to be transacted in the average day than was possible
+previously. Since many things can now go on together which previously
+waited for direction, authority and personal arrangement, a man's
+business life is lengthened one-third, while his business may mostly be
+done, to his great convenience, from one place. It has given employment
+to a large number of persons, a large proportion of whom are young
+women. The status of woman in the business world has been, fortunately
+or unfortunately, by so much changed. It has introduced a new necessity,
+never again to be dispensed with. It has changed the ancient habits, and
+with them, unconsciously, _the habit of thought_. Contact not
+personal between man and man has increased. The _thought_ of others
+is quickly arrived at. It has caused us to become more appreciative of
+the absolute meanings and values of words, without assistance from face,
+manner or gesture. Laughter may be heard, but tears are unseen. It has
+induced caution in speech and enforces brevity. While none of its
+conveniences are now noted, and all that it gives is expected, the
+telephone, with all its effects, has entered--into the sum of life.
+
+On the wall or table there is a box, and beside this box projects a
+metal arm. In a fork of this arm hangs a round, black, trumpet-shaped,
+hard rubber tube. This last is the receiving instrument. It is taken
+from its arm and held close to the ear. The answers are heard in it as
+though the person speaking were there concealed in an impish embodiment
+of himself. Meantime the talking is done into a hole in the side of the
+box, while the receiver is held to the ear. This is all that appears
+superficially. An operation incredible has its entire machinery
+concealed in these simplicities. It is difficult to explain the mystery
+of the telephone in words--though it has been said to be simple--and it
+is almost impossible unless the reader comprehends, or will now
+undertake to comprehend, what has been previously said on the subject of
+the production of magnetism by a current of electricity, as in the case
+of the electro-magnet, and on the subject of induction and its laws.
+
+It has been shown that electricity produces magnetism; that the current,
+properly managed as described, creates instantly a powerful magnet out
+of a piece of soft iron, and leaves it again a mere piece of iron at the
+will of the operator. This process also will work backwards. An electric
+current produces a magnet, and _a magnet also may be made to produce
+an electric current_. It is one more of the innumerable, almost
+universal, cases where scientific and mechanical processes may be
+reversed. When the dynamo is examined this process is still further
+exemplified, and when we examine the dynamo and the motor together we
+have a striking example of the two processes going on together.
+
+The application of this making of a current, or changing its intensity,
+in the telephone, is apparently totally unlike the continuous
+manufacture of the induced current for daily use by means of the steam
+engine and dynamo. But it is in exact accord with the same laws. It
+will, perhaps, be more readily understood by recalling the results of
+the experiment of the two wires, where it was found that an _approach
+to_, or a _receding from_, a wire carrying a current, produces
+an impulse over the wire that has by itself no current at all. Now, it
+must be added to that explanation that if the battery were detached from
+that conducting wire, and if, instead of its being a wire for the
+carrying of a battery current _it were itself a permanent magnet_,
+the same results would happen in the other wire if it were rapidly moved
+toward and away from this permanent magnet. If the reader should stretch
+a wire tightly between two pegs on a table, and should then hold the
+arms of a common horseshoe magnet very near it, and should twang the
+stretched wire with his finger, as he would a guitar string, the
+electrometer would show an induced alternate current in the wire. Since
+this is an illustration of the principle of the dynamo, stated in its
+simplest form, it may be well to remember that in this manner--with the
+means multiplied and in all respects made the most of--a very strong
+current of electricity may be evolved without any battery or other
+source of electricity except a magnet. In connection with this
+substitution of a magnet for a current-carrying wire, it must be
+remembered that moving the magnet toward or from the wire has the same
+result as moving the wire instead. It does not matter which piece is
+moved.
+
+In addition to the above, it should be stated that not only will an
+induced current be set up in the wire, but also _the magnetism in the
+magnet will be increased or diminished as the tremblings of the wire
+cause it to approach or recede from it_. Therefore if a wire be led
+away from each pole of a permanent magnet, and the ends united to form a
+circuit, an induced current will appear in this wire if a piece of soft
+iron is passed quickly near the magnet.
+
+There is an essential part of the telephone that it is necessary to go
+outside of the field of electricity to describe. It is undoubtedly
+understood by the reader that all sound is produced by vibrations, or
+rapid undulations, of the surrounding air. If a membrane of any kind is
+stretched across a hoop, and one talks against it, so to speak, the
+diaphragm or membrane will be shaken, will vibrate, with the movement of
+the air produced by the voice. If a cannon be fired all the windows
+rattle, and are often broken. A peal of thunder will cause the same jar
+and rattle of window panes, manifestly by what we call
+"sound"--vibrations of the air. The window frame is a "diaphragm." The
+ear is constructed on the same principle, its diaphragm being actually
+moved by the vibrations of air, being what we call hearing. With these
+facts about sound understood in connection with those given in
+connection with the substitution of a magnet for a battery current, it
+is entirely possible for any non-expert to understand the theory of the
+construction of the telephone.
+
+In the Bell telephone, now used with the Blake transmitter [which
+differs somewhat from the arrangement I shall now describe] a bar magnet
+has a portion of its length wound with very fine insulated wire. Across
+the opposite end of this polarized [Footnote: "Polarized" means
+magnetized; having the two poles of a permanent magnet. The term is
+frequently used in descriptions of electrical appliances. Instead of
+using the terms _positive_ and _negative_, it is also
+customary to speak of the "North" or the "South" of a magnet, battery or
+circuit.] magnet, crosswise to it, and very close, there is placed a
+diaphragm of thin sheet iron. This is held only around its edge, and its
+center is free to vibrate toward and from the end of this polarized
+magnet. This thin disc of iron, therefore, follows the movements, the
+"soundwaves," of the air against it, which are caused by the human
+voice. We have an instance of apiece of soft iron moving toward, and
+away from, a magnet. It moves with a rapidity and violence precisely
+proportioned to the tones and inflections of the voice. Those movements
+are almost microscopic, not perceptible to the eye, but sufficient.
+
+The approaching and receding have made a difference, in the quality of
+the magnet. Its magnetism has been increased and diminished, and the
+little coil of insulated wire around it has felt these changes, and
+carried them as impulses over the circuit of which it is a part. In that
+circuit, at the other end, there is a precisely similar little insulated
+coil, upon a precisely similar polarized magnet. These impulses pass
+through this second coil, and increase or diminish the magnetism in the
+magnet round which it is coiled. That, in turn, affects by magnetic
+attraction the diaphragm that is arranged in relation to its magnet
+precisely as described for the first. The first being controlled as to
+the extent and rapidity of its movements by the loudness and other
+modifications of the voice, the impulses sent over the circuit vary
+accordingly. As a consequence, so does the strength of the magnet whose
+coil is also in the circuit. So, therefore, does its power of attraction
+over its diaphragm vary. The result is that the movements that are
+caused in the first diaphragm by the voice, are caused in the second by
+an _attraction_ that varies in strength in proportion to the
+vibrations of the voice speaking against the first diaphragm.
+
+This is the theory of the telephone. The sounds are not carried, but
+_mechanically produced_ again by the rattle of a thin piece of iron
+close to the listener's ear. The voice is full, audible, distinct, as we
+hear it naturally, and as it impinges upon the transmitting diaphragm.
+In reproduction at the receiving instrument it is small in volume;
+almost microscopic, if the phrase may be applied to sound. We hear it
+only by placing the ear close to the diaphragm. It will be seen that
+this is necessarily so. No attempts to remedy the difficulty have so far
+been successful. There is no means of reproducing the volume of the
+voice with the minute vibrations of a little iron disc.
+
+In actual service an electro-magnet is used instead of, or in addition
+to, the bar magnets described above. A steady flow from a battery is
+passed through an instrument which throws this current into proper
+vibrations by stopping the flow of the current at each interval between
+impulses. There is a piece of carbon between the diaphragm and its
+support. The wires are connected with the diaphragm and its support, and
+the current passes through the carbon. When the diaphragm vibrates, the
+carbon is slightly compressed by it. Pressure reduces its resistance,
+and a greater current passes through it and over the wires of the
+circuit for the instant during which the touch remains. This is the
+Blake transmitter. It should be explained that carbon stands low on the
+list of conductors of electricity. The more dense it is, the better
+conductor. The varying pressures of the diaphragm serve to produce this
+varying density and the consequent varying impulses of the current which
+effect the receiving diaphragm.
+
+The transmitter, as above described, is in the square box, and its round
+black diaphragm may be seen behind the round hole into which one talks.
+[Footnote: Shouting into a telephone doubtless comes of the idea,
+unconscious, that one is speaking to a person at a distance. To speak
+distinctly is better, and in an ordinary tone.] The receiver is the
+trumpet-shaped tube which hangs on its side, and is taken from its hook
+to be used. The call-bell has nothing to do with the telephone. It is
+operated by a small magneto-generator,--a very near relative of the
+dynamo-the current from which is sent over the telephone circuit (the
+same wires) when the small crank is turned. Sometimes the question
+occurs: "Why ring one's own bell when one desires to ring only that at
+the central office?" The answer is that both bells are in the same
+circuit. If the circuit is uninterrupted your bell will ring when you
+ring the other, and a bell at each end of your circuit is necessary in
+any case, else you could not yourself be called.
+
+When the receiving instrument is on its hook its weight depresses the
+lever slightly. This slight movement _connects_ the bell circuit
+and _disconnects_ the telephone circuit. Take it off the hook and
+the reverse is effected.
+
+The long-distance telephone differs from the ordinary only in larger
+conductors, improved instruments, and a metallic circuit--two wires
+instead of the ordinary single wire and ground connections.
+
+[Illustration: TELEAUTOGRAPH TRANSMITTING INSTRUMENT.]
+
+THE TELAUTOGRAPH.--This, the latest of modern miracles in the field of
+electricity, comes naturally after the telegraph and telephone, since it
+supplements them as a means of communication between individuals. It
+also is the invention of Prof. Elisha Gray, who seems to be as well the
+author of the name of his extraordinary achievement. It is not the first
+instrument of the kind attempted. The desire to find a means of writing
+at a distance is old. Bain, of Edinburgh, made a machine partially
+successful fifty years ago. Like the telegraph as intended by Morse,
+there was the interposition of typesetting before a message could be
+sent. It did not write, or follow the hand of the operator in writing,
+though it did reproduce at the other end of the circuit in facsimile the
+faces of the types that had been set by the sender. It was a process by
+electrolysis, well understood by all electricians. Several of this
+variety of writing telegraphs have been made, some of them almost
+successful, but all lacking the vital essential. [Footnote: The lack of
+_one vital essential_ has been fatal to hundreds of inventions.
+Inventors unconsciously follow paths made by predecessors. The entire
+class of transmitting instruments must dispense with tedious
+preliminaries, and must use _words_. Vail accomplished this in
+telegraphy. Bell and others in the telephone, and Gray has borne the
+same fact in mind in the present development of the telautograph.] In
+1856 Casselli, of Florence, made a writing telegraph which had a
+pendulum arrangement weighing fourteen pounds. Only one was ever made,
+but it resulted in many new ideas all pertaining to the facsimile
+systems--the following of the faces of types--and all were finally
+abandoned.
+
+The invention of Gray is a departure. The sender of a message sits down
+at a small desk and takes up a pencil, writing with it on ordinary paper
+and in his usual manner. A pen at the other end of the circuit follows
+every movement of his hand. The result is an autograph letter a hundred
+miles or more away. A man in Chicago may write and sign a check payable
+in Indianapolis. Personal directions may be given authoritatively and
+privately. As in the case of the telephone, no intervening operator is
+necessary. No expertness is required. Even the use of the alphabet is
+not necessary. A drawing of any description, anything that can be traced
+with a pen or pencil, is copied precisely by the pen at the receiving
+desk. The possibilities of this instrument, the uses it may develop, are
+almost inconceivable. It might be imagined that the lines drawn would be
+continuous. On the contrary, when the pen is lifted by the writer at the
+sending desk it also lifts itself from the paper at that of the
+receiver.
+
+The action of the telautograph depends upon the variations in magnetic
+strength between two small electro-magnets. It has been seen that an
+electro-magnet exerts its attractive force in proportion to the current
+which passes through its coil. To use a phrase entirely non-technical,
+it will "pull" hard or easy in proportion to the strength of the passing
+current. This fact has been observed as the cause of action in the
+telephone, where one diaphragm, moved by the air-vibrations caused by
+the voice, causes a varying current to pass over the wire, attracting
+the other diaphragm less or more as the first is moved toward or away
+from its magnet. In the telautograph the varying currents are caused not
+by the diaphragm influenced by the voice, but _by a pencil moved by
+the hand_.
+
+To show how these movements may be caused let us imagine a case that may
+occur in nature. It is an interesting mechanical study. There is an
+upright rush or reed growing in the middle of a running stream. The stem
+of this rush has elasticity naturally; it has a tendency to stand
+upright; but it bends when there is a current against it. It is easy
+enough to imagine it bending down stream more or less as the current is
+more or less strong.
+
+Imagine now another stream entering the first at right angles to it, and
+that the rush stands in the center of both currents. It will then bend
+to the force of the second stream also, and the direction in which it
+will lean will be a compromise between the forces of the two. Lessen the
+flow of the current in one of the streams, and the rush will bend a
+little less before that current and swing around to the side from which
+it receives less pressure. Cut off either of the currents entirely, and
+it will bend in the direction of the other current only. In a word,
+_if the quantity or strength of the current of both streams can be
+controlled at will, the rush can be made to swing in any direction
+between the two, and its tip will describe any figure desired, aided, of
+course, by its own disposition to stand upright when there is no
+pressure_.
+
+Let us imagine the rush to be a pen or pencil, and the two streams of
+water to be two currents of electricity having power to sway and move
+this pencil in proportion to their relative strength, as the streams did
+the rush. Imagine further that these two currents are varied and changed
+with reference to each other by the movements of a pen in a man's hand
+at another place. It is an essential part of the mechanism of the
+telautograph, and the movement is known among mechanicians as
+"compounding a point."
+
+Gray, while using the principles involved in compounding a point, seems
+to have discarded the ways of transmitting magnetic impulses of varying
+strength commonly in use. His method he calls the "step-by-step"
+principle, and it is a striking example of what patience and ingenuity
+may accomplish in the management of what is reputedly the most elusive
+and difficult of the powers of nature. The machine was some six years in
+being brought into practical form, and was perfected only after a long
+series of experiments. In its operation it deals with infinitesimal
+measurements and quantities. The first attempts were on the "variable
+current" system, which was later discarded for the "step-by-step" plan
+mentioned.
+
+In writing an ordinary lead pencil may be used. From the point of this
+two silk cords are extended diagonally, their directions being at right
+angles to each other, and the ends of these cords enter openings made
+for them in the cast iron case of the instrument on each side of the
+small desk on which the writing is done.
+
+Inside the case each cord is wound on a small drum which is mounted on a
+vertical shaft. Now if the pencil-point is moved straight upward or
+downward it is manifest that both shafts will move alike. If the
+movement is oblique in any direction, one of the shafts will turn more
+than the other, and the degree of all these turnings of each shaft in
+reference to the other will be precisely governed by the direction in
+which the pencil-point is moved.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF MECHANICAL TELAUTOGRAPH. BOW-DRILL
+ARRANGEMENT.]
+
+Now, suppose each shaft to carry a small, toothed wheel, and that upon
+these teeth a small arm rests. As the wheel turns this arm will move as
+a pawl does on a ratchet. Imagine that at each slight depression between
+the ratchet-teeth it breaks a contact and cuts off a current, and at
+each slight rise renews the contact and permits a current to pass. This
+current affects an electro-magnet--one for each shaft--at the receiving
+end, and each of these magnets, when the current is on, attracts an
+armature bearing a pawl, which, being lifted, allows the notched wheel,
+upon which it bears, to turn _to the extent of one notch_. The
+arrangement may be called an electric clutch, that may be arranged in
+many ways, and the detail of its action is unimportant in description,
+so that it be borne in mind that _each time a notch is passed in
+turning the shaft by drawing upon or relaxing the cords attached to the
+pencil-point_, an impulse of electricity is sent to an electro-magnet
+and armature which allows _a corresponding wheel and its shaft to turn
+one notch, or as many notches, as are passed at the transmitting
+shaft_. In moving the pencil one inch to one side, we will suppose it
+permits the shaft on which the cord is wound to turn forty notches. Then
+forty impulses of electricity have been sent over the wire, the clutch
+has been released forty times, and the shaft to which it is attached has
+turned precisely as much as the shaft has which was turned, or was
+allowed to turn, by the cord wound upon it and attached to the pencil.
+
+It will be remembered that the arrangement is double. There are two
+shafts operated by the writer's pencil--one on each side of it. Two
+corresponding shafts occupy relative positions in respect to the
+automatic pen of the receiving instrument. There are two circuits, and
+two wires are at present necessary for the operation of the instrument.
+It remains to describe the manner of operating the automatic pen by
+connection with its two shafts which are turned by the step-by-step
+arrangement described, precisely as much and at the same time as those
+of the transmitting instrument are.
+
+[Illustration: WORK OF THE TELAUTOGRAPH. COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION, 1893.]
+
+To each shaft of the receiving instrument is attached an aluminum
+pen-arm by means of cords, each arm being fixed, in regard to its shaft,
+as a bow drill is in regard to its drill. These arms meet in the center
+of the writing tablet, V-shaped, as the cords are with relation to the
+writer's pencil in the sending instrument. A small tube conveys ink from
+a reservoir along one of the pen-arms, and into a glass tube upright at
+the junction of the arms. This tube is the pen. Now, let us imagine the
+pencil of the writer pushed straight upward from the apex of the
+V-shaped figure the cords and pencil-point make on the writing desk.
+Then both the shafts at the points of the arms of the V will rotate
+equally. [Footnote: See diagram of mechanical Telautograph, and of bow
+drill. In the latter, in ordinary use, the stick and string; rotate the
+spool. Rotating the spool will, in turn, move the stick and string, and
+this is its action in the pen-arms of the Telautograph.] The number of
+impulses sent from each of these shafts, by the means explained, will be
+equal. Each of the shafts of the receiving instrument will rotate alike,
+and each draw up its arm of the automatic pen precisely as though one
+took hold of the points of the two legs of the V, and drew them apart to
+right and left in a straight line. This moves the apex of the V, with
+its pen, in a straight line upward at the same time the writer at the
+sending instrument pushed his pencil upward. If this one movement,
+considered alone, is understood, all the rest follow by the same means.
+This is, as nearly as it may be described without the use of technical
+mechanical terms, the principle of the telautograph. It must be seen
+that all that is necessary to describe any movement of the sender's
+pencil upon the paper under the receiving pen is that the rotating
+upright shafts of the latter should move precisely as much, and at the
+same time, with those two which get their movement from the wound cords
+and attached pencil-points in the hand of the writer.
+
+Only one essential item of the movement remains. The shafts of both
+instruments must be rotated by some separate mechanical agency, capable
+of being automatically reversed. By an arrangement unnecessary to
+explain in detail, the pencil of the writer lifted from the paper
+resting on the metallic table which forms the desk; results in the
+automatic lifting of the pen from the paper at the receiving desk.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Prof. Elisha Gray was born in 1835, in Ohio. He was a blacksmith, and
+later, a carpenter. But he was given to chemical and mechanical
+experiments rather than to the industries. When twenty-one, he entered
+Oberlin College, remaining there five years, and earning all the money
+he spent. He devoted his time chiefly to studies of the physical
+sciences. As a young man he was an invalid. Later he was not remarkably
+successful in business, failing several times in his beginnings. His
+first invention was a telegraph self-adjusting relay. It was not
+practically successful. Afterwards he was employed with an electrical
+manufacturing company at Cleveland and Chicago. Most of his earlier
+inventions in the line of electrical utility are not distinctively
+known. He has never been idle, and they all possessed practical merit.
+For many years before he was known as the wizard of the telautograph, he
+was foremost in the ranks of physicists and electricians. He is not a
+discoverer of great principles, but is professionally skillful and
+accomplished, and eminently practical. His every effort is exerted to
+avoid intricacy and clumsiness in machinery. In 1878 he was awarded the
+grand prize at the Paris Exposition, and was given the degree of
+Chevalier and the decorations of the Legion of Honor by the French
+Government, and again in 1881, at the Electrical Exposition at Paris, he
+was honored with the gold medal for his inventions. He secured the
+degree of A.M. at Oberlin College, and was the recipient of the degree
+of Ph.D. from the Ripon (Wis.) College. For years he was connected with
+those institutions as non-resident Lecturer in Physics. Another
+University gave him the degree of LL.D. He is a member of the American
+Philosophical Society, the Society of Electrical Engineers of England,
+and the Society of Telegraph Engineers of London. He received an award
+and a certificate from the Centennial Exposition for his inventions in
+electricity.
+
+The same lesson is to be gathered from his career, so far, that is given
+by the life of every noted American. It means that money, family,
+prestige, have no place as leverages of success in any field. The rule
+is toward the opposite. The qualities and capacities that win do so
+without these early advantages, and all the more surely because there is
+an inducement to use them. There is no "luck."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE ELECTRIC LIGHT.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It has been stated that modern theory recognizes two classes of
+electricity, the _Static_ and the _Dynamic_. The difference
+is, however, solely noticeable in operation. Of the dynamic class there
+can be no more common and striking example than the now almost universal
+electric light. Yet, with a sufficient expenditure of chemicals and
+electrodes, and a sufficient number of cells, electric lighting, either
+arc or incandescent, can be as effectively accomplished as with the
+current evolved by a powerful dynamo. [Footnote: As an illustration of
+the day of beginnings, a few years ago the _thalus_, or lantern,
+the pride of the rural Congressman, on the dome of the Capitol at
+Washington was lighted by electricity, and an immense circular chamber
+beneath the dome was occupied by hundreds of cells of the ordinary form
+of battery. The lamps were of the incandescent variety, and what we now
+know as the filament was platinum wire. Vacuum bulb, filament, carbon,
+dynamo, were all unknown. But the current, and the heat of resistance,
+and every fact now in use in electric lighting, were there in
+operation.]
+
+The reader will understand that modern dynamic electricity owes its
+development to the principle of economy in production. Practical science
+most effectively awakens from its lethargy at the call of commerce.
+Nevertheless, from the earliest moment in which it became known that
+electricity was akin to heat--that an interruption of the easy passage
+of a current produced heat--the minds of men were busy with the question
+of how to turn the tremendous fact to everyday use. Progress was slow,
+and part of it was accidental. The great servant of modern mankind was
+first an untrained one. It was a marked advance when the gaslights in a
+theater could be all lighted at once by means of batteries and the spark
+of an induction coil. The bottom of Hell Gate, in New York harbor, was
+blown out by Gen. Newton by the same means, and would have been
+impossible otherwise. But these were only incidents and suggestions.
+The question was how to make this instantaneous spark _continuous_.
+There was pondering upon the fact that the only difference between heat
+and electricity is one of molecular arrangement. Heat is a molecular
+motion like that of electricity, without the symmetry and harmony of
+action electricity has. The vibrations of electricity are accomplished
+rapidly, and without loss. Those of heat are slow, and greatly
+radiated. _When a current of electricity reaches a place in the
+conductor where it cannot pass easily, and the orderly vibrations of its
+molecules are disturbed, they are thrown into the disorderly motion
+known as heat._ So, when the conductor is not so good; when a large
+wire is reduced suddenly to a small one; when a good conductor, such as
+copper, has a section of resisting conduction, such as carbon; heat and
+light are at once evolved at that point, and there is produced what we
+know as the electric light. However concealed by machinery and devices,
+and all the arrangements by which it is made more lasting, steady,
+economical and automatic, it is no more nor less than this. _The
+difference between heat and electricity is only a difference in the
+rates of vibration of their molecules._ Whatever the theory as to
+molecules, or essence, or actual nature and origin, the practical fact
+that heat and light are the results of the circumstances described above
+remains. This has long been known, and the question remained how to
+produce an adequate current economically. The result was the machine we
+know as the Dynamo.
+
+The first electric light was very brief and brilliant and was made by
+accident. Sir Humphrey Davy, in 1809, in pulling apart the two ends of
+wires attached to a battery of two thousand small cells, the most
+powerful generator that had been made to that time, produced a brief and
+brilliant spark, the result of momentarily _imperfect contact._
+Every such spark, produced since then innumerable times by accident, is
+an example of electric lighting. There are now in use in the United
+States some two million arc lights and nearly double that number of
+incandescent.
+
+There are two principal systems of electric lighting; one is by actually
+burning away the ends of carbon-points in the open air. This is the
+"arc." The other is by heating to a white heat a filament of carbon, or
+some substance of high resistance, in a glass bulb from which the air
+has been exhausted. This is the "incandescent."
+
+[Illustration: THE INCANDESCENT LIGHT]
+
+In the arc light the current passes across an _imperfect contact_,
+and this imperfection consists in a gap of about one-sixteenth of an
+inch between the extremities of two rods of carbon carrying a current.
+This small gap is a place of bad conduction and of the piling up of
+atoms, producing heat, burning, light. In the body of the lamp there are
+appliances for the automatic holding apart of the two points of the
+carbon, and the causing of them to continually creep together, yet never
+touch. Many devices have been contrived to this end. With all theories
+and reasons well known, and all effects accurately calculated, upon this
+small arrangement depends the practical utility of the arc light. The
+best arrangement is the invention of Edison, and is controlled most
+ingeniously by the current itself, acting through the increased
+difficulty of its passage when the two carbon-points are too far apart,
+and the increased ease with which it flows when they are too near
+together. The current, in leaping the small gap between the
+carbon-points, takes a _curved_ path, hence the name "arc" light.
+In passing from the positive to the negative carbon it carries small
+particles of incandescent carbon with it, and consequently the end of
+the positive carbon is hollowed out, while the end of the negative is
+built up to a point.
+
+The incandescent light is in principle the same as the arc, produced by
+the same means and based upon the same principle of impediment to the
+free passage of the current. It was first produced by heating with the
+current to incandescence a fine platinum wire. As stated above,
+electricity that quietly traverses a large wire will suddenly develop
+great heat upon reaching a point where it is called upon to traverse, a
+smaller one. Platinum was attempted for this place of greater resistance
+because of its qualities. It does not rust, has a low specific heat, and
+is therefore raised to a higher temperature with less heat imparted. But
+it was a scarce and expensive material, and so long as it was heated to
+incandescence in the open air, that is, so long as its heat was fed as
+other heat is, by oxygen, it was slowly consumed. Platinum is no longer
+in the field of electric lighting, and the substitute which takes its
+place in the present incandescent lamp, and which is known as a
+"filament," is not heated in contact with the air. The experiments and
+endeavors that brought this result constitute the story of the
+incandescent lamp.
+
+The result is due to the patient intelligence of the American scientist
+and inventor, Thomas A. Edison. After all the absolute essentials of a
+practical incandescent lamp had been thought out; after the qualities
+and characteristics of the current were all known under the
+circumstances necessary to its use in lighting, the practical
+accomplishment still remained. Edison is said to have once worked for
+several weeks in the making of a single loop-shaped carbon filament that
+would bear the most delicate handling. This was then carefully carried
+to a glass-worker to be inclosed in a bulb, and at the first movement he
+broke it, and the work must be done over and done better. It finally
+was. The little pear-shaped bulb with its delicate loop of filament,
+which cost months of toil and experiment at first, is now a common
+article, manufactured at an absurdly small cost, packed in barrelfuls
+and shipped everywhere, and consumed by the million. A means has been
+found for producing the vacuum of its interior rapidly, cheaply and
+thoroughly, and the beautiful incandescent glow hangs in lines and
+clusters over the civilized world. The phenomenon of incandescence
+without oxygen seems peculiar to these lights alone. [Footnote: The
+"electric field," previously explained, seemed to exist by giving a
+magnetic quality to the surrounding air. It would be as true if one
+should speak of a magnetized vacuum, since the same field would exist in
+that as in surrounding air.]
+
+So simple are great facts when finally accomplished that there remains
+little to add on the subject of the mechanism of the electric light. The
+two varieties, arc and incandescent, are used together as most
+convenient, the large and very brilliant arc being especially adapted to
+out-of-doors situations, and the gentler, steadier and more permanent
+glow of the incandescent to interiors. The latter is also capable of a
+modification not applicable to the arc. It can, in theaters and other
+buildings, be "turned down" to a gentle, blood-red glow. The means by
+which this is accomplished is ingenious and surprising, since it means
+that the supply of electricity over a wire--seemingly the most subtle
+and elusive essence on earth--may be controlled like a stream from a
+cock, or the gas out of a burner. But this reduction of the current that
+makes the red glow in the clusters in a theater is by no means the only
+instance. The trolley-car, and even the common motor, may be made to
+start very slowly, and the unseen current whose touch kills is fed to
+its consumer at will.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+THE DYNAMO.--To the man who has been all his life thinking of the steam
+engine as the highest and almost only embodiment of controlled
+mechanical power, another machine, both supplementary to the steam
+engine and far excelling it, whose familiar _burring_ sound is now
+heard in almost every village in the United States and has become the
+characteristic sound of modern civilization, must constitute a source of
+continual question and surprise. To be accustomed to the dynamo, to look
+upon it as a matter of course and a conceded fact, one must have come to
+years of maturity and found it here.
+
+Its practical existence dates back at furthest to 1870. Yet it is based
+upon principles long since known, and can scarcely be said to be the
+invention of any one mind or man. Its lineal ancestor was the
+_magneto-electric machine_, in the early construction of which
+figure the names of Siemens, Wilde, Ladd, and earlier and later
+electricians. Kidder's medical battery used forty years ago or more, and
+still used and purchasable in its first form, was a dynamo. A footnote
+in a current encyclopedia states that: "An account of the
+Magneto-electric machine of M. Gramme, in the London _Standard_ of
+April 9th, 1873, confirmed by other information, leads to the belief
+that a decided improvement has been made in these machines." The word
+"dynamo" was then unknown. Later, Edison, Weston, Thompson, Hopkinson,
+Ferranti and others appear as improvers in the mechanism necessary for
+best developing a well-known principle, and many of these improvements
+may be classed among original inventions. As soon as the
+magneto-electric machine attained a size in the hands of experimenters
+that took it out of the field of scientific toys it began to be what we
+now know as a dynamo. A paragraph in the encyclopedia referred to says,
+in speaking of Ladd, of London, "These developments of electric action
+are not obtained without corresponding expenditure of force. The armatures
+are powerfully attracted by the magnets, and must be forcibly pulled away.
+Indeed, one of Wilde's machines, when producing a very intense electric
+light, required about five horse power to drive it."
+
+[Illustration: MAGNETO-ELECTRIC MACHINE. THE PREDECESSOR OF THE DYNAMO.]
+
+Thus was the secret in regard to electric power unconsciously divulged
+some twenty years ago.
+
+In all nature there is no recipe for getting something for nothing. The
+modern dynamo, apparently creating something out of nothing, like all
+other machines _gives back only what is given to it_, minus a fair
+percentage for waste, loss, friction, and common wear. Its advantages
+amount to a miracle of convenience only. So far as power is concerned,
+it merely transfers it for long distances over a single wire. So far as
+light is considered, it practically creates it where wanted, in new and
+convenient forms, with a new intensity and beauty, but with the same
+expenditure of transmitted energy in the form of burned coal as would be
+used in manufacturing the gas that was new, wonderful, and a luxury at
+the beginning of the century.
+
+The dynamo is the most prominent instance of actual mechanical utility
+in the field of electrical induction. It seems almost incredible that
+the apparently small facts discovered by Faraday, the bookbinder, the
+employe of Sir Humphrey Davy at weekly wages the struggling experimenter
+in the subtleties of an infant giant, should have produced such results
+within sixty years. [Footnote: Faraday was not entirely alone in his
+life of physical research. He was associated with Davy, and quarreled
+with him about the liquefaction of chlorine and other gases, and was the
+companion of Wallaston, Herschel, Brand, and others. In connection with
+Stodart, he experimented with steel, with results still considered
+valuable. The scientific world still speaks of his quarrel with Davy
+with regret, since the personalities of great men should be free from
+ordinary weaknesses. But Lady Davy was not a scientist, and while the
+brilliant young mechanic was in her husband's employment for scientific
+purposes she insisted upon treating him as a servant, whereat the
+independence of thinking which made him capable of wandering in fields
+unknown to conventionality and routine blazed into natural resentment.
+The quarrel of 1823 must have been greatly augmented, in the lady's
+eyes, in 1824, for in that year Faraday was made a member of the Royal
+Society.
+
+In his lectures and public experiments he was greatly assisted by a man
+now almost forgotten, an "intelligent artilleryman" named Andersen. This
+unknown soldier with a taste for natural science doubtless had his
+reward in the exquisite pleasure always derived from the personal
+verification of facts hitherto unknown. There is often a pecuniary
+reward for the servant of science. Just as often there is not, and the
+work done has been the same.
+
+It was on Christmas morning, 1821, that Faraday first succeeded in
+making a magnetic needle rotate around a wire carrying an electric
+current. He was the discoverer of benzole, the basis of our modern
+brilliant aniline dyes. In 1831 he made the discovery he had been
+leading to for many years--that of magneto-electric induction. All we
+have of electricity that is now a part of our daily life is the result
+of this discovery.
+
+Faraday was born in 1791, and died August, 1867, in a house presented to
+him by Victoria, who had not the same opinion of his relations to the
+aristocracy that Lady Davy seems to have had. His insight into science
+was something explainable only on the supposition that he was gifted
+with a kind of instinct. He was a scientific prophet. A man who could,
+in 1838, foresee the ocean cable, and describe those minute difficulties
+in its working that all in time came true, must be classed as one of the
+great, clear, intuitive intellects of his race. He was in youth
+apprenticed to a bookbinder, "and many of the books he bound he read." A
+line in his indentures says: "In consideration of his faithful service,
+no premium is to be given." When these words were written there was no
+dream that the "faithful service" should be for all posterity.]
+
+[Illustration: Faraday's Spark. Striking the leg of a horseshoe magnet
+with an iron bar wound with insulated wire causes a contact between
+loose end of wire and small disc, and a spark.
+
+Faraday's First Magneto-Electric Experiment. A horseshoe magnet passed
+near a bent soft iron wound with insulated wire caused an induced
+current in the wire.
+
+TWO OF FARADAY'S EARLY EXPERIMENTS IN INDUCTION.]
+
+He who made the first actual machine to evolve a current in compliance
+with Faraday's formulated laws was an Italian named Pixu, in 1832. His
+machine consisted of a horseshoe magnet set on a shaft, and made to
+revolve in front of two cores of, soft iron wound with wire, and having
+their ends opposite the legs of the magnet. Shortly after Pixu, the
+inventors of the times ceased to turn the magnet on a shaft, and turned
+the iron cores instead, because they were lighter. In like manner, the
+huge field magnets of a modern dynamo are not whirled round a stationary
+armature, but the armature is whirled within the legs of the magnet with
+very great rapidity. The next step was to increase the number of magnets
+and the number of wire-wound iron cores--bobbins. The magnets were made
+compound, laminated; a large number of thin horseshoe magnets were laid
+together, with opposite poles touching. These were all comparatively
+small machines--what we now, with some reason, regard as having been
+toys whose present results were rather long in coming.
+
+[Illustration: THE SIEMENS' ARMATURE AND WINDING. THE FIRST STEP TOWARD
+THE MODERN DYNAMO.]
+
+Then came Siemens, of Berlin, in 1857. He was probably the first to wind
+the iron core, what we now call the _armature_, with wire from end
+to end, _lengthwise_, instead of round and round as a spool. This
+resulted, of course, in the shaft of the armature being also placed
+crosswise to the legs of the magnet, as it is in the modern dynamo. One
+of the ends of the wire used in this winding was fastened to the axle of
+the armature, and the other to a ring insulated from the shaft, but
+turning with it. Two springs, one bearing on the shaft and the other on
+the ring, carried away the current through wires attached to them.
+Siemens also originated the mechanical idea of hollowing out the legs of
+the magnet on the inside for the armature to turn in close to the
+magnet, almost fitting. It was the first time any of these things had
+been done, and their author probably had no idea that they would be
+prominent features of the dynamo of a little later time, in all
+essentials closely imitated.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF SHAFT, SPLIT RING AND "BRUSHES."]
+
+It will be guessed from what has been previously said on the subject of
+induction that the currents from such an electro-magnetic machine would
+be alternating currents, the impulses succeeding each other in alternate
+directions. To remedy this and cause the currents to flow always in the
+same direction, the "_commutator_" was devised. The ring mentioned
+above was split, and the two springs both bore upon it, one on each
+side. The ends of the wires were both fastened to this ring. The springs
+came to be known as "brushes." The effect was that one of them was in
+the insulated space between the split halves of the ring while the other
+was bearing on the metal to which the wire was attached. This action was
+alternate, and so arranged that the current carried away was always
+direct. When an armature has a winding of more than one wire, as the
+practical dynamo always has, the insulated ring is divided into as many
+pieces as there are wires, and the two brushes act as above for the
+entire series.
+
+Pacinotti, of Florence, constructed a magneto-electric machine in which
+the current flows always in one direction without a commutator. It has
+what is known as a _ring armature_, and is the mother of all
+dynamos built upon that principle. It is exceedingly ingenious in
+construction, and for certain purposes in the arts is extensively used.
+A description of it is too technical to interest others than those
+personally interested in the class of dynamo it represents.
+
+Wilde, of Manchester, England, improved the Siemens machine in 1866 by
+doing that which is the feature that makes possible the huge "field
+magnet" of the modern dynamo, which is not a magnet at all, strictly
+speaking. He caused the current, after it had been rectified by the
+commutator, to return again into coils of wire round the legs of his
+field magnets, as shown in the diagram. This induced in them a new
+supply of magnetism, and this of course intensified the current from the
+armature. It is true he had a separate smaller magneto-electric machine,
+with which he evolved a current for the coil around the legs of the
+field magnet of a greatly larger machine upon which he depended for his
+actual current, and that he did not know, although he was practically
+doing the same thing, that if he should divert this current made by the
+larger machine itself back through the coils of its field magnet, he
+would not need the extra small machine at all, and would have a much
+more powerful current.
+
+[Illustration: SIMPLEST FORM OF DYNAMO]
+
+And here arises a difference and a change of name. All generating
+machines to this date had been called "_Magneto-electric_" because
+they used _permanent_ steel magnets with which to generate a
+current by the whirling of the bobbin which we now call an armature. The
+time came, led to by the improvement of Wilde, in which those steel
+permanent magnets were no longer used. Then the machine became the
+"_dynamo-electric_" machine, and leaving off one word, according to
+our custom, "_dynamo_."
+
+Siemens and Wheatstone almost simultaneously invented so much of the
+dynamo as was yet incomplete. It has "cores"--the parts that answer to
+the legs of a horseshoe magnet--of soft iron, sometimes now even of cast
+iron. These, at starting, possess very little magnetism--practically
+none at all--yet sufficient to generate a very weak current in the
+coils, windings, of the armature when it begins to turn. This weak
+current, passing through the windings of the field magnet, makes these
+still stronger magnets, and the effect is to evolve a still stronger
+current in the armature. Soon the full effect is reached. The big iron
+field magnet, often weighing some thousands of pounds, is then the same
+as a permanent steel horseshoe magnet, which would hardly be possible at
+all. One who has watched the installation of a dynamo, knowing that
+there is nowhere near any ordinary source of electricity, and has seen
+its armature begin to whirl and hum, and then in a few moments the
+violet sparklings of the brushes and the evident presence of a powerful
+current of electricity, is almost justified in the common opinion that
+the genius of man has devised a machine to _create_ something out
+of nothing. It is true that a _starting_ quantity of electricity is
+required. It exists in almost every piece of iron. Sometimes, to hasten
+first action, some cells of a galvanic battery are used to pass a
+current through the coils of the field magnet. After the first use there
+is always enough magnetism remaining in them during rest or stoppage to
+make a dynamo efficient after a few moments operation.
+
+[Illustration: PACINOTTI'S RING-ARMATURE DYNAMO.]
+
+This is the dynamo in principle of action. The varieties in construction
+now in use number scores, perhaps hundreds. Some of them are monsters in
+size, and evolve a current that is terrific. They are all essentially
+the same, depending for action upon the laws illustrated in the simplest
+experiment in induced electricity. One of the best known of the modern
+machines is Edison's, represented in the picture at the head of this
+article. In it the field magnet--answering to the horseshoe magnet of
+the magneto-electric machine--is plainly distinguishable to the
+unskilled observer. It is not even solid, but is made of several pieces
+bolted together. Its legs are hollowed at the ends to admit closely the
+armature which turns there. There are valuable peculiarities in its
+construction, which, while complying in all respects with the dynamo
+principle, utilize those principles to the best mechanical advantage. So
+do others, in other respects that did not occur even to Edison, or were
+not adopted by him. Probably the modern dynamo is the most efficient,
+the most accurately measurable, the least wasteful of its power, and the
+most manageable, of any power-machine so far constructed by man for
+daily use.
+
+The motor.--This is the twin of the dynamo. In all essentials the two
+are of the same construction. A difference in the arrangement of the
+terminals of the wire coils or the wrappings of armature and field
+magnet, makes of the one a dynamo and of the other a motor.
+Nevertheless, they are separate studies in electrical science. Practice
+has brought about modified constructions, as in the case of the dynamo.
+The differences between the two machines, and their similarities as
+well, may be explained by a general brief statement.
+
+_It is the work of the dynamo to convert mechanical energy into the
+form of electrical energy. The motor, in turn, changes this electrical
+energy back again into mechanical energy._
+
+Where the electric light is produced by the dynamo current no motor
+intervenes. The current is converted into heat and light by merely
+having an impediment, a restriction, a narrowness, interposed to its
+free passage on a conducting wire, as heretofore explained, very much as
+water in a pipe foams and struggles at a narrow place or an obstruction.
+Where mechanical movements are to be produced by the dynamo current the
+motor is always the intermediate machine. In the dynamo the armature is
+rotated by steam power, producing an electrical energy in the form of a
+powerful current transmitted by a wire. In the motor the armature, in
+turn, _is rotated by_ this current. It is but another instance of
+that ability to work backwards--to reverse a process--that seems to
+pervade all machines, and almost all processes. I have mentioned steam
+power, and, consequently, the necessary burning of coal and expenditure
+of money in producing the dynamo current. The dynamo and motor are not
+necessarily economical inventions, but the opposite when the force
+produced is to be transmitted again, with some loss, into the same
+mechanical energy that has already been produced by the burning of coal
+and the making of steam. Across miles of space, and into places where
+steam would not be possible, the power is invisibly carried. Suggestions
+of this convenience--stated cases--it is not necessary to cite. The
+fact is a prominent one, to be noted everywhere.
+
+And it may be made a mechanical economy. The most prominent instance of
+this is the new utilization of Niagara as a turbine water-power with
+which to whirl the armatures of gigantic dynamos, using the power thus
+obtained upon motors, and in the production of light and the
+transmission of power to neighboring cities.
+
+The discovery of the possibility of transmitting power by a wire, and
+converting it again into mechanical energy, is a strange story of the
+human blindness that almost always attends an acuteness, a thinking
+power, a prescience, that is the characteristic of humanity alone, but
+which so often stops short of results. This discovery has been
+attributed to accident alone; the accident of an employe mistaking the
+uses of wires and fastening their ends in the wrong places. But a French
+electrician thus describes the occurrence as within his own experience.
+His name is Hypolyte Fontaine.
+
+But let us first advert to the forgetfulness of the man who really
+invented the machine that was capable of the opposite action of both
+dynamo and motor. This was the Italian, Pacinotti. [Footnote: Moses G.
+Farmer, an American, and celebrated in his day for intelligent
+electrical researches, is claimed to have made the first reversible
+motor ever contrived. A small motor made by Farmer in 1847, and
+embodying the electro-dynamic principle was exhibited at the great
+exposition at Chicago in 1893. If the genealogy of this machine remains
+undisputed it fixes the fact that the discovery belongs to this country,
+and to an American.] He mentioned that his machine could be used either
+to generate a current of electricity on the application of motive power
+to its armature, or to produce motive power on connecting it with a
+source of electricity. Yet it did not occur to him to definitely
+experiment with two of his machines for the purpose of accomplishing
+that which in less than twenty years has revolutionized our ideas and
+practice in transmitted force. He did not suggest that two of his
+machines could be run together, one as a generator and the other as a
+motor. He did not think of its advantages with the facilities for it, of
+his own creation, in his hands.
+
+M. Fontaine states that at the Vienna Exposition of 1873 there was a
+Gramme machine intended to be operated by a primary battery, to show
+that the Gramme was capable of being worked by a current, and, as there
+was also a second machine of the same kind there, of also generating
+one. These two machines were to demonstrate this range of capacity as
+_separately worked_, one by power, the other with a battery. There
+was, then, no intention of coupling them together as late as 1873, with
+the means at hand and the suggestion almost unavoidable. The dynamo and
+motor had not occurred to any one. But M. Fontaine states that he failed
+to get the primary (battery) current in time for the opening, and was
+troubled by the dilemma. Then the idea occurred to him, as he could do
+no better, to work one of the machines with a current "deprived," partly
+stolen, from the other, as a temporary measure. A friend lent him the
+necessary piece of wire, and he connected the two machines. The machine
+used as a motor was connected with a pumping apparatus, and when the
+machine intended as a generator started, and this make-shift,
+temporarily-stolen current was carried to the acting motor, the action
+of the last was so much more vigorous than was intended that the water
+was thrown over the sides of the tank. Fontaine was forced to remedy
+this excessive action by procuring an additional wire of such length
+that its resistance permitted the motor to work more mildly and throw
+less water. This accidentally established the fact of distance,
+convenience, a revolution in the power of the industrial world. Fontaine
+states that Gramme had previously told him that he had done the same
+thing with his machines. The idea was never patented. Neither Pacinotti,
+who invented the machine originally, nor Gramme, one of the great names
+of modern electricity, nor this skilled practical electrician, Fontaine,
+who had charge of the exhibit of the Gramme system at Vienna, considered
+the fact of the transmission of concentrated power over a thin wire to a
+great distance as one of value to its inventor or to the industries of
+mankind. With the motor and the dynamo already made, it was an accident
+that brought them together after all.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may be amusing, if not useful, to spend a moment in reviewing of the
+efforts of men to utilize the power of the electrical current in
+mechanics before the day of the dynamo and a motor, and while yet the
+electric light was an infant in the nursery of the laboratory. They knew
+then, about 1835 to 1870, of the laws of induction as applied to the
+electro-magnet, or in small machines the generating power, so called, of
+the magneto-electric arrangement embodied, as a familiar example, in
+Kidder's medical battery. There is a long list of those inventors,
+American and European. The first patent issued for an American
+electro-motor was in 1837, to a man named Thomas Davenport, of Brandon,
+Vt. He was a man far ahead of his times. He built the first electric
+railroad ever seen, at Springfield, Mass., in 1835, and considering the
+means, whose inadequacy is now better understood by any reader of these
+lines than it then was by the deepest student of electricity, this first
+railroad was a success. Davenport came as near to solving the problem of
+an electric motor as was possible without the invention of Pacinotti.
+Following this there were many patents issued for electro-magnetic
+motors to persons residing in all parts of the country, north and south.
+One was made by C. G. Page, of the Smithsonian Institute, in which the
+motive power consisted in a round rod, acting as a plunger, being pulled
+into the space where the core would be in an ordinary electro-magnet,
+and thereby working a crank. [Footnote: The _National
+Intelligencer_, a prominent Washington newspaper, said with reference
+to Page's motor "He has shown that before long electro-magnetic action
+will have dethroned steam and will be the adopted motor," etc. This was
+an enthusiasm not based upon any fact then known about a machine not
+even in the line of the present facts of electro-dynamics.] A large
+motor of this kind is alleged, in 1850, to have developed ten horse
+power. It was actually applied to outdoor experiment as a car-motor on
+an actual railroad track, and was efficient for several miles. But it
+carried with it its battery-cells, and they were disarranged and stirred
+by the jolting, and being made of crockeryware were broken. The
+chemicals cost much more than fuel for steam, and there could be no
+economical motive for further experiment. It was a huge toy, as the
+entire sum of electrical science was until it was made useful first in
+the one instance of the telegraph, and long after that date the use of
+the electro-magnet, with a cam to cut off and turn on again the current
+at proper intervals, which was the one principle of all attempts, was a
+repeated and invariable failure. That which was wanted and lacking was
+not known, and was finally discovered and successively developed as has
+been described.
+
+Electric railroads.--There was an instance of almost simultaneous
+invention in the case of the first practical electric railroads. S. D.
+Field, Dr. Siemens, and Thomas A. Edison all applied for patents in
+1880. Of these, Field was first in filing, and was awarded patents. The
+combined dynamo and motor were, of course, the parents of the practical
+idea. Field's patents covered a motor in or under the car, operated by a
+current from a stationary source of electricity--of course a dynamo.
+These first electric roads had the current carried on the rail. They
+were partially successful, but there was something wrong in the plan,
+and that something was induction by the earth. Later came, as a remedy
+for this, the "Trolley" system; the trolley being a small, grooved wheel
+running upon a current-carrying wire overhead. The question of how best
+to convey a current to the car-motor is a serious one, doubtless at this
+moment occupying the attention of highly-trained intelligence
+everywhere. The motor current is one of high power, and as such
+intractable; and it is in the character of this current, rather than in
+methods of insulation, that the remedy for the much-objected-to overhead
+wire is to be found. It will be remembered that all the phenomena of
+induction are _unhindered by insulation_.
+
+Aside from the current-carrying problem, the electric road is
+explainable in all its features upon the theory and practice of the
+dynamo and motor. It is merely an application of the two machines. The
+last is, in usual practice, under the car, and geared to the truck-axle.
+A more modern mechanical improvement is to make the axle the shaft of
+the motor armature. When the motor has used the current it passes by
+most systems into the rail and the ground. By others there is a
+"metallic circuit"--two wires. Many men whose interest and occupation
+leads them to a study of such matters know that the use of electricity,
+instead of steam locomotion, is merely a question of time on all
+railroads. I have said elsewhere that the actual age of electricity had
+not yet fully come. It seems to us now that we have attained the end;
+that there is little more to know or to do. But so have all the
+generations thought in their day. In the field of electricity there are
+yet to come practical results of which one may have some foreshadowings
+in the experiments of men like Tesla, which will make our present times
+and knowledge seem tame and slow.
+
+Electrolysis.--In all history, fire has been the universal practical
+solvent. It has been supplanted by the electrical current in some of the
+most beautiful and useful phenomena of our time. Electrolysis is the
+name of the process by which fluid chemicals are decomposed by the
+current.
+
+A familiar early experiment in electrolysis is the decomposition of
+water--a chemical composed of oxygen and hydrogen, though always thought
+of and used as a simple, pure fluid. If the poles of a galvanic battery
+are immersed in water slightly mixed with sulphuric acid to favor
+electrical action, these poles will become covered with bubbles of gas
+which presently rise to the surface and pass off. These bubbles are
+composed of the two constituents of water, the oxygen rising from the
+positive and the hydrogen from the negative pole. Particles of the
+substance decomposed are transferred, some to one pole and some to the
+other; and, therefore, electrolysis is always practiced in a fluid in
+order that this transference may more readily occur.
+
+The quantity of _electrolyte_--the substance decomposed--that is
+transferred in a given time is in proportion to the strength of the
+current. When this electrolyte is composed of many substances a current
+will act a little on all of them, and the quantity in which the
+elementary bodies appear at the poles of the current depends upon the
+quantities of the compounds in the liquid, and on the relative ease with
+which they yield to the electrical action.
+
+The electrolytic processes are not the mere experiments a brief
+description of them would indicate, but are among the important
+processes for the mechanical products of modern times. The extensive
+nickel-plating that became a permanent fad in this country on the
+discovery of a special process some years ago, is all done by
+electrolysis. The silver plating of modern tableware and table cutlery,
+as beautiful and much less expensive than silver, and the fine finish of
+the beautiful bronze hardware now used in house-furnishing, are the
+results of the same process. Some use for it enters into almost every
+piece of fine machinery, and into the beautifying or preserving of
+innumerable small articles that are made and used in unlimited quantity.
+
+The process and its principle is general, but there are many details
+observed in the actual work of electroplating which interest only those
+engaged. One of the most usual of these is that of making an
+electrotype. This may mean the making of an exact impression of a medal,
+coin, or other figure, or a depositing of a coating of the same on any
+metallic surface. Formerly the faces of the types used in printing were
+very commonly faced with copper to give them finish and a wearing
+quality. Even fresh, natural fruits that have been evenly coated with
+plumbago may be covered with a thin shell of metal. A silver head may be
+placed on the wood of a walking stick, precisely conforming on the
+outside to the form of the wood within.
+
+The deposit of metal in the electrotyping process always takes place at
+the negative pole--the pole by which the current passes out of the fluid
+into its conductor. This is the "_cathode_." The other is the
+"_anode_." The "bath," as the fluid in which the process is
+accomplished is called, for silver, gold or platinum contains one
+hundred parts of water, ten of potassium cyanide, and one of the cyanide
+of whichever of those metals is to be deposited. The articles to be
+plated are suspended in this bath and the battery-power, varying in
+intensity according to circumstances, is applied. After removal they are
+buffed and finished. A varying detail is practiced for different metals,
+and the current now commonly used is from a dynamo. [Footnote: Among
+modern modifications of the dynamic current, is its use, modified by
+proper appliances, for the telegraph and the telephone circuits of
+cities and the larger towns. Every electric current may now be safely
+attributed to that source, and from the same circuit and generator all
+modifications may be produced at once.]
+
+The origin of electrolysis is said to be with Daniell, who noticed the
+deposit of copper while experimenting with the battery that bears his
+name. Jacobi, at St. Petersburg, first published a description of the
+process in 1839. The Elkingtons were the first to actually put the
+process into commercial practice.
+
+It would be interesting now, were it apropos, to describe the seemingly
+very ancient processes by which our ancestors gilded, plated, were
+deceived and deceived others, previous to about 1845. For those things
+were done, and the genuineness of life has by no means been destroyed by
+the modern ease with which a precious metal may be deposited upon one
+utterly base. A contemplation of the moral side of the subject might
+lead at once to the conclusion that we could now spare one of the least
+in actual importance of the processes of the all-pervading and wonderful
+essence that alike makes the lightning-stroke and gilds the plebeian pin
+that fastens a baby's napkin. But from any other view we could not now
+dispense with anything electricity does.
+
+General facts.--The names of many of the original investigators of
+electrical phenomena are perpetuated in the familiar names of electrical
+measurements. For, notwithstanding its seeming subtlety, there is no
+force in use, or that has ever been used by men, capable of being so
+definitely calculated, measured, determined beforehand, as electricity
+is. As time passes new measurements are adopted and named, some of them
+being proposed as lately as 1893. An instance of the value of some of
+these old determinations of a time when all we now know of electrical
+science was unknown, may be given in what is known as Ohm's Law. Ohm was
+a native of Erlangen, in Bavaria, and was Professor of Physics at
+Munich, where he died in 1874. He formulated this Law in 1827, and it
+was translated into English in 1847. He was recognized at the time, and
+was given the Copley medal of the Royal Society of London. The Law--for
+by that distinctive name is it still called, though the name "Ohm," also
+expresses a unit of measurement--is that _the quantity of current that
+will pass through a conductor is proportional to the pressure and
+inversely proportional to the distance_. That is:
+
+Current = Pressure / Resistance.
+
+Transposing the terms of the equation we may get an expression for
+either of those elements, current, pressure, or resistance, in the terms
+of the other two. This relation holds true and is accurate in every
+possible case and condition of practical work. This remarkable precision
+and definiteness of action has made possible the creation of an
+extensive school of electrical testing, by which we are not only enabled
+to make accurate measurement of electrical apparatus and appliances, but
+also to make determinations in _other_ fields by the agency of
+electricity. When an ocean cable is injured or broken the precise
+location of the trouble is made _by measuring the electrical
+resistance of the parts on each side of the injury_.
+
+The magnitudes of measurements of electricity are expressed in the
+following convenient electrical units:
+
+The VOLT (named from Volta) equals a unit of _pressure_ that is
+equal to one cell of a gravity battery.
+
+The OHM, as a unit of measurement, equals a unit of _resistance_
+that is equivalent to the resistance of a hundred feet of copper wire
+the size of a pin.
+
+The AMPERE (named from Ampere, 1775-1836, author of a "Collection of
+Observations on Electro-Dynamics" and other works, and a profound
+practical investigator) equals a unit of _current_ equivalent to
+the current which one Volt of pressure will produce through one Ohm of
+wire (or resistance).
+
+The Coulomb (1736--inventor of the means of measuring electricity called
+the "Torsion balance," and general early investigator) equals a unit of
+_quantity_ of one Ampere flowing for one second.
+
+The Farad (from Faraday, the discoverer of the laws of Induction, see
+_ante_), equals that unit of _capacity_ which is the capacity
+for holding one Coulomb. Death current.--What is now spoken of as the
+"Death Current" is one that will instantly overcome the "resistance" of
+the human, or animal, body. It is a current of from one to two thousand
+Volts--about the same as that used in maintaining the large arc lights.
+This question of the killing capacity of the current became officially
+prominent some years ago, upon the passage by the legislature of the
+State of New York of a statute requiring the death penalty to be
+inflicted by means of electricity. The object was to deter evildoers by
+surrounding the penalty with scientific horror, [Footnote: Hence also
+the new lingual atrocity, the word "electrocute," derived from "execute"
+by decapitation and the addition of "electro"] and the idea had its
+origin in the accidents which formerly occurred much more frequently
+than now. The "death current" is now almost everywhere, though the care
+of the men who continually work about "live" wires has grown to be much
+like that of men who continually handle firearms or explosives, and
+accidents seldom happen. At first it was apparently difficult for the
+general public to appreciate the fact that the silent and
+harmless-looking wires must be avoided. There was suddenly a new and
+terrific power in common use, and it was as slender, silent and
+unobtrusive as it was fatal.
+
+Insulation of the hands by the use of rubber gloves, and extreme care,
+are the means by which those who are called "linemen"--a new
+industry--protect themselves in their occupation. But there is a new
+commandment added to the list of those to be memorized by the
+body-politic. "Do not tread upon, drive over, or touch _any_ wire."
+It may be, and probably is, harmless. But you cannot positively
+know. [Footnote: It is a common trait of general human nature to refuse
+to learn save by the hardest of experiences, and so far as the crediting
+of statements is concerned, to at first believe everything that is not
+true, and reject most that is. The supernatural, the phenomena of
+alleged witchcraft and diabolism, and of "luck," "hoodoo," "fate," etc.,
+find ready disciples among those who reject disdainfully the results of
+the working of natural law. When the railroads were first built across
+the plains the Indians repeatedly attempted to stop moving trains by
+holding the ends of a rope stretched across the track in front of the
+engine, and with results which greatly surprised them When the lines
+were first constructed in northern Mexico the Mexican peasant could not
+be induced to refrain from trying personal experiments with the new
+power, and scores of him were killed before he learned that standing on
+the track was dangerous. In the United States the era of accidents
+through indifference to common-looking wires has almost passed, but for
+some years the fatality was large because people are always governed by
+appearances connected with _previous_ notions, until _new_
+experiences teach them better.]
+
+INSTRUMENTS OF MEASUREMENT.--Some of the most costly and beautiful of
+modern scientific instruments are those used in the measurements and
+determinations of electrical science. There are many forms and varieties
+for every specific purpose. Electrical measurement has become a
+department of physical science by itself, and a technical, extensive and
+varied one. Already the electrical specialist, no more an original
+experimenter or investigator than the average physician is, has become
+professional. He makes plans, submits facts, estimates cost, and states
+results with almost certainty.
+
+ELECTRICITY AS AN INDUSTRY.--Immense factories are now devoted to the
+manufacture of electrical goods exclusively. Large establishments in
+cities are filled with them. The installation of the electric plant in a
+dwelling house is done in the same way, and as regularly, as the
+plumbing is. Soon there must be still another enlargement, since the
+heating of houses through a wire, and the kitchen being equipped with
+cooking utensils whose heat is for each vessel evolved in its own
+bottom, is inevitable.
+
+The following are some of the facts, in figures, of the business side of
+electricity in the United States at the present writing. In 1866, about
+twenty years after the establishment of the telegraph, but with a
+population of only a little more than half the present, there were
+75,686 miles of telegraph wire in use, and 2,520 offices. In 1893 there
+were 740,000 miles of wire, and more than 20,000 offices. The receipts
+for the year first named are unknown, but for 1893 they were about
+$24,000,000. The expenses of the system for the same year were
+$16,500,000.
+
+The telephone, an industry now about sixteen years old, had in 1893, for
+the Bell alone, over 200,000 miles of wire on poles, and over 90,000
+miles of wire under ground. The instruments were in 15,000 buildings.
+There were 10,000 employes, and 233,000 subscribers. All companies
+combined had 441,000 miles of wire. Ninety-two millions of dollars were
+invested in telephone _fixtures_.
+
+In 1893, the average cost of a telegram was thirty-one and one
+six-tenths cents, and the average alleged cost of sending the same to
+the companies was twenty-two and three-tenths cents, leaving a profit of
+nine and three-tenths cents on every message. It must be remembered that
+with mail facilities and cheapness that are unrivalled, the telegraph
+message is always an extraordinary mode of communication; an emergency.
+These few figures may serve to give the reader a dim idea of the
+importance to which the most ordinary and general of the branches of
+electrical industry have grown in the United States.
+
+MEDICAL ELECTRICITY.--For more than fifty years the medical fraternity
+in regular practice persisted in disregarding all the claims made for
+the electric current as a therapeutic agent. In earlier times it was
+supposed to have a value that supplanted all other medical agencies.
+Franklin seems to have been one of the earliest experimenters in this
+line, and to have been successful in many instances where his brief
+spark from the only sources of the current then known were applicable to
+the case. The medical department of the science then fell into the hands
+of charlatans, and there is a natural disposition to deal in the
+wonderful, the miraculous or semi-miraculous, in the cure of disease.
+Divested of the wonder-idea through a wider study and greater knowledge
+of actual facts, electricity has again come forward as a curative agent
+in the last ten years. Instruction in its management in disease is
+included in the curriculum of almost every medical school, and most
+physicians now own an outfit, more or less extensive, for use in
+ordinary practice. To decry and utterly condemn is no longer the custom
+of the steady-going physician, the ethics of whose cloth had been for
+centuries to condemn all that interfered with the use of drugs, and
+everything whose action could not be understood by the examples of
+common experience, and without special study outside the lines of
+medical knowledge as prescribed.
+
+Perhaps the developments based upon the discoveries of Faraday have had
+much to do with the adoption of electricity as a curative agent. The
+current usually used is the Faradic; the induced alternate current from
+an induction coil. This is, indeed, the current most useful in the
+majority of the nervous derangements in the treatment of which the
+current is of acknowledged utility.
+
+In surgery the advance is still greater. "Galvano-cautery" is the
+incandescent light precisely; the white-hot wire being used to cut off,
+or burn off, and cauterize at the same time, excrescences and growths
+that could not be easily reached by other means than a tube and a small
+loop of platinum wire. A little incandescent lamp with a bulb no bigger
+than a pea is used to light up and explore cavities, and this advance
+alone, purely mechanical and outside of medical science, is of immense
+importance in the saving of life and the avoidance of human suffering.
+
+It may be added that there is nothing magical, or by the touch, or
+mysterious, in the treatment of disease by the electrical current. The
+results depend upon intelligent applications, based upon reason and
+experience, a varied treatment for varying cases. Nor is it a remedy to
+be applied by the patient himself more than any other is. On the
+contrary, he may do himself great injury. The pills, potions, powders
+and patent medicines made to be taken indiscriminately, and which he
+more or less understands, may be still harmful yet much safer. Even the
+application of one or the other of the two poles with reference to the
+course of a nerve, may result in injury instead of good.
+
+INCOMPLETE POSSIBILITIES.--There are at least two things greatly desired
+by mankind in the field of electrical science and not yet attained. One
+of these, that may now be dismissed with a word, is the resolving of the
+latent energy of, say a ton of coal, into electrical energy without the
+use of the steam engine; without the intervention of any machine. For
+electricity is not manufactured; not created by men in any case. It
+exists, and is merely gathered, in a measure and to a certain extent
+confined and controlled, and sent out as a _concentrated form of
+energy_ on its various errands. Should a means for the concentration
+of this universally diffused energy be found whereby it could be made to
+gather, by the new arrangement of some natural law such as places it in
+enormous quantities in the thundercloud, a revolution that would
+permeate and visibly change all the affairs of men would take place,
+since the industrial world is not a thing apart, but affects all men,
+and all institutions, and all thought.
+
+The other desideratum, more reasonable apparently, yet far from present
+accomplishment, is a means of storing and carrying a supply of
+electricity when it has been gathered by the means now used, or by any
+means.
+
+THE STORAGE BATTERY is an attempt in this last direction. The name is
+misleading, since even in this attempt electricity is in no sense
+"stored," but a chemical action producing a current takes place in the
+machine. The arrangement is in its infancy. Instances occur in which,
+under given circumstances, it is more or less efficient, and has been
+improved into greater efficiency. But many difficulties intervene, one
+of which is the great weight of the appliances used, and another,
+considerable cost. The term "storage battery" is now infrequently used,
+and the name "secondary" battery is usually substituted. The principle
+of its action is the decomposing of combined chemicals by the action of
+a current applied from a stationary generator or dynamo, and that these
+chemicals again unite as soon as they are allowed to do so by the
+completing of a circuit, _and in re-combining give off nearly as much
+electricity as was first used in separating them._ The action of the
+secondary, "storage," battery, once charged, is like that of a primary
+battery. The current is produced by chemical action. Two metals outside
+of the solution contained in a primary battery cell, but under differing
+physical conditions from each other, will yield a current. A piece of
+polished iron and a piece of rusty iron, connected by a wire, will yield
+a small current. Rusty lead, so to speak, so connected with bright lead,
+has a high electromotive force. Oxygen makes lead rusty, and hydrogen
+makes it bright. Oxygen and hydrogen are the two gases cast off when
+water is subjected to a current. (See _ante_ under
+_Electrolysis_) So Augustin Plante, the inventor of as much as we
+yet have of what is called a storage or secondary battery, suspended two
+plates of lead in water, and when a current of electricity was passed
+through it hydrogen was thrown off at one plate, making it bright, and
+oxygen at the other plate, peroxydizing its surface. When the current
+was removed the altered plates, connected by a wire, would send off a
+current which was in the opposite direction from the first, and this
+would continue until the plates were again in their original condition.
+This is the principle and mode of action of the storage battery. So far
+it has assumed many forms. Scores of modifications have been invented
+and patented. The leaden plates have taken a variety of forms, yet have
+remained leaden plates, one cleaned and the other fouled by the
+electrolytic action of a current, and giving off an almost equivalent
+current again by the return process. The arrangement endures for several
+repetitions of the process, but is finally expensive and always
+inconvenient. The secondary battery, in its infancy, as stated, presents
+now much the same obstacles to commercial use the galvanic, or primary,
+battery did before the induced current had become the servant of man.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+ELECTRICAL INVENTION IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+
+A list of the electrical inventors of this country would be very long.
+Many of the names are, in the mass and number of inventions, almost
+lost. It happens that many of the practical applications described in
+this volume, indeed most of them, are the work of citizens of this
+country.
+
+In previous chapters I have referred briefly to Franklin, Morse, Field,
+and others. These men have left names that, without question, may be
+regarded as permanent. Their chiefest distinguishing trait was
+originality of idea, and each one of them is a lesson to the American
+boy. In a sense the greatest of all these, and in the same sense, the
+greatest American, was Benjamin Franklin. A sketch of his career has
+been given, but to that may be added the following: He had arrived at
+conclusions that were vast in scope and startling in result by applying
+the reasoning faculty upon observations of phenomena that had been
+recurring since the world was made, and had been misunderstood from the
+beginning. He used the simplest means. His experiment was in a different
+way daily performed for him by nature. He was philosophically daring,
+indifferently a tinker with nature's terrific machinery; a knocker at
+the door of an august temple that men were never known to have entered;
+a mortal who smiled in the face of inscrutable and awful mystery, and
+who defied the lightning in a sense not merely moral. [Footnote:
+Professor Richmann, of St. Petersburg, was instantly killed by lightning
+while repeating Franklin's experiment.]
+
+His genius lay in a power of swift inductive reasoning. His common sense
+and his sense of humor never forsook him. He uttered keen apothegms that
+have lived like those of Solon. He was a philosopher like Diogenes,
+lacking the bitterness. He wrote the "Busy-Body," and annually made the
+plebeian and celebrated "Almanac," and the "Ephemera" that were not
+ephemeral, and is the author of the story of "The Whistle," that
+everybody knows, and everybody reads with shamefacedness because it is a
+brief chapter out of his own history.
+
+He was apparently an adept in the art of caring for himself, one of the
+most successful worldings of his time, yet he wrote, thought, toiled
+incessantly, for his fellow men. He had little education obtained as it
+is supposed an education must be obtained. He was commonplace. No one
+has ever told of his "silver tongue," or remembered a brilliant
+after-dinner speech that he has made. Yet he finally stood before
+mankind the companion of princes, the darling of splendid women, covered
+with the laurels of a brilliant scientific renown. But he was a printer,
+a tinkerer with stoves, the inventor of the lightning rod, the man who
+had spent one-half his life in teaching apprentices, such as he himself
+had been when his jealous and common-minded brother had whipped him,
+that "time is money," that "credit is money"--which is the most
+prominent fact in the commercial world of 1895--and that honor and
+self-respect are better than wealth, pleasure, or any other good.
+
+Yet clear, keen, cold and inductive as was Franklin's mind, no vision
+reached him, in the moment of that triumph when he felt the lightning
+tingling in his fingers from a hempen string, of those wonders which
+were to come. He knew absolutely nothing of that necromancy through
+which others of his countrymen were to girdle the world with a common
+intelligence, and yet others were to use in sprinkling night with
+clusters as innumerable and mysterious as the higher stars.
+
+The story of the Morse telegraph has been repeatedly told, and I have
+briefly sketched it in connection with the subject of the telegraph.
+But, unlike the original, scientifically lonely and independent
+Franklin, Morse had the best assistance of his times in the persons of
+men more skilled than himself and almost as persistent. The chief of
+these was Alfred Vail, a name until lately almost unknown to scientific
+fame, who eliminated the clumsy crudities of Morse's conception, remade
+his instruments, and was the inventor of that renowned alphabet which
+spells without letters or writing or types, that may be seen or heard or
+felt or tasted, that is adapted to any language and to all conditions,
+and that performs to this day, and shall to all time, the miracle of
+causing the inane rattle of pieces of metal against each other to speak
+to even a careless listener the exact thoughts of one a thousand miles
+away.
+
+Another of the men who might be appropriately included in any
+comprehensive list of aiders and abettors of the present telegraph
+system were Leonard D. Gale, then Professor of Chemistry in the
+University of New York, and Professor Joseph Henry, who had made, and
+was apparently indifferent to the importance of it because there was no
+alphabet to use it with, the first electric telegraph ever constructed
+to be read, or used, _by sound_. Last, though hardly least if all
+facts are understood, might be included a skillful youth named William
+Baxter, afterwards known as the inventor of the "Baxter Engine," who,
+shut in a room with Vail in a machine shop in New Jersey, made in
+conjunction with the author of the alphabet the first telegraphic
+instrument that, with Henry's magnet and battery cells, sent across
+space the first message ever read by a person who did not know what the
+words of the message would say or mean until they had been received.
+
+After the telegraph the state of electrical knowledge was for a long
+time such that electrical invention was in a sense impossible. The
+renowned exploit of Field was not an invention, but a heroic and
+successful extension of the scope and usefulness of an invention. But
+thought was not idle, and filled the interval with preparations for
+final achievements unequaled in the history of science. Two of these
+results are the electric light and the telephone. For the various
+"candles," such as that of Jablochkoff, exhibited at Paris in 1870, only
+served to stimulate investigation of the alluring possibilities of the
+subject. The details of these great inventions are better known than
+those of any others. The telegraph and the newspaper reporter had come
+upon the field as established institutions. Every process and progress
+was a piece of news of intense interest. When the light glowed in its
+bulb and sparkled and flashed at the junction points of its
+chocolate-colored sticks it had been confidently expected. There was
+little surprise. The practical light of the world was considered
+probable, profitable, and absolutely sure. The real story will never be
+told. The thoughts, which phrase may also include the inevitable
+disappointments of the inventor, are never written down by him. That
+variety of brain which, with a few great exceptions, was not known until
+modern, very recent times, which does not speculate, contrive, imagine
+only, but also reduces all ideas to _commercial_ form, has yet to
+have its analysis and its historian, for it is to all intents a new
+phase of the evolution of mind.
+
+[Illustration: THOMAS A. EDISON.]
+
+A typical example of this class of intellect is Mr. Thomas A. Edison. It
+may be doubted if such a man could, in the qualities that make him
+remarkable, be the product of any other country than ours. In common
+with nearly all those who have left a deep impression upon our country,
+Edison was the child of that hackneyed "respectable poverty" which here
+is a different condition from that existing all over Europe, where the
+phrase was coined. There, the phrase, and the condition it describes,
+mean a dull content, an incapacity to rise, a happy indifference to all
+other conditions, a dullness that does not desire to learn, to change,
+to think. To respectable poverty in other civilizations there are strong
+local associations like those of a cat, not arising to the dignity of
+love of country. In the United States, without a word, without argument
+or question, a young man becomes a pioneer--not necessarily one of
+locality or physical newness, but a pioneer in mind--in creed, politics,
+business--in the boundless domain of hope and endeavor. In America no
+man is as his father was except in physical traits. No man there is a
+volunteer soldier fighting his country's battles except from a
+conviction that he ought to be. A man is an inventor, a politician, a
+writer, first because he knows that valuable changes are possible, and,
+second, because he can make such changes profitable to himself. It is
+the great realm of immutable steadfastness combined with constant
+change; unique among the nations.
+
+Edison never had more than two months regular schooling in his entire
+boyhood. There is, therefore, nothing trained, "regular," technical,
+about him. If there had been it is probable that we might never have
+heard of him. He is one of the innumerable standing arguments against
+the old system advocated by everybody's father, and especially by the
+older fathers of the church, and which meant that every man and woman
+was practically cut by the same pattern, or cast in the same general
+mould, and was to be fitted for a certain notch by training alone. No
+more than thirty years ago the note of preparation for the grooves of
+life was constantly sounded. Natural aptitude, "bent," inclination, were
+disregarded. The maxim concocted by some envious dull man that "genius
+is only another name for industry," was constantly quoted and believed.
+
+But Edison's mother had been trained, practically, as an instructor of
+youth. He had hints from her in the technical portions of a boy's
+primary training. He is not an ignorant man, but, on the contrary, a
+very highly educated one. But it is an education he has constructed for
+himself out of his aptitudes, as all other actual educations have really
+been. When he was ten years old he had read standard works, and at
+twelve is stated to have struggled, ineffectually perhaps, with Newton's
+_Principia_. At that age he became a train-boy on the Grand Trunk
+railroad for the purpose of earning his living; only another way of
+pioneering and getting what was to be got by personal endeavor. While in
+that business he edited and printed a little newspaper; not to please an
+amateurish love of the beautiful art of printing, but for profit. He was
+selling papers, and he wanted one of his own to sell because then he
+would get more out of it in a small way. He never afterwards showed any
+inclination toward journalism, and did not become a reporter or
+correspondent, or start a rural daily. While he was a train-boy,
+enjoying every opportunity for absorbing a knowledge of human nature,
+and of finally becoming a passenger conductor or a locomotive engineer,
+something called his attention to the telegraph as a promoter of
+business, as a great and useful institution, and he resolved to become
+an "operator." This was his electrical beginning. Yet before he took
+this step he was accused of a proclivity toward extraordinary things. In
+the old "caboose" where he edited, set up, and printed his newspaper he
+had established a small chemical laboratory, and out of these chemicals
+there is said to have been jolted one day an accident which caused him
+some unpopularity with the railroad people. He was all the time a
+business man. He employed four boy helpers in his news and publishing
+business. It took him a long time to learn the telegraph business under
+the circumstances, and when he was at last installed on a "plug" circuit
+he began at once to do unusual things with the current and its machines
+and appliances. This is what he tells of his first electrical invention.
+
+There was an operator at one end of the circuit who was so swift that
+Edison and his companion could not "take" fast enough to keep up with
+him. He found two old Morse registers--the machines that printed with a
+steel point the dots and dashes on a paper slip wound off of a reel.
+These he arranged in such a way that the message written, or indented,
+on them by the first instrument were given to him by the second
+instrument at any desired rate of speed or slowness.
+
+This gave to him and his friend time to catch up. This, in Morse's time,
+would have been thought an achievement. Edison seems to regard it as a
+joke. There was no time for prolonged experiment. It was an emergency,
+and the idea must necessarily have been supplemented by a quick
+mechanical skill.
+
+It was this same automatic recorder, the idea embodied in it, that by
+thought and logical deduction afterwards produced that wonderful
+automaton, the phonograph. He rigged a hasty instrument that was based
+upon the idea that if the indentations made in a slip of paper could be
+made to repeat the ticking sound of the instrument, similar indentations
+made by a point on a diaphragm that was moved by the _voice_ might
+be made to repeat the voice. His rude first instrument gave back a sound
+vaguely resembling the single word first shouted into it and supposed to
+be indented on a slip of paper, and this was enough to stimulate further
+effort. He finally made drawings and took them to a machinist whom he
+knew, afterwards one of his assistants, who laughed at the idea but made
+the model. Previously he bet a friend a barrel of apples that he could
+do it. When the model was finished he arranged a piece of tin foil and
+talked into it, and when it gave back a distinct sound the machinist was
+frightened, and Edison won his barrel of apples, "which," he says, "I
+was very glad to get."
+
+The "Wizard" is a man evidently pertaining to the class of human
+eccentrics who excite the interest of their fellow-men "to see what they
+will do next," but without any idea of the final value of that which may
+come by what seems to them to be mere unbalanced oddity. Such people are
+invariably misunderstood until they succeed. When he invented the
+automatic repeating telegraph he was discharged, and walked from Decatur
+to Nashville, 150 miles, with only a dollar or two as his entire
+possessions. With a pass thence to Louisville, he and a friend arrived
+at that place in a snowstorm, and clad in linen "dusters." This does not
+seem scientific or professor-like, but it has not hindered; possibly it
+has immensely helped. It reminds one of the Franklinic episodes when
+remembered in connection with future scientific renown and the court of
+France.
+
+One of the secrets of Edison's great success is the ease with which he
+concentrates his mind. He is said to possess the faculty of leaving one
+thing and taking up another whenever he wills. He even carries on in his
+mind various trains of thought at the same time. The operations of his
+brain are imitated in his daily conduct, which is direct and simple in
+all respects. He is never happier than when engaged in the most
+absorbing and exacting mental toil. He dresses in a machinist's clothes
+when thus employed in his laboratory, and was long accustomed to work
+continuously for as long as he was so inclined without regard to
+regularity, or meals, or day or night. He is willing to eat his food
+from a bench that is littered with filings, chips and tools. To relieve
+strain and take a moment's recreation he is known to have bought a
+"cottage" organ and taught himself to play it, and to go to it in the
+middle of the night and grind out tunes for relaxation. He has a working
+library containing several thousand books. He pores over these volumes
+to inform himself upon some pressing idea, and does so in the midst of
+his work. No man could have made some of his inventions unaided by
+technical science and a knowledge of the results of the investigations
+of many others, and it has often been wondered how a man not technically
+educated could have seemed so well to know. There was a mistake. He
+_is_ educated; a scientific investigator of remarkable attainments.
+
+In thinking of the inventions of Edison and their value, a dozen of the
+first class, that would each one have satisfied the ambition or taken
+the time of an ordinary man, can be named. The mimeograph and the
+electric pen are minor. Then there are the stock printer, the automatic
+repeating telegraph, quadruplex telegraphy, the phono-plex, the
+ore-milling process, the railway telegraph, the electric engine, the
+phonograph. Some of these inventions seem, in the glow of his
+incandescent light, or with one's ear to the tube of the telephone he
+improved in its most essential part, to be too small for Edison. But
+nothing was too small for Franklin, or for the boy who played idly with
+the lid of his mother's tea-kettle and almost invented the steam-engine
+of today, or for Hero of Alexandria, who dreamed a thousand years before
+its time of the power that was to come. So was Henry's first electric
+telegraph the merest toy, and his electro-magnet was supported upon a
+pile of books, his signal bell was that with which one calls a servant,
+and his idea was a mere experiment without result. There was a boy
+Edison needed there then, whose toys reap fortunes and light, and
+enlighten, the world. The electric pen was in its day immensely useful
+in the business world, because it was the application of the stencil to
+ordinary manuscript, and caused the making of hundreds of copies upon
+the stencil idea, and with a printer's roller instead of a brush. The
+mimeograph was the same idea in a totally different form. It was writing
+upon a tablet that is like a bastard-file, with a steel-pointed stylus.
+Each slight projection makes a hole in the paper, and then the stencil
+idea begins again.
+
+Something has been previously said of the difficulties attending the
+making of the filament for the incandescent light. It is a little thing,
+smaller than a thread, frail, delicate, sealed in a bulb almost
+absolutely exhausted of air, smooth without a flaw, of absolutely even
+caliber from end to end. The world was searched for substances out of
+which to make it, and experiments were endlessly and tediously tried;
+all for this one little part of a great invention, which, like all other
+inventions, would be valueless in the want of a single little part.
+
+There are hundreds, an unknown number, of inventions in electricity in
+this country whose authors are unknown, and will never be known to the
+general public. The patent office shows many thousands of such in the
+aggregate. Many useful improvements in the telephone alone have come
+under the eye of every casual reader of the newspapers. These are now
+locked up from the world, with many other patented changes in existing
+machines, because of the great expense attending their substitution for
+those arrangements now in use.
+
+All the principles--the principles that, finally demonstrated, become
+laws--upon which electrical invention is based, are old. It seems
+impossible, during the entire era of modern thought, to have found a new
+trait, a development, a hitherto unsuspected quality. Tesla, in some of
+his most wonderful experiments, seems almost to have touched the
+boundaries of an unexplored realm, yet not quite, not yet, and most
+likely absolute discovery can no farther go. To play upon those known
+laws--to twist them to new utilities and give them new developments--has
+been the work of the creators of all the modern electrical miracles.
+There is scarcely a field in which men work in which the results are not
+more apparent, yet all we have, and undoubtedly most we shall ever have,
+of electricity we shall continue to owe to the infant period of the
+science.
+
+It may be truthfully claimed that most of these extraordinary
+applications of electricity have been made by American inventors.
+Wherever there is steam, on sea or land, there, intimately associated
+with American management, will be found the dynamic current and all its
+uses. The science of explosive destruction has almost entirely changed,
+and with a most extraordinary result. But one of the factors of this
+change has been the electric current, a something primarily having
+nothing to do with guns, ships or sailing. The modern man-of-war,
+beginning with those of our own navy, is lighted by the electric light,
+signalled and controlled by the current, and her ponderous guns are
+loaded, fired, and even _sighted_ by the same means. Her officers
+are a corps of electrical experts. A large part of her crew are trained
+to manipulate wires instead of ropes, and her total efficiency is
+perhaps three times what it would be with the same tonnage under the old
+regime. There is a new sea life and sea science, born full grown within
+ten years from a service encrusted with traditions like barnacles, and
+that could not have come by any other agency. A big gun is no longer
+merely that, but also an electrical machine, often with machinery as
+complicated as that of a chronometer and much more mysterious in
+operation.
+
+I have said that the huge piece was even sighted by electricity. There
+is really nothing strange in the statement, though it may read like a
+fairy tale or a metaphor to whoever has never had his attention called
+to the subject. In a small way, with the name of its inventor almost
+unknown except to his messmates, it is one of the most wonderful, and
+one of the simplest, of the modern miracles. As a mere instance of the
+wide extent of modern ideas of utility, and of the possibilities of
+application of the laws that were discovered and formulated by those
+whose names the units of electrical measurements bear, it may be briefly
+stated how a group of gunners may work behind an iron breastwork, and
+never see the enemy's hull, and yet aim at him with a hundred times the
+accuracy possible in the day of the _Old Ironsides_ and the
+_Guerriere_.
+
+And first it may be stated that the _range-finder_ is largely a
+measure of mere economy. A two-million-dollar cruiser is not sailed, or
+lost, as a mere pastime. Whoever aims best will win the fight. Ten years
+ago the way of finding distance, or range, which is the same thing, was
+experimental. If a costly shot was fired over the enemy the next one was
+fired lower, and possibly between the two the range might be got, both
+vessels meantime changing positions and range. To change this, to either
+injure an antagonist quickly or get away, the "range-finder" was
+invented, as a matter not of business profit, by Lieutenant Bradley A.
+Fiske, of the U. S. Navy, in 1889. It has its reason in the familiar
+mathematical proposition that if two angles and one side of a triangle
+are known, the other sides of the triangle are easily found. That is,
+that it can be determined how far it is to a distant object without
+going to it. But Fiske's range-finder makes no mathematical
+calculations, nor requires them to be made, and is automatic. A base
+line permanently fixed on the ship is the one side of a triangle
+required. The distance of the object to be hit is determined by its
+being the apex of an imaginary triangle, and at each of the other
+angles, at the two ends of the base line, is fixed a spyglass. These are
+directed at the object.
+
+So far electricity has had nothing to do with the arrangement, but now
+it enters as the factor without which the device could have no
+adaptation. As the telescopes are turned to bear upon the target they
+move upon slides or wires bent into an arc, and these carry an electric
+current. The difference in length of the slide passed over in turning
+the telescopes upon the object causes a greater or less resistance to
+the current, precisely as a short wire carries a current more easily;
+with less "resistance;" than a long one. A contrivance for measuring the
+current, amounting to the same thing that other instruments do of the
+same class that are used every day, allows of this resistance being
+measured and read, not now in units of electricity, but _in distance
+to the apex of the triangle where the target is_; in yards. The man
+at each telescope has only to keep it pointed at the target as it moves,
+or as the vessel moves which wishes to hit it. And now even the
+telephone enters into the arrangement. Elsewhere in the ship another man
+may stand with the transmitter at his ear. He will hear a buzzing sound
+until the telescopes stop moving, and at the same time there will be
+under his eye a pointer moving over a graduated scale. The instant the
+sound ceases he reads the range denoted by the index and scale. The
+information is then conveyed in any desired way to the men at the guns;
+these, of course, being aimed by a scale corresponding to that under the
+eye of the man at the telephone. The plan is not here detailed as
+technical information valuable to the casual reader, but as showing the
+wide range of electrical applications in fields where possible
+usefulness would not have been so much as suspected a few years ago. The
+same gentleman, Lieut. Fiske, is also the author of ingenious electrical
+appliances for the working of those immense gun-carriages that have
+grown too big for men to move, and for the hoisting into their cavernous
+breeches of shot and shell. The men who work these guns now do not need
+to see the enemy, even through the porthole or the embrasure. They can
+attend strictly to the business of loading and firing, assisted by
+machines nearly or quite automatic, and can cant and lay the piece by an
+index, and fire with an electric lanyard. The genius of science has
+taken the throne vacated by the goddess of glory. The sailor has gone,
+and the expert mechanician has taken his place. The tar and his training
+have given way to the register, the gauge and the electrometer. The big
+black guns are no longer run backward amid shouts and flying splinters,
+and rammed by men stripped to the waist and shrouded in the smoke of the
+last discharge, but swing their long and tapering muzzles to and fro out
+of steel casemates, and tilt their ponderous breeches like huge
+grotesque animals lying down. The grim machinery of naval battle is
+moved by invisible hands, and its enormous weight is swayed and tilted
+by a concealed and silent wire.
+
+This strange slave, that toils unmoved in the din of battle, has been
+reduced to domestic servitude of the plainest character. The
+demonstrations made of cooking by electricity at the great fair of 1893
+leave that service possible in the future without any question.
+Electrical ovens, models of neatness, convenience and _coolness_,
+were shown at work. They were made of wood, lined with asbestos, and
+were lighted inside with an incandescent lamp. The degree of temperature
+was shown by a thermometer, and mica doors rendered the baking or
+roasting visible. There could be no question of too much heat on one
+side and too little on another, because switches placed at different
+points allowed of a cutting off, or a turning on, whenever needed.
+Laundry irons had an insulated pliable connection attached, so that heat
+was high and constant at the bottom of the iron and not elsewhere. There
+were all the appliances necessary for the broiling of steaks, the making
+of coffee and the baking of cakes, and the same mystery, which is no
+longer a mystery, pervaded it all. Woman is also to become an
+electrician, at least empirically, and in time soon to come will
+understand her voltage and her Amperes as she now does her drafts and
+dampers and the quality of her fuel.
+
+It is a practical fact that chickens are hatched by the thousand by the
+electrical current, and that men have discovered more than nature knew
+about the period of incubation, and have reduced it by electricity from
+twenty-one to nineteen days. The proverb about the value of the time of
+the incubating hen has passed into antiquity with all things else in the
+presence of electrical science.
+
+Whenever an American mechanician, a manufacturer or an inventor, is
+confronted by a difficulty otherwise insolvable he turns to electricity.
+Its laws and qualities are few. They seem now to be nearly all known,
+but the great curiosity of modern times is the almost infinite number of
+applications which these laws and qualities may be made to serve. One
+may turn at a single glance from the loading and firing of naval guns to
+the hatching of chickens and the cooking of chocolate by precisely the
+same means, silently used in the same way. Most of these applications,
+and all the most extraordinary ones, are of American origin. Their
+inventors are largely unknown. There is no attempt made here to more
+than suggest the possibilities of the near future by a glimpse of the
+present. The generation that is rising, the boy who is ten years old,
+should easily know more of electrical science than Franklin did. There
+are certain primal laws by which all explanations of all that now is,
+and most probably of almost all that is to come so far as principles go,
+may be readily understood, and these I have endeavored, in this and
+preceding chapters, to explain.
+
+There are in the United States new applications of electricity literally
+every day. Before the written page is printed some startling application
+is likely to be made that gives to that page at once an incompleteness
+it is impossible to guard against or avoid. There is a strong
+inclination to prophesy; to tell of that which is to come; to picture
+the warmed and illuminated future, smokeless and odorless, and the homes
+in which the children of the near future shall be reared. Some of those
+few apprehended things, suggested as being possible or desirable in
+these chapters, have been since done and the author has seen them. This
+American facility of electrical invention has one great cause, one
+specific reason for its fruitfulness. It is because so many acute minds
+have mastered the simple laws of electrical action. This knowledge not
+only fosters intelligent and fruitful experiment but it prevents the
+doing of foolish things. No man who has acquired a knowledge of
+mechanical forces, who understands at least that great law that for all
+force exerted there is exacted an equivalent, ever dreams upon the folly
+of the perpetual motion. In like manner does a knowledge, purely
+theoretical, of the laws of electricity prevent that waste of time in
+gropings and dreams of which the story of science and the long human
+struggle in all ages and in all departments is full.
+
+Finally, I would, if possible dispell all ideas of strangeness and
+mystery and semi-miracle as connected with electrical phenomena. There
+is no mystery; above all, there is no caprice. There are, in electricity
+and in all other departments of science, still many things undiscovered.
+It is certain that causes lead far back into that realm which is beyond
+present human investigation. _Force_ has innumerable manifestations
+that are visible, that are understood, that are controlled. Its
+_origin_ is behind the veil. A thousand branching threads of
+argument may be taken up and woven into the single strand that leads
+into the unknown. Out of the thought that is born of things has already
+arisen a new conception of the universe, and of the Eternal Mind who is
+its master. Among these things, these daily manifestations of a seeming
+mystery, the most splendid are the phenomena of electricity. They court
+the human understanding and offer a continual challenge to that faculty
+which alone distinguishes humanity from the beasts. The assistance given
+in the preceding pages toward a clear understanding of the reason why,
+so far as known, is perhaps inadequate, but is an attempt offered for
+what of interest or value may be found.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Steam Steel and Electricity, by James W. Steele
+
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+Project Gutenberg's Steam Steel and Electricity, by James W. Steele
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
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+Title: Steam Steel and Electricity
+
+Author: James W. Steele
+
+Release Date: April, 2005 [EBook #7886]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on May 30, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-Latin-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STEAM STEEL AND ELECTRICITY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Tonya Allen
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+STEAM STEEL AND ELECTRICITY
+
+By
+
+JAMES W. STEELE
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+THE STORY OF STEAM.
+
+    What Steam is.--Steam in Nature.--The Engine in its earlier
+    forms.--Gradual explosion.--The Hero engine.--The Temple-door
+    machine.--Ideas of the Middle Ages.--Beginnings of the modern
+    engine.--Branca's engine.--Savery's engine.--The Papin engine
+    using cylinder and piston.--Watt's improvements upon the
+    Newcomen idea.--The crank movement.--The first use of steam
+    expansively.--The "Governor."--First engine by an American
+    Inventor.--Its effect upon progress in the United
+    States.--Simplicity and cheapness of the modern engine.--Actual
+    construction of the modern engine.--Valves, piston, etc., with
+    diagrams.
+
+THE AGE OF STEEL.
+
+    The various "Ages" in civilization.--Ancient knowledge of the
+    metals.--The invention and use of Bronze.--What Steel is.--The
+    "Lost Arts."--Metallurgy and chemistry.--Oriental Steel.--Modern
+    definition of Steel.--Invention of Cast Steel.--First iron-ore
+    discoveries in America.--First American Iron-works.--Early
+    methods without steam.--First American casting.--Effect of iron
+    industry upon independence.--Water-power.--The trip-hammer.--The
+    steam-hammer of Nasmyth.--Machine-tools and their
+    effects.--First rolling-mill.--Product of the iron industry in
+    1840-50.--The modern nail, and how it came.--Effect of iron upon
+    architecture.--The "Sky-Scraper."--Gas as fuel in iron
+    manufactures.--The Steel of the present.--The invention of
+    Kelley.--The Bessemer process.--The "Converter."--Present
+    product of Steel.--The Steel-mill.
+
+THE STORY OF ELECTRICITY.
+
+    The oldest and the youngest of the sciences.--Origin of the
+    name.--Ancient ideas of Electricity.--Later experiments.--Crude
+    notions and wrong conclusions.--First Electric
+    Machine.--Frictional Electricity.--The Leyden Jar.--Extreme
+    ideas and Fakerism.--Franklin, his new ideas and their
+    reception.--Franklin's Kite.--The Man Franklin.--Experiments
+    after Franklin, leading to our present modern uses.--Galvani and
+    his discovery.--Volta, and the first "Battery."--How a battery
+    acts.--The laws of Electricity, and how they were
+    discovered.--Induction, and its discoverer.--The line at which
+    modern Electricity begins.--Magnetism and Electricity.--The
+    Electro-Magnet.--The Molecular theory.--Faraday, and his Law of
+    Magnetic Force.
+
+MODERN ELECTRICITY.
+
+    CHAPTER I. The Four great qualities of Electricity which make
+    its modern uses possible.--The universal wire.--Conductors and
+    non conductors.--Electricity an exception in the ordinary Laws
+    of Nature.--A dual nature: "Positive" and "Negative."--All
+    modern uses come under the law of Induction.--Some of the laws
+    of this induction.--Magnets and Magnetism.--Relationship between
+    the two.--Magnetic "poles."--Practical explanation of the action
+    of induction.--The Induction Coil.--Dynamic and Static
+    Electricity.--The Electric Telegraph.--First attempts.--Morse,
+    and his beginnings.--The first Telegraph Line.--Vail, and the
+    invention of the dot-and-dash alphabet.--The old instruments and
+    the new.--The final simplicity of the telegraph.
+
+    CHAPTER II. The Ocean Cable.--Differences between land lines and
+    cables.--The story of the first cable.--Field and his final
+    success.--The Telephone.--Early attempts.--Description of Bell's
+    invention.--The Telautograph.--Early attempts and the idea upon
+    which they were based.--Description of Gray's invention.--How a
+    Telautograph may be made mechanically.
+
+    CHAPTER III. The Electric Light.--Causes of heat and light in
+    the conductor of a current.--The first Electric Light.--The Arc
+    Light, and how constructed.--The Incandescent.--The
+    Dynamo.--Date of the invention.--Successive steps.--Faraday the
+    discoverer of its principle.--Pix�'s
+    machine.--Pacinatti.--Wilde.--Siemens' and Wheatstone.--The
+    Motor.--How the Dynamo and Motor came to be coupled.--Review of
+    first attempts.--Kidder's battery.--Page's machine.--Electric
+    Railroads.--Electrolysis.--General facts.--Electrical
+    Measurements.--"Death Current."--Instruments of
+    Measurement.--Electricity as an Industry.--Medical
+    Electricity.--Incomplete possibilities.--What the "Storage
+    Battery" is.
+
+    CHAPTER IV. Electrical Invention in the United States.--Review
+    of the careers of Franklin, Morse, Field, Edison and
+    others.--Some of the surprising applications of
+    Electricity.--The Range-Finder.--Cooking and heating by
+    Electricity.
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF STEAM
+
+
+That which was utterly unknown to the most splendid civilizations of the
+past is in our time the chief power of civilization, daily engaged in
+making that history of a new era that is yet to be written in words. It
+has been demonstrated long since that men's lives are to be influenced
+not by theory, or belief, or argument and reason, so much as by that
+course of daily life which is not attempted to be governed by argument
+and reason, but by great physical facts like steam, electricity and
+machinery in their present applications.
+
+The greatest of these facts of the present civilization are expressed in
+the phrase, Steam and Steel. The theme is stupendous. Only the most
+prominent of its facts can be given in small space, and those only in
+outline. The subject is also old, yet to every boy it must be told
+again, and the most ordinary intelligence must have some desire to know
+the secrets, if such they are, of that which is unquestionably the
+greatest force that ever yielded to the audacity of humanity. It is now
+of little avail to know that all the records that men revere, all the
+great epics of the world, were written in the absence of the
+characteristic forces of modern life. A thousand generations had lived
+and died, an immense volume of history had been enacted, the heroes of
+all the ages, and almost those of our own time, had fulfilled their
+destinies and passed away, before it came about that a mere physical
+fact should fill a larger place in our lives than all examples, and that
+the evanescent vapor which we call steam should change daily, and
+effectively, the courses and modes of human action, and erect life upon
+another plane.
+
+It may seem not a little absurd to inquire now "what is steam?"
+Everybody knows the answer. The non-technical reader knows that it is
+that vapor which, for instance, pervades the kitchen, which issues from
+every cooking vessel and waste-pipe, and is always white and visible,
+and moist and warm. We may best understand an answer to the question,
+perhaps, by remembering that steam is one of the three natural
+conditions of water: ice, fluid water, and steam. One or the other of
+these conditions always exists, and always under two others: pressure
+and heat. When the air around water reaches the temperature of
+thirty-two degrees by the scale of Fahrenheit, or � or zero by the
+Centigrade scale, and is exposed to this temperature for a time, it
+becomes ice. At two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit it becomes
+steam. Between these two temperatures it is water. But the change to
+steam which is so rapid and visible at the temperature above mentioned
+is taking place slowly all the time when water, in any situation, is
+exposed to the air. As the temperature rises the change becomes more
+rapid. The steam-making of the arts is merely that of all nature,
+hastened artificially and intentionally.
+
+The element of pressure, mentioned above, enters into the proposition
+because water boils at a lower temperature, with less heat, when the
+weight of the atmosphere is less than normal, as it is at great
+elevations, and on days when, as we now express it, there is a low
+barometer. Long before any cook could explain the fact it was known that
+the water boiling quickly was a sign of storm. It has often been found
+by camping-parties on mountains that in an attempt to boil potatoes in a
+pot the water would all "boil away," and leave the vegetables uncooked.
+The heat required to evaporate it at the elevation was less than that
+required to cook in boiling water. It is one of the instances where the
+problems of nature intrude themselves prominently into the affairs of
+common life without previous notice.
+
+This universal evaporation, under varying circumstances, is probably the
+most important agency in nature, and the most continuous and potent.
+There was only so much water to begin with. There will never be any less
+or any more. The saltness of the sea never varies, because the loss by
+evaporation and the new supply through condensation of the
+steam--rain--necessarily remain balanced by law forever. The surface of
+our world is water in the proportion of three to one. The extent of
+nature's steam-making, silent, and mostly invisible, is immeasurable and
+remains an undetermined quantity. The three forms of water combine and
+work together as though through intentional partnership, and have, thus
+combined, already changed the entire land surface of the world from what
+it was to what it is, and working ceaselessly through endless cycles
+will change it yet more. The exhalations that are steam become the water
+in a rock-cleft. It changes to ice with a force almost beyond
+measurement in the orderly arrangement of its crystals in compliance
+with an immutable law for such arrangement, and rends the rock. The
+process goes on. There is no high mountain in any land where water will
+not freeze. The water of rain and snow carries away the powdered remains
+from year to year, and from age to age. The comminuted ruins of
+mountains have made the plains and filled up and choked the mouth of the
+Mississippi. The soil that once lay hundreds of miles away has made the
+delta of every river that flows into the sea. The endless and resistless
+process goes on without ceasing, a force that is never expended, and but
+once interrupted within the knowledge of men, then covered a large area
+of the world with a sea of ice that buried for ages every living thing.
+
+The common idea of the steam that we make by boiling water is that it is
+all water, composed of that and nothing else, and this conception is
+gathered from apparent fact. Yet it is not entirely true. Steam is an
+invisible vapor in every boiler, and does not become what we know by
+sight as steam until it has become partly cooled. As actual steam
+uncooled, it is a gas, obeying all the laws of the permanent gases. The
+creature of temperature and pressure, it changes from this gaseous form
+when their conditions are removed, and in the change becomes visible to
+us. Its elasticity, its power of yielding to compression, are enormous,
+and it gives back this elasticity of compression with almost
+inconceivable readiness and swiftness. To the eye, in watching the
+gliding and noiseless movements of one of the great modern engines, the
+power of which one has only a vague and inadequate conception seems not
+only inexplicable, but gentle. The ponderous iron pieces seem to weigh
+nothing. There is a feeling that one might hinder the movement as he
+would that of a watch. There is an inability to realize the fact that
+one of the mightiest forces of nature is there embodied in an easy,
+gliding, noiseless impulse. Yet it is one that would push aside massy
+tons of dead weight, that would almost unimpeded crush a hole through
+the enclosing wall, that whirls upon the rails the drivers of a
+locomotive weighing sixty tons as though there were no weight above
+them, no bite upon the rails. There is an enormous concentration of
+force somewhere; of a force which perhaps no man can fairly estimate;
+and it is under the thin shell we call a boiler. Were it not elastic it
+could not be so imprisoned, and when it rebels, when this thin shell is
+torn like paper, there is a havoc by which we may at last inadequately
+measure the power of steam.
+
+We have in modern times applied the word "engine" almost exclusively to
+the machine which is moved by the pressure of steam. Yet we might go
+further, since one of the first examples of a pressure engine, older
+than the steam machine by nearly four hundred years, is the gun. Reduced
+to its principle this is an engine whose operation depends upon the
+expansion of gas in a cylinder, the piston being a projectile. The same
+principle applies in all the machines we know as "engines." An
+air-engine works through the expansion of air in a cylinder by heat. A
+gas-engine, now of common use, by the expansion, which is explosion,
+caused by burning a mixture of coal-gas and air, and the steam-engine,
+the universal power generator of modern life, works by the expansion of
+the vapor of water as it is generated by heat. Steam may be considered a
+species of _gradual_ explosion applied to the uses of industry. It
+often becomes a real one, complying with all the conditions, and as
+destructive as dynamite.
+
+It cannot be certainly known how long men have experimented with the
+expansive force of steam. The first feeble attempt to purloin the power
+of the geyser was probably by Hero, of Alexandria, about a hundred and
+thirty years before Christ. His machine was also the first known
+illustration of what is now called the "turbine" principle; the
+principle of _reaction_ in mechanics. [Footnote: This principle is
+often a puzzle to students. There is an old story of the man who put a
+bellows in his boat to make wind against the sail, and the wind did not
+affect the sail, but the boat went backward in an opposite direction
+from the nozzle of the bellows. There is probably no better illustration
+of reaction than the "kick" of a gun, which most persons know about. The
+recoil of a six-pound field piece is usually from six to twelve feet. It
+can be understood by supposing a gun to be loaded with powder and an
+iron rod longer than the barrel to be left on the charge. If the outer
+end of this rod were then placed against a tree, and the gun were fired,
+it is manifest that the gun would become the projectile, and be fired
+off of the rod backward or burst. In ordinary cases the air in the bore,
+and immediately outside of the muzzle, acts comparatively, and in a
+measure, as the supposed rod against the tree would. It gives way, and
+is elastic, but not as quickly as the force of the explosion acts, and
+the gun is pushed backwards. It is the turbine principle, running into
+hundreds of uses in mechanics.] He made a closed vessel from whose
+opposite sides radiated two hollow arms with holes in their sides, the
+holes being on opposite sides of the tubes from each other. This vessel
+he mounted on an upright spindle, and put water in it and heated the
+water. The steam issuing from the holes in the arms drove them backward.
+The principle of the action of Hero's machine has been accepted for two
+thousand years, though never in a steam-engine. It exists under all
+circumstances similar to his. In water, in the turbine wheel, it has
+been made most efficacious. The power applied now for the harnessing of
+Niagara for the purpose of sending electric currents hundreds of miles
+is the turbine wheel.
+
+[Illustration: THE SUPPOSED HERO ENGINE.]
+
+Hero appears to the popular imagination as the greatest inventor of the
+past. Every school boy knows him. Archimedes, the Greek, was the
+greater, and a hundred and fifty years the earlier, and was the author
+of the significance of the word "Eureka," as we use it now. But Hero was
+the pioneer in steam. He made the first steam-engine, and is immortal
+through a toy.
+
+The first _practical_ device in which expansion was used seems to
+have been for the exploiting of an ecclesiastical trick intended to
+impress the populace. There is a saying by an antique wit that no two
+priests or augurs could ever meet and look at each other without a
+knowing wink of recognition. Hero is said to have been the author of
+this contrivance also. The temple doors would open by themselves when
+the fire burned on the altar, and would close again when that fire was
+extinguished, and the worshippers would think it a miracle. It is
+interesting because it contained the principle upon which was afterwards
+attempted to be made the first working low-pressure or atmospheric
+steam-engine. Yet it was not steam, but air, that was used. A hollow
+altar containing air was heated by the fire being kindled upon it. The
+air expanded and passed through a pipe into a vessel below containing
+water. It pressed the water out through another pipe into a bucket
+which, being thereby made heavier, pulled open the temple doors. When
+the fire went out again there was a partial vacuum in the vessel that
+had held the water at first, and the water was sucked back through the
+pipe out of the bucket. That became lighter again and allowed the doors
+to close with a counter-weight. All that was then necessary to convince
+the populace of the genuineness of the seeming miracle was to keep them
+from understanding it. The machinery was under the floor. There have
+been thousands of miracles since then performed by natural agencies, and
+there have passed many ages since Hero's machine during which not to
+understand a thing was to believe it to be supernatural.
+
+[Illustration: THE TEMPLE-DOOR TRICK.]
+
+From the time of Hero until the seventeenth century there is no record
+of any attempt being made to utilize steam-pressure for a practical
+purpose. The fact seems strange only because steam-power is so prominent
+a fact with ourselves. The ages that intervened were, as a whole, times
+of the densest superstition. The human mind was active, but it was
+entirely occupied with miracle and semi-miracle; in astrology, magic and
+alchemy; in trying to find the key to the supernatural. Every thinker,
+every educated man, every man who knew more than the rest, was bent upon
+finding this key for himself, so that he might use it for his own
+advantage. During all those ages there was no idea of the natural
+sciences. The key they lacked, and never found, that would have opened
+all, is the fact that in the realm of science and experiment there is no
+supernatural, and only eternal law; that cause produces its effect
+invariably. Even Kepler, the discoverer of the three great laws that
+stand as the foundation of the Copernican system of the universe, was in
+his investigations under the influence of astrological and cabalistic
+superstitions. [Footnote: Kepler, a German, lived between 1571 and 1630.
+His life was full of vicissitudes, in the midst of which he performed an
+astonishing Even the science of amount of intellectual labor, with
+lasting results. He was the personal friend of Galileo and Tycho Brahe,
+and his life may be said to have been spent in finding the abstract
+intelligible reason for the actual disposition of the solar system, in
+which physical cause should take the place of arbitrary hypothesis. He
+did this.] medicine was, during those ages, a magical art, and the idea
+of cure by medicine, that drugs actually _cure_, is existent to
+this day as a remnant of the Middle Ages. A man's death-offense might be
+that he knew more than he could make others understand about the then
+secrets of nature. Yet he himself might believe more or less in magic.
+No one was untouched; all intellect was more or less enslaved.
+
+And when experiments at last began to be made in the mechanisms by which
+steam might be utilized they were such as boys now make for amusement;
+such as throwing a steam-jet against the vanes of a paddle-wheel. Such
+was Branca's engine, made nine years after the landing of our
+forefathers at Plymouth, and thought worthy of a description and record.
+The next attempt was much more practical, but cannot be accurately
+assigned. It consisted of two chambers, from each of which alternately
+water was forced by steam, and which were filled again by cooling off
+and the forming of a vacuum where the steam had been. One chamber worked
+while the other cooled. It was an immense advance in the direction of
+utility.
+
+About 1698, we begin to encounter the names that are familiar to us in
+connection with the history of the steam-engine. In that year Thomas
+Savery obtained a patent for raising water by steam. His was a
+modification of the idea described above. The boilers used would be of
+no value now, nevertheless the machine came into considerable use, and
+the world that learned so gradually became possessed with the idea that
+there was a utility in the pressure of steam. Savery's engine is said to
+have grown out of the accident of his throwing a flask containing a
+little wine on the fire at a tavern. Concluding immediately afterwards
+that he wanted it, he snatched it off of the fender and plunged it into
+a basin of water to cool it. The steam inside instantly condensing, the
+water rushed in and filled it as it cooled.
+
+We now come to the beginning of the steam engine as we understand the
+term; the machine that involves the use of the cylinder and piston.
+These two features had been used in pumps long before, the atmospheric
+pump being one of the oldest of modern machines. The vacuum was known
+and utilized long before the cause of it was known. [Footnote: The
+discoverer was an Italian, Torricelli, about 1643. Gallileo, his tutor
+and friend, did not know why water would not rise in a tube more than
+thirty-three feet. No one knew of the _weight of the atmosphere_,
+so late as the early days of this republic. Many did not believe the
+theory long after that time. Torricelli, by his experiments, demonstrated
+the fact and invented the mercurial barometer, long known as the
+"Torricellian Tube." This last instrument led to another discovery; that
+the weight of the atmosphere varied from time to time in the same
+locality, and that storms and weather changes were indicated by a rising
+and falling of the column of mercury in the tube of the
+siphon-barometer. That which we call the "weather-bureau," organized by
+General Albert J. Myer, United States Army, in 1870, and growing out of
+the army signal service, of which he was chief, makes its "forecasts" by
+the use of the telegraph and the barometer. The "low pressure area"
+follows a path, which means a change of weather on that path. Notices by
+telegraph define the route, and the coming storm is not foretold, but
+_foreknown;_ not prophesied, but _ascertained._ If we have
+been led from the crude pump of Gallileo's time directly to the weather
+bureau of the present with its invaluable signals to sailors and
+convenience to everybody, it is no more than is continually to be traced
+even to the beginning of the wonderful school of modern science.]
+
+But in the beginning it was not proposed to use steam in connection with
+the cylinder and piston which now really constitutes the steam-engine.
+Reverting again to the example of the gun, it was suggested to push a
+piston forward in a tube by the explosion of gunpowder behind it, or to
+repeat the Savery experiment with powder instead of steam. These ideas
+were those of about 1678-1685. The very earliest cylinder and piston
+engine was suggested by Denis Papin in 1690. These early inventors only
+went a portion of the way, and almost the entire idea of the
+steam-engine is of much later date. Mankind had then a singular gift of
+beginning at the wrong end. Every inventor now uses facts that seem to
+him to have been always known, and that are his by a kind of intuition.
+But they were all acquired by the tedious experience of a past that is
+distinguished by a few great names whose owners knew in their time
+perhaps one-tenth part as much as the modern inventor does, who is
+unconsciously using the facts learned by old experience. But the others
+began at the beginning.
+
+[Illustration: EARLY NEWCOMEN PUMPING ENGINE. STEAM-COCK, COLD WATER
+COCK AND WASTE-SPIGOT ALL WORKED BY HAND.]
+
+In 1711, almost a hundred years after the arrival at Jamestown and
+Plymouth of the fathers of our present civilization, the steam-engine
+that is called Newcomen's began to be used for the pumping of water out
+of mines. This engine, slightly modified, and especially by the boy who
+invented the automatic cut-off for the steam valves, was a most rude and
+clumsy machine measured by our ideas. There appears to have been
+scarcely a single feature of it that is now visible in a modern engine.
+The cylinder was always vertical. It had the upper end open, and was a
+round iron vessel in which a plunger moved up and down. Steam was let in
+below this plunger, and the walking-beam with which it was connected by
+a rod had that end of it raised. When raised the steam was cut off, and
+all that was then under the piston was condensed by a jet of cold water.
+The outside air-pressure then acted upon it and pushed it down again. In
+this down-stroke by air-pressure the work was done. The far end of the
+walking-beam was even counter-weighted to help the steam-pressure. The
+elastic force of compressed steam was not depended upon, was hardly even
+known, in this first working and practical engine of the world. Every
+engine of that time was an experimental structure by itself. The boiler,
+as we use it, was unknown. Often it was square, stayed and braced
+against pressure in a most complicated way. Yet the Newcomen engine held
+its place for about seventy-five years; a very long time in our
+conception, and in view of the vast possibilities that we now know were
+before the science. [Footnote: As late as 1880, the steam-engine
+illustrated and described in the "natural philosophy" text books was
+still the Newcomen, or Newcomen-Watt engine, and this while that engine
+was almost unknown in ordinary circumstances, and double-acting
+high-pressure engines were in operation everywhere. This last, without
+which not much could be done that is now done, was evidently for a long
+time after it came into use regarded as a dangerous and unphilosophical
+experiment, hardly scientific, and not destined to be permanently
+adopted.]
+
+In the year 1760, James Watt, who was by occupation what is now known as
+a model-maker, and who lived in Glasgow, was called upon to repair a
+model of a Newcomen engine belonging to the university. While thus
+engaged he was impressed with the great waste of steam, or of time and
+fuel, which is the same thing, involved in the alternate heating and
+cooling of Newcomen's cylinder. To him occurred the idea of keeping the
+cylinder as hot as the steam used in it. Watt was therefore the inventor
+of the first of those economies now regarded as absolute requirements in
+construction. He made the first "steam-jacket," and was, as well, the
+author of the idea of covering the cylinder with a coat of wood, or
+other non-conductor. He contrived a second chamber, outside of the
+cylinder, where the then indispensable condensation should take place.
+Then he gave this cylinder for the first time two heads, and let out the
+piston-rod through a hole in the upper head, with packing. He used steam
+on the upper side of the piston as well as the lower, and it will be
+seen that he came very near to making the modern engine.
+
+Yet he did not make it. He was still unable to dispense with the
+condensing and vacuum and air-pressure ideas. Acting for the first time
+in the line of real efficiency, he failed to go far enough to attain it.
+He made a double-acting engine by the addition of many new parts; he
+even attained the point of applying his idea to the production of
+circular motion. But he merely doubled the Newcomen idea. His engine
+became the Newcomen-Watt. He had a condensing chamber at each end of the
+stroke and could therefore command a reciprocating movement. The
+walking-beam was retained, not for the purpose for which it is often
+used now, but because it was indispensable to his semi-atmospheric
+engine.
+
+[Illustration: THE PERFECTED NEWCOMEN-WATT ENGINE.]
+
+It may seem almost absurd that the universal crank-movement of an engine
+was ever the subject of a patent. Yet such was the case. A man named
+Pickard anticipated Watt, and the latter then applied to his engines the
+"sun-and-planet" movement, instead of the crank, until the patent on the
+latter expired. The steam-engine marks the beginning of a long series of
+troubles in the claims of patentees.
+
+In 1782 came Watt's last steam invention, an engine that used steam
+_expansively_. This was an immense stride. He was also at the same
+time the inventor of the "throttle," or choke valve, by which he
+regulated the supply of steam to the piston. It seems a strange thing
+that up to this time, about 1767, an engine in actual use was started by
+getting up steam enough to make it go, and waiting for it to begin, and
+stopped by putting out the fire.
+
+Then he invented the "governor," a contrivance that has scarcely changed
+in form, and not at all in action, since it was first used, and is one
+of the few instances of a machine perfect in the beginning. Two balls
+hang on two rods on each side of an upright shaft, to which the rods are
+hinged. The shaft is rotated by the engine, and the faster it turns the
+more the two balls stand out from it. The slower it turns the more they
+hang down toward it. Any one can illustrate this by whirling in his
+hands a half-open umbrella. There is a connection between the movement
+of these balls and the throttle; as they swing out more they close it,
+as they fall closer to the shaft they open it. The engine will therefore
+regulate its own speed with reference to the work it has to do from
+moment to moment.
+
+[Illustration: THE GOVERNOR.]
+
+Through all these changes the original idea remained of a vacuum at the
+end of every stroke, of indispensable assistance from atmospheric
+pressure, of a careful use of the direct expansive power of steam, and
+of the avoidance of the high pressures and the actual power of which
+steam is now known to be safely capable. [Footnote: In a reputable
+school "philosophy" printed in 1880, thus: "In some engines" (describing
+the modern high-pressure engine, universal in most land service) "the
+apparatus for condensing steam alternately above and below the piston is
+dispensed with, and the steam, after it has moved the piston from one
+end of the cylinder to the other, is allowed to escape, by the opening
+of a valve, directly into the air. To accomplish this it is evident that
+the steam must have an elastic force greater than the pressure of the
+air, _or it could not expand and drive out the waste steam on the
+other side of the piston, in opposition to the pressure of the air_."
+According to this teaching, which the young student is expected to
+understand and to entirely believe, a pressure of steam of, say eighty
+to a hundred and twenty pounds to the inch on one side of the piston is
+accompanied by an absolute vacuum there, which permits the pressure of
+the outside air to exert itself against the opposite side of the piston
+through the open port at the other end of the cylinder. That is, a state
+of things which would exist if the steam behind the piston _were
+suddenly condensed_, exists anyway. If it be true the facts should be
+more generally known; if not, most of the school "philosophies" need
+reviewing.] Then an almost unknown American came upon the scene. In
+English hands the story at once passes from this point to the
+experiments of Trevethick and George Stevenson with steam as applied to
+railway locomotion. But as Watt left it and Trevethick found it, the
+steam engine could never have been applied to locomotion. It was slow,
+ponderous, complicated and scientific, worked at low pressures, and Watt
+and his contemporaries would have run away in affright from the
+innovation that came in between them and the first attempts of the
+pioneers of the locomotive. This innovation was that of Evans, the
+American, of whom further presently.
+
+The first steam-engine ever built in the United States was probably of
+the Watt pattern, in 1773. In 1776, the year of beginning for ourselves,
+there were only two engines of any kind in the colonies; one at Passaic,
+N. J., the other at Philadelphia. We were full of the idea of the
+independence we had won soon afterwards, but in material respects we had
+all before us.
+
+In 1787, Oliver Evans introduced improvements in grain mills, and was
+generally efficient as one of the beginners in the field of American
+invention. Soon afterwards he is known to have made a steam-engine which
+was the first high-pressure double-acting engine ever made. The engine
+that used steam at each end of the cylinder with a vacuum and a
+condenser, was in this first instance, so far as any record can be
+found, supplanted by the engine of to-day. The reason of the delay it is
+difficult to account for on any other grounds than lack of boldness, for
+unquestionably the early experimenters knew that such an engine could be
+made. They were afraid of the power they had evoked. Such a machine may
+have seemed to them a willful toying with disaster. Their efforts were
+bent during many years toward rendering a treacherous giant useful, yet
+entirely harmless. Their boilers, greatly improved over those I have
+mentioned, never were such as were afterwards made to suit the high
+pressures required by the audacity of Hopkins. This audacity was the
+mother of the locomotive, and of that engine which almost from that date
+has been used for nearly every purpose of our modern life that requires
+power. The American innovation may have passed unnoticed at the time,
+but intentionally or otherwise it was imitated as a preliminary to all
+modern engines. Nearly a century passed between the making of the first
+practical engine and that one which now stands as the type of many
+thousands. But now every little saw-mill in the American woods could
+have, and finally did have, its little cheap, unscientific, powerful and
+non-vacuum engine, set up and worked without experience, and maintained
+in working order by an unskilled laborer. A thousand uses for steam grew
+out of this experiment of a Yankee who knew no better than to tempt fate
+with a high-pressure and speed and recklessness that has now become
+almost universal.
+
+There was with Watt and his contemporaries apparently a fondness for
+cost and complications. Most likely the finished Watt engine was a
+handsome and stately machine, imposing in its deliberate movements.
+There is apparently nothing simpler than the placing of the head of the
+piston-rod between two guide-pieces to keep it in line and give it
+bearing. Yet we have only to turn back a few years and see the elaborate
+and beautiful geometrical diagram contrived by Watt to produce the same
+simple effect, and known as a "parallel motion." It kept its place until
+the walking-beam was cast away, and the American horizontal engine came
+into almost universal use.
+
+The object of this chapter so far has been to present an idea of
+beginnings; of the evolution of the universal and indispensable machine
+of civilization. The steam-engine has given a new impetus to industry,
+and in a sense an added meaning to life. It has made possible most that
+was ever dreamed of material greatness. It has altered the destiny of
+this nation, and other nations, made greatness out of crude beginnings,
+wealth out of poverty, prosperity upon thousands of square miles of
+uninhabitable wilderness. It was the chiefest instrumentality in the
+widening of civilization, the bringing together of alien peoples, the
+dissemination of ideas. Electricity may carry the idea; steam carries
+the man with the idea. The crude misconceptions of old times existed
+naturally before its time, and have largely vanished since it came.
+Marco Polo and Mandeville and their kind are no longer possibilities.
+Applied to transportation, locomotion alone, its effects have been
+revolutionary. Applied to common life in its minute ramifications these
+effects could not have been believed or foretold, and are incredible.
+The thought might be followed indefinitely, and it is almost impossible
+to compare the world as we know it with the world of our immediate
+ancestors. Only by means of contrasts, startling in their details, can
+we arrive at an adequate estimate, even as a moral farce, of the power
+of steam as embodied in the modern engine in a thousand forms.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Perhaps it might be well to attempt to convey, for the benefit of the
+youngest reader, an idea of the actual working of the machine we call a
+steam-engine. There are hundreds of forms, and yet they are all alike
+in essentials. To know the principle of one is to know that of all.
+There is probably not an engine in the world in effective common
+use--the odd and unusual rotary and other forms never having been
+practical engines--that is not constructed upon the plan of the cylinder
+and piston. These two parts make the engine. If they are understood only
+differences in construction and detail remain.
+
+Imagine a short tube into which you have inserted a pellet, or wad of
+any kind, so that it fits tolerably, yet moves easily back and forth in
+the bore of the tube. If this pellet or wad is at one end of the tube
+you may, by inserting that end in your mouth and putting air-pressure
+upon it, make it slide to the other end. You do not touch it with
+anything; you may push it back and forth with your breath as many times
+as you wish, not by blowing against it, so to speak, but by producing an
+actual air-pressure upon it which is confined by the sides of the tube
+and cannot go elsewhere. The only pressure necessary is enough to move
+the pellet.
+
+Now, if you push this little pellet one way by the air-pressure from
+your mouth, and then, instead of reversing the tube in the mouth and
+pushing it back again in the same way, reverse the process and suck the
+air out from behind it, it comes back by the pressure of the outside
+atmosphere. This was the way the first steam engines worked. Their only
+purpose was to get the piston lifted, and air-pressure did all the
+actual work.
+
+If you turn the tube, and put an air-pressure first at one end and then
+at the other, and pay no attention to vacuum or atmospheric pressure,
+you will have the principle of the later modern, almost universal,
+high-pressure, double-acting steam-engine.
+
+But now you must imagine that the tube is fixed immovably, and that the
+air-pressure is constant in a pipe leading to the tube, and yet must be
+admitted first to one end of the tube and then to the other alternately,
+in order to push the pellet back and forth in it. It seems simple.
+Perhaps the young reader can find a way to do it, but it required about
+a hundred years for ingenious men to find out how to do precisely the
+same thing automatically. It involves the steam-chest and the
+slide-valve, and all other kinds of steam valves that have been
+invented, including the Corliss cut-off, and all others that are akin to
+it in object and action.
+
+But now imagine the tube closed at each end to begin with, and the
+little moving pellet, or plunger, on the inside. To get the air into
+both ends of the tube alternately, and to use its pressure on each side
+of the pellet, we will suppose that the air-pipe is forked, and that one
+end of each fork is inserted into the side of the tube near the end,
+like the figure below, and imagine also that you have put a finger over
+each end of the tube.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 1]
+
+We are now getting the air-pressure through the pipe in both ends of the
+tube alike, and do not move the pellet either way. To make it move we
+must do something more, and open one end of the tube, and close that
+fork of the air-pipe, and thus get all the pressure on one side of the
+pellet. Remove one finger from the end of the tube, and pinch the fork
+of the air-tube that is on that side. The pellet will now move toward
+that end of the tube which is open. Reverse the process, and it can be
+pushed back again with air-pressure to the other end, and so on
+indefinitely.
+
+Let us improve the process. We will close each end of the tube
+permanently, and insert four cocks in the tube and forked pipe.
+
+We have here two tubes inserted at each end of the large tube, and in
+each of these is a cock. We have each cock connected by a rod to the
+lever set on a pin in the middle of the tube. We must have these cocks
+so arranged that when the lever is moved (say) to the right, A. is
+opened and B. is closed, and D. is opened and C. is closed. Now if the
+air-pressure is constant through the forked air-tube, and the cock E. is
+open, if the top of the lever is moved to the right, the pellet will be
+pushed to the left in the large tube. If the lever is moved to the left,
+and the two cocks that were open are closed, and the two that were
+closed are opened again, the pellet will be sent back to the other end
+of the tube. This movement of the pellet in the tube will occur as often
+as the lever is moved and there is any air-pressure in the forked tube.
+There is a _supply_-cock, opened and an _escape_-cock closed,
+and an escape-cock _opened_ and a supply-cock _closed_, at
+each end of the tube, _every time the lever is moved_.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 2]
+
+We are using air instead of steam, and the movement of these four cocks
+all at the same time, and the result of moving them, is precisely that
+of the slide-valve of a steam-engine. The diagrams of this slide-valve
+would be difficult to understand. The action of the cocks can be more
+readily understood, and the result, and even much of the action, is
+precisely the same.
+
+But to make the arrangement entirely efficient we must go a little
+further into the construction of a steam-engine. The pellet in the tube
+has no connection with the outside, and we can get nothing from it. So
+we give it a stem, thus: and when we do so we change it into a piston
+and its rod. Where it passes through the stopper at the end of the tube
+it must pass air- (or steam-) tight. Then as we push the piston back and
+forth we have a movement that we can attach to machinery at the end of
+the rod, and get a result from. We also move the cocks, or valves,
+automatically by the movement of the rod.
+
+[Illustration: Fig. 3]
+
+Turning now to Fig. 3 again let us imagine a connection made between the
+rod and the end of the lever in Fig. 2. Now put on the air (or steam)
+pressure, and when the piston has reached the right-hand end of the tube
+it automatically, by its connections, closes B. and opens A., and opens
+D. and closes C. The pellet will be pushed back in the tube and go to
+the other end of it, through the pressure coming against the piston
+through the part of the air tube where the cock D. is open. It reaches
+the left-hand end of the tube, and we must imagine that when it gets
+there it, in the same manner and by the proper connections, closes D.,
+opens C., closes A. and opens B. If these mechanical movements are
+completed it must be plain that so long as the air (or steam) pressure
+is continued in the forked pipe the piston will automatically cut off
+its supply and open its escape at each alternate end, and move back and
+forth. Any boy can see how a backward and forward movement may be made
+to give motion to a crank. All other details in an engine are questions
+of convenience in construction, and not questions of principle or manner
+of action.
+
+Of older readers, I might request the supposition that, in Fig. 2, only
+the valves A. and B. were automatically and invariably opened and closed
+by the action of the piston-rod of Fig. 3, and that C. and D. were
+controlled solely by the governor, before mentioned, which we will
+suppose to be located at E. Then the escape of the steam ahead of the
+piston must always come at the same time with reference to the stroke,
+but the supply will depend upon the requirements of each individual
+stroke, and the work it has to do, and afford to the piston a greater or
+less push, as the emergencies of that particular instant may require.
+This arrangement would be one of regularity of movement and of economy
+in the use of steam. That which is needed is supplied, and no more. This
+is the principle and the object of the Corliss cut-off, and of all
+others similar to it in purpose. Their principle is that _only the
+escape is automatically controlled by the movements of the
+piston-rod_, occurring always at the same time with reference to the
+stroke, while _the supply is under control of the movement of the
+governor_, and regulated according to the emergencies of the
+movement. The governor, in any of its forms, as ordinarily applied,
+performs only half of this function. It regulates the general supply of
+steam to the cylinder, but the supply-valve continues to be opened,
+always to full width, and always at the same moment with reference to
+the stroke. With the two separate sets of automatic machinery required
+by engines of the Corliss type, the piston does not always receive its
+steam at the beginning of the stroke, and the supply may be cut off
+partially or entirely at any point in its passage along the cylinder, as
+the work to be done requires. The economic value of such an arrangement
+is manifest. No attempt is made here to explain by means of elaborate
+diagrams. It is believed that if the reason of things, and the principle
+of action, is clear, the particulars may be easily studied by any reader
+who is disposed to master mechanical details.
+
+
+
+
+THE AGE OF STEEL
+
+
+In very recent times the processes of civilization have had a strong and
+almost unnoted tendency toward the increased use of the _best_.
+Thus, most that iron once was, in use and practice, steel now is. This
+use, growing daily, widens the scope that must be taken in discussing
+the features of an Age of Steel. One name has largely supplanted the
+other. In effect iron has become steel. Had this chapter been written
+twenty, or perhaps ten, years earlier, it should have been more
+appropriately entitled the Age of Iron. A separation of the two great
+metals in general description would be merely technical, and I shall
+treat the subject very much as though, in accordance with the practical
+facts of the case, the two metals constituted one general subject, one
+of them gradually supplanting the other in most of the fields of
+industry where iron only was formerly used.
+
+The greatest progresses of the race are almost always unappreciated at
+the time, and are certainly undervalued, except by contrast and
+comparison. We must continually turn backward to see how far we have
+gone. An individual who is born into a certain condition thinks it as
+hard as any other until by experience and comparison he discovers what
+his times might have been. As for us, in the year 1894, we are not
+compelled to look backward very far to observe a striking contrast.
+
+[Illustration: IN OLD TIMES. PRYING OUT A "BLOOM."]
+
+All the wealth of today is built upon the forests and prairies and
+swamps of yesterday, and we must take a wider and more comprehensive
+glance backward if we should wish to institute those comparisons which
+make contrasts startling.
+
+We are accustomed to read and to hear of the "Age" of this or that.
+There was a "Stone" Age, beginning with the tribes to whom it came
+before the beginnings of their history, or even of tradition, and if we
+look far backward we may contrast our own time with the times of men who
+knew no metals. They were men. They lived and hoped and died as we do,
+even in what is now our own country. Often they were not even
+barbarians. They builded houses and forts, and dug drains and built
+aqueducts, and tilled the soil. They knew the value of those things we
+most value now, home and country; and they organized armies, and fought
+battles, and died for an idea, as we do. Yet all the time, a time ages
+long, the utmost help they had found for the bare and unaided hand was
+the serrated edge of a splintered flint, or the chance-found fragment
+beside a stream that nature, in a thousand or a million years of
+polishing, had shaped into the rude semblance of a hammer or a pestle.
+All men have in their time burned and scraped and fashioned all they
+needed with an astonishing faculty of making it answer their needs. They
+once almost occupied the world. Such were those who, so far as we know,
+were once the exclusive owners of this continent. They were an
+agricultural, industrious and home-loving people. [Footnote: The Mound
+Builders and Cave Dwellers. They knew only lead and copper.]
+
+Then came, with a strange leaving out of the plentiful and easily worked
+metals which are the subject of this chapter, the great Age of Bronze.
+This next stage of progress after stone was marked by a skillful alloy,
+requiring even now some scientific knowledge in its compounding of
+copper and tin. A thousand theories have been brought forward to account
+for this hiatus in the natural stages of human progress, the truth
+probably being that both tin and copper are more fusible than iron-ores,
+and that both are found as natural metals. Some accident such as
+accounts for the first glass, [Footnote: The story is told by Pliny.
+Some sailors, landing on the eastern coast of Spain, supported their
+cooking utensils on the sand with stones, and built a fire under them.
+When they had finished their meal, glass was found to have been made
+from the niter and sea-sand by the heat of their fire. The same thing
+has been done, by accident, in more recent times, and may have been done
+before the incident recounted. It is also done by the lightning striking
+into sand and making those peculiar glass tubes known as
+_Fulmenites_, found in museums and not very uncommon.] some
+camp-fire unintended fusion, produced the alloy that became the metal of
+all the arms and arts, and so remained for uncounted centuries. In this
+connection it is declared that the Age of Bronze knew something that we
+cannot discover; the art of tempering the alloy so that it would bear an
+edge like fine steel. If this be true and we could do it, we should by
+choice supplant the subject of this chapter for a thousand uses. As the
+matter stands, and in our ignorance of a supposed ancient secret, the
+tempering of bronze has an effect precisely opposite to that which the
+process has upon steel.
+
+Nevertheless, the old Age of Bronze had its vicissitudes. Those men knew
+nothing that we consider knowledge now. It was a time when some of the
+most splendid temples, palaces and pyramids were constructed, and these
+now lie ruined yet indestructible in the nooks and corners of a desert
+world. Perhaps the hard rock was chiselled with tools of tempered
+copper. The fact is of little importance now since the object of the art
+is almost unknown, and the scattered capitals and columns of Baalbeck
+are like monuments without inscriptions; the commemorating memorials of
+a memory unknown. The Age of Bronze and all other ages that have
+preceded ours lacked the great essentials that insure perpetuity. The
+Age of Steel, that came last, that is ours now; a degenerate time by all
+ancient standards; has for its crowning triumph a single machine which
+is alone enough to satisfy the union of two names that are to us what
+Caster and Pollux were to the bronze-armed Roman legions of the heroic
+time--the modern power printing-press.
+
+It may be well to ask and answer the question that at the first view may
+seem to the reader almost absurd. What is steel? The answer must, in the
+majority of instances, be given in accordance with the common
+conception; which is that it is not iron, yet very like it. The old
+classification of the metal, even familiarly known, needs now to be
+supplemented, since it does not describe the modern cast and malleable
+compounds of iron, carbon and metalloids used for structural purposes,
+and constituting at least three-fourths of the metal now made under the
+name of steel. The old term, steel, meant the cast, but malleable,
+product of iron, containing as much carbon as would cause the metal to
+harden when heated to redness and quenched in water. It must also be
+included in the definition that the product must be as free as possible
+from all admixtures except the requisite amount of carbon. This is
+"tool" steel. [Footnote: It must not be understood that tool steel was
+always a cast metal. In manufacturing, iron bars were laid together in
+a box or retort, together with powdered charcoal, and heated to a
+certain degree for a certain time. The carbon from the charcoal was
+absorbed by the iron, and from the blistered appearance of the bars when
+taken out this product was, and is known as "blister" steel.]
+
+And here occurs a strange thing. A skill in chemistry, the successor of
+alchemy, is the educational product of the highest form of civilization.
+
+[Illustration: ANCIENT SMELTING. A RUDE WALL ENCLOSING ALTERNATE LAYERS
+OF IRON ORE AND CHARCOAL.]
+
+Metallurgy is the highest and most difficult branch of chemistry. Steel
+is the best result of metallurgy. Yet steel is one of the oldest
+products of the race, and in lands that have been asleep since written
+history began. Wendell Phillips in a lecture upon "The Lost Arts,"--
+celebrated at the date of its delivery, but now obsolete because not
+touching upon advances made in science since Phillips's day,--states
+that the first needle ever made in England, in the time of Henry VIII,
+was made by a Negro, and that when he died the art died with him. They
+did not know how to prepare the steel or how to make the needle. He adds
+that some of the earliest travelers in Africa found a tribe in the
+interior who gave them better razors than the explorers had. Oriental
+steel has been celebrated for ages as an inimitable product. It is
+certainly true that by the simple processes of semi-barbarism the finest
+tool-steel has been manufactured, perhaps from the days of Tubal Cain
+downward. The keenness of edge, the temper whose secret is now unknown,
+the marvelous elasticity of the tools of ancient Damascus, are familiar
+by repute to every reader and have been celebrated for thousands of
+years. The swords and daggers made in central Asia two thousand years
+ago were more remarkable than any similar product of the present for
+elaborate and beautiful finish as well as for a cutting quality and a
+tenacity of edge unknown to modern days. All the tests and experiments
+of a modern government arsenal, with all the technical knowledge of
+modern times, do not produce such tool-steel. It is also alleged that
+the ancient weapons did not rust as ours do, and that the oldest are
+bright to this day. The steel tools and arms that are made in the
+strange country of India do not rust there, while in the same climate
+ours are eaten away. Besides the secret of tempering bronze, it would
+seem that among the lost arts [Footnote: Modern science dates from three
+discoveries. That of Copernicus, the effect of which was to separate
+scientific astronomy, the astronomy of natural law and defined cause,
+from astrology, or the astronomy of assertion and tradition. That of
+Torricelli and Paschal of the actual and measurable weight of the
+atmosphere, which was the beginning for us of the science of physics,
+and that of Lavoisier who suspected, and Priestly who demonstrated,
+oxygen and destroyed the last vestiges of the theory of alchemy. Stahl
+was the last of these, and Lavoisier the first of the new school in that
+which I have stated is the highest development of modern science,
+chemistry. In all these departments we have no adequate reason to assert
+that we are not ourselves mere students. Some of the functions of
+oxygen, and the simplest, were unknown within five years before the date
+of these chapters.]--a subject that it is easy to make too much
+of--there was a chemical ingredient or proportion in steel that we now
+know nothing of. The old lands of sameness and slumber have kept their
+secrets.
+
+The definition of the word "steel" has been the subject of a scientific
+quarrel on account of new processes. The grand distinguishing trait of
+steel, to which it owes all the qualities that make it valuable for the
+uses to which no other metal can be put, is _homogeneity due to
+fusion_. Wrought iron, while having similar chemical qualities, and
+often as much carbon, is _laminated in structure_. Structural
+qualities are largely increasing in importance, and as the structural
+compounds came gradually to be produced more and more by the casting
+processes; as they ceased to be laminated in structure and became
+homogeneous, they were called by the name of steel. The name has been
+based upon the structure of the material rather than upon its chemical
+ingredients as heretofore. There is now a disposition to call all
+compounds of iron that are crystalline in structure, made homogeneous by
+casting, by the general name of steel, and to distinguish all those
+whose structural quality is due to welding by the name of iron.
+[Footnote: It should be understood that the shapes of structural and
+other forms of what we now call steel are given by rolling the ingot
+after casting, and that the crystalline composition of the metal
+remains.] This is an outline of the controversy about the differences
+which should be expressed by a name, between tool steel and structural
+steel. In tool steel there is an almost infinite variety as to quality.
+The best is a high product of practical science, and how to make the
+best seems now, as hinted above, a lost art. It has, besides, a great
+variety. These varieties are only produced after thousands of
+experiments directed to finding out what ingredients and processes make
+toward the desired result. These processes, were they all known outside
+the manufactories of certain specialists, would little interest the
+general reader. All machinists know of certain brands of tool steel
+which they prefer. Tool steel is made especially for certain purposes;
+as for razors and surgical instruments, for saws, for files, for
+springs, for cutting tools generally. In these there may be little
+actual difference of quality or manufacture. The tempering of steel
+after it has been forged into shape is a specialty, almost a natural
+gift. The manufacture of tool steel, is, as stated, one of the most
+technical of the arts, and one of the most complicated of the
+applications of long experience and experiment.
+
+Cast steel was first made in 1770 by Huntsman, who for the first time
+melted the "blistered" steel, which until that time had been the tool
+steel of commerce, in a crucible. Since that time the process of melting
+wrought iron has become practical and cheap, and results in
+_crystalline_, instead of a laminated structure for all steels. The
+definition of steel now is that it is _a compound of iron which has
+been cast from a fluid state into a malleable mass._
+
+The ordinary test applied to distinguish wrought iron from steel is to
+ascertain whether the metal hardens with heating and suddenly cooling in
+cold water, becoming again softened on reheating and cooling slowly. If
+it does this it is steel of some quality, good or bad; if not, it is
+iron.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first mention of iron-ore in America is by Thomas Harriot, an
+English writer of the time of Raleigh's first colonies. He wrote a
+history of the settlement on Roanoke Island, in which he says: "In two
+places in the countrey specially, one about foure score and the other
+six score miles from the port or place where wee dwelt, wee founde neere
+the water side the ground to be rockie, which by the triall of a
+minerall man, was found to hold iron richly. It is founde in manie
+places in the countrey else." Harriot speaks further of "the small
+charge for the labour and feeding of men; the infinite store of wood;
+the want of wood and the deerness thereof in England." It was before the
+day of coal and coke, or of any of the processes known now. The iron
+mines of Roanoke Island were never heard of again.
+
+Iron-ore in the colonies is again heard of in the history of Jamestown,
+in 1607. A ship sailed from there in 1608 freighted with "iron-ore,
+sassafras, cedar posts and walnut boards." Seventeen tons of iron were
+made from this ore, and sold for four pounds per ton. This was the first
+iron ever made from American ores. The first iron-works ever erected in
+this country were, of course almost, burned by the Indians, in 1622, and
+in connection three hundred persons were killed.
+
+[Illustration: EARLY SMELTING IN AMERICA.]
+
+Fire and blood was the end of the beginning of many American industries.
+Ore was plentiful, wood was superabundant, methods were crude. They
+could easily excel the Virginia colonists in making iron in Persia and
+India at the same date. The orientals had certain processes, descended
+to them from remote times, discovered and practiced by the first
+metal-workers that ever lived. The difference in the situation now is
+that here the situation and methods have so changed that the story is
+almost incredible. There, they remain as always. The first instance of
+iron-smelting in America is a text from which might be taken the entire
+vast sermon of modern industrial civilization.
+
+The orientals lacked the steam-engine. So did we in America. The blast
+was impossible everywhere except by hand, and contrivances for this
+purpose are of very great antiquity. The bellows was used in Egypt three
+thousand years ago. It may be that the very first thought by primitive
+man was of how to smelt the metals he wanted so much and needed so
+badly. His efforts to procure a means of making his fire burn under his
+little dump of ore led him first into the science which has attained a
+new importance in very recent times, pneumatics. The first American
+furnaces were blown by the ordinary leather bellows, or by a contrivance
+they had which was called a "blowing tub," or by a very ancient machine
+known as a _"trompe"_ in which water running through a wooden pipe
+was very ingeniously made to furnish air to a furnace. It is when the
+means are small that ingenuity is actually shown. If the later man is
+deprived of the use of the latest machinery he will decline to undertake
+an enterprise where it is required. The same man in the woods, with
+absolute necessity for his companion, will show an astonishing capacity
+for persevering invention, and will live, and succeed.
+
+[Illustration: WATER-POWER BLOWING TUB.]
+
+In the lack of steam they learned, as stated, to use water-power for
+making the blast. The "blowing-tub" was such a contrivance. It was built
+of wood, and the air-boxes were square. There were two of these, with
+square pistons and a walking-beam between them. A third box held the air
+under a weighted piston and fed it to the furnace. Some of these were
+still in effective use as late as 1873. They were still used long after
+steam came. The entire machine might be called, correctly, a very large
+piston-bellows. A smaller machine with a single barrel may be found now,
+reduced, in the hands of men who clean the interior of pianos, and tune
+them.
+
+The first iron works built in the present United States that were
+commercially successful, were established in Massachusetts, in the town
+of Saugus, a few miles from Boston. The company had a monopoly of
+manufacture under grant for ten years. [Footnote: Some quaint records
+exist of the incidents of manufacturing in those times.
+
+In 1728, Samuel Higley and Joseph Dewey, of Connecticut, represented to
+the Legislature that Higley had, "with great pains and cost, found out
+and obtained a curious art by which to convert, change, or transmute,
+common iron into good steel sufficient for any use, and was the first
+that ever performed such an operation in America." A certificate, signed
+by Timothy Phelps and John Drake, blacksmiths, states that, in June,
+1725, Mr. Higley obtained from the subscribers several pieces of iron,
+so shaped that they could be known again, and that a few days later "he
+brought the same pieces which we let him have, and we proved them and
+found them good steel, which was the first steel that ever was made in
+this country, that we ever saw or heard of." But this remarkable
+transmuting process was not heard of again unless it be the process of
+"case-hardening," re-invented some years ago, and known now to mechanics
+as a recipe.
+
+The smallness of things may be inferred from the fact that, in 1740, the
+Connecticut Legislature granted to Messrs. Fitch, Walker & Wyllys "the
+sole privilege of making steel for the term of fifteen years, upon this
+condition that they should, in the space of two years, make half a ton
+of steel." Even this condition was not complied with and the term was
+extended.] They began in 1643, twenty-three years after the landing,
+which is one of the evidences of the anxiety of those troublesome people
+to be independent, and of how well men knew, even in those early times,
+how much the production of iron at home has to do with that
+independence. This new industry was, at all times, controlled and
+regulated by law.
+
+The very first hollow-ware casting made in America is said to be still
+in existence. It was a little kettle holding less than a quart.
+
+[Illustration: THE FIRST CASTING MADE IN AMERICA.]
+
+The beginnings of the iron industry in America were none too early.
+There came a need for them very soon after they had extended into other
+parts of New England, and into New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and
+Maryland. In 1775, there were a large number of small furnaces and
+foundries. But coal and iron, the two earth-born servants of national
+progress which are now always twins, were not then coupled. The first of
+them was out of consideration. The early iron men looked for water-falls
+instead, and for the wood of the primeval forest. [Footnote: It is now
+easy to learn that a coal-mine may be a more valuable possession than a
+gold-mine, and that iron is better as an industry than silver. There are
+mountains of iron in Mexico, but no coal, and silver-mines so rich that
+silver, smelted with expensive wood fuel, is the staple product of the
+country. Yet the people are among the poorest in Christendom. There is a
+ceaseless iron-famine, so that the chiefest form of railway robbery is
+the stealing of the links and pins from trains. There are almost no
+metal industries. A barbaric agriculture prevails for the want of
+material for the making of tools. The actual means of progress are not
+at hand, notwithstanding the product of silver, which goes by weight as
+a commodity to purchase most that the country needs.] They became very
+necessary to the country in 1755--when the "French" war came, and they
+then began the making of the shot and guns used in that struggle, and
+became accustomed to the manufacture in time for the Revolution. Looking
+back for causes conducive to momentous results, we may here find one not
+usually considered in the histories. But for the advancement of the iron
+industry in America, great for the time and circumstances, independence
+could not have been won, and even the _feeling_ and desire of
+independence would have been indefinitely delayed.
+
+The industry was slow, painful, and uncertain, only because the mechanic
+arts were pursued only to an extent possible with the skill and muscular
+energy of men. There were none of the wonderful automatic mechanisms
+that we know as machine-tools. There was only the almost unaided human
+arm with which to subdue the boundless savagery of a continent, and win
+independence and form a nation besides. The demand for huge masses of
+the most essential of the factors of civilization has grown since,
+because the ironclad and the big gun have come, and those inadequate
+forces and crude methods supplied for a time the demand that was small
+and imperative. The largest mass made then, and frequently spoken of in
+colonial records, was a piece called a "sow;" spelled then "sowe." It
+was a long, triangular mass, cast by being run into a trench made in
+sand. [Footnote: When, later, little side-trenches were made beside the
+first, with little channels to carry the metal into them, the smaller
+castings were naturally called "pigges." Hence our "pig-iron."]
+
+[Illustration: MAKING A TRENCH TO CAST A "SOWE."]
+
+Those were the palmy days of the "trip hammer." Nasmyth was not born
+until 1808, and no machine inventor had yet come upon the scene. The
+steam-hammer that bears his name, which means a ponderous and powerful
+machine in which the hammer is lifted by the direct action of steam in a
+piston, the lower end of whose rod is the hammer-head, has done more for
+the development of the iron industry than any other mechanical
+invention. It was not actually used until 1842, or '43. It finally, with
+many improvements in detail, grew into a monster, the hammer-head, or
+"tup," being a mass of many tons. And they of modern times were not
+content merely to let this great mass fall. They let in steam above the
+piston, and jammed it down upon the mass of glowing metal, with a shock
+that jars the earth. The strange thing about this Titanic machine is
+that it can crack an egg, or flatten out a ton or more of glowing iron.
+Hundreds of the forgings of later times, such as the wrought iron or
+steel frames of locomotives, and the shafts of steamers, and the forged
+modern guns, could not be made by forging without this steam hammer.
+
+[Illustration: THE STEAM HAMMER.]
+
+Then slowly came the period of all kinds of "machine tools." During the
+period briefly described above they could not make sheet metal. The
+rolling mill must have come, not only before the modern steam-boiler,
+but even before the modern plow could be made. Can the reader imagine a
+time in the United States when sheet metal could not be rolled, and even
+tin plates were not known? If so, he can instantly transport himself to
+the times of the wooden "trencher," and the "pewter" mug and pitcher, to
+the days when iron rails for tramways were unknown, and when even the
+"strap-iron," always necessary, was rudely and slowly hammered out on an
+anvil. [Footnote: About 1720, nails were the most needed of all the
+articles of a new country. Farmers made them for themselves, at home.
+The secret of how to roll out a sheet and split it into nail-rods was
+stolen from the one shop that knew how, at Milton, Mass., to give to
+another at Mlddleboro. The thief had the Biblical name of Hashay H.
+Thomas. He stole the secret while the hands of the Milton mill were gone
+to dinner, and served his country and broke up a small monopoly in so
+doing.]
+
+Shears came with the "rolls;" vast engines of gigantic biting capacity,
+that cut sheets of iron as a lady's scissors cut paper. This cut the
+squares of metal used for boiler plates, and the steam-engine having
+come, was turned to the manufacture of materials for its own
+construction. Others were able to bite off great bars.
+
+The first mill in which iron was rolled in America, was built in 1817
+near Connellsville, in Fayette county, Penn. Until 1844, the rolling
+mills of this country produced little more than bar-iron, hoops, and
+plates. All the early attempts at railroads used the "strap" rail;
+unless cast "fish-bellies" were used; which was flat bar-iron provided
+with counter sunk holes, in which to drive nails for holding the iron to
+long stringers of wood laid upon ties. When actual rail-making for
+railroads began, the rolling mill raised its powers to meet the
+emergency. The "T" rail, universally now used, was invented by Robert
+Stevens, president and chief engineer of the Camden and Amboy railroad,
+and the first of them were laid as track for that road in 1832. From
+this time until 1850, rolling mills for making "U" and "T" rails rapidly
+increased in number, but in that year all but two had ceased to be
+operated because of foreign competition.
+
+[Illustration: SHEARS FOR CUTTING BAR-IRON.]
+
+During some five years previous to this writing a revolution has taken
+place in the construction of buildings which has resulted in what is
+known as the "sky-scraper." This was, in many respects, the most
+startling innovation of times that are startling in most other respects,
+and was begun in that metropolis of surprises and successes, the city of
+Chicago. This innovation was really such in the matter of using steel in
+the entire framing of a commercial building, but it was not the first
+use of metal as a building material. The first iron beams used in
+buildings were made in 1854, in a rolling mill at Trenton, N. J., and
+were used in the construction of the Cooper Institute, and the building
+of Harper & Brothers. For these special rolls, of a special invention,
+were made. These have now become obsolete, and a new arrangement is used
+for what are known as "structural shapes."
+
+[Illustration: HYDRAULIC SHEARS. THE KNIFE HAS A PRESSURE OF 3,000 TONS,
+CLIPPING PIECES OF IRON TWO BY FOUR FEET.]
+
+I have spoken of the use of wood-fuel in the early stages of iron
+manufacture in this country, followed by the adoption exclusively of
+coal and its products. Then, many years later, came the departure from
+this in the use of gas for fuel. The first use of this kind is said to
+date as far back as the eighth century, and modifications of the idea
+had been put in practice in this country, in which gas was first made
+from coal and then used as fuel. Then came "natural gas." This product
+has been known for many centuries. It was the "eternal" fuel of the
+Persian fire-worshippers, and has been used as fuel in China for ages.
+Its earliest use in this country was in 1827, when it was made to light
+the village of Fredonia, N. Y. Probably its first use for manufacturing
+purposes was by a man named Tompkins, who used it to heat salt-kettles
+in the Kenawha valley in 1842. Its next use for manufacturing purposes
+was made in a rolling mill in Armstrong county, Penn., in 1874,
+forty-seven years after it had been used at Fredonia, and twenty-nine
+years after it had been used to boil salt.
+
+Now the use of natural gas as manufacturing fuel is universal, not alone
+over the spot where the gas is found, but in localities hundreds of
+miles away. It is one of the strangest developments of modern scientific
+ingenuity. That enormous battery of boilers, which was one of the most
+imposing spectacles of the Columbian Exhibition of 1893, whose roar was
+like that of Niagara, was fed by invisible fuel that came silently in
+pipes from a state outside of that where the great fair was held. We are
+left to the conclusion that the making of the coal into gas at the mine,
+and the shipping of it to the place of consumption through pipes, is
+more certain of realization than were a hundred of the early problems of
+American progress that have now been successful for so long that the
+date of their beginning is almost forgotten.
+
+THE STEEL OF THE PRESENT.--The story of steel has now almost been told,
+in that general outline which is all that is possible without an
+extensive detail not interesting to the general reader. In it is
+included, of necessity, a resum� of the progress, from the earliest
+times in this country, of the great industry which is more indicative
+than any other of the material growth of a nation. I now come to that
+time when steel began to take the place that iron had always held in
+structural work of every class. The differences between this structural
+steel and that which men have known by the name exclusively from remote
+ages, I have so far indicated only by reference to the well-known
+qualities of the latter. It now remains to describe the first.
+
+In 1846 an American named William Kelley was the owner of an iron-works
+at Eddyville, Ky. It was an early era in American manufactures of all
+kinds, and the district was isolated, the town not having five hundred
+inhabitants, and the best mechanical appliances were remote.
+
+In 1847, Kelley began, without suggestion or knowledge of any
+experiments going on elsewhere, to experiment in the processes now known
+as the "Bessemer," for the converting of iron into steel. To him
+occurred, as it now appears first, the idea that in the refining process
+fuel would be unnecessary after the iron was melted if _powerful
+blasts of air were forced into the fluid metal_. This is the basic
+principle of the Bessemer process. The theory was that the heat
+generated by the union of the oxygen of the air with the carbon of the
+metal, would accomplish the refining. Kelley was trying to produce
+malleable iron in a new, rapid and effective way. It was merely an
+economy in manufacture he was endeavoring to attain.
+
+To this end he made a furnace into which passed an air-blast pipe,
+through which a stream of air was forced into the mass of melted metal.
+He produced refined iron. Following this he made what is now called a
+"converter," in which he could refine fifteen hundred pounds of metal in
+five minutes, effecting a great saving in time and fuel, and in his
+little establishment the old processes were thenceforth dispensed with.
+It was locally known as "Kelley's air-boiling process." It proved
+finally to be the most important, in large results, ever conceived in
+metallurgy. I refer to it hurriedly, and do not attempt to follow the
+inventor's own description of his constructions and experiments. When he
+heard that others in England were following the same line of experiment,
+he applied for a patent. He was decided to be the first inventor of the
+process, and a patent was granted him over Bessemer, who was a few days
+before him. There is no question that others were more skillful, and
+with better opportunities and scientific associations, in carrying out
+the final details, mechanical and chemical, which have completed the
+Kelley process for present commercial uses. Neither is there any
+question that this back-woods iron-making American was the first to
+refine iron by passing through it, while fluid, a stream of air, which
+is the process of making that steel which is not tool steel, and yet is
+steel, the now almost universal material for the making of structures;
+the material of the Ferris wheel, the wonderful palaces of the Columbian
+exposition, the sky-scrapers of Chicago, the rails, the tacks,
+[Footnote: In the history of Rhode Island, by Arnold, it is claimed that
+the first cold cut nails in the world were made by Jeremiah Wilkinson,
+in 1777. The process was to cut them from an old chest-lock with a pair
+of shears, and head them in a smith's vise. Then small nails were cut
+from old Spanish hoops, and headed in a vise by hand. Needles and pins
+were made by the same person from wire drawn by himself. Supposing this
+to be the beginning of the cut-nail idea, _the machine for making
+them_ would still remain the actual and practical invention, since it
+would mark the beginning of the industry as such. The importance of the
+latter event may be measured by the fact that about the end of the last
+century there began a strong demand. In the homely farm-houses, or the
+little contracted shops of New England villages, the descendants of the
+Pilgrims toiled providently, through the long winter months, at beating
+into shape the little nails which play so useful a part in modern
+industry. A small anvil served to beat the wire or strip of iron into
+shape and point it; a vise worked by the foot clutched it between jaws
+furnished with a gauge to regulate the length, leaving a certain portion
+projecting, which, when beaten flat by a hammer, formed the head. This
+was industry, but not manufacture, for in 1890 the manufacturers of this
+country produced over _eight hundred million pounds_ of iron,
+steel, and wire nails, representing a consumption of this absolutely
+indispensable manufacture for that year, at the rate of over _twelve
+pounds_ for each individual inhabitant of the United States.] the
+fence-wire, the sheet-metal, the rails of the steam-railroads and the
+street-lines, the thousand things that cannot be thought of without a
+list, and which is a material that is furnished more cheaply than the
+old iron articles were for the same purposes.
+
+[Illustration: SECTIONAL VIEW OF A BESSEMER "CONVERTER."]
+
+The technical detail of steel-making is exceedingly interesting to
+students of applied science, but it _is_ detail, the key to which
+is in the process mentioned; the forcing of a stream of air through a
+molten mass of iron. The "converter" is a huge pitcher-shaped vessel,
+hung upon trunnions so as to be tilted, and it is usual to admit through
+these trunnions, by means of a continuing pipe, the stream of air. The
+converters may contain ten tons or more of liquid metal at one time,
+which mass is converted from iron into steel at one operation.
+
+Forty-five years ago, or less, works that could turn out fifty tons of
+iron in a day were very large. Now there are many that make _five
+hundred tons_ of steel in the same time. Then, nearly all the work
+was done by hand, and men in large numbers handled the details of all
+processes. Now it would be impossible for human hands and strength to do
+the work. The steel-mill is, indeed, the most colossal combination of
+Steam and Steel. There are tireless arms, moved by steam, insensible
+alike to monstrous strains and white heat, which seize the vast ingots
+and carry them to and fro, handling with incredible celerity the masses
+that were unknown to man before the invention of the Bessemer process.
+And all these operations are directed and controlled by a man who stands
+in one place, strangely yet not inappropriately named a "pulpit," by
+means of the hand-gear that gives them all to him like toys.
+
+No one who has seen a steel-mill in operation, can go away and really
+write a description of it; no artist or camera has ever made its
+portrait, yet it is the most impressive scene of the modern, the
+industrial, world. There is a "fervent heat," surpassing in its
+impressions all the descriptions of the Bible, and which destroys all
+doubt of fire with capacity to burn a world and "roll the heavens
+together as a scroll." There is a clang and clatter accompanying a
+marvelous order. There are clouds of steam. There are displays of sparks
+and glow surpassing all the pyrotechnics of art. Monstrous throats gasp
+for a draught of white-hot metal and take it at a gulp. Glowing masses
+are trundled to and fro. There are mountains of ore, disappearing in a
+night, and ever renewed. There is a railway system, and the huge masses
+are conveyed from place to place by locomotive engines. There is a water
+system that would supply a town. There may be miles of underground pipes
+bringing gas for fuel. Amid these scenes flit strong men, naked to the
+waist, unharmed in the red pandemonium, guiding every process,
+superintending every result; like other men, yet leading a life so
+strange that it is apparently impossible. The glowing rivers they
+escape; corruscating showers of flying white-hot metal do not fall upon
+them; the leaping, roaring, hungry, annihilating flames do not touch
+them; the gurgling streams of melted steel are their familiar
+playthings; yet they are but men.
+
+The "rolling" of these slabs and ingots into rails is a following
+operation still. The continuous rail is often more than a hundred feet
+in length, which is cut into three or four rails of thirty feet each,
+and it goes through every operation that makes it a "T" rail weighing
+ninety pounds to the yard with the single first heat. There are trains
+of rolls that will take in a piece of white-hot metal weighing six tons,
+and send it out in a long sheet three thirty-seconds of an inch thick
+and nearly ten feet wide. The first steel rails made in this country
+were made by the Chicago Rolling Mill Company, in May, 1865. Only six
+rails were then made, and these were laid in the tracks of the Chicago
+and North Western Railroad. It is said they lasted over ten years. The
+first nails, or tacks, were made of steel at Bridgewater, Mass., at
+about the same date.
+
+[Illustration: ROLLING INGOTS.]
+
+Some thirty years ago there were but two Bessemer converters in the
+United States, and the manufacture of steel did not reach then five
+hundred tons per annum. In 1890 the product was more than five million
+tons.
+
+In 1872 the price of steel was one hundred and eighty-six dollars per
+gross ton. It can be purchased now at varying prices less than thirty
+dollars per ton. The consumption of seventy millions of people is so
+great that it is difficult to imagine how so enormous a mass of almost
+imperishable material can be absorbed, and the latest figures show a
+consumption greatly in excess of those mentioned as the sum of
+manufactures.
+
+We turn again for the comparison without which all figures are valueless
+to the good year 1643, when the "General court" passed a resolve
+commending the great progress made in the manufacture of iron which they
+had licensed two years before, and granted the company still further
+privileges and immunities upon condition that it should furnish the
+people "with barre iron of all sorts for their use at not exceedynge
+twenty pounds per ton." We recall the first little piece of hollow ware
+made in America. We remember how old the old world is said to be and how
+long the tribes of men have plodded upon it, and then the picture
+appears of the progress that has grown almost under our eyes. The real
+Age of Steel began in 1865. It is not yet thirty years old. By
+comparison we are impressed with the fact that the real history of the
+metal is compressed into less than half an ordinary lifetime.
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF ELECTRICITY
+
+
+[Illustration: ERIPUIT CAELO FULMEN, SCEPTRUMQUE TYRANNIS.]
+
+There is a sense in which electricity may be said to be the youngest of
+the sciences. Its modern development has been startling. Its phenomena
+appear on every hand. It is almost literally true that the lighting has
+become the servant of man.
+
+But it is also the oldest among modern sciences. Its manifestations have
+been studied for centuries. So old is its story that it has some of the
+interest of a mediaeval romance; a romance that is true. Steam is gross,
+material, understandable, noisy. Its action is entirely comprehensible.
+The explosives, gunpowder, begriming the nations in all the wars since
+1350, nitroglycerine, oxygen and hydrogen in all the forms of their
+combination, seem to be gross and material, the natural, though
+ferocious, servants of mankind. But electricity floats ethereal, apart,
+a subtle essence, shining in the changing splendors of the aurora yet
+existent in the very paper upon which one writes; mysteriously
+everywhere; silent, unseen, odorless, untouchable, a power capable of
+exemplifying the highest majesty of universal nature, or of lighting the
+faint glow of the fragile insect that flies in the twilight of a summer
+night. Obedient as it has now been made by the ingenuity of modern man,
+docile as it may seem, obeying known laws that were discovered, not
+made, it yet remains shadowy, mysterious, impalpable, intangible,
+dangerous. It is its own avenger of the daring ingenuity that has
+controlled it. Touch it, and you die.
+
+Electricity was as existent when the splendid scenes described in
+Genesis were enacted before the poet's eye as it is now, and was
+entirely the same. Its very name is old. Before there were men there
+were trees. Some of these exuded gum, as trees do now, and this gum
+found a final resting place in the sea, either by being carried thither
+by the currents of the streams beside which those trees grew, or by the
+land on which they stood being submerged in some of the ancient changes
+and convulsions to which the world has been frequently subject. In the
+lapse of ages this gum, being indestructible in water, became a fossil
+beneath the waves, and being in later times cast up by storms on the
+shores of the Baltic and other seas, was found and gathered by men, and
+being beautiful, finally came to be cut into various forms and used as
+jewelry. One has but to examine his pipe-stem, or a string of yellow
+beads, to know it even now. It is amber. The ancient Greeks knew and
+used it as we do, and without any reference to what we now call
+"electricity" their name for it was ELEKTRON. The earliest mention of it
+is by Homer, a poet whose personality is so hidden in the mists of far
+antiquity that his actual existence as a single person has been doubted,
+and he mentions it in connection with a necklace made of it.
+
+But very early in human history, at least six hundred years before
+Christ, this elektron had been found to possess a peculiar property that
+was imagined to belong to it alone. It mysteriously attracted light
+bodies to it after it had been rubbed. Thales, the Franklin of his
+remote time, was the man who is said to have discovered this peculiar
+and mysterious quality of the yellow gum, and if it be true, to him must
+be conceded the unwitting discovery of electricity. It was the first
+step in a science that usurps all the prerogatives of the ancient gods.
+He recorded his discovery, and was impressed with awe by it, and
+accounted for the phenomenon he had observed by ascribing to the dull
+fossil a living soul. That is the unconscious impression still, after
+twenty-five hundred years have passed since Thales died; that hidden in
+the heart of electrical phenomena there is a weird sentience; what a
+Greek would consider something divine and immortal apart from matter.
+But neither Thales, nor Theophrastus, nor Pliny the elder, nor any
+ancient, could conceive of a fact but dimly guessed until the day of
+Franklin; that this secret of the silent amber was also that of the
+thunder-cloud, that the essence that drew to it a floating filament is
+also that which rends an oak, that had splintered their temples and
+statues, and had not spared even the image of Jupiter Tonans himself.
+The spectral lights which hung upon the masts of the ancient galleys of
+the Mediterranean were named Castor and Pollux, not electricity.
+Absolutely no discovery was made, though the religion of ancient Etruria
+was chiefly the worship of a spirit by them seen, but unknown; to us
+electrical science; a science chained, yet really unknown and still
+feared though chained. It is the story of this servitude only that is
+capable of being told, and the first weak bands were a hundred and
+forty-six years in forging; from the Englishman Gilbert's "_De
+Magnete_," to Franklin's Kite.
+
+During all this time, and to a great degree long after, electricity was
+a scientific toy. Experiences in the sparkling of the fur of cats, the
+knowledge that there were fishes that possessed a mysterious paralyzing
+power, and various common phenomena all attributable to some unknown
+common cause, did not greatly increase the sum of actual knowledge of
+the subject. There was no divination of what the future would bring, and
+not the least conception of actual and impending possibilities. When,
+finally, the greatest thinkers of their times began to investigate; when
+Boyle began to experiment, and even the transcendent genius of Newton
+stooped to enquiry; from the days of those giants down to those of the
+American provincial postmaster, Benjamin Franklin, a period of some
+seventy years, almost all the knowledge obtained was only useful in
+indicating how to experiment still further. So small was the knowledge,
+so aimless the long experimenting, that the discovery that not amber
+only, but other substances as well, possessed the electric quality when
+rubbed, was a notable advance in knowledge. Later, in 1792, it was found
+by Gray that certain substances possessed the power of carrying;
+"conducting" as we now term it; the mysterious fluid from one substance
+to another; from place to place. This discovery constituted an actual
+epoch in the history of the science, and justly, since this small
+beginning with a wet string and a cylinder of glass or a globe of
+sulphur was the first unwitting illustration of the net-work of wires
+now hanging all over the world. The next step was to find that all
+substances were not alike in a power to conduct a current; _i.e._,
+that there were "conductors" and "non-conductors," and all varying
+grades and powers between. The next discovery was that there were, as
+was then imagined, several kinds of electricity. This conclusion was
+incorrect, and its use was to lead at last to the discovery, by
+Franklin, that the many kinds were but two, and even these not kinds,
+but qualities, present always in the unchanging essence that is
+everywhere, and which are known to us now by the names that Franklin
+gave them; the _positive_ and _negative_ currents; one always
+present with the other, and in every phenomenon known to electrical
+science.
+
+Probably the first machine ever contrived for producing an electric
+current was made by a monk, a Scotch Benedictine named Gordon who lived
+at Erfurt, in Saxony. I shall have occasion, hereafter, to describe
+other machines for the same purpose, and this first contrivance is of
+interest by comparison. It was a cylinder of glass about eight inches
+long, with a wooden shaft in the center, the ends of which were passed
+through holes in side-pieces, and it is said to have been operated by
+winding a string around the shaft and drawing the ends of the string
+back and forth alternately.
+
+[Illustration: THE FIRST ELECTRICAL MACHINE.]
+
+The Franklinic machine, the modern glass disc fitted with combs,
+rubbers, bands and cranks, is nothing more in principle or manner of
+action than the first crude arrangement of the monk of Erfurt.
+
+All these experiments, and all that for many years followed, were made
+in electricity produced by friction; by rubbing some body like glass,
+sulphur or rosin. Many men took part in producing effects that were
+almost meaningless to them--the preliminaries to final results for us.
+Improved electrical machines were made, all seeming childish and
+inadequate now, and all wonderful in their day. There is a long list of
+immortal names connected with the slow development of the science, and
+among their experiments the seventeenth century passed away. Dufaye and
+the Abbe Nollet worked together about 1730, and mutually surprised each
+other daily. Guericke, better known as the inventor of the air-pump,
+made a sulphur-ball machine, often claimed to have been the first.
+Hawkesbee constructed a glass machine that was an improvement over that
+of Guericke. Stephen Gray unfolded the leading principles of the
+science, but without any understanding of their results as we now
+understand them. The next advance was made in finding a way to hold some
+of the electricity when gathered, and the toy which we know as the
+Leyden Jar surprised the scientific world. Its inventor, Professor
+Muschenbrock, wrote an account of it to R�aumur, and lacks language to
+express the terror into which his own experiments had thrown him. He had
+unwittingly accumulated, and had accidentally discharged, and had, for
+the first time in human experience, felt something of the shock the
+modern lineman dreads because it means death. He had toiled until he
+held the baleful genie in a glass vessel partially filled with water,
+and the sprite could not be seen. Accidentally he made a connection
+between the two surfaces of the jar, and declared that he did not
+recover from the experience for two days, and that nothing could induce
+him to repeat it. He had been touched by the lightning, and had not
+known it. [Footnote: The Leyden Jar has little place in the usefulness
+of modern electricity, and has no relationship with the modern so-called
+"Storage" Battery.]
+
+Then began the fakerism which attached itself to the science of
+electricity, and that has only measurably abandoned it in very late
+times. Itinerant electricians began to infest the cities of Europe,
+claiming medicinal and almost supernatural virtues for the mysterious
+shock of the Leyden Vial, and showing to gaping multitudes the quick and
+flashing blue spark which was, though no man knew it then, a miniature
+imitation of the bolt of heaven. That fact, verging as closely upon the
+sublimest power of nature as a man may venture to and live, was not even
+suspected until Franklin had invented a battery of such jars, and had
+performed hundreds of experiments therewith that finally established in
+his acute, though prosaic, mind the identity of his puny spark with that
+terrific flash that, until that time, had been regarded by all mankind
+as a direct and intentional expression of the power of Almighty God.
+
+Thus Franklin came into the field. He was an investigator who brought to
+his aid a singular capacity possessed by the very few; the capacity for
+an unbiased looking for the hidden reasons of things. There was no field
+too sacred or too old for his prying investigations and his private
+conclusions. He was, as much as any man ever is, an original thinker. He
+knew of all the electrical experiments of others, and they produced in
+his mind conclusions distinctly his own. He was, upon topics pertaining
+to the field of reason, experience and common sense, the clearest and
+most vigorous writer of his time save one, and such conclusions as he
+arrived at he knew how to promulgate and explain. All that Franklin
+discovered would but add to the tedium of the subject of electricity
+now, but from his time definitely dates the knowledge that of
+electricity, in all its developments, there is really but one kind,
+though for convenience sake we may commonly speak of two, or even more.
+He first gave the names by which they are still known to the two
+qualities of one current; a name of convenience only. He knew first a
+fact that still puzzles inquiry, and is still largely unknown--that
+electricity is not _created_, produced, manufactured, by any human
+means, and that all we may do, then or now, is to gather it from its
+measureless diffusion in the air, the world, or the spaces of the wide
+creation, and that, like "heat" and "cold," it is a relative term. He
+demonstrated that any body which has electricity gives it to any other
+body that has at the moment less. Before he had actually tried that
+celebrated experiment which is alone sufficient to give him place among
+the immortals, he had declared the theory upon which he made it to be
+true, and by reasoning, in an age that but dimly understood the force
+and conditions of inductive reason, had proved that lightning is but an
+electric spark. It seems hardly necessary to add that his theories were
+ridiculed by the most intelligent scientists of his time, and scoffed at
+even by the countrymen of Newton and Davy, the members of the Royal
+Society of England. Franklin was a provincial American, and had, in
+other fields than electricity, troubled the British placidity.
+
+[Illustration: B. FRANKLIN]
+
+Only one of these, a man named Collinson, saw any value in these
+researches of the provincial in the wilds of America. He published
+Franklin's letters to him. Buffon read them, and persuaded a friend to
+translate them into French. They were translated afterwards into many
+languages, and when in his isolation he did not even know it, the
+obscure printer, the country postmaster who kept his official accounts
+with his own hands, was the bearer of a famous name. He was assailed by
+the Nollet previously mentioned, and by a party of French philosophers,
+yet there arose, in his absence and without his knowledge, a party who
+called themselves distinctively "Franklinists."
+
+Then came the personal test of the truth of these theories that had been
+promulgated over Europe in the name of the unknown American. He was then
+forty-five years old, successful in his walk and well-known in his
+immediate locality, but by no means as prominent or famous among his
+neighbors as he was in Europe. He was not so fertile in resources as to
+be in any sense inspired, and had privately waited for the finishing of
+a certain spire in the little town of Philadelphia so that he might use
+it to get nearer to the clouds to demonstrate his theory of lightning.
+It was in June, 1752, that this great exemplar of the genius of
+common-sense descended to the trial of the experiment that was the
+simplest and the most ordinary and the most sublime; the commonest in
+conception and means yet the most famous in results; ever tried by man.
+He had grown impatient of delay in the matter of the spire, and hastily,
+as by a sudden thought, made a kite. It was merely a silk handkerchief
+whose four corners were attached to the points of two crossed sticks. It
+was only the idea that was great; the means were infantile. A thunder
+shower came over, and in an interval between sprinklings he took with
+him his son, and went by back ways and alleys to a shed in an open
+field. The two raised the kite as boys did then and do now, and stood
+within the shelter. There was a hempen string, and on this, next his
+hand, he had tied a bit of ribbon and an ordinary iron key. A cloud
+passed over without any indications of anything whatever. But it began
+to rain, and as the string became wet he noticed that the loose
+filaments were standing out from it, as he had often seen them do in his
+experiments with the electrical machine. He drew a spark from the key
+with his finger, and finally charged a Leyden jar from this key, and
+performed all the then known proof-experiments with the lightning drawn
+from heaven.
+
+It is manifest that the slightest indication of the presence of the
+current in the string was sufficient to have demonstrated the fact which
+Franklin sought to fix. But it would have been insufficient to the
+general mind. The demonstration required was absolute. Even among
+scientists of the first class less was then known about electricity and
+its phenomena, and the causes of them, than now is known by every child
+who has gone to school. No estimate of the boldness and value of
+Franklin's renowned experiment can be made without a full appreciation
+of his times and surroundings. He demonstrated that which was undreamed
+before, and is undoubted now. The wonders of one age have been the toys
+and tools of the next through the entire history of mankind. The meaning
+of the demonstration was deep; its results were lasting The
+experimenters thereafter worked with a knowledge that their
+investigations must, in a sense, include the universe. Perhaps the
+obscure man who had toyed with the lightnings himself but vaguely
+understood the real meaning of his temerity. For he had, as usual, an
+intensely practical purpose in view. He wished to find a way of "drawing
+from the heavens their lightnings, and conducting them harmless to the
+earth." He was the first inventor of a practical machine, for a useful
+purpose, with which electricity had to do. That machine was the
+lightning-rod. Whatever its purpose, mankind will not forget the simple
+greatness of the act. At this writing the statue of Franklin stands
+looking upward at the sky, a key in his extended hand, in the portico of
+a palace which contains the completest and most beautiful display of
+electrical appliances that was ever brought together, at the dawn of
+that Age of Electricity which will be noon with us within one decade.
+The science and art of the civilized world are gathered about him, and
+on the frieze above his head shines, in gold letters, that sentence
+which is a poem in a single line. "ERIPUIT CAELO FULMEN, SCEPTRUMQUE
+TYRANNIS." [Footnote: "He snatched the lightning from heaven, and the
+sceptre from tyrants."]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE MAN FRANKLIN.--Benjamin Franklin was born at Boston, Mass., Jan.
+17th, 1706. His father was a chandler, a trade not now known by that
+term, meaning a maker of soaps and candles. Benjamin was the fifteenth
+of a family of seventeen children. He was so much of the same material
+with other boys that it was his notion to go to sea, and to keep him
+from doing so he was apprenticed to his brother, who was a printer. To
+be apprenticed then was to be absolutely indentured; to belong to the
+master for a term of years. Strangely enough, the boy who wanted to be a
+sailor was a reader and student, captivated by the style of the
+_Spectator_, a model he assiduously cultivated in his own extensive
+writings afterwards. He was not assisted in his studies, and all he ever
+knew of mathematics he taught himself. Being addicted to literature by
+natural proclivity he inserted his own articles in his brother's
+newspaper, and these being very favorably commented upon by the local
+public, or at least noticed and talked about, his authorship of them was
+discovered, and this led to a quarrel between the two brothers.
+Nevertheless, when James, the elder brother, was imprisoned for alleged
+seditious articles printed by him, the paper was for a time issued in
+young Benjamin's name. But the quarrel continued, the boy was imposed
+upon by his master, and brother, as naturally as might have been
+expected under the circumstances of the younger having the monopoly of
+all the intellectual ability that existed between the two, and in 1723,
+being then only seventeen, he broke his indentures, a heinous offense in
+those times, and ran away, first to New York and then to Philadelphia,
+where he found employment as a journeyman printer. He had attained a
+skill in the business not usual at the time.
+
+The boy had, up to this time, read everything that came into his hands.
+A book of any kind had a charm for him. His father observing this had
+intended him for the ministry, that being the natural drift of a pious
+father's mind in the time of Franklin's youth, when he discovered any
+inclination to books on the part of a son. But, later, he would neglect
+the devotions of the Sabbath if he had found a book, notwithstanding the
+piety of his family. Sometimes he distressed them further by neglecting
+his meals, or sitting up at night, for the same reason. There is no
+question that young Franklin was a member of that extensive fraternity
+now known as "cranks." [Footnote: Most people, then and now, can point
+to people of their acquaintance whom they hold in regard as originals or
+eccentrics. It is a somewhat dubious title for respect, even with us who
+are reckoned so eccentric a nation. And yet all the great inventions
+which have done so much for civilization have been discovered by
+eccentrics--that is, by men who stepped out of the common groove; who
+differed more or less from other men in their habits and ideals.] He
+read a book advocating exclusive subsistence upon a vegetable diet and
+immediately adopted the idea, remaining a disciple of vegetarianism for
+several years. But there is another reason hinted. He saved money by the
+vegetable scheme, and when his printer's lunch had consisted of
+"biscuits (crackers) and water" for some days, he had saved money enough
+to buy a new book.
+
+This young printer, who, at school, in the little time he attended one,
+had "failed entirely in mathematics," could assimilate "Locke on the
+Understanding," and appreciate a translation of the Memorabilia of
+Xenophon. Even after his study of this latter book he had a fondness for
+the calm reasoning of Socrates, and wished to imitate him in his manner
+of reasoning and moralizing. There is no question but that the great
+heathen had his influence across the abyss of time upon the mind of a
+young American destined also to fill, in many respects, the foremost
+place in his country's history. There was one, at least, who had no
+premonition of this. His brother chastised him before he had been
+imprisoned, and after he had begun to attract attention as a writer in
+one of the only two newspapers then printed in America, and beat him
+again after he was released, having meantime been vigorously defended by
+his apprentice editorially while he languished. To have beaten Benjamin
+Franklin with a stick, when he was seventeen years old, seems an absurd
+anti-climax in American history. But it is true, and when the young man
+ran away there was still another odd episode in a great career.
+
+Upon his first arrival in Philadelphia as a runaway apprentice, with one
+piece of money in his pocket, occurs the one gleam of romance in
+Franklin's seemingly Socratic life. He says he walked in Market Street
+with a baker's loaf under each arm, with all his shirts and stockings
+bulging in his pockets, and eating a third piece of bread as he walked,
+and this on a Sunday morning. Under these circumstances he met his
+future wife, and he seems to have remembered her when next he met her,
+and to have been unusually prepossessed with her, because on the first
+occasion she had laughed at him going by. He was one of those whose
+sense of humor bears them through many difficulties, and who are even
+attracted by that sense in others. He was, at this period, absurd
+without question. Having eaten all the bread he could, and bestowed the
+remainder upon another voyager, he drank out of the Delaware and went to
+church; that is, he sat down upon a bench in a Quaker meeting-house and
+went to sleep, and was admonished thence by one of the brethren at the
+end of the service.
+
+Franklin had, in the time of his youth, the usual experiences in
+business. He made a journey to London upon promises of great advancement
+in business, and was entirely disappointed, and worked at his trade in
+London. Afterwards, during the return voyage to America, he kept a
+journal, and wrote those celebrated maxims for his own guidance that are
+so often quoted. The first of these is the gem of the collection: "I
+resolve to be extremely frugal for some time, until I pay what I owe." A
+second resolve is scarcely less deserving of imitation, for it declares
+it to be his intention "to speak all the good I know of everybody." It
+must be observed that Franklin was afterwards the great maximist of his
+age, and that his life was devoted to the acquisition of worldly wisdom.
+In his body of philosophy there is included no word of confidence in the
+condemnation of offenses by the act or virtue of another, no promise of,
+or reference to, the rewards of futurity.
+
+When about twenty-one years of age, we find this old young man tired of
+a drifting life and many projects, and desiring to adopt some occupation
+permanently. He had courted the girl who had laughed at him, and then
+gone to England and forgotten her. She had meantime married another man,
+and was now a widow. In 1730 he married her. Meantime, entering into the
+printing business on his own account, he often trundled his paper along
+the streets in a wheelbarrow, and was intensely occupied with his
+affairs. His acquisitive mind was never idle, and in 1732 he began the
+publication of the celebrated "Poor Richard's Almanac." This was among
+the most successful of all American publications, was continued for
+twenty-five years, and in the last issue, in 1757, he collected the
+principal matter of all preceding numbers, and the issue was extensively
+republished in Great Britain, was translated into several foreign
+languages, and had a world-wide circulation. He was also the publisher
+of a newspaper, _The Pennsylvania Gazette_, which was successful
+and brought him into high consideration as a leader of public opinion in
+times which were beginning to be troubled by the questions that finally
+brought about a separation from the mother country.
+
+Time and space would fail in anything like a detailed account of the
+life of this remarkable man. His only son, the boy who was with him at
+the flying of the kite, was an illegitimate child, and it is a
+remarkable instance of unlikeness that this only son became a royalist
+governor of New Jersey, was never an American in feeling, and removed to
+England and died there. The sum of Franklin's life is that he was a
+statesman, a financier of remarkable ability, a skillful diplomat, a
+law-maker, a powerful and felicitous writer though without imagination
+or the literary instinct, and a controversialist who seldom, if ever,
+met his equal. He was always a printer, and at no period of his great
+career did he lose his affection for the useful arts and common
+interests of mankind. He is the founder of the American Philosophical
+Society, and of a college which grew into the present University of
+Pennsylvania. To him is due the origin of a great hospital which is
+still doing beneficent work. He raised, and caused to be disciplined,
+ten thousand men for the defense of the country. He was a successful
+publisher of the literature of the common people, yet a literature that
+was renowned. He could turn his attention to the improvement of
+chimneys, and invented a stove still in use, and still bearing his name
+as the author of its principle. [Footnote: The stove was not used in
+Franklin's time to any extent. The "Franklin Stove" was a fireplace so
+far as the advantages were concerned, such as ventilation and the
+pleasure of an open fire. But it also radiated heat from the back and
+sides as well as the front, and was intended to sit further out into a
+room; to be both fireplace and stove.] He organized the postal system of
+the United States before the Union existed. He was a signer of the
+Declaration of Independence. He sailed as commissioner to France at the
+age of seventy-one, and gave all his money to his country on the eve of
+his departure, yet died wealthy for his time. Serene, even-tempered,
+philosophical, he was yet far-seeing, care-taking, sagacious, and
+intensely industrious. He acquired a knowledge of the Italian and
+Spanish languages, and was a proficient French speaker and writer. He
+possessed, in an extraordinary degree, the power of gaining the regard,
+even the affection, of his fellow-men. He was even a competent musician,
+mastering every subject to which his attention was turned; and
+province-born and reared in the business of melting tallow and setting
+types, without collegiate education, he shone in association with the
+men and women who had place in the most brilliant epoch of French
+intellectual history. At fourscore years he performed the work that
+would have exhausted a man of forty, and at the same time wrote, for
+mere amusement, sketches such as the "Dialogue between Franklin and the
+Gout," and added, with the cool philosophy of all his life still
+lingering about his closing hours: "When I consider how many terrible
+diseases the human body is liable to, I think myself well off that I
+have only three incurable ones, the gout, the stone, and old age."
+
+[Illustration: THE FRANKLIN STOVE.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Franklin, electrical experiments went on with varying results,
+confined within what now seems to have been a very narrow field, until
+1790. The great facts outside of the startling disclosure made by
+Franklin's experiments remained unknown. It was another forty years of
+amused and interested playing with a scientific toy. But in that year
+the key to the _utility_ of electricity was found by one Galvani.
+He was not an electrician at all, but a professor of anatomy in the
+university of Bologna. It may be mentioned in passing that he never knew
+the weight or purport of his own discovery, and died supposing and
+insisting that the electric fluid he fancied he had discovered had its
+origin in the animal tissues. Misapprehending all, he was yet
+unconsciously the first experimenter in what we, for convenience,
+designate _dynamic_ electricity. He knew only of _animal_
+electricity, and called it by that name; a misnomer and a mistake of
+fact, and the cause of an early scientific quarrel the promoting of
+which was the actual reason of the advance that was made in the science
+following his accidental and enormously important discovery.
+
+There are many stories of the details of the ordinarily entirely
+unimportant circumstances that led to _Galvanism_ and the
+_Galvanic Battery_. Volta actually made this battery, then known as
+the Voltaic Pile, but he made it because of Galvani's discovery. The
+reader is requested to bear these names in mind; Galvani and Volta. They
+have a unique claim upon us. With others that will follow, they have
+descended to all posterity in the immortal nomenclature of the science
+of electricity. It is through the accidental discovery of the plodding
+demonstrator of anatomy in a medical college, a man who died at last in
+poverty and in ignorance of the meaning of his own work, that we have
+now the vast web of telegraph and telephone wires that hangs above the
+paths of men in every civilized country, and the cables that lie in the
+ooze of the oceans from continent to continent. His discovery was the
+result of one of the commonest incidents of domestic life. Variously
+described by various writers, the actual circumstance seems reducible to
+this.
+
+In Galvani's kitchen there was an iron railing, and immediately above
+the railing some copper hooks, used for the purpose of hanging thereon
+uncooked meats. His wife was an invalid, and wishing to tempt her
+appetite he had prepared a frog by skinning it, and had hung it upon one
+of the copper hooks. The only use intended to be asked of this renowned
+batrachian was the making of a little broth. Another part of the skinned
+anatomy touched the iron rail below, and the anatomist observed that
+this casual contact produced a convulsive twitching of the dead
+reptile's legs. He groped about this fact for many years. He fancied he
+had discovered the principle of life. He made the phenomenon to hang
+upon the facts clustering about his own profession, familiar to him, and
+about which it was natural for him to think. He promulgated theories
+about it that are all now absurd, however tenable then. His was an
+instance of how the fatuities of men in all the fields of science, faith
+or morals, have often led to results as extraordinary as they have been
+unexpected. That he died in poverty in 1798 is a mere human fact. That
+in this life he never knew is merely another. It is but a part of that
+sadness that, through life, and, indeed, through all history, hangs over
+the earthly limitations of the immortal mind.
+
+Volta, his contemporary and countryman, finally solved the problem as to
+the reason why. and made that "Voltaic Pile" which came to be our modern
+"battery." Acting upon the hint given by Galvani's accident, this pile
+was made of thin sheets of metal, say of copper and zinc, laid in series
+one above the other, with a piece of cloth wet with dilute acid
+interposed between each sheet and the next. The sheets were connected at
+the edges in pairs, a sheet of zinc to a sheet of copper, and the pile
+began with a sheet of one metal and ended with one of the other. It is
+to be noted that a single pair would have produced the same result as a
+hundred pairs, only more feebly. A single large pair is, indeed, the
+modern electric battery of one cell. The beginning and the ending sheets
+of the Voltaic pile were connected by a wire, through which the current
+passed. We, in our commonest industrial battery, use the two pieces of
+metal with the fluid between. The metals are usually copper and zinc,
+and the fluid is water in which is dissolved sulphate of copper. The
+wire connection we make hundreds of miles long, and over this wire
+passes the current. If we part this wire the current ceases. If we join
+it again we instantly renew it. There are many forms of this battery.
+The two metals, the _electrodes_, are not necessarily zinc and
+copper and no others. The acidulated fluid is not invariably water with
+sulphate of copper dissolved in it. Yet in all modifications the same
+thing is done in essentially the same way, and the Voltaic pile, and a
+little back of that Galvani's frog, is the secret of the telegraph, the
+telephone, the telautograph, the cable message. In the case of Galvani's
+frog, the fluids of the recently killed body furnished the liquid
+containing the acid, the copper hook and the iron railing furnished the
+dissimilar metals, and the nerves and muscles of the frog's body,
+connecting the two metals, furnished the wire. They were as good as
+Franklin's wet string was. The effect of the passage of a current of
+electricity through a muscle is to cause it to spasmodically contract,
+as everyone knows who has held the metallic handles of an ordinary small
+battery. Many years passed before the mystery that has long been plain
+was solved by acute minds. Galvani thought he saw the electric quality
+_in the tissues of the_ frog. Volta came to see them as produced
+_by chemical action upon two dissimilar metals_. The first could
+not maintain his theories against facts that became apparent in the
+course of the investigations of several years, yet he asserted them with
+all the pertinacious conservatism of his profession, which it has
+required ages to wear away, and died poor and unhonored. The other
+became a nobleman and a senator, and wore medals and honors. It is a
+world in which success alone is seen, and in which it may be truthfully
+said that the contortions of an eviscerated and unconscious frog upon a
+casual hook were the not very remote cause of the greatest advancements
+and discoveries of modern civilization.
+
+Yet the mystery is not yet entirely explained. In the study of
+electricity we are accustomed to accept demonstrated facts as we find
+them. When it is asked _how_ a battery acts, what produces the
+mysterious current, the only answer that can now be given is that it is
+_by the conversion of the energy of chemical affinity into the energy
+of electrical vibrations_. Many mixtures produce heat. The
+explanation can be no clearer than that for electricity. Electricity and
+heat are both _forms of energy_, and, indeed, are so similar that
+one is almost synonymous with the other. The enquiry into the original
+sources of energy, latent but present always, will, when finally
+answered, give us an insight into mysteries that we can only now infer
+are reserved for that hereafter, here or elsewhere, which it is part of
+our nature to believe in and hope for. The theory of electrical
+vibrations is explained elsewhere as the only tenable one by which to
+account for electrical action. One may also ask how fire burns, or,
+rather, why a burning produces what we call "heat," and the actual
+question cannot be answered. The action of fire in consuming fuel, and
+the action of chemicals in consuming metals, are similar actions. They
+each result in the production of a new form of energy, and of energy in
+the form of vibrations. In the action of fire the vibrations are
+irregular and spasmodic; in electricity they are controlled by a certain
+rhythm or regularity. Between heat and electricity there is apparently
+only this difference, and they are so similar, and one is so readily
+converted into the other, that it is a current scientific theory that
+one is only a modified form of the other. Many acute minds have
+reflected upon the problem of how to convert the latent energy of coal
+into the energy of electricity without the interposition of the steam
+engine and machinery. There apparently exist reasons why the problem
+will never be solved. There is no intelligence equal to answering the
+question as to precisely where the heat came from, or how it came, that
+instantly results upon the striking of a common match. It was
+_evolved_ through friction. The means were necessary. Friction, or
+its precise equivalent in energy, must occur. The result is as strange,
+and in the same manner strange, as any of the phenomena of electricity.
+Precisely here, in the beginning of the study of these phenomena, the
+student should be warned that an attitude of wonder or of awe is not one
+of enquiry. The demonstrations of electricity are startling chiefly for
+three reasons: newness, silence, and inconceivable rapidity of action.
+Let one hold a wire in one's hand six or eight inches from the end, and
+then insert that end into the flame of a gas-jet. It is as old as human
+experience that that part of the wire which is not in the flame finally
+grows hot, and burns one's fingers. A change has taken place in the
+molecules of the wire that is not visible, is noiseless, and that has
+_traveled along the wire_. It excites neither wonder nor remark. No
+one asks the reason why. Yet it cannot be explained except by some
+theory more or less tenable, and the phenomenon, in kind though not in
+degree, is as unaccountable as anything in the magic of electricity. In
+a true sense there is, nothing supernatural, or even wonderful, in all
+the vast universe of law. If we would learn the facts in regard to
+anything, it must be after we have passed the stage of wonder or of
+reverence in respect to it. That which was the "Voice of God"--as truly,
+in a sense, it was and is--until Franklin's day, has since been a
+concussion of the air, an echo among the clouds, the passage of an
+electric discharge. It is the first lesson for all those who would
+understand.
+
+The time had now come when that which had seemed a lawless wonder should
+have its laws investigated, formulated and explained. A man named
+Coulomb, a Frenchman, is the author of a system of measurements of the
+electric current, and he it was who discovered that the action of
+electricity varies, not with the distance, but, like gravity, _in the
+inverse ratio of the square of the distance_. Coulomb was the maker
+of the first instrument for measuring a current, which was known as the
+_torsion balance_. The results of his practical investigations made
+easier the practical application of electrical power as we now use it,
+though he foresaw nothing of that application; and the engineer of
+to-day applies his laws, and those of his fellow scientists, as those
+which do not fail. Volta was one of these, and he also furnished, as
+will hereafter be seen, a name for one of the units of electrical
+measurement.
+
+Both Galvani and Volta passed into shadow, when, in 1820, Professor H.
+C. Oersted, of Copenhagen, discovered the law upon which were afterwards
+slowly built the electrical appliances of modern life. It was the great
+principle of INDUCTION. The student of electricity may begin here if he
+desires to study only results, and is not interested in effects, causes,
+and the pains and toils which led to those results. The term may seem
+obscure, and is, doubtless, as a name, the result of a sudden idea; but
+upon induction and its laws the simplest as well as the most complicated
+of our modern electrical appliances depend for a reason for action. Its
+discovery set Amp�re to work. They had all imagined previously that
+there was some connection between electricity and magnetism, and it was
+this idea that instigated the investigations of Ampere. It was imagined
+that the phenomena of electricity were to be explained by magnetism.
+This was not untrue, but it was only a part of the truth. Ampere proved
+that _magnetism could also readily be produced by a current of
+electricity_. From this idea, practically carried out, grew the
+ELECTRO MAGNET, and to Amp�re we are indebted for the actual discovery
+of the elementary principles of what we now call electrodynamics, or
+dynamic electricity, [Footnote: In all science there is a continual
+going back to the past for a means of expression for things whose
+application is most modern. _Dynamic_; DYNAMO, is the Greek word
+for power; to be able. Once established, these names are seldom
+abandoned. There is no more reason for calling our electrical
+power-producing machine a "Dynamo" than there would be in so designating
+a steam engine or a water-wheel. But, a term of general significance if
+used at all, it has come to be the special designation of that one
+machine. It is brief, easily said, and to the point, but is in no way
+necessarily connected with _electrical_ power distinctively.] in
+which are included the Dynamo, and its twin and indispensable, the
+Motor. Amp�re is also the author of the _molecular theory_, by
+which alone, with our present knowledge, can the action of electricity
+be explained in connection with the iron core which is made a magnet by
+the current, and left again a mere piece of iron when the current is
+interrupted. Ten years later Faraday explained and applied the laws of
+Induction, basing them upon the demonstrations of Amp�re. The use of a
+core of soft iron, magnetized by the passage of a current through a
+helix of wire wrapping it as the thread does a spool, is the
+indispensable feature, in some form meaning the same thing, with the
+same results, in all machines that are given movement to by an electric
+current. This is the electro-magnet. It is made a magnet not by actual
+contact, or by being made the conductor of a current, but by being
+placed in the "electrical field" and temporarily magnetized by
+induction.
+
+Faraday began his brilliant series of experiments in 1831. To express
+briefly the laws of action under which he worked, he wrote the
+celebrated statement of the Law of Magnetic Force. He proved that the
+current developed by induction is the same in all its qualities with
+other currents, and, indeed, demonstrated Franklin's theory that all
+electricity is the same; that, as to _kind_, there is but one. All
+electrical action is now viewed from the Faradic position.
+
+The story of electricity, as men studied it in the primary school of the
+science, ends where Faraday began. Under the immutable laws he
+discovered and formulated we now enter the field of result, of action,
+of commercial interest and value. We might better say the field of
+usefulness, since commercial value is but another expression for
+usefulness. A revolution has been wrought in all the ways and thoughts
+of men since a date which a man less than sixty years old can recall.
+The laws under which the miracle has been wrought existed from all
+eternity. They were discovered but yesterday. Progress, the destiny of
+man, has kept pace in other fields. We live our time in our predestined
+day, learning and knowing, like grown-up children, what we may. In a
+future whose distance we may not even guess, the children of men shall
+reap the full fruition of the prophesy that has grown old in waiting,
+and "shall be as gods, knowing good from evil."
+
+
+
+
+MODERN ELECTRICITY
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+Electricity, in all its visible exhibitions, has certain unvarying
+qualities. Some of these have been mentioned in the preceding chapter.
+Others will appear in what is now to follow. These qualities or habits,
+invariable and unchangeable, are, briefly:
+
+(1) It has the unique power of drawing, "attracting" other objects at a
+distance.
+
+(2) For all human uses it is instantaneous in action, through a
+conductor, at any distance. A current might be sent around the world
+while the clock ticked twice.
+
+(3) It has the power of decomposing chemicals (Electrolysis), and it
+should be remembered that even water is a chemical, and that substances
+composed of one pure organic material are very rare.
+
+(4) It is readily convertible into heat in a wire or other conductor.
+
+These four qualities render its modern uses possible, and should be
+remembered in connection with what is presently to be explained.
+
+These uses are, in application, the most startling in the entire history
+of civilization. They have come about, and their applications have been
+made effective, within twenty years, and largely within ten. This
+subtlest and most elusive essence in nature, not even now entirely
+understood, is a part of common life. Some years ago we began to spell
+our thoughts to our fellow-men across land and sea with dots and dashes.
+Within the memory of the present high school boy we began to talk with
+each other across the miles. Now there is no reason why we shall not
+begin to write to each other letters of which the originals shall never
+leave our hands, yet which shall stand written in a distant place in our
+own characters, indisputably signed by us with our own names. We
+apparently produce out of nothing but the whirling of a huge bobbin of
+wire any power we may wish, and send it over a thin wire to where we
+wish to use it, though every adult can remember when the difficulty of
+distance, in the propelling of machinery, was thought to have been
+solved to the satisfaction of every reasonable man by the making of wire
+cables that would transmit power between grooved wheels a distance of
+some hundreds of feet. We turn night into day with the glow of lamps
+that burn without flame, and almost without heat, whose mysterious glow
+is fed from some distant place, that hang in clusters, banners, letters,
+in city streets, and that glow like new stars along the treeless prairie
+horizon where thirty years ago even the beginnings of civilization were
+unknown. Yet the mysterious agent has not changed. It is as it was when
+creation began to shape itself out of chaos and the abyss. Men have
+changed in their ability to reason, to deduce, to discover, and to
+construct. To know has become a part of the sum of life; to understand
+or to abandon is the rule. When the ages of tradition, of assertion
+without the necessity for proof, of content with all that was and was
+right or true because it was a standard fixed, went by, the age not
+necessarily of steam, or of steel, or of electricity, but the age of
+thought, came in. Some of the results of this thought, in one of the
+most prominent of its departments, I shall attempt to describe.
+
+A wire is the usual concomitant in all electrical phenomena. It is
+almost the universally used conductor of the current. In most cases it
+is of copper, as pure as it can be made in the ordinary course of
+manufacture. There are other metals that conduct an electrical current
+even better than copper does, but they happen to be expensive ones, such
+as silver. The usual telegraph-line is efficient with only iron wire.
+
+We habitually use the words "conductor" and "conduct" in reference to
+the electric current. A definition of that common term may be useful. It
+is a relative one. _A conductor is any substance whose atoms, or
+molecules, have the power of conveying to each other quickly their
+electricities_. Before the common use of electricity we were
+accustomed to commonly speak of conductors of heat; good, or poor. The
+same meaning is intended in speaking of conductors of electricity.
+_Non-conductors are those whose molecules only acquire this power
+under great pressure_. Electricity always takes the _easiest_
+road, not necessarily the shortest. This is the path that electricians
+call that of "least resistance." There are no absolutely perfect
+conductors, and there are no substances that may be called absolutely
+non-conductors. A non-conductor is simply a reluctant, an excessively
+slow, conductor. In all electrical operations we look first for these
+two essentials: a good conductor and a good non-conductor. We want the
+latter as supports and attachments for the first. If we undertake to
+convey water in a pipe we do not wish the pipe to leak. In conveying
+electricity upon a wire we have a little leak wherever we allow any
+other conductor to come too near, or to touch, the wire carrying the
+current. These little electrical leaks constantly exist. All nature is
+in a conspiracy to take it wherever it can find it, and from everything
+which at the moment has more than some other has, or more than its share
+with reference to the air and the world, of the mysterious essence that
+is in varying quantities everywhere. Glass is the usual non-conductor in
+daily use. A glance at the telegraph poles will explain all that has
+just been said. Water in large quantity or widely diffused is a fair
+conductor. Therefore, the glass insulators on the telegraph-poles are
+cup-shaped usually on the under side where the pin that holds them is
+inserted, so that the rain may not actually wet this pin, and thus make
+a water-connection between the wire, glass, pin, pole and ground.
+
+We are accustomed to things that are subject to the law of gravity.
+Water will run through a pipe that slants downward. It will pass through
+a pipe that slants upward only by being pushed. But electricity, in its
+far journeys over wires, is not subject to gravity. It goes
+indifferently in any direction, asking only a conductor to carry it.
+There is also a trait called _inertia_; that property of all matter
+by which it tends when at rest to remain so, and when in motion to
+continue in motion, which we meet at every step we take in the material
+world. Electricity is again an exception. It knows neither gravity, nor
+inertia, nor material volume, nor space. It cannot be contained or
+weighed. Nothing holds it in any ordinary sense. It is difficult to
+express in words the peculiar qualities that caused the early
+experimenters to believe it had a soul. It is never idle, and in its
+ceaseless journeyings it makes choice of its path by a conclusion that
+is unerring and instantaneous.
+
+We find that it is the constant endeavor of electricity to _equalize
+its quantities and its two qualities, in all substances that are near it
+that are capable of containing it_. To this end, seemingly by
+definite intention, it is found on the outsides of things containing it.
+It gathers on the surfaces of all conductors. If there are knobs or
+points it will be found in them, ready to leap off. When any electrified
+body is approached by a conductor, the fluid will gather on the side
+where the approach is made. If in any conductor the current is weak,
+very little of it, if any, will go off into the conductor before actual
+contact is made. If it is strong, it will often leap across the space
+with a spark. One body may be charged with positive, and another with
+negative, electricity. There is then a disposition to equalize that
+cannot be easily repressed. The positive and the negative will assume
+their dual functions, their existence together, in spite of obstacles.
+So as to quantity. That which has most cannot be restrained from
+imparting to that which has less. The demonstration of these facts
+belongs to the field of experimental, or laboratory, electricity. The
+most common of the visible experiments is on a vast scale. It is the
+thunder-storm. Mother Earth is the great depository of the fluid. The
+heavy clouds, as they gather, are likewise full. Across the space that
+lies between the exchange takes place--the lightning-flash.
+
+In the preceding chapter I have hastily alluded to the phenomenon known
+as the key to electricity as a utilitarian science; a means of material
+usefulness. These uses are all made possible under the laws of what we
+term INDUCTION. To comprehend this remarkable feature of electric
+action, it must first be understood that all electrical phenomena occur
+in what has been termed an "_Electrical Field_" This field may be
+illustrated simply. A wire through which a current is passing _is
+always surrounded by a region of attractive force_. It is
+scientifically imagined to exist in the form of rings around the wire.
+In this field lie what are termed "lines of force." The law as stated is
+that the lines in which the magnetism produced by electricity acts
+_are always at right angles with the direction in which the current is
+passing_. Let us put this in ordinary phrase, and say that in a wire
+through which a current is passing there is a magnetic attraction, and
+that the "pull" is always _straight toward the wire_. This
+magnetism in a wire, when it is doubled up and multiplied sufficiently,
+has strong powers of attraction. This multiplying is accomplished by
+winding the wire into a compact coil and passing a current through it.
+If one should wind insulated wire around a core, or cylinder, and should
+then pull out the cylinder and attach the two ends of the wire to the
+opposite poles of a battery, when the current passed through the coil
+the hollow interior of it would be a strong magnetic field. The air
+inside might be said to be a magnet, though if there were no air there,
+and the coil were under the exhausted receiver of an air-pump, the
+effect would be the same, and the _vacuum_ would be magnetized. A
+piece of iron inserted where the core was, would instantly become a
+magnet, and when the insulated wire is wound around a soft iron core,
+and the core is left in place, we have at once what is known as an
+_Electro-Magnet_.
+
+The wire windings of an electro-magnet are always insulated; wound with
+a non-conductor, like silk or cotton; so that the coils may not touch
+each other in the winding and thus permit the current to run off through
+contact by the easiest way, and cut across and leave most of the coil
+without a current. For it may as well be stated now that no matter how
+good a conductor a wire may be, two qualities of it cause what is called
+"_resistance_"--the current does not pass so easily. These two
+qualities are _thinness_ and _length_. The current will not
+traverse all the length of a long coil if it can pass straight through
+the same mass, and it is made to go the long way _by keeping the wires
+from touching each other_--preventing "contact," and lessening the
+opportunity to jump off which electricity is always looking for.
+
+When this coil is wound in layers, like the thread upon a spool, it
+increases the intensity of the magnetism in the core by as many times as
+there are coils, up to a certain point. If the core is merely soft iron,
+and not steel, it becomes magnetized instantly, as stated, and will draw
+another piece of iron to it with a snap, and hold it there as long as
+there is a current passing through the coil. But as instantly, when the
+current is stopped, this soft iron core ceases to be a magnet, and
+becomes as it was before--an inert and ordinary piece of iron. What has
+just been described is always, in some form, one of the indispensable
+parts of the electromagnetic machines used in industrial electricity,
+and in all of them except the appliances of electric lighting, and even
+in that case it is indispensable in producing the current which consumes
+the points of the carbon, or heats the filament to a white glow. The
+current may traverse the wire for a hundred miles to reach this little
+coil. But, instantly, at a touch a hundred miles away that forms a
+contact, there is a continuous "circuit;" the core becomes a magnet, and
+the piece of iron near it is drawn suddenly to it. Remove the distant
+finger from the button, the contact is broken, and the piece of iron
+immediately falls away again. It is the wonder of _the production of
+instant movement at any distance, without any movement of any connecting
+part_. It is a mysterious and incredible transmission of force not
+included among human possibilities forty years ago. It is now common,
+old, familiar. Conceive of its possibilities, of its annihilation of
+time and space, of its distant control, and of that which it is made to
+mean and represent in the spelled-out words of language, and it still
+remains one of the wonders of the world: the Electric Telegraph.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+MAGNETS AND MAGNETISM.--Having described a magnet that is made and
+unmade at will, it may be appropriate to describe magnets generally. The
+ordinary, permanent magnet, natural or artificial, has little place in
+the arts. It cannot be controlled. In common phrase, it cannot be made
+to "let go" at will. The greatest value of magnetism, as connected with
+electricity, consists in the fact of the intimate relationship of the
+two. A magnet may be made at will with the electric current, as
+described above. A little later we shall see how the process may be
+reversed, and the magnet be made to produce the most powerful current
+known, and yet owe its magnetism to the same current.
+
+The word _Magnet_ comes from the country of _Magnesia_, where
+"loadstone" (magnetic iron ore) seems first to have been found. The
+artificial magnet, as made and used in early experiments and still
+common as a toy or as a piece in some electrical appliances, is a piece
+of fine steel, of hard temper, which has been magnetized, usually by
+having had a current passed through or around it, and sometimes by
+contact with another magnet. For the singular property of a magnet is
+that it may continually impart its quality, yet never lose any of its
+own. Steel alone, of all the metals, has the decided quality of
+retaining its property of being a magnet. A "bar" magnet is a straight
+piece of steel magnetized. A "horseshoe" magnet is a bar magnet bent
+into the form of the letter "U."
+
+Every magnet has two "poles"--the positive, or North pole, and the
+negative, or South pole. If any magnet, of any size, and having as one
+piece two poles only, be cut into two, or a hundred pieces, each
+separate piece will be like the original magnet and have its two poles.
+The law is arbitrary and invariable under all circumstances, and is a
+law of nature, as unexplainable and as invariable as any in that
+mysterious code. All bar magnets, when suspended by their centers, turn
+their ends to the North and South, a familiar example of this being the
+ordinary compass. But in magnetism, _like repels like_. The world
+is a huge magnet. The pole of the magnet which points to the North is
+not the North pole of the needle as we regard it, but the opposite, the
+South.
+
+No one can explain precisely why iron, the purer and softer the better,
+becomes a powerful and effective magnet under the influence of the
+current, and instantly loses that character when the current ceases, and
+why steel, the purer and harder the better, at first rejects the
+influence, and comes slowly under it, but afterwards retains it
+permanently. Iron and steel are the magnetic metals, but there is a
+considerable list of metals not magnetic that are better than they as
+_conductors_ of the electric current. In a certain sense they are
+also the electric metals. A Dynamo, or Motor, made of brass or copper
+entirely would be impossible. All the phenomena of combined magnetism
+and electricity, all that goes to make up the field of industrial
+electric action, would be impossible without the indispensable of
+ordinary iron, and for the sole reason that it possesses the peculiar
+qualities, the affinities, described.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is now an understanding of the electro-magnet, with some idea of
+the part it may be made to play in the movement of pieces, parts, and
+machines in which it is an essential. It has been explained how soft
+iron becomes a magnet, not necessarily by any actual contact with any
+other magnet, or by touching or rubbing, but by being placed in an
+electric field. It acquired its magnetism by induction; by _drawing
+in_ (since that is the meaning of the term) the electricity that was
+around it. But induction has a still wider field, and other
+characteristics than this alone. Some distinct idea of these may be
+obtained by supposing a simple case, in which I shall ask the reader to
+follow me.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM THEORY OF INDUCTION]
+
+Let us imagine a wire to be stretched horizontally for a little space,
+and its two ends to be attached to the two poles of an ordinary battery
+so that a current may pass through it. Another wire is stretched beside
+the first, not touching it, and not connected with any source of
+electricity. Now, if a current is passed through the first wire a
+current will also show in the second wire, passing in an _opposite
+direction_ from the first wire's current. But this current in the
+second wire does not continue. It is a momentary impulse, existing only
+at the moment of the first passing of the current through the wire
+attached to the poles of the battery. After this first instantaneous
+throb there is nothing more. But now cut off the current in the first
+wire, and the second wire will show another impulse, this time in the
+_same direction_ with the current in the first wire. Then it is all
+over again, and there is nothing more. The first of these wires and
+currents, the one attached to the battery poles, is called the
+_Primary_. The second unattached wire, with its impulses, is called
+the _Secondary_.
+
+Let us now imagine the primary to be attached to the battery-poles
+permanently. We will not make or break the circuit, and we can still
+produce currents, "impulses," in the secondary. Let us imagine the
+primary to be brought nearer to the secondary, and again moved away from
+it, the current passing all the time through it. Every time it is moved
+nearer, an impulse will be generated in the secondary which will be
+opposite in direction to the current in the primary. Every time it is
+moved away again, an impulse in the secondary will be in the same
+direction as the primary current. So long, as before, as the primary
+wire is quiet, there will be no secondary current at all.
+
+There is still a third effect. If the current in the primary be
+_increased or diminished_ we shall have impulses in the secondary.
+
+This is a supposed case, to render the facts, the laws of induction,
+clear to the understanding. The experiment might actually be performed
+if an instrument sufficiently delicate were attached to the terminals of
+the secondary to make the impulses visible. The following facts are
+deduced from it in regard to all induced currents. They are the primary
+laws of induction:--
+
+A current which begins, which approaches, or which increases in strength
+in the primary, induces, with these movements or conditions, a momentary
+current in the _opposite direction_ in the secondary.
+
+A current which stops, which retires, or which decreases in strength in
+the primary, induces a momentary current _in the same direction_
+with the current in the primary.
+
+To make the results of induction effective in practice, we must have
+great length of wire, and to this end, as in the case of the
+electro-magnet, we will adopt the spool form. We will suppose two wires,
+insulated so as to keep them from actually touching, held together side
+by side, and wound upon a core in several layers. There will then be two
+wires in the coil, and the opposite ends of one of these wires we will
+attach to the poles of a battery, and send a current through the coil.
+This would then be the primary, and the other would be the secondary, as
+described above. But, since the power and efficiency of an induced
+current depends upon the length of the secondary wire that is exposed to
+the influence of the current carried by the primary, we fix two separate
+coils, one small enough to slip inside of the other. This smaller, inner
+coil is made with coarser wire than the outer, and the latter has an
+immense length of finer wire. The current is passed through the smaller,
+inside coil, and each time that it is stopped, or started, there will be
+an impulse, and a very strong one, through the outer--the secondary
+coil. Leave the current uninterrupted, and move the outer coil, or the
+inner one, back and forth, and the same series of strong impulses will
+be observed in the coil that has no connection with any source of
+electricity.
+
+What I have just described as an illustration of the laws governing the
+production of induced currents, is, in fact, what is known as the
+_Induction Coil_. In the old times of a quarter of a century ago it
+was extensively used as an illustrator of the power of the electric
+current. Sometimes the outer coil contained fifty miles of wire, and the
+spark, a close imitation of a flash of lightning, would pass between the
+terminals of the secondary coil held apart for a distance of several
+feet, and would pierce sheets of plate glass three inches thick. Before
+the days of practical electric lighting the induction-coil was used for
+the simultaneous lighting of the gas-jets in public buildings, and is
+still so used to a limited extent. Its description is introduced here as
+an illustration of the laws of induction which the reader will find
+applied hereafter in newer and more effective ways. The commonest
+instance now of the use of the induction-coil is in the very frequent
+small machine known as a medical battery. There must be a means of
+making and breaking the current (the circuit) as described above. This,
+in the medical battery, is automatic, and it is that which produces the
+familiar buzzing sound. The mechanism is easily understood upon
+examination.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At some risk of tediousness with those who have already made an
+examination of elementary electricity, I have now endeavored to convey
+to the reader a clear idea of (1), what electricity is, so far as known.
+(2) Of how the current is conducted, and its influence in the field
+surrounding the conductor. (3) The nature of the induced current, and
+the manner in which it is produced. The sum of the information so far
+may be stated in other words to be how to make an electromagnet, and how
+to produce an induced current. Such information has an end in view. A
+knowledge of these two items, an understanding of the details, will be
+found, collectively or separately, to underlie an understanding of all
+the machines and appliances of modern electricity, and in all
+probability, of all those that are yet to come.
+
+But in the prominent field of electric lighting (to which presently we
+shall come), there is still another principle involved, and this
+requires some explanation (as well given here as elsewhere) of the
+current theory as to what electricity is. [Footnote: There are several
+"schools" among scientists, those who pursue pure science, irrespective
+of practical applications, and who are rather disposed to narrow the
+term to include that field alone, that are divided among themselves upon
+the question of what electricity is. The "Substantialists" believe that
+it is a kind of matter. Others deny that, and insist that it is a "form
+of Energy," on which point there can be no serious question. Still
+others reject both these views. Tesla has said that "nothing stands in
+the way of our calling electricity 'ether associated with matter, or
+bound ether.'" Professor Lodge says it is "a form, or rather a mode of
+manifestation, of the ether" The question is still in dispute whether we
+have only one electricity or two opposite electricities. The great field
+of chemistry enters into the discussion as perhaps having the solution
+of the question within its possibilities. The practical electrician acts
+upon facts which he knows are true without knowing their cause;
+empirically; and so far adheres to the molecular hypothesis. The
+demonstrations and experiments of Tesla so far produce only new
+theories, or demonstrate the fallacies of the old, but give us nothing
+absolute. Nevertheless, under his investigations, the possibilities of
+the near future are widely extended. By means of currents alternating
+with very high frequency, he has succeeded in passing by induction,
+through the glass of 1 lamp, energy sufficient to keep a filament in a
+state of incandescence _without the use of any connecting wires_.
+He has even lighted a room by producing in it such a condition that an
+illuminating appliance may be placed anywhere and lighted without being
+electrically connected with anything. He has produced the required
+condition by creating in the room a powerful electrostatic field
+alternating very rapidly. He suspends two sheets of metal, each
+connected with one of the terminals of the coil. If an exhausted tube is
+carried anywhere between these sheets, or placed anywhere, it remains
+always luminous.
+
+Something of the unquestionable possibilities are shown in the following
+quotation from _Nature_, as expressed in a lecture by Prof. Crookes
+upon the implied results of Tesla's experiments.
+
+The extent to which this method of illumination may be practically
+available, experiments alone can decide. In any case, our insight into
+the possibilities of static electricity has been extended, and the
+ordinary electric machine will cease to be regarded as a mere toy.
+
+Alternating currents have, at the best, a rather doubtful reputation.
+But it follows from Tesla's researches that, is the rapidity of the
+alternation increases, they become not more dangerous but less so. It
+further appears that a true flame can now be produced without chemical
+aid--a flame which yields light and heat without the consumption of
+material and without any chemical process. To this end we require
+improved methods for producing excessively frequent alternations and
+enormous potentials. Shall we be able to obtain these by tapping the
+ether? If so, we may view the prospective exhaustion of our coal-fields
+with indifference; we shall at once solve the smoke question, and thus
+dissolve all possible coal rings.
+
+Electricity seems destined to annex the whole field, not merely of
+optics, but probably also of thermotics.
+
+Rays of light will not pass through a wall, nor, as we know only too
+well, through a dense fog. But electrical rays of a foot or two
+wave-length, of which we have spoken, will easily pierce such mediums,
+which for them will be transparent.
+
+Another tempting field for research, scarcely yet attacked by pioneers,
+awaits exploration. I allude to the mutual action of electricity and
+life. No sound man of science indorses the assertion that "electricity
+is life." nor can we even venture to speak of life as one of the
+varieties or manifestations of energy. Nevertheless, electricity has an
+important influence upon vital phenomena, and is in turn set in action
+by the living being--animal or vegetable. We have electric fishes--one
+of them the prototype of the torpedo of modern warfare. There is the
+electric slug which used to be met with in gardens and roads about
+Hoinsey Rise; there is also an electric centipede. In the study of such
+facts and such relations the scientific electrician has before him an
+almost infinite field of inquiry.
+
+The slower vibrations to which I have referred reveal the bewildering
+possibility of telegraphy without wires, posts, cables, or any of our
+present costly appliances. It is vain to attempt to picture the marvels
+of the future. Progress, as Dean Swift observed, may be "too fast for
+endurance."] As to this, all we may be said to know, as has been
+remarked, is that it is one of the _forms of energy_, and its
+manifestations are in the form of _motion_ of the minute and
+invisible atoms of which it is composed. This movement is
+instantaneously communicated along the length of a conductor. There
+must, of course, be an end to this process in theory, because all the
+molecules once moved must return to rest, or to a former condition,
+before being moved again. Therefore it is necessary to add that when
+the motion of the last molecule has been absorbed by some apparatus
+for applying it to utility, the last particles, atoms, molecules, are
+restored to rest, and may again receive motion from infringing particles,
+and this transmission of energy along a conductor is
+continuous--continually absorbed and repeated. This is _dynamic_
+electricity; not differing in kind, in essence, from any other, but only
+in application.
+
+If the conductor is entirely insulated, so that no molecular movements
+can be communicated by it to contiguous bodies, all its particles become
+energized, and remain so as long as the conductor is attached to a
+source of electricity. In such a case an additional charge is required
+only when some of the original charge is taken away, escapes. This is
+_Static_ electricity; the same as the other, but in theory
+differing in application.
+
+The molecular theory is, unquestionably, tenable under present
+conditions. It is that to which science has attained in its inquiries to
+the present date. The electric light is scarcely explainable upon any
+other hypothesis. The remaining conclusions may be left in abeyance, and
+without argument.
+
+Science began with static electricity, so called, because its sources
+were more readily and easily discovered in the course of scientific
+accidents, as in the original discovery of the property of rubbed amber,
+etc., and the long course of investigations that were suggested by that
+antique, accidental discovery. What we know as the dynamic branch of the
+subject was created by the investigations of Faraday; induction was its
+mother. It is the practically important branch, but its investigation
+required the invention of machinery to perform its necessary operations.
+Between the two branches the sole difference--a difference that may be
+said not actually to exist--is in _quantity and pressure_.
+
+To the department of static electricity all those industrial appliances
+first known belong, as the telegraph, electro-plating, etc. I shall
+first consider this class of appliances and machines. The most important
+of the class is
+
+[Illustration]
+
+THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH.--The word is Greek, meaning, literally, "to
+write from a distance." But long since, and before Morse's invention, it
+had come to mean the giving of any information, by any means, from afar.
+The existence of telegraphs, not electric, is as old as the need of
+them. The idea of quickness, speedy delivery, is involved. If time is
+not an object, men may go or send. The means used in telegraphing, in
+ancient and modern times, have been sound and sight. Anything that can
+be expressed so as to be read at a distance, and that conveys a meaning,
+is a telegram. [Footnote: This word is of American coinage, and first
+appeared in the _Albany Evening Journal_, in 1852. It avoids the
+use of two words, as "Telegraphic Message," or "Telegraphic Dispatch,"
+and the ungrammatical use of "Telegraph," for a message by telegraph.
+The new word was at once adopted.] Our plains Indians used columns of
+smoke, or fires, and are the actual inventors of the _heliograph_,
+now so called, though formerly meaning the making of a picture by the
+aid of the sun--photography. The vessels of a squadron at sea have long
+used telegraphic signals. Some of the celebrated sentences of our
+history have been written by visual signals, such as "Hold the fort, for
+I am coming," "Don't give up the ship," etc. Order of showing,
+positions, and colors are arbitrarily made to mean certain words. The
+sinking of the "_Victoria_" in 1893, was brought about by the
+orders conveyed by marine signals. Bells and guns signal by sound. So
+does the modern electric telegraph, contrary to original design. It is
+all telegraphy, but it all required an agreed and very limited code, and
+comparative nearness. None of the means in ancient use were available
+for the multifarious uses of modern commerce.
+
+As soon as it was known that electricity could be sent long distances
+over wires, human genius began to contrive a way of using it as a means
+of conveying definite intelligence. The first idea of the kind was
+attempted to be put into effect in 1774. This was, however, before the
+discovery of the electro-magnet (about 1800), or even the Galvanic
+battery, and it was seriously proposed to have as many wires as there
+were letters; each wire to have a frictional battery for generating
+electricity at one end of the circuit, and a pith-ball electroscope at
+the other. The modern reader may smile at the idea of the hurried sender
+of a message taking a piece of cat-skin, or his silk handkerchief, and
+rubbing up the successive letter-balls of glass or sulphur until he had
+spelled out his telegram. Later a man named Dyer, of New York, invented
+a system of sending messages by a single wire, and of causing a record
+to be made at the receiving office by means of a point passing over
+litmus paper, which the current was to mark by chemical action, the
+paper passing over a roller or drum during the operation. The battery
+for this arrangement was also frictional. They knew of no other. Then
+came the deflected-needle telegraph, first suggested by Amp�re, and a
+few such lines were constructed, and to some extent operated. In one of
+the original telegraph lines the wires were bound in hemp and laid in
+pipes on the surface of the ground. The expedient of poles and
+atmospheric insulation was not thought of until it was adopted as a last
+resort during the construction of Morse's first line between Washington
+and Baltimore.
+
+In the year 1832, an American named Samuel F. B. Morse was making a
+voyage home from Havre to New York in the sailing packet _Sully_.
+He was an educated man, a graduate of Yale, and an artist, being the
+holder of a gold medal awarded him for his first work in sculpture, and
+no want of success drove him to other fields. But during this tedious
+voyage of the old times in a sailing vessel he seems to have conceived
+the idea which thenceforth occupied his life. It was the beginning of
+the present Electric Telegraph. During this same voyage he embodied his
+notions in some drawings, and they were the beginnings of vicissitudes
+among the most long-continued and trying for which life affords any
+opportunity. He abandoned his studies. He paid attention to no other
+interest. He passed years in silent and lonesome endeavors that seemed
+to all others useless. He subjected himself to the reproaches of all his
+friends, lost the confidence of business men, gained the reputation of
+being a monomaniac, and was finally given over to the following of
+devices deemed the most useless and unpromising that up to that time had
+occupied the mind of any man.
+
+The rank and file of humanity had no definite idea of the plan, or of
+the results that would follow if it were successful. In reality no one
+cared. It was Morse's enterprise exclusively--a crank's fad alone. There
+has been no period in the history of society when the public, as a body,
+was interested in any great change in the systems to which it was
+accustomed. There is always enmity against an improver. In reality, the
+question of how much money Morse should make by inventing the electric
+telegraph was the question of least importance. Yet it was regarded as
+the only one. He is dead. His profits have gone into the mass, his
+honors have become international. The patents have long expired. The
+public, the entire world, are long since the beneficiaries, and the
+benefits continue to be inconceivably vast. Nothing in all history
+exceeds in moral importance the invention of the telegraph except the
+invention of printing with movable types.
+
+[Illustration: AN ELECTRO-MAGNET OF MORSE'S TIME.]
+
+After eight years of waiting, and the repeated instruction of the entire
+Congress of the United States in the art of telegraphy, that body was
+finally induced to make an appropriation of thirty thousand dollars to
+be expended in the construction of an experimental line between
+Washington and Baltimore. And now begins the actual strangeness of the
+story of the Telegraph. After many years of toil, Morse still had
+learned nothing of the efficient construction of an electro-magnet. The
+magnet which he attempted to use unchanged was after the pattern of the
+first one ever made--a bent U-shaped bar, around which were a few turns
+of wire not insulated. The bar was varnished for insulation, and the
+turns of wire were so few that they did not touch each other. The
+apparatus would not work at a distance of more than a few feet, and not
+invariably then. Professor Leonard D. Gale suggested the cause of the
+difficulty as being in the sparseness of the coils of wire on the magnet
+and the use of a single-cell battery. He furnished an electro-magnet and
+battery out of his own belongings, with which the efficiency of the
+contrivance was greatly increased. The only insulated wire then known
+was bonnet-wire, used by milliners for shaping the immense flaring
+bonnets worn by our grandmothers, and when it finally came to
+constructing the instruments of the first telegraphic system the entire
+stock of New York was exhausted. The immense stocks of electrical
+supplies now available for all purposes was then, and for many years
+afterwards, unknown. Previous to the investigations of Professor Henry,
+in 1830, only the theory of causing a core of soft iron to become a
+magnet was known, and the actual magnet, as we make it, had not been
+made. Morse, in his beginnings, had not money enough to employ a
+competent mechanic, and was himself possessed of but scant mechanical
+skill or knowledge of mechanical results. Persistency was the quality by
+which he succeeded.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF MORSE'S INSTRUMENT, 1830, WITH ITS WRITING.]
+
+The battery used first by Morse, as stated, was a single cell. The one
+made later by his partner, Alfred Vail, the real author of all the
+workable features of the Morse telegraph, and of every feature which
+identifies it with the telegraph of the present, was a rectangular
+wooden box divided into eight compartments, and coated inside with
+beeswax so that it might resist the action of acids. The telegraphic
+instrument as made by Morse was a rectangular frame of wood, now in the
+cabinet of the Western Union Telegraph Company, at New York, which was
+intended to be clamped to the edge of a table when in use. He knew
+nothing of the splendid invention since known as the "Morse Alphabet,"
+and the spelling of words in a telegram was not intended by him. His
+complicated system, as described in his caveat filed by him in 1837,
+consisted in a system of signs, by which numbers, and consequently words
+and sentences, were to be indicated. There was then a set of type
+arranged to regulate and communicate the signs, and rules in which to
+set this type. There was a means for regulating the movement forward of
+the rule containing the types. This was a crank to be turned by the
+hand. The marking or writing apparatus at the receiving instrument was a
+pendulum arranged to be swung _across_ the slip of paper, as it was
+unwound from the drum, making a zig-zag mark the points of which were to
+be counted, a certain number of points meaning a certain numeral, which
+numeral meant a word. A separate type was used to represent each
+numeral, having a corresponding number of projections or teeth. A
+telegraphic dictionary was necessary, and one was at great pains
+prepared by Morse. His process was, therefore, to translate the message
+to be sent into the numerals corresponding to the words used, to set the
+types corresponding to those numerals in the rule, and then to pass the
+rule through the appliance arranged for the purpose in connection with
+the electric current. The receiver must then translate the message by
+reference to the telegraphic dictionary, and write out the words for the
+person to whom the message was sent. This was all changed by Vail, who
+invented the "dot-and-dash" alphabet, and modified the mechanical action
+of the instrument necessary for its use. The arrangement of a steel
+embossing-point working upon a grooved roller--a radical difference--was
+a portion of this change. The invention of the axial magnet, also
+Vail's, was another. Morse had regarded a mechanical arrangement for
+transmitting signals as necessary. Vail, in the practice of the first
+line, grew accustomed to sending messages by dipping the end of the wire
+in the mercury cup,--the beginning of the present transmitting
+instrument, which is also his invention--and Morse's "port-rule," types,
+and other complicated arrangements, went into the scrap-heap.
+
+[Illustration: MODERN TRANSMITTER.]
+
+Yet there were some strange things still left. The receiving relay
+weighed 185 pounds. An equally efficient modern one need not weigh more
+than half a pound. Morse had intended to make a _recording_
+telegraph distinctively; it was to his mind its chiefest value. Almost
+in the beginning it ceased to be such, and the recording portion of the
+instrument has for many years been unknown in a telegraph office, being
+replaced by the "sounder." This was also the invention of Vail. The more
+expert of the operators of the first line discovered that it was
+possible to read the signals _by the sound_ made by the armature
+lever. In vain did the managers prohibit it as unauthorized. The
+practice was still carried on wherever it could be without detection.
+Morse was uncompromising in his opposition to the innovation. The
+wonderful alphabet of the telegraph, the most valuable of the separate
+inventions that make up the system, was not his conception. The
+invention of this alphabetical code, based on the elements of time and
+space, has never met with the appreciation it has deserved. It has been
+found applicable everywhere. Flashes of light, the raising and lowering
+of a flag, the tapping of a finger, the long and short blasts of a steam
+whistle, spell out the words of the English language as readily as does
+the sounder in a telegraph-office. It may be interpreted by sight,
+touch, taste, hearing. With a wire, a battery and Vail's alphabet,
+telegraphy is entirely possible without any other appliances.
+
+[Illustration: MODERN "SOUNDER."]
+
+A brief sketch of the difficulties attending the making of the first
+practical telegraph line will be interesting as showing how much and how
+little men knew of practical electricity in 1843. [Footnote: There was
+no possibility of their knowing more, notwithstanding that, viewed from
+the present, their inexperienced struggles seem almost pathetic. So,
+also, do the ideas of Galvani and the experiments and conclusions of all
+except Franklin, until we come to Faraday. It is one of the features of
+the time in which we live that, regardless of age, we are all scholars
+of a new school in which mere diligence and behavior are not rewarded,
+and in which it is somewhat imperative that we should keep up with our
+class in an understanding of _what are now the facts of daily
+life_, wonders though they were in the days of our youth.] To begin
+with, it was a "metallic circuit;" that is, two wires were to be used
+instead of one wire and a "ground connection." They knew nothing of this
+last. Vail discovered and used it before the line was finished. The two
+wires, insulated, were inclosed in a pipe, lead presumably, and the pipe
+was placed in the ground. Ezra Cornell, afterwards the founder of
+Cornell University, had been engaged in the manufacture and sale of a
+patent plow, and undertook to make a pipe-laying machine for this new
+telegraph line. After the work had been begun Vail tested and united the
+conductors as each section was laid. When ten miles were laid the
+insulation, which had been growing weaker, failed altogether. There was
+no current. Probably every schoolboy now knows what the trouble was. The
+earth had stolen the current and absorbed it. The modern boy would
+simply remark "Induction," and turn his attention to some efficient
+remedy. Then, there was consternation. Cornell dexterously managed to
+break the pipe-laying machine, so as to furnish a plausible excuse to
+the newspapers and such public as there may be said to have been before
+there was any telegraph line. Days were spent in consultation at the
+Relay House, and in finding the cause of the difficulty and the remedy.
+Of the congressional appropriation nearly all had been spent. The
+interested parties even quarreled, as mere men will under such
+circumstances, and the want of a little knowledge which is now
+elementary about electricity came near wrecking forever an enterprise
+whose vast importance could not be, and was not then, even approximately
+measured.
+
+[Illustration: ALFRED VAIL.]
+
+Finally, after some weeks delay, it was decided to introduce what has
+become the most familiar feature of the landscape of civilization, and
+string the wires on poles. There is little need to follow the enterprise
+further. Morse stayed with one instrument in the Capitol at Washington,
+and Vail carried another with him at the end of the line. Already the
+type-and-rule and all the symbols and dictionaries had been discarded,
+and the dot-and-dash alphabet was substituted. On April 23d, 1844, Vail
+substituted the earth for the metallic circuit as an experiment, and
+that great step both in knowledge and in practice was taken.
+
+Within an incredibly brief space the Morse Electric Telegraph had spread
+all over the world. No man's triumph was ever more complete. He passed
+to those riches and honors that must have been to him almost as a
+fulfilled dream. In Europe his progresses were like those of a monarch.
+He was made a member of almost all of the learned societies of the
+world, and on his breast glittered the medals and orders that are the
+insignia of human greatness. A congress of representatives of ten of the
+governments of Europe met in Paris in 1858, and it was unanimously
+decided that the sum of four hundred thousand francs--about a hundred
+thousand dollars--should be presented to him. He died in New York in
+1872.
+
+[Illustration: PROF. HENRY'S ELECTROMAGNET AND ARMATURE]
+
+Yet not a single feature of the invention of Morse, as formulated in his
+caveat and described in his original patent, is to be found among the
+essentials of modern telegraphy. They had mostly been abandoned before
+the first line had been completed, and the arrangements of his
+associate, Vail, were substituted. Professor Joseph Henry had, in 1832,
+constructed an electromagnetic telegraph whose signals were made by
+sound, as all signals now are in the so-called Morse system. He hung a
+bar-magnet on a pivot in its center as a compass-needle is hung. He
+wound a U-shaped piece of soft iron with insulated wire, and made it an
+electro-magnet, and placed the north end of the magnetized bar between
+the two legs of this electro-magnet. When the latter was made a magnet
+by the current the end of the bar thus placed was attracted by one leg
+of the magnet and repelled by the other, and was thus caused to swing in
+a horizontal plane so that the opposite end of it struck a bell. Thus
+was an electric telegraph made as an experimental toy, and fulfilling
+all the conditions of such an one giving the signals by sound, as the
+modern telegraph does. It lacked one thing--the essential. [Footnote:
+The details of the construction of the modern telegraph line are not
+here stated. There are none that change, in principle, the outline above
+given.]
+
+The Vail telegraphic alphabet had not been thought of. Had such an idea
+been conceived previously a message could have been read as it is read
+now, and with the toy of Professor Henry which he abandoned without an
+idea of its utility or of the possibilities of any telegraph as we have
+long known them. Morse knew these possibilities. He was one of the
+innumerable eccentrics who have been right, one of the prophets who have
+been in the beginning without honor, not only in respect to their own
+country, but in respect to their times.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF TELEGRAPH SYSTEM.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+THE OCEAN CABLE.--The remaining department of Telegraphy is embodied in
+the startling departure from ancient ideas of the possible which we know
+as cable telegraphy, the messages by such means being _cablegrams_.
+About these ocean systems there are many features not applying to lines
+on land, though they are intended to perform the same functions in the
+same way, with the same object of conveying intelligence in language,
+instantly and certainly, but under the sea.
+
+The marine cables are not simple wires. There is in the center a strand
+of usually seven small copper wires, intended as the conductor of the
+current. These, twisted loosely into a small cable, are surrounded by
+repeated layers of gutta-percha, which is, in turn, covered with jute.
+Outside of all there is an armor of wires, and the entire cable appears
+much like any other of the wire cables now in common use with elevators,
+bridges, and for many purposes. In the shallow waters of bays and
+harbors, where anchors drag and the like occurrences take place, the
+armor of a submarine cable is sometimes so heavy as to weigh more than
+twenty tons to the mile.
+
+There are peculiar difficulties encountered in sending messages by an
+ocean cable, and some of these grow out of the same induction whose laws
+are indispensable in other cases. The inner copper core sets up
+induction in the strands of the outer armor, and that again with the
+surrounding water. There is, again, a species of re-induction affecting
+the core, so that faint impulses may be received at the terminals that
+were never sent by the operators. All of these difficulties combined
+result in what electricians term "retardation." It is one of the
+departments of telegraphy that, like the unavoidable difficulties in all
+machines and devices, educates men to their special care, and keeps them
+thinking. It is one of the natural features of all the mechanical
+sciences that results in the continual making of improvements.
+
+The first impression in regard to ocean cables would be that very strong
+currents are used in sending impulses so far. The opposite is true. The
+receiving instrument is not the noisy "sounder" of the land lines. There
+was, until recently, a delicate needle which swung to and fro with the
+impulses, and reflected beams of light which, according to their number
+and the space between them spelled out the message according to the Vail
+dot-and-dash alphabet. Now, however, a means still more delicate has
+been devised, resulting in a faint wavy ink-line on a long, unwinding
+slip of paper, made by a fountain pen. This strange manuscript may be
+regarded as the latest system of writing in the world, having no
+relationship to the art of Cadmus, and requiring an expert and a special
+education to decipher it. Those faint pulsations, from a hand three
+thousand miles away across the sea, are the realization of a magic
+incredible. The necromancy and black art of all antiquity are childish
+by comparison. They give but faint indications of what they often
+are--the messages of love and death; the dictations of statesmanship;
+the heralds of peace or war; the orders for the disposition of millions
+of dollars.
+
+The story of the laying of the first ocean cable is worthy of the
+telling in any language, but should be especially interesting to the
+American boy and girl. It is a story of native enterprise and
+persistence; perhaps the most remarkable of them all.
+
+The earliest ocean telegraph was that laid by two men named Brett,
+across the English Channel. For this cable, a pioneer though crossing
+only a narrow water, the conservative officials of the British
+government refused a charter. In August, 1850, they laid a single copper
+wire covered with gutta-percha from Dover in England to the coast of
+France. The first wire was soon broken, and a second was made consisting
+of several strands, and this last was soon imitated in various short
+reaches of water in Europe.
+
+But the Atlantic had always been considered unfathomable. No line had
+ever sounded its depths, and its strong currents had invariably swept
+away the heaviest weights before they reached its bed. Its great
+feature, so far as known, was that strange ocean river first noted and
+described by Franklin, and known to us as the Gulf Stream. In 1853 a
+circumstance occurred which again turned the attention of a few men to
+the question of an Atlantic cable. Lieutenant Berryman, of the Navy,
+made a survey of the bottom of the Atlantic from Newfoundland to
+Ireland, and the wonderful discovery was made that the floor of the
+ocean was a vast plain, not more than two miles below the surface,
+extending from one continent to the other. This plain is about four
+hundred miles wide and sixteen hundred long, and there are no currents
+to disturb the mass of broken shells and unknown fishes that lie on its
+oozy surface. It was named the "Telegraphic Plateau," with a view to its
+future use. At either edge of this plateau huge mountains, from four to
+seven thousand feet high, rise out of the depths. There are precipices
+of sheer descent down which the cable now hangs. The Azores and Bermudas
+are peaks of ocean mountains. The warm river known as the Gulf Stream,
+coming northward meets the ice-bergs and melts them, and deposits the
+shells, rocks and sand they carry on this plain. When it was discovered
+the difficulty in the way of an Atlantic cable seemed no longer to
+exist, and those who had been anxious to engage in the enterprise began
+to bestir themselves.
+
+Of these the most active was the American, Cyrus W. Field. He began life
+as a clerk in New York City. When thirty-five years old he became
+engaged in the building of a land line of telegraph across Newfoundland,
+the purpose of which was to transmit news brought by a fast line of
+steamers intended to be established, and the idea is said to have
+occurred to him of making a line not only so far, but across the sea. In
+November, 1856, he had succeeded in forming a company, and the entire
+capital, amounting to 350,000 pounds, was subscribed. The governments of
+England and the United States promised a subsidy to the stockholders.
+The cable was made in England. The _Niagara_ was assigned by the
+United States, and the _Agamemnon_ by England, each attended by
+smaller vessels, to lay the cable. In August, 1857, the Niagara left the
+coast of Ireland, dropping her cable into the sea. Even when it dropped
+suddenly down the steep escarpment to the great plateau the current
+still flowed. But through the carelessness of an assistant the cable
+parted. That was the beginning of mishaps. The task was not to be so
+easily done, and the enterprise was postponed until the following year.
+
+That next year was still more memorable for triumph and disappointment.
+It was now designed that the two vessels should meet in mid-ocean, unite
+the ends of the cable, and sail slowly to opposite shores. There were
+fearful storms. The huge _Agamemnon_, overloaded with her half of
+the cable, was almost lost. But finally the spot in the waste and middle
+of the Atlantic was reached, the sea was still, and the vessels steamed
+away from each other slowly uncoiling into the sea their two halves of
+the second cable. It parted again, and the two ships returned to
+Ireland.
+
+In July they again met in mid-ocean. Europe and America were both
+charitably deriding the splendid enterprise. All faith was lost. It was
+known, to journalism especially, that the cable would never be laid and
+that the enterprise was absurd. But it was like the laying of the first
+land line. There was a way to do it, existing in the brains and faith of
+men, though at first that way was not known. From this third meeting the
+two ships again sailed away, the _Niagara_ for America, the
+_Agamemnon_ for Valencia Bay. This time the wire did not part, and
+on August 29th, 1858, the old world and the new were bound together for
+the first time, and each could read almost the thoughts of the other.
+The queen saluted America, and the president replied. There were salutes
+of cannon and the ringing of bells. But the messages by the cable grew
+indistinct day by day, and finally ceased. The Atlantic cable had been
+laid, and--had failed.
+
+Eight years followed, and the cable lay forgotten at the bottom of the
+sea. The reign of peace on earth and good will to men had so far failed
+to come and they were years of tumult and bitterness. The Union of the
+United States was called upon to defend its integrity in a great war. A
+bitter enmity grew up between us and England. The telegraph, and all its
+persevering projectors, were almost absolutely forgotten. Electricians
+declared the project utterly impracticable, and it began, finally, to be
+denied that any messages had ever crossed the Atlantic at all, and Field
+and his associates were discredited. It was said that the current could
+not be made to pass through so long a circuit. New routes were spoken
+of--across Bering's Strait, and overland by way of Siberia--and
+measures began to be taken to carry this scheme into effect.
+
+Amid these discouragements, Field and his associates revived their
+company, made a new cable, and provided everything that science could
+then suggest to aid final success. This new cable was more perfect than
+any of the former ones, and there was a mammoth side-wheel steamer known
+as the _Great Eastern_, unavailable as it proved for the ordinary
+uses of commerce, and this vessel was large enough to carry the entire
+cable in her hold. In July, 1865, the huge steamer left Ireland,
+dropping the endless coil into the sea. The same men were engaged in
+this last attempt that had failed in all the previous ones. It is one of
+the most memorable instances of perseverance on record. But on August
+6th a flaw occurred, and the cable was being drawn up for repairs. The
+sound of the wheel suddenly stopped; the cable broke and sunk into the
+depths. The _Great Eastern_ returned unsuccessful to her port.
+
+Field was present on board on this occasion, and had been present on
+several similar ones. There was, so far as known, no record made by him
+of his thoughts. There were now five cables in the bed of the Atlantic,
+and each one had carried down with it a large sum of money, and a still
+larger sum of hopes. Yet the Great Eastern sailed again in July, 1866,
+her tanks filled with new cable and Field once more on her decks. It was
+the last, and the successful attempt. The cable sank steadily and
+noiselessly into the sea, and on July 26th the steamer sailed into
+Trinity Bay. The connection was made at Heart's Content, a little New
+Foundland fishing village, and one for this occasion admirably named.
+Then the lost cable of 1865 was found, raised and spliced.
+
+In these later times, if a flaw should occur, science would locate it,
+and go and repair it. Even if this were not true, the fact remains that
+this last cable, and that of 1865, have been carrying their messages
+under the sea for nearly thirty years. The lesson is that repeated
+failures do not mean _final_ failure. There is often said to be a
+malice, a spirit of rebellion, in inanimate things. They refuse to
+become slaves until they are once and for all utterly subdued, and then
+they are docile forever. Yet the malice truly lies in the inaptitude and
+inexperience of men. Had Field and his associates known how to make and
+lay an Atlantic cable in the beginning as well as they did in the end,
+the first one laid would have been successful. The years were passed in
+the invention of machinery for laying, and in improving the construction
+of each successive cable. Many have been laid since then, certainly and
+without failure. Men have learned how. [Footnote: At present the total
+mileage of submarine cables is about 152,000 miles, costing altogether
+$200,000,000. The length of land wires throughout the world is over
+2,000,000 miles, costing $225,000,000. The capital invested in all
+lines, land and sea, is about $530,000,000.]
+
+Thirteen years were passed in this succession of toils, expenditures,
+trials and failures. Field crossed the Atlantic more than fifty times in
+these years, in pursuit of his great idea. At last, like Morse, he was
+crowned with wealth, success, medals and honors. He was acquainted with
+all the difficulties. It is now known that he knew through them all that
+an ocean cable could finally be laid.
+
+THE TELEPHONE.--The telegraph had become old. All nations had become
+accustomed to its use. More than thirty years had elapsed--a long time
+in the last half of the nineteenth century--before mankind awoke to a
+new and startling surprise; the telegraph had been made to transmit not
+only language, but the human voice in articulate speech. [Footnote: It
+has been noted that Morse's idea was a _recording_ telegraph, that
+being in his mind its most valuable point, and that this idea has long
+been obsolete. In like manner, when the Telephone was invented there was
+a general business opinion that it was perhaps an instrument useful in
+colleges for demonstrating the wonders of electricity, but not useful
+for commercial purposes _because it made no record_. "Business will
+always be done in black and white" was the oracular verdict of prominent
+and experienced business men. It may be true, but a little conversation
+across space has been found indispensable. The telephone is a remarkable
+business success.] The fact first became known in 1873, and was the
+invention of Alexander G. Bell, of Chicago.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF TELEPHONE.--THE BLAKE TRANSMITTER.]
+
+There were several, no one knows how many, attempts to accomplish this
+remarkable feat previous to the success of Professor Bell. One of these
+was by Reis, of Frankfort, in 1860. It did not embrace any of the most
+valuable principles involved in what we know as the telephone, since it
+could not transmit _speech_. Professor Bell's first operative
+apparatus was accompanied by simultaneous inventions by Gray, Edison,
+and others. This remarkable instance of several of the great
+electricians of the country evolving at nearly the same time the same
+principal details of a revolutionary invention, has never been fully
+explained. The first rather crude and ineffective arrangements were
+rapidly improved by these men, and by others, prominent among whom is
+Blake, whose remarkable transmitter will be described presently. The
+best devices of these inventors were finally embodied, and in the
+resulting instrument we have one of the chiefest of those modern wonders
+whose first appearance taxed the credulity of mankind. [Footnote: There
+were, until a recent period, a line of statements, alleged facts and
+reasonings, that were incredible in proportion to intelligence. The
+occurrences of recent times have reversed this rule with regard to all
+things in the domain of applied science. It is the ignorant and narrow
+only who are incredulous, and the ears of intelligence are open to every
+sound. All that is not absurd is possible, and all that is possible is
+sure to be accomplished. The telephone, as a statement, _was_
+absurd, but not to the men who worked for its accomplishment and finally
+succeeded. The lines grow narrow. It requires now a high intelligence to
+decide even upon the fact of absurdity within the domain of natural
+law.]
+
+In reality the telephone is simple in construction. Workmen who are not
+accomplished electricians constantly erect, correct and repair the lines
+and instruments. The machine is not liable to derangement. Any person
+may use it the first time of trying, and this use is almost universal.
+Yet it is, from the view of any hour in all the past, an
+incomprehensible mystery. A moment of reflection drifts the mind
+backward and renders it almost incredible in the present. The human
+voice, recognizable, in articulate words, is apparently borne for miles,
+now even for some hundreds of miles, upon an attenuated wire which hangs
+silent in the air carrying absolutely nothing more than thousands of
+little varying impulses of electricity. Not a word that is spoken at one
+end of it is ever heard at the other, and the conclusion inevitable to
+the reason of even twenty years ago would be that if one person does not
+actually hear the other talk there is a miracle. Probably this idea that
+the voice is actually carried is not very uncommon. The facts seem
+incomprehensible otherwise, and it is not considered that if that idea
+were correct it _would_ be a miracle.
+
+The entire explanation of the magic of the telephone lies in electrical
+induction. To the brief explanation of that phenomenon previously given
+the reader is again referred for a better understanding of what now
+follows.
+
+But, first, a moment's consideration may be given to the results
+produced by the use of this appliance, which, as an illustration of the
+way of the world was an innovation that, had it remained uninvented or
+impossible, would never have been even desired. One third more business
+is said now to be transacted in the average day than was possible
+previously. Since many things can now go on together which previously
+waited for direction, authority and personal arrangement, a man's
+business life is lengthened one-third, while his business may mostly be
+done, to his great convenience, from one place. It has given employment
+to a large number of persons, a large proportion of whom are young
+women. The status of woman in the business world has been, fortunately
+or unfortunately, by so much changed. It has introduced a new necessity,
+never again to be dispensed with. It has changed the ancient habits, and
+with them, unconsciously, _the habit of thought_. Contact not
+personal between man and man has increased. The _thought_ of others
+is quickly arrived at. It has caused us to become more appreciative of
+the absolute meanings and values of words, without assistance from face,
+manner or gesture. Laughter may be heard, but tears are unseen. It has
+induced caution in speech and enforces brevity. While none of its
+conveniences are now noted, and all that it gives is expected, the
+telephone, with all its effects, has entered--into the sum of life.
+
+On the wall or table there is a box, and beside this box projects a
+metal arm. In a fork of this arm hangs a round, black, trumpet-shaped,
+hard rubber tube. This last is the receiving instrument. It is taken
+from its arm and held close to the ear. The answers are heard in it as
+though the person speaking were there concealed in an impish embodiment
+of himself. Meantime the talking is done into a hole in the side of the
+box, while the receiver is held to the ear. This is all that appears
+superficially. An operation incredible has its entire machinery
+concealed in these simplicities. It is difficult to explain the mystery
+of the telephone in words--though it has been said to be simple--and it
+is almost impossible unless the reader comprehends, or will now
+undertake to comprehend, what has been previously said on the subject of
+the production of magnetism by a current of electricity, as in the case
+of the electro-magnet, and on the subject of induction and its laws.
+
+It has been shown that electricity produces magnetism; that the current,
+properly managed as described, creates instantly a powerful magnet out
+of a piece of soft iron, and leaves it again a mere piece of iron at the
+will of the operator. This process also will work backwards. An electric
+current produces a magnet, and _a magnet also may be made to produce
+an electric current_. It is one more of the innumerable, almost
+universal, cases where scientific and mechanical processes may be
+reversed. When the dynamo is examined this process is still further
+exemplified, and when we examine the dynamo and the motor together we
+have a striking example of the two processes going on together.
+
+The application of this making of a current, or changing its intensity,
+in the telephone, is apparently totally unlike the continuous
+manufacture of the induced current for daily use by means of the steam
+engine and dynamo. But it is in exact accord with the same laws. It
+will, perhaps, be more readily understood by recalling the results of
+the experiment of the two wires, where it was found that an _approach
+to_, or a _receding from_, a wire carrying a current, produces
+an impulse over the wire that has by itself no current at all. Now, it
+must be added to that explanation that if the battery were detached from
+that conducting wire, and if, instead of its being a wire for the
+carrying of a battery current _it were itself a permanent magnet_,
+the same results would happen in the other wire if it were rapidly moved
+toward and away from this permanent magnet. If the reader should stretch
+a wire tightly between two pegs on a table, and should then hold the
+arms of a common horseshoe magnet very near it, and should twang the
+stretched wire with his finger, as he would a guitar string, the
+electrometer would show an induced alternate current in the wire. Since
+this is an illustration of the principle of the dynamo, stated in its
+simplest form, it may be well to remember that in this manner--with the
+means multiplied and in all respects made the most of--a very strong
+current of electricity may be evolved without any battery or other
+source of electricity except a magnet. In connection with this
+substitution of a magnet for a current-carrying wire, it must be
+remembered that moving the magnet toward or from the wire has the same
+result as moving the wire instead. It does not matter which piece is
+moved.
+
+In addition to the above, it should be stated that not only will an
+induced current be set up in the wire, but also _the magnetism in the
+magnet will be increased or diminished as the tremblings of the wire
+cause it to approach or recede from it_. Therefore if a wire be led
+away from each pole of a permanent magnet, and the ends united to form a
+circuit, an induced current will appear in this wire if a piece of soft
+iron is passed quickly near the magnet.
+
+There is an essential part of the telephone that it is necessary to go
+outside of the field of electricity to describe. It is undoubtedly
+understood by the reader that all sound is produced by vibrations, or
+rapid undulations, of the surrounding air. If a membrane of any kind is
+stretched across a hoop, and one talks against it, so to speak, the
+diaphragm or membrane will be shaken, will vibrate, with the movement of
+the air produced by the voice. If a cannon be fired all the windows
+rattle, and are often broken. A peal of thunder will cause the same jar
+and rattle of window panes, manifestly by what we call
+"sound"--vibrations of the air. The window frame is a "diaphragm." The
+ear is constructed on the same principle, its diaphragm being actually
+moved by the vibrations of air, being what we call hearing. With these
+facts about sound understood in connection with those given in
+connection with the substitution of a magnet for a battery current, it
+is entirely possible for any non-expert to understand the theory of the
+construction of the telephone.
+
+In the Bell telephone, now used with the Blake transmitter [which
+differs somewhat from the arrangement I shall now describe] a bar magnet
+has a portion of its length wound with very fine insulated wire. Across
+the opposite end of this polarized [Footnote: "Polarized" means
+magnetized; having the two poles of a permanent magnet. The term is
+frequently used in descriptions of electrical appliances. Instead of
+using the terms _positive_ and _negative_, it is also
+customary to speak of the "North" or the "South" of a magnet, battery or
+circuit.] magnet, crosswise to it, and very close, there is placed a
+diaphragm of thin sheet iron. This is held only around its edge, and its
+center is free to vibrate toward and from the end of this polarized
+magnet. This thin disc of iron, therefore, follows the movements, the
+"soundwaves," of the air against it, which are caused by the human
+voice. We have an instance of apiece of soft iron moving toward, and
+away from, a magnet. It moves with a rapidity and violence precisely
+proportioned to the tones and inflections of the voice. Those movements
+are almost microscopic, not perceptible to the eye, but sufficient.
+
+The approaching and receding have made a difference, in the quality of
+the magnet. Its magnetism has been increased and diminished, and the
+little coil of insulated wire around it has felt these changes, and
+carried them as impulses over the circuit of which it is a part. In that
+circuit, at the other end, there is a precisely similar little insulated
+coil, upon a precisely similar polarized magnet. These impulses pass
+through this second coil, and increase or diminish the magnetism in the
+magnet round which it is coiled. That, in turn, affects by magnetic
+attraction the diaphragm that is arranged in relation to its magnet
+precisely as described for the first. The first being controlled as to
+the extent and rapidity of its movements by the loudness and other
+modifications of the voice, the impulses sent over the circuit vary
+accordingly. As a consequence, so does the strength of the magnet whose
+coil is also in the circuit. So, therefore, does its power of attraction
+over its diaphragm vary. The result is that the movements that are
+caused in the first diaphragm by the voice, are caused in the second by
+an _attraction_ that varies in strength in proportion to the
+vibrations of the voice speaking against the first diaphragm.
+
+This is the theory of the telephone. The sounds are not carried, but
+_mechanically produced_ again by the rattle of a thin piece of iron
+close to the listener's ear. The voice is full, audible, distinct, as we
+hear it naturally, and as it impinges upon the transmitting diaphragm.
+In reproduction at the receiving instrument it is small in volume;
+almost microscopic, if the phrase may be applied to sound. We hear it
+only by placing the ear close to the diaphragm. It will be seen that
+this is necessarily so. No attempts to remedy the difficulty have so far
+been successful. There is no means of reproducing the volume of the
+voice with the minute vibrations of a little iron disc.
+
+In actual service an electro-magnet is used instead of, or in addition
+to, the bar magnets described above. A steady flow from a battery is
+passed through an instrument which throws this current into proper
+vibrations by stopping the flow of the current at each interval between
+impulses. There is a piece of carbon between the diaphragm and its
+support. The wires are connected with the diaphragm and its support, and
+the current passes through the carbon. When the diaphragm vibrates, the
+carbon is slightly compressed by it. Pressure reduces its resistance,
+and a greater current passes through it and over the wires of the
+circuit for the instant during which the touch remains. This is the
+Blake transmitter. It should be explained that carbon stands low on the
+list of conductors of electricity. The more dense it is, the better
+conductor. The varying pressures of the diaphragm serve to produce this
+varying density and the consequent varying impulses of the current which
+effect the receiving diaphragm.
+
+The transmitter, as above described, is in the square box, and its round
+black diaphragm may be seen behind the round hole into which one talks.
+[Footnote: Shouting into a telephone doubtless comes of the idea,
+unconscious, that one is speaking to a person at a distance. To speak
+distinctly is better, and in an ordinary tone.] The receiver is the
+trumpet-shaped tube which hangs on its side, and is taken from its hook
+to be used. The call-bell has nothing to do with the telephone. It is
+operated by a small magneto-generator,--a very near relative of the
+dynamo-the current from which is sent over the telephone circuit (the
+same wires) when the small crank is turned. Sometimes the question
+occurs: "Why ring one's own bell when one desires to ring only that at
+the central office?" The answer is that both bells are in the same
+circuit. If the circuit is uninterrupted your bell will ring when you
+ring the other, and a bell at each end of your circuit is necessary in
+any case, else you could not yourself be called.
+
+When the receiving instrument is on its hook its weight depresses the
+lever slightly. This slight movement _connects_ the bell circuit
+and _disconnects_ the telephone circuit. Take it off the hook and
+the reverse is effected.
+
+The long-distance telephone differs from the ordinary only in larger
+conductors, improved instruments, and a metallic circuit--two wires
+instead of the ordinary single wire and ground connections.
+
+[Illustration: TELEAUTOGRAPH TRANSMITTING INSTRUMENT.]
+
+THE TELAUTOGRAPH.--This, the latest of modern miracles in the field of
+electricity, comes naturally after the telegraph and telephone, since it
+supplements them as a means of communication between individuals. It
+also is the invention of Prof. Elisha Gray, who seems to be as well the
+author of the name of his extraordinary achievement. It is not the first
+instrument of the kind attempted. The desire to find a means of writing
+at a distance is old. Bain, of Edinburgh, made a machine partially
+successful fifty years ago. Like the telegraph as intended by Morse,
+there was the interposition of typesetting before a message could be
+sent. It did not write, or follow the hand of the operator in writing,
+though it did reproduce at the other end of the circuit in facsimile the
+faces of the types that had been set by the sender. It was a process by
+electrolysis, well understood by all electricians. Several of this
+variety of writing telegraphs have been made, some of them almost
+successful, but all lacking the vital essential. [Footnote: The lack of
+_one vital essential_ has been fatal to hundreds of inventions.
+Inventors unconsciously follow paths made by predecessors. The entire
+class of transmitting instruments must dispense with tedious
+preliminaries, and must use _words_. Vail accomplished this in
+telegraphy. Bell and others in the telephone, and Gray has borne the
+same fact in mind in the present development of the telautograph.] In
+1856 Casselli, of Florence, made a writing telegraph which had a
+pendulum arrangement weighing fourteen pounds. Only one was ever made,
+but it resulted in many new ideas all pertaining to the facsimile
+systems--the following of the faces of types--and all were finally
+abandoned.
+
+The invention of Gray is a departure. The sender of a message sits down
+at a small desk and takes up a pencil, writing with it on ordinary paper
+and in his usual manner. A pen at the other end of the circuit follows
+every movement of his hand. The result is an autograph letter a hundred
+miles or more away. A man in Chicago may write and sign a check payable
+in Indianapolis. Personal directions may be given authoritatively and
+privately. As in the case of the telephone, no intervening operator is
+necessary. No expertness is required. Even the use of the alphabet is
+not necessary. A drawing of any description, anything that can be traced
+with a pen or pencil, is copied precisely by the pen at the receiving
+desk. The possibilities of this instrument, the uses it may develop, are
+almost inconceivable. It might be imagined that the lines drawn would be
+continuous. On the contrary, when the pen is lifted by the writer at the
+sending desk it also lifts itself from the paper at that of the
+receiver.
+
+The action of the telautograph depends upon the variations in magnetic
+strength between two small electro-magnets. It has been seen that an
+electro-magnet exerts its attractive force in proportion to the current
+which passes through its coil. To use a phrase entirely non-technical,
+it will "pull" hard or easy in proportion to the strength of the passing
+current. This fact has been observed as the cause of action in the
+telephone, where one diaphragm, moved by the air-vibrations caused by
+the voice, causes a varying current to pass over the wire, attracting
+the other diaphragm less or more as the first is moved toward or away
+from its magnet. In the telautograph the varying currents are caused not
+by the diaphragm influenced by the voice, but _by a pencil moved by
+the hand_.
+
+To show how these movements may be caused let us imagine a case that may
+occur in nature. It is an interesting mechanical study. There is an
+upright rush or reed growing in the middle of a running stream. The stem
+of this rush has elasticity naturally; it has a tendency to stand
+upright; but it bends when there is a current against it. It is easy
+enough to imagine it bending down stream more or less as the current is
+more or less strong.
+
+Imagine now another stream entering the first at right angles to it, and
+that the rush stands in the center of both currents. It will then bend
+to the force of the second stream also, and the direction in which it
+will lean will be a compromise between the forces of the two. Lessen the
+flow of the current in one of the streams, and the rush will bend a
+little less before that current and swing around to the side from which
+it receives less pressure. Cut off either of the currents entirely, and
+it will bend in the direction of the other current only. In a word,
+_if the quantity or strength of the current of both streams can be
+controlled at will, the rush can be made to swing in any direction
+between the two, and its tip will describe any figure desired, aided, of
+course, by its own disposition to stand upright when there is no
+pressure_.
+
+Let us imagine the rush to be a pen or pencil, and the two streams of
+water to be two currents of electricity having power to sway and move
+this pencil in proportion to their relative strength, as the streams did
+the rush. Imagine further that these two currents are varied and changed
+with reference to each other by the movements of a pen in a man's hand
+at another place. It is an essential part of the mechanism of the
+telautograph, and the movement is known among mechanicians as
+"compounding a point."
+
+Gray, while using the principles involved in compounding a point, seems
+to have discarded the ways of transmitting magnetic impulses of varying
+strength commonly in use. His method he calls the "step-by-step"
+principle, and it is a striking example of what patience and ingenuity
+may accomplish in the management of what is reputedly the most elusive
+and difficult of the powers of nature. The machine was some six years in
+being brought into practical form, and was perfected only after a long
+series of experiments. In its operation it deals with infinitesimal
+measurements and quantities. The first attempts were on the "variable
+current" system, which was later discarded for the "step-by-step" plan
+mentioned.
+
+In writing an ordinary lead pencil may be used. From the point of this
+two silk cords are extended diagonally, their directions being at right
+angles to each other, and the ends of these cords enter openings made
+for them in the cast iron case of the instrument on each side of the
+small desk on which the writing is done.
+
+Inside the case each cord is wound on a small drum which is mounted on a
+vertical shaft. Now if the pencil-point is moved straight upward or
+downward it is manifest that both shafts will move alike. If the
+movement is oblique in any direction, one of the shafts will turn more
+than the other, and the degree of all these turnings of each shaft in
+reference to the other will be precisely governed by the direction in
+which the pencil-point is moved.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF MECHANICAL TELAUTOGRAPH. BOW-DRILL
+ARRANGEMENT.]
+
+Now, suppose each shaft to carry a small, toothed wheel, and that upon
+these teeth a small arm rests. As the wheel turns this arm will move as
+a pawl does on a ratchet. Imagine that at each slight depression between
+the ratchet-teeth it breaks a contact and cuts off a current, and at
+each slight rise renews the contact and permits a current to pass. This
+current affects an electro-magnet--one for each shaft--at the receiving
+end, and each of these magnets, when the current is on, attracts an
+armature bearing a pawl, which, being lifted, allows the notched wheel,
+upon which it bears, to turn _to the extent of one notch_. The
+arrangement may be called an electric clutch, that may be arranged in
+many ways, and the detail of its action is unimportant in description,
+so that it be borne in mind that _each time a notch is passed in
+turning the shaft by drawing upon or relaxing the cords attached to the
+pencil-point_, an impulse of electricity is sent to an electro-magnet
+and armature which allows _a corresponding wheel and its shaft to turn
+one notch, or as many notches, as are passed at the transmitting
+shaft_. In moving the pencil one inch to one side, we will suppose it
+permits the shaft on which the cord is wound to turn forty notches. Then
+forty impulses of electricity have been sent over the wire, the clutch
+has been released forty times, and the shaft to which it is attached has
+turned precisely as much as the shaft has which was turned, or was
+allowed to turn, by the cord wound upon it and attached to the pencil.
+
+It will be remembered that the arrangement is double. There are two
+shafts operated by the writer's pencil--one on each side of it. Two
+corresponding shafts occupy relative positions in respect to the
+automatic pen of the receiving instrument. There are two circuits, and
+two wires are at present necessary for the operation of the instrument.
+It remains to describe the manner of operating the automatic pen by
+connection with its two shafts which are turned by the step-by-step
+arrangement described, precisely as much and at the same time as those
+of the transmitting instrument are.
+
+[Illustration: WORK OF THE TELAUTOGRAPH. COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION, 1893.]
+
+To each shaft of the receiving instrument is attached an aluminum
+pen-arm by means of cords, each arm being fixed, in regard to its shaft,
+as a bow drill is in regard to its drill. These arms meet in the center
+of the writing tablet, V-shaped, as the cords are with relation to the
+writer's pencil in the sending instrument. A small tube conveys ink from
+a reservoir along one of the pen-arms, and into a glass tube upright at
+the junction of the arms. This tube is the pen. Now, let us imagine the
+pencil of the writer pushed straight upward from the apex of the
+V-shaped figure the cords and pencil-point make on the writing desk.
+Then both the shafts at the points of the arms of the V will rotate
+equally. [Footnote: See diagram of mechanical Telautograph, and of bow
+drill. In the latter, in ordinary use, the stick and string; rotate the
+spool. Rotating the spool will, in turn, move the stick and string, and
+this is its action in the pen-arms of the Telautograph.] The number of
+impulses sent from each of these shafts, by the means explained, will be
+equal. Each of the shafts of the receiving instrument will rotate alike,
+and each draw up its arm of the automatic pen precisely as though one
+took hold of the points of the two legs of the V, and drew them apart to
+right and left in a straight line. This moves the apex of the V, with
+its pen, in a straight line upward at the same time the writer at the
+sending instrument pushed his pencil upward. If this one movement,
+considered alone, is understood, all the rest follow by the same means.
+This is, as nearly as it may be described without the use of technical
+mechanical terms, the principle of the telautograph. It must be seen
+that all that is necessary to describe any movement of the sender's
+pencil upon the paper under the receiving pen is that the rotating
+upright shafts of the latter should move precisely as much, and at the
+same time, with those two which get their movement from the wound cords
+and attached pencil-points in the hand of the writer.
+
+Only one essential item of the movement remains. The shafts of both
+instruments must be rotated by some separate mechanical agency, capable
+of being automatically reversed. By an arrangement unnecessary to
+explain in detail, the pencil of the writer lifted from the paper
+resting on the metallic table which forms the desk; results in the
+automatic lifting of the pen from the paper at the receiving desk.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Prof. Elisha Gray was born in 1835, in Ohio. He was a blacksmith, and
+later, a carpenter. But he was given to chemical and mechanical
+experiments rather than to the industries. When twenty-one, he entered
+Oberlin College, remaining there five years, and earning all the money
+he spent. He devoted his time chiefly to studies of the physical
+sciences. As a young man he was an invalid. Later he was not remarkably
+successful in business, failing several times in his beginnings. His
+first invention was a telegraph self-adjusting relay. It was not
+practically successful. Afterwards he was employed with an electrical
+manufacturing company at Cleveland and Chicago. Most of his earlier
+inventions in the line of electrical utility are not distinctively
+known. He has never been idle, and they all possessed practical merit.
+For many years before he was known as the wizard of the telautograph, he
+was foremost in the ranks of physicists and electricians. He is not a
+discoverer of great principles, but is professionally skillful and
+accomplished, and eminently practical. His every effort is exerted to
+avoid intricacy and clumsiness in machinery. In 1878 he was awarded the
+grand prize at the Paris Exposition, and was given the degree of
+Chevalier and the decorations of the Legion of Honor by the French
+Government, and again in 1881, at the Electrical Exposition at Paris, he
+was honored with the gold medal for his inventions. He secured the
+degree of A.M. at Oberlin College, and was the recipient of the degree
+of Ph.D. from the Ripon (Wis.) College. For years he was connected with
+those institutions as non-resident Lecturer in Physics. Another
+University gave him the degree of LL.D. He is a member of the American
+Philosophical Society, the Society of Electrical Engineers of England,
+and the Society of Telegraph Engineers of London. He received an award
+and a certificate from the Centennial Exposition for his inventions in
+electricity.
+
+The same lesson is to be gathered from his career, so far, that is given
+by the life of every noted American. It means that money, family,
+prestige, have no place as leverages of success in any field. The rule
+is toward the opposite. The qualities and capacities that win do so
+without these early advantages, and all the more surely because there is
+an inducement to use them. There is no "luck."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+THE ELECTRIC LIGHT.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It has been stated that modern theory recognizes two classes of
+electricity, the _Static_ and the _Dynamic_. The difference
+is, however, solely noticeable in operation. Of the dynamic class there
+can be no more common and striking example than the now almost universal
+electric light. Yet, with a sufficient expenditure of chemicals and
+electrodes, and a sufficient number of cells, electric lighting, either
+arc or incandescent, can be as effectively accomplished as with the
+current evolved by a powerful dynamo. [Footnote: As an illustration of
+the day of beginnings, a few years ago the _thalus_, or lantern,
+the pride of the rural Congressman, on the dome of the Capitol at
+Washington was lighted by electricity, and an immense circular chamber
+beneath the dome was occupied by hundreds of cells of the ordinary form
+of battery. The lamps were of the incandescent variety, and what we now
+know as the filament was platinum wire. Vacuum bulb, filament, carbon,
+dynamo, were all unknown. But the current, and the heat of resistance,
+and every fact now in use in electric lighting, were there in
+operation.]
+
+The reader will understand that modern dynamic electricity owes its
+development to the principle of economy in production. Practical science
+most effectively awakens from its lethargy at the call of commerce.
+Nevertheless, from the earliest moment in which it became known that
+electricity was akin to heat--that an interruption of the easy passage
+of a current produced heat--the minds of men were busy with the question
+of how to turn the tremendous fact to everyday use. Progress was slow,
+and part of it was accidental. The great servant of modern mankind was
+first an untrained one. It was a marked advance when the gaslights in a
+theater could be all lighted at once by means of batteries and the spark
+of an induction coil. The bottom of Hell Gate, in New York harbor, was
+blown out by Gen. Newton by the same means, and would have been
+impossible otherwise. But these were only incidents and suggestions.
+The question was how to make this instantaneous spark _continuous_.
+There was pondering upon the fact that the only difference between heat
+and electricity is one of molecular arrangement. Heat is a molecular
+motion like that of electricity, without the symmetry and harmony of
+action electricity has. The vibrations of electricity are accomplished
+rapidly, and without loss. Those of heat are slow, and greatly
+radiated. _When a current of electricity reaches a place in the
+conductor where it cannot pass easily, and the orderly vibrations of its
+molecules are disturbed, they are thrown into the disorderly motion
+known as heat._ So, when the conductor is not so good; when a large
+wire is reduced suddenly to a small one; when a good conductor, such as
+copper, has a section of resisting conduction, such as carbon; heat and
+light are at once evolved at that point, and there is produced what we
+know as the electric light. However concealed by machinery and devices,
+and all the arrangements by which it is made more lasting, steady,
+economical and automatic, it is no more nor less than this. _The
+difference between heat and electricity is only a difference in the
+rates of vibration of their molecules._ Whatever the theory as to
+molecules, or essence, or actual nature and origin, the practical fact
+that heat and light are the results of the circumstances described above
+remains. This has long been known, and the question remained how to
+produce an adequate current economically. The result was the machine we
+know as the Dynamo.
+
+The first electric light was very brief and brilliant and was made by
+accident. Sir Humphrey Davy, in 1809, in pulling apart the two ends of
+wires attached to a battery of two thousand small cells, the most
+powerful generator that had been made to that time, produced a brief and
+brilliant spark, the result of momentarily _imperfect contact._
+Every such spark, produced since then innumerable times by accident, is
+an example of electric lighting. There are now in use in the United
+States some two million arc lights and nearly double that number of
+incandescent.
+
+There are two principal systems of electric lighting; one is by actually
+burning away the ends of carbon-points in the open air. This is the
+"arc." The other is by heating to a white heat a filament of carbon, or
+some substance of high resistance, in a glass bulb from which the air
+has been exhausted. This is the "incandescent."
+
+[Illustration: THE INCANDESCENT LIGHT]
+
+In the arc light the current passes across an _imperfect contact_,
+and this imperfection consists in a gap of about one-sixteenth of an
+inch between the extremities of two rods of carbon carrying a current.
+This small gap is a place of bad conduction and of the piling up of
+atoms, producing heat, burning, light. In the body of the lamp there are
+appliances for the automatic holding apart of the two points of the
+carbon, and the causing of them to continually creep together, yet never
+touch. Many devices have been contrived to this end. With all theories
+and reasons well known, and all effects accurately calculated, upon this
+small arrangement depends the practical utility of the arc light. The
+best arrangement is the invention of Edison, and is controlled most
+ingeniously by the current itself, acting through the increased
+difficulty of its passage when the two carbon-points are too far apart,
+and the increased ease with which it flows when they are too near
+together. The current, in leaping the small gap between the
+carbon-points, takes a _curved_ path, hence the name "arc" light.
+In passing from the positive to the negative carbon it carries small
+particles of incandescent carbon with it, and consequently the end of
+the positive carbon is hollowed out, while the end of the negative is
+built up to a point.
+
+The incandescent light is in principle the same as the arc, produced by
+the same means and based upon the same principle of impediment to the
+free passage of the current. It was first produced by heating with the
+current to incandescence a fine platinum wire. As stated above,
+electricity that quietly traverses a large wire will suddenly develop
+great heat upon reaching a point where it is called upon to traverse, a
+smaller one. Platinum was attempted for this place of greater resistance
+because of its qualities. It does not rust, has a low specific heat, and
+is therefore raised to a higher temperature with less heat imparted. But
+it was a scarce and expensive material, and so long as it was heated to
+incandescence in the open air, that is, so long as its heat was fed as
+other heat is, by oxygen, it was slowly consumed. Platinum is no longer
+in the field of electric lighting, and the substitute which takes its
+place in the present incandescent lamp, and which is known as a
+"filament," is not heated in contact with the air. The experiments and
+endeavors that brought this result constitute the story of the
+incandescent lamp.
+
+The result is due to the patient intelligence of the American scientist
+and inventor, Thomas A. Edison. After all the absolute essentials of a
+practical incandescent lamp had been thought out; after the qualities
+and characteristics of the current were all known under the
+circumstances necessary to its use in lighting, the practical
+accomplishment still remained. Edison is said to have once worked for
+several weeks in the making of a single loop-shaped carbon filament that
+would bear the most delicate handling. This was then carefully carried
+to a glass-worker to be inclosed in a bulb, and at the first movement he
+broke it, and the work must be done over and done better. It finally
+was. The little pear-shaped bulb with its delicate loop of filament,
+which cost months of toil and experiment at first, is now a common
+article, manufactured at an absurdly small cost, packed in barrelfuls
+and shipped everywhere, and consumed by the million. A means has been
+found for producing the vacuum of its interior rapidly, cheaply and
+thoroughly, and the beautiful incandescent glow hangs in lines and
+clusters over the civilized world. The phenomenon of incandescence
+without oxygen seems peculiar to these lights alone. [Footnote: The
+"electric field," previously explained, seemed to exist by giving a
+magnetic quality to the surrounding air. It would be as true if one
+should speak of a magnetized vacuum, since the same field would exist in
+that as in surrounding air.]
+
+So simple are great facts when finally accomplished that there remains
+little to add on the subject of the mechanism of the electric light. The
+two varieties, arc and incandescent, are used together as most
+convenient, the large and very brilliant arc being especially adapted to
+out-of-doors situations, and the gentler, steadier and more permanent
+glow of the incandescent to interiors. The latter is also capable of a
+modification not applicable to the arc. It can, in theaters and other
+buildings, be "turned down" to a gentle, blood-red glow. The means by
+which this is accomplished is ingenious and surprising, since it means
+that the supply of electricity over a wire--seemingly the most subtle
+and elusive essence on earth--may be controlled like a stream from a
+cock, or the gas out of a burner. But this reduction of the current that
+makes the red glow in the clusters in a theater is by no means the only
+instance. The trolley-car, and even the common motor, may be made to
+start very slowly, and the unseen current whose touch kills is fed to
+its consumer at will.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+THE DYNAMO.--To the man who has been all his life thinking of the steam
+engine as the highest and almost only embodiment of controlled
+mechanical power, another machine, both supplementary to the steam
+engine and far excelling it, whose familiar _burring_ sound is now
+heard in almost every village in the United States and has become the
+characteristic sound of modern civilization, must constitute a source of
+continual question and surprise. To be accustomed to the dynamo, to look
+upon it as a matter of course and a conceded fact, one must have come to
+years of maturity and found it here.
+
+Its practical existence dates back at furthest to 1870. Yet it is based
+upon principles long since known, and can scarcely be said to be the
+invention of any one mind or man. Its lineal ancestor was the
+_magneto-electric machine_, in the early construction of which
+figure the names of Siemens, Wilde, Ladd, and earlier and later
+electricians. Kidder's medical battery used forty years ago or more, and
+still used and purchasable in its first form, was a dynamo. A footnote
+in a current encyclopedia states that: "An account of the
+Magneto-electric machine of M. Gramme, in the London _Standard_ of
+April 9th, 1873, confirmed by other information, leads to the belief
+that a decided improvement has been made in these machines." The word
+"dynamo" was then unknown. Later, Edison, Weston, Thompson, Hopkinson,
+Ferranti and others appear as improvers in the mechanism necessary for
+best developing a well-known principle, and many of these improvements
+may be classed among original inventions. As soon as the
+magneto-electric machine attained a size in the hands of experimenters
+that took it out of the field of scientific toys it began to be what we
+now know as a dynamo. A paragraph in the encyclopedia referred to says,
+in speaking of Ladd, of London, "These developments of electric action
+are not obtained without corresponding expenditure of force. The armatures
+are powerfully attracted by the magnets, and must be forcibly pulled away.
+Indeed, one of Wilde's machines, when producing a very intense electric
+light, required about five horse power to drive it."
+
+[Illustration: MAGNETO-ELECTRIC MACHINE. THE PREDECESSOR OF THE DYNAMO.]
+
+Thus was the secret in regard to electric power unconsciously divulged
+some twenty years ago.
+
+In all nature there is no recipe for getting something for nothing. The
+modern dynamo, apparently creating something out of nothing, like all
+other machines _gives back only what is given to it_, minus a fair
+percentage for waste, loss, friction, and common wear. Its advantages
+amount to a miracle of convenience only. So far as power is concerned,
+it merely transfers it for long distances over a single wire. So far as
+light is considered, it practically creates it where wanted, in new and
+convenient forms, with a new intensity and beauty, but with the same
+expenditure of transmitted energy in the form of burned coal as would be
+used in manufacturing the gas that was new, wonderful, and a luxury at
+the beginning of the century.
+
+The dynamo is the most prominent instance of actual mechanical utility
+in the field of electrical induction. It seems almost incredible that
+the apparently small facts discovered by Faraday, the bookbinder, the
+employ� of Sir Humphrey Davy at weekly wages the struggling experimenter
+in the subtleties of an infant giant, should have produced such results
+within sixty years. [Footnote: Faraday was not entirely alone in his
+life of physical research. He was associated with Davy, and quarreled
+with him about the liquefaction of chlorine and other gases, and was the
+companion of Wallaston, Herschel, Brand, and others. In connection with
+Stodart, he experimented with steel, with results still considered
+valuable. The scientific world still speaks of his quarrel with Davy
+with regret, since the personalities of great men should be free from
+ordinary weaknesses. But Lady Davy was not a scientist, and while the
+brilliant young mechanic was in her husband's employment for scientific
+purposes she insisted upon treating him as a servant, whereat the
+independence of thinking which made him capable of wandering in fields
+unknown to conventionality and routine blazed into natural resentment.
+The quarrel of 1823 must have been greatly augmented, in the lady's
+eyes, in 1824, for in that year Faraday was made a member of the Royal
+Society.
+
+In his lectures and public experiments he was greatly assisted by a man
+now almost forgotten, an "intelligent artilleryman" named Andersen. This
+unknown soldier with a taste for natural science doubtless had his
+reward in the exquisite pleasure always derived from the personal
+verification of facts hitherto unknown. There is often a pecuniary
+reward for the servant of science. Just as often there is not, and the
+work done has been the same.
+
+It was on Christmas morning, 1821, that Faraday first succeeded in
+making a magnetic needle rotate around a wire carrying an electric
+current. He was the discoverer of benzole, the basis of our modern
+brilliant aniline dyes. In 1831 he made the discovery he had been
+leading to for many years--that of magneto-electric induction. All we
+have of electricity that is now a part of our daily life is the result
+of this discovery.
+
+Faraday was born in 1791, and died August, 1867, in a house presented to
+him by Victoria, who had not the same opinion of his relations to the
+aristocracy that Lady Davy seems to have had. His insight into science
+was something explainable only on the supposition that he was gifted
+with a kind of instinct. He was a scientific prophet. A man who could,
+in 1838, foresee the ocean cable, and describe those minute difficulties
+in its working that all in time came true, must be classed as one of the
+great, clear, intuitive intellects of his race. He was in youth
+apprenticed to a bookbinder, "and many of the books he bound he read." A
+line in his indentures says: "In consideration of his faithful service,
+no premium is to be given." When these words were written there was no
+dream that the "faithful service" should be for all posterity.]
+
+[Illustration: Faraday's Spark. Striking the leg of a horseshoe magnet
+with an iron bar wound with insulated wire causes a contact between
+loose end of wire and small disc, and a spark.
+
+Faraday's First Magneto-Electric Experiment. A horseshoe magnet passed
+near a bent soft iron wound with insulated wire caused an induced
+current in the wire.
+
+TWO OF FARADAY'S EARLY EXPERIMENTS IN INDUCTION.]
+
+He who made the first actual machine to evolve a current in compliance
+with Faraday's formulated laws was an Italian named Pix�, in 1832. His
+machine consisted of a horseshoe magnet set on a shaft, and made to
+revolve in front of two cores of, soft iron wound with wire, and having
+their ends opposite the legs of the magnet. Shortly after Pix�, the
+inventors of the times ceased to turn the magnet on a shaft, and turned
+the iron cores instead, because they were lighter. In like manner, the
+huge field magnets of a modern dynamo are not whirled round a stationary
+armature, but the armature is whirled within the legs of the magnet with
+very great rapidity. The next step was to increase the number of magnets
+and the number of wire-wound iron cores--bobbins. The magnets were made
+compound, laminated; a large number of thin horseshoe magnets were laid
+together, with opposite poles touching. These were all comparatively
+small machines--what we now, with some reason, regard as having been
+toys whose present results were rather long in coming.
+
+[Illustration: THE SIEMENS' ARMATURE AND WINDING. THE FIRST STEP TOWARD
+THE MODERN DYNAMO.]
+
+Then came Siemens, of Berlin, in 1857. He was probably the first to wind
+the iron core, what we now call the _armature_, with wire from end
+to end, _lengthwise_, instead of round and round as a spool. This
+resulted, of course, in the shaft of the armature being also placed
+crosswise to the legs of the magnet, as it is in the modern dynamo. One
+of the ends of the wire used in this winding was fastened to the axle of
+the armature, and the other to a ring insulated from the shaft, but
+turning with it. Two springs, one bearing on the shaft and the other on
+the ring, carried away the current through wires attached to them.
+Siemens also originated the mechanical idea of hollowing out the legs of
+the magnet on the inside for the armature to turn in close to the
+magnet, almost fitting. It was the first time any of these things had
+been done, and their author probably had no idea that they would be
+prominent features of the dynamo of a little later time, in all
+essentials closely imitated.
+
+[Illustration: DIAGRAM OF SHAFT, SPLIT RING AND "BRUSHES."]
+
+It will be guessed from what has been previously said on the subject of
+induction that the currents from such an electro-magnetic machine would
+be alternating currents, the impulses succeeding each other in alternate
+directions. To remedy this and cause the currents to flow always in the
+same direction, the "_commutator_" was devised. The ring mentioned
+above was split, and the two springs both bore upon it, one on each
+side. The ends of the wires were both fastened to this ring. The springs
+came to be known as "brushes." The effect was that one of them was in
+the insulated space between the split halves of the ring while the other
+was bearing on the metal to which the wire was attached. This action was
+alternate, and so arranged that the current carried away was always
+direct. When an armature has a winding of more than one wire, as the
+practical dynamo always has, the insulated ring is divided into as many
+pieces as there are wires, and the two brushes act as above for the
+entire series.
+
+Pacinotti, of Florence, constructed a magneto-electric machine in which
+the current flows always in one direction without a commutator. It has
+what is known as a _ring armature_, and is the mother of all
+dynamos built upon that principle. It is exceedingly ingenious in
+construction, and for certain purposes in the arts is extensively used.
+A description of it is too technical to interest others than those
+personally interested in the class of dynamo it represents.
+
+Wilde, of Manchester, England, improved the Siemens machine in 1866 by
+doing that which is the feature that makes possible the huge "field
+magnet" of the modern dynamo, which is not a magnet at all, strictly
+speaking. He caused the current, after it had been rectified by the
+commutator, to return again into coils of wire round the legs of his
+field magnets, as shown in the diagram. This induced in them a new
+supply of magnetism, and this of course intensified the current from the
+armature. It is true he had a separate smaller magneto-electric machine,
+with which he evolved a current for the coil around the legs of the
+field magnet of a greatly larger machine upon which he depended for his
+actual current, and that he did not know, although he was practically
+doing the same thing, that if he should divert this current made by the
+larger machine itself back through the coils of its field magnet, he
+would not need the extra small machine at all, and would have a much
+more powerful current.
+
+[Illustration: SIMPLEST FORM OF DYNAMO]
+
+And here arises a difference and a change of name. All generating
+machines to this date had been called "_Magneto-electric_" because
+they used _permanent_ steel magnets with which to generate a
+current by the whirling of the bobbin which we now call an armature. The
+time came, led to by the improvement of Wilde, in which those steel
+permanent magnets were no longer used. Then the machine became the
+"_dynamo-electric_" machine, and leaving off one word, according to
+our custom, "_dynamo_."
+
+Siemens and Wheatstone almost simultaneously invented so much of the
+dynamo as was yet incomplete. It has "cores"--the parts that answer to
+the legs of a horseshoe magnet--of soft iron, sometimes now even of cast
+iron. These, at starting, possess very little magnetism--practically
+none at all--yet sufficient to generate a very weak current in the
+coils, windings, of the armature when it begins to turn. This weak
+current, passing through the windings of the field magnet, makes these
+still stronger magnets, and the effect is to evolve a still stronger
+current in the armature. Soon the full effect is reached. The big iron
+field magnet, often weighing some thousands of pounds, is then the same
+as a permanent steel horseshoe magnet, which would hardly be possible at
+all. One who has watched the installation of a dynamo, knowing that
+there is nowhere near any ordinary source of electricity, and has seen
+its armature begin to whirl and hum, and then in a few moments the
+violet sparklings of the brushes and the evident presence of a powerful
+current of electricity, is almost justified in the common opinion that
+the genius of man has devised a machine to _create_ something out
+of nothing. It is true that a _starting_ quantity of electricity is
+required. It exists in almost every piece of iron. Sometimes, to hasten
+first action, some cells of a galvanic battery are used to pass a
+current through the coils of the field magnet. After the first use there
+is always enough magnetism remaining in them during rest or stoppage to
+make a dynamo efficient after a few moments operation.
+
+[Illustration: PACINOTTI'S RING-ARMATURE DYNAMO.]
+
+This is the dynamo in principle of action. The varieties in construction
+now in use number scores, perhaps hundreds. Some of them are monsters in
+size, and evolve a current that is terrific. They are all essentially
+the same, depending for action upon the laws illustrated in the simplest
+experiment in induced electricity. One of the best known of the modern
+machines is Edison's, represented in the picture at the head of this
+article. In it the field magnet--answering to the horseshoe magnet of
+the magneto-electric machine--is plainly distinguishable to the
+unskilled observer. It is not even solid, but is made of several pieces
+bolted together. Its legs are hollowed at the ends to admit closely the
+armature which turns there. There are valuable peculiarities in its
+construction, which, while complying in all respects with the dynamo
+principle, utilize those principles to the best mechanical advantage. So
+do others, in other respects that did not occur even to Edison, or were
+not adopted by him. Probably the modern dynamo is the most efficient,
+the most accurately measurable, the least wasteful of its power, and the
+most manageable, of any power-machine so far constructed by man for
+daily use.
+
+The motor.--This is the twin of the dynamo. In all essentials the two
+are of the same construction. A difference in the arrangement of the
+terminals of the wire coils or the wrappings of armature and field
+magnet, makes of the one a dynamo and of the other a motor.
+Nevertheless, they are separate studies in electrical science. Practice
+has brought about modified constructions, as in the case of the dynamo.
+The differences between the two machines, and their similarities as
+well, may be explained by a general brief statement.
+
+_It is the work of the dynamo to convert mechanical energy into the
+form of electrical energy. The motor, in turn, changes this electrical
+energy back again into mechanical energy._
+
+Where the electric light is produced by the dynamo current no motor
+intervenes. The current is converted into heat and light by merely
+having an impediment, a restriction, a narrowness, interposed to its
+free passage on a conducting wire, as heretofore explained, very much as
+water in a pipe foams and struggles at a narrow place or an obstruction.
+Where mechanical movements are to be produced by the dynamo current the
+motor is always the intermediate machine. In the dynamo the armature is
+rotated by steam power, producing an electrical energy in the form of a
+powerful current transmitted by a wire. In the motor the armature, in
+turn, _is rotated by_ this current. It is but another instance of
+that ability to work backwards--to reverse a process--that seems to
+pervade all machines, and almost all processes. I have mentioned steam
+power, and, consequently, the necessary burning of coal and expenditure
+of money in producing the dynamo current. The dynamo and motor are not
+necessarily economical inventions, but the opposite when the force
+produced is to be transmitted again, with some loss, into the same
+mechanical energy that has already been produced by the burning of coal
+and the making of steam. Across miles of space, and into places where
+steam would not be possible, the power is invisibly carried. Suggestions
+of this convenience--stated cases--it is not necessary to cite. The
+fact is a prominent one, to be noted everywhere.
+
+And it may be made a mechanical economy. The most prominent instance of
+this is the new utilization of Niagara as a turbine water-power with
+which to whirl the armatures of gigantic dynamos, using the power thus
+obtained upon motors, and in the production of light and the
+transmission of power to neighboring cities.
+
+The discovery of the possibility of transmitting power by a wire, and
+converting it again into mechanical energy, is a strange story of the
+human blindness that almost always attends an acuteness, a thinking
+power, a prescience, that is the characteristic of humanity alone, but
+which so often stops short of results. This discovery has been
+attributed to accident alone; the accident of an employ� mistaking the
+uses of wires and fastening their ends in the wrong places. But a French
+electrician thus describes the occurrence as within his own experience.
+His name is Hypolyte Fontaine.
+
+But let us first advert to the forgetfulness of the man who really
+invented the machine that was capable of the opposite action of both
+dynamo and motor. This was the Italian, Pacinotti. [Footnote: Moses G.
+Farmer, an American, and celebrated in his day for intelligent
+electrical researches, is claimed to have made the first reversible
+motor ever contrived. A small motor made by Farmer in 1847, and
+embodying the electro-dynamic principle was exhibited at the great
+exposition at Chicago in 1893. If the genealogy of this machine remains
+undisputed it fixes the fact that the discovery belongs to this country,
+and to an American.] He mentioned that his machine could be used either
+to generate a current of electricity on the application of motive power
+to its armature, or to produce motive power on connecting it with a
+source of electricity. Yet it did not occur to him to definitely
+experiment with two of his machines for the purpose of accomplishing
+that which in less than twenty years has revolutionized our ideas and
+practice in transmitted force. He did not suggest that two of his
+machines could be run together, one as a generator and the other as a
+motor. He did not think of its advantages with the facilities for it, of
+his own creation, in his hands.
+
+M. Fontaine states that at the Vienna Exposition of 1873 there was a
+Gramme machine intended to be operated by a primary battery, to show
+that the Gramme was capable of being worked by a current, and, as there
+was also a second machine of the same kind there, of also generating
+one. These two machines were to demonstrate this range of capacity as
+_separately worked_, one by power, the other with a battery. There
+was, then, no intention of coupling them together as late as 1873, with
+the means at hand and the suggestion almost unavoidable. The dynamo and
+motor had not occurred to any one. But M. Fontaine states that he failed
+to get the primary (battery) current in time for the opening, and was
+troubled by the dilemma. Then the idea occurred to him, as he could do
+no better, to work one of the machines with a current "deprived," partly
+stolen, from the other, as a temporary measure. A friend lent him the
+necessary piece of wire, and he connected the two machines. The machine
+used as a motor was connected with a pumping apparatus, and when the
+machine intended as a generator started, and this make-shift,
+temporarily-stolen current was carried to the acting motor, the action
+of the last was so much more vigorous than was intended that the water
+was thrown over the sides of the tank. Fontaine was forced to remedy
+this excessive action by procuring an additional wire of such length
+that its resistance permitted the motor to work more mildly and throw
+less water. This accidentally established the fact of distance,
+convenience, a revolution in the power of the industrial world. Fontaine
+states that Gramme had previously told him that he had done the same
+thing with his machines. The idea was never patented. Neither Pacinotti,
+who invented the machine originally, nor Gramme, one of the great names
+of modern electricity, nor this skilled practical electrician, Fontaine,
+who had charge of the exhibit of the Gramme system at Vienna, considered
+the fact of the transmission of concentrated power over a thin wire to a
+great distance as one of value to its inventor or to the industries of
+mankind. With the motor and the dynamo already made, it was an accident
+that brought them together after all.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may be amusing, if not useful, to spend a moment in reviewing of the
+efforts of men to utilize the power of the electrical current in
+mechanics before the day of the dynamo and a motor, and while yet the
+electric light was an infant in the nursery of the laboratory. They knew
+then, about 1835 to 1870, of the laws of induction as applied to the
+electro-magnet, or in small machines the generating power, so called, of
+the magneto-electric arrangement embodied, as a familiar example, in
+Kidder's medical battery. There is a long list of those inventors,
+American and European. The first patent issued for an American
+electro-motor was in 1837, to a man named Thomas Davenport, of Brandon,
+Vt. He was a man far ahead of his times. He built the first electric
+railroad ever seen, at Springfield, Mass., in 1835, and considering the
+means, whose inadequacy is now better understood by any reader of these
+lines than it then was by the deepest student of electricity, this first
+railroad was a success. Davenport came as near to solving the problem of
+an electric motor as was possible without the invention of Pacinotti.
+Following this there were many patents issued for electro-magnetic
+motors to persons residing in all parts of the country, north and south.
+One was made by C. G. Page, of the Smithsonian Institute, in which the
+motive power consisted in a round rod, acting as a plunger, being pulled
+into the space where the core would be in an ordinary electro-magnet,
+and thereby working a crank. [Footnote: The _National
+Intelligencer_, a prominent Washington newspaper, said with reference
+to Page's motor "He has shown that before long electro-magnetic action
+will have dethroned steam and will be the adopted motor," etc. This was
+an enthusiasm not based upon any fact then known about a machine not
+even in the line of the present facts of electro-dynamics.] A large
+motor of this kind is alleged, in 1850, to have developed ten horse
+power. It was actually applied to outdoor experiment as a car-motor on
+an actual railroad track, and was efficient for several miles. But it
+carried with it its battery-cells, and they were disarranged and stirred
+by the jolting, and being made of crockeryware were broken. The
+chemicals cost much more than fuel for steam, and there could be no
+economical motive for further experiment. It was a huge toy, as the
+entire sum of electrical science was until it was made useful first in
+the one instance of the telegraph, and long after that date the use of
+the electro-magnet, with a cam to cut off and turn on again the current
+at proper intervals, which was the one principle of all attempts, was a
+repeated and invariable failure. That which was wanted and lacking was
+not known, and was finally discovered and successively developed as has
+been described.
+
+Electric railroads.--There was an instance of almost simultaneous
+invention in the case of the first practical electric railroads. S. D.
+Field, Dr. Siemens, and Thomas A. Edison all applied for patents in
+1880. Of these, Field was first in filing, and was awarded patents. The
+combined dynamo and motor were, of course, the parents of the practical
+idea. Field's patents covered a motor in or under the car, operated by a
+current from a stationary source of electricity--of course a dynamo.
+These first electric roads had the current carried on the rail. They
+were partially successful, but there was something wrong in the plan,
+and that something was induction by the earth. Later came, as a remedy
+for this, the "Trolley" system; the trolley being a small, grooved wheel
+running upon a current-carrying wire overhead. The question of how best
+to convey a current to the car-motor is a serious one, doubtless at this
+moment occupying the attention of highly-trained intelligence
+everywhere. The motor current is one of high power, and as such
+intractable; and it is in the character of this current, rather than in
+methods of insulation, that the remedy for the much-objected-to overhead
+wire is to be found. It will be remembered that all the phenomena of
+induction are _unhindered by insulation_.
+
+Aside from the current-carrying problem, the electric road is
+explainable in all its features upon the theory and practice of the
+dynamo and motor. It is merely an application of the two machines. The
+last is, in usual practice, under the car, and geared to the truck-axle.
+A more modern mechanical improvement is to make the axle the shaft of
+the motor armature. When the motor has used the current it passes by
+most systems into the rail and the ground. By others there is a
+"metallic circuit"--two wires. Many men whose interest and occupation
+leads them to a study of such matters know that the use of electricity,
+instead of steam locomotion, is merely a question of time on all
+railroads. I have said elsewhere that the actual age of electricity had
+not yet fully come. It seems to us now that we have attained the end;
+that there is little more to know or to do. But so have all the
+generations thought in their day. In the field of electricity there are
+yet to come practical results of which one may have some foreshadowings
+in the experiments of men like Tesla, which will make our present times
+and knowledge seem tame and slow.
+
+Electrolysis.--In all history, fire has been the universal practical
+solvent. It has been supplanted by the electrical current in some of the
+most beautiful and useful phenomena of our time. Electrolysis is the
+name of the process by which fluid chemicals are decomposed by the
+current.
+
+A familiar early experiment in electrolysis is the decomposition of
+water--a chemical composed of oxygen and hydrogen, though always thought
+of and used as a simple, pure fluid. If the poles of a galvanic battery
+are immersed in water slightly mixed with sulphuric acid to favor
+electrical action, these poles will become covered with bubbles of gas
+which presently rise to the surface and pass off. These bubbles are
+composed of the two constituents of water, the oxygen rising from the
+positive and the hydrogen from the negative pole. Particles of the
+substance decomposed are transferred, some to one pole and some to the
+other; and, therefore, electrolysis is always practiced in a fluid in
+order that this transference may more readily occur.
+
+The quantity of _electrolyte_--the substance decomposed--that is
+transferred in a given time is in proportion to the strength of the
+current. When this electrolyte is composed of many substances a current
+will act a little on all of them, and the quantity in which the
+elementary bodies appear at the poles of the current depends upon the
+quantities of the compounds in the liquid, and on the relative ease with
+which they yield to the electrical action.
+
+The electrolytic processes are not the mere experiments a brief
+description of them would indicate, but are among the important
+processes for the mechanical products of modern times. The extensive
+nickel-plating that became a permanent fad in this country on the
+discovery of a special process some years ago, is all done by
+electrolysis. The silver plating of modern tableware and table cutlery,
+as beautiful and much less expensive than silver, and the fine finish of
+the beautiful bronze hardware now used in house-furnishing, are the
+results of the same process. Some use for it enters into almost every
+piece of fine machinery, and into the beautifying or preserving of
+innumerable small articles that are made and used in unlimited quantity.
+
+The process and its principle is general, but there are many details
+observed in the actual work of electroplating which interest only those
+engaged. One of the most usual of these is that of making an
+electrotype. This may mean the making of an exact impression of a medal,
+coin, or other figure, or a depositing of a coating of the same on any
+metallic surface. Formerly the faces of the types used in printing were
+very commonly faced with copper to give them finish and a wearing
+quality. Even fresh, natural fruits that have been evenly coated with
+plumbago may be covered with a thin shell of metal. A silver head may be
+placed on the wood of a walking stick, precisely conforming on the
+outside to the form of the wood within.
+
+The deposit of metal in the electrotyping process always takes place at
+the negative pole--the pole by which the current passes out of the fluid
+into its conductor. This is the "_cathode_." The other is the
+"_anode_." The "bath," as the fluid in which the process is
+accomplished is called, for silver, gold or platinum contains one
+hundred parts of water, ten of potassium cyanide, and one of the cyanide
+of whichever of those metals is to be deposited. The articles to be
+plated are suspended in this bath and the battery-power, varying in
+intensity according to circumstances, is applied. After removal they are
+buffed and finished. A varying detail is practiced for different metals,
+and the current now commonly used is from a dynamo. [Footnote: Among
+modern modifications of the dynamic current, is its use, modified by
+proper appliances, for the telegraph and the telephone circuits of
+cities and the larger towns. Every electric current may now be safely
+attributed to that source, and from the same circuit and generator all
+modifications may be produced at once.]
+
+The origin of electrolysis is said to be with Daniell, who noticed the
+deposit of copper while experimenting with the battery that bears his
+name. Jacobi, at St. Petersburg, first published a description of the
+process in 1839. The Elkingtons were the first to actually put the
+process into commercial practice.
+
+It would be interesting now, were it apropos, to describe the seemingly
+very ancient processes by which our ancestors gilded, plated, were
+deceived and deceived others, previous to about 1845. For those things
+were done, and the genuineness of life has by no means been destroyed by
+the modern ease with which a precious metal may be deposited upon one
+utterly base. A contemplation of the moral side of the subject might
+lead at once to the conclusion that we could now spare one of the least
+in actual importance of the processes of the all-pervading and wonderful
+essence that alike makes the lightning-stroke and gilds the plebeian pin
+that fastens a baby's napkin. But from any other view we could not now
+dispense with anything electricity does.
+
+General facts.--The names of many of the original investigators of
+electrical phenomena are perpetuated in the familiar names of electrical
+measurements. For, notwithstanding its seeming subtlety, there is no
+force in use, or that has ever been used by men, capable of being so
+definitely calculated, measured, determined beforehand, as electricity
+is. As time passes new measurements are adopted and named, some of them
+being proposed as lately as 1893. An instance of the value of some of
+these old determinations of a time when all we now know of electrical
+science was unknown, may be given in what is known as Ohm's Law. Ohm was
+a native of Erlangen, in Bavaria, and was Professor of Physics at
+Munich, where he died in 1874. He formulated this Law in 1827, and it
+was translated into English in 1847. He was recognized at the time, and
+was given the Copley medal of the Royal Society of London. The Law--for
+by that distinctive name is it still called, though the name "Ohm," also
+expresses a unit of measurement--is that _the quantity of current that
+will pass through a conductor is proportional to the pressure and
+inversely proportional to the distance_. That is:
+
+Current = Pressure / Resistance.
+
+Transposing the terms of the equation we may get an expression for
+either of those elements, current, pressure, or resistance, in the terms
+of the other two. This relation holds true and is accurate in every
+possible case and condition of practical work. This remarkable precision
+and definiteness of action has made possible the creation of an
+extensive school of electrical testing, by which we are not only enabled
+to make accurate measurement of electrical apparatus and appliances, but
+also to make determinations in _other_ fields by the agency of
+electricity. When an ocean cable is injured or broken the precise
+location of the trouble is made _by measuring the electrical
+resistance of the parts on each side of the injury_.
+
+The magnitudes of measurements of electricity are expressed in the
+following convenient electrical units:
+
+The VOLT (named from Volta) equals a unit of _pressure_ that is
+equal to one cell of a gravity battery.
+
+The OHM, as a unit of measurement, equals a unit of _resistance_
+that is equivalent to the resistance of a hundred feet of copper wire
+the size of a pin.
+
+The AMP�RE (named from Amp�re, 1775-1836, author of a "Collection of
+Observations on Electro-Dynamics" and other works, and a profound
+practical investigator) equals a unit of _current_ equivalent to
+the current which one Volt of pressure will produce through one Ohm of
+wire (or resistance).
+
+The Coulomb (1736--inventor of the means of measuring electricity called
+the "Torsion balance," and general early investigator) equals a unit of
+_quantity_ of one Ampere flowing for one second.
+
+The Farad (from Faraday, the discoverer of the laws of Induction, see
+_ante_), equals that unit of _capacity_ which is the capacity
+for holding one Coulomb. Death current.--What is now spoken of as the
+"Death Current" is one that will instantly overcome the "resistance" of
+the human, or animal, body. It is a current of from one to two thousand
+Volts--about the same as that used in maintaining the large arc lights.
+This question of the killing capacity of the current became officially
+prominent some years ago, upon the passage by the legislature of the
+State of New York of a statute requiring the death penalty to be
+inflicted by means of electricity. The object was to deter evildoers by
+surrounding the penalty with scientific horror, [Footnote: Hence also
+the new lingual atrocity, the word "electrocute," derived from "execute"
+by decapitation and the addition of "electro"] and the idea had its
+origin in the accidents which formerly occurred much more frequently
+than now. The "death current" is now almost everywhere, though the care
+of the men who continually work about "live" wires has grown to be much
+like that of men who continually handle firearms or explosives, and
+accidents seldom happen. At first it was apparently difficult for the
+general public to appreciate the fact that the silent and
+harmless-looking wires must be avoided. There was suddenly a new and
+terrific power in common use, and it was as slender, silent and
+unobtrusive as it was fatal.
+
+Insulation of the hands by the use of rubber gloves, and extreme care,
+are the means by which those who are called "linemen"--a new
+industry--protect themselves in their occupation. But there is a new
+commandment added to the list of those to be memorized by the
+body-politic. "Do not tread upon, drive over, or touch _any_ wire."
+It may be, and probably is, harmless. But you cannot positively
+know. [Footnote: It is a common trait of general human nature to refuse
+to learn save by the hardest of experiences, and so far as the crediting
+of statements is concerned, to at first believe everything that is not
+true, and reject most that is. The supernatural, the phenomena of
+alleged witchcraft and diabolism, and of "luck," "hoodoo," "fate," etc.,
+find ready disciples among those who reject disdainfully the results of
+the working of natural law. When the railroads were first built across
+the plains the Indians repeatedly attempted to stop moving trains by
+holding the ends of a rope stretched across the track in front of the
+engine, and with results which greatly surprised them When the lines
+were first constructed in northern Mexico the Mexican peasant could not
+be induced to refrain from trying personal experiments with the new
+power, and scores of him were killed before he learned that standing on
+the track was dangerous. In the United States the era of accidents
+through indifference to common-looking wires has almost passed, but for
+some years the fatality was large because people are always governed by
+appearances connected with _previous_ notions, until _new_
+experiences teach them better.]
+
+INSTRUMENTS OF MEASUREMENT.--Some of the most costly and beautiful of
+modern scientific instruments are those used in the measurements and
+determinations of electrical science. There are many forms and varieties
+for every specific purpose. Electrical measurement has become a
+department of physical science by itself, and a technical, extensive and
+varied one. Already the electrical specialist, no more an original
+experimenter or investigator than the average physician is, has become
+professional. He makes plans, submits facts, estimates cost, and states
+results with almost certainty.
+
+ELECTRICITY AS AN INDUSTRY.--Immense factories are now devoted to the
+manufacture of electrical goods exclusively. Large establishments in
+cities are filled with them. The installation of the electric plant in a
+dwelling house is done in the same way, and as regularly, as the
+plumbing is. Soon there must be still another enlargement, since the
+heating of houses through a wire, and the kitchen being equipped with
+cooking utensils whose heat is for each vessel evolved in its own
+bottom, is inevitable.
+
+The following are some of the facts, in figures, of the business side of
+electricity in the United States at the present writing. In 1866, about
+twenty years after the establishment of the telegraph, but with a
+population of only a little more than half the present, there were
+75,686 miles of telegraph wire in use, and 2,520 offices. In 1893 there
+were 740,000 miles of wire, and more than 20,000 offices. The receipts
+for the year first named are unknown, but for 1893 they were about
+$24,000,000. The expenses of the system for the same year were
+$16,500,000.
+
+The telephone, an industry now about sixteen years old, had in 1893, for
+the Bell alone, over 200,000 miles of wire on poles, and over 90,000
+miles of wire under ground. The instruments were in 15,000 buildings.
+There were 10,000 employ�s, and 233,000 subscribers. All companies
+combined had 441,000 miles of wire. Ninety-two millions of dollars were
+invested in telephone _fixtures_.
+
+In 1893, the average cost of a telegram was thirty-one and one
+six-tenths cents, and the average alleged cost of sending the same to
+the companies was twenty-two and three-tenths cents, leaving a profit of
+nine and three-tenths cents on every message. It must be remembered that
+with mail facilities and cheapness that are unrivalled, the telegraph
+message is always an extraordinary mode of communication; an emergency.
+These few figures may serve to give the reader a dim idea of the
+importance to which the most ordinary and general of the branches of
+electrical industry have grown in the United States.
+
+MEDICAL ELECTRICITY.--For more than fifty years the medical fraternity
+in regular practice persisted in disregarding all the claims made for
+the electric current as a therapeutic agent. In earlier times it was
+supposed to have a value that supplanted all other medical agencies.
+Franklin seems to have been one of the earliest experimenters in this
+line, and to have been successful in many instances where his brief
+spark from the only sources of the current then known were applicable to
+the case. The medical department of the science then fell into the hands
+of charlatans, and there is a natural disposition to deal in the
+wonderful, the miraculous or semi-miraculous, in the cure of disease.
+Divested of the wonder-idea through a wider study and greater knowledge
+of actual facts, electricity has again come forward as a curative agent
+in the last ten years. Instruction in its management in disease is
+included in the curriculum of almost every medical school, and most
+physicians now own an outfit, more or less extensive, for use in
+ordinary practice. To decry and utterly condemn is no longer the custom
+of the steady-going physician, the ethics of whose cloth had been for
+centuries to condemn all that interfered with the use of drugs, and
+everything whose action could not be understood by the examples of
+common experience, and without special study outside the lines of
+medical knowledge as prescribed.
+
+Perhaps the developments based upon the discoveries of Faraday have had
+much to do with the adoption of electricity as a curative agent. The
+current usually used is the Faradic; the induced alternate current from
+an induction coil. This is, indeed, the current most useful in the
+majority of the nervous derangements in the treatment of which the
+current is of acknowledged utility.
+
+In surgery the advance is still greater. "Galvano-cautery" is the
+incandescent light precisely; the white-hot wire being used to cut off,
+or burn off, and cauterize at the same time, excrescences and growths
+that could not be easily reached by other means than a tube and a small
+loop of platinum wire. A little incandescent lamp with a bulb no bigger
+than a pea is used to light up and explore cavities, and this advance
+alone, purely mechanical and outside of medical science, is of immense
+importance in the saving of life and the avoidance of human suffering.
+
+It may be added that there is nothing magical, or by the touch, or
+mysterious, in the treatment of disease by the electrical current. The
+results depend upon intelligent applications, based upon reason and
+experience, a varied treatment for varying cases. Nor is it a remedy to
+be applied by the patient himself more than any other is. On the
+contrary, he may do himself great injury. The pills, potions, powders
+and patent medicines made to be taken indiscriminately, and which he
+more or less understands, may be still harmful yet much safer. Even the
+application of one or the other of the two poles with reference to the
+course of a nerve, may result in injury instead of good.
+
+INCOMPLETE POSSIBILITIES.--There are at least two things greatly desired
+by mankind in the field of electrical science and not yet attained. One
+of these, that may now be dismissed with a word, is the resolving of the
+latent energy of, say a ton of coal, into electrical energy without the
+use of the steam engine; without the intervention of any machine. For
+electricity is not manufactured; not created by men in any case. It
+exists, and is merely gathered, in a measure and to a certain extent
+confined and controlled, and sent out as a _concentrated form of
+energy_ on its various errands. Should a means for the concentration
+of this universally diffused energy be found whereby it could be made to
+gather, by the new arrangement of some natural law such as places it in
+enormous quantities in the thundercloud, a revolution that would
+permeate and visibly change all the affairs of men would take place,
+since the industrial world is not a thing apart, but affects all men,
+and all institutions, and all thought.
+
+The other desideratum, more reasonable apparently, yet far from present
+accomplishment, is a means of storing and carrying a supply of
+electricity when it has been gathered by the means now used, or by any
+means.
+
+THE STORAGE BATTERY is an attempt in this last direction. The name is
+misleading, since even in this attempt electricity is in no sense
+"stored," but a chemical action producing a current takes place in the
+machine. The arrangement is in its infancy. Instances occur in which,
+under given circumstances, it is more or less efficient, and has been
+improved into greater efficiency. But many difficulties intervene, one
+of which is the great weight of the appliances used, and another,
+considerable cost. The term "storage battery" is now infrequently used,
+and the name "secondary" battery is usually substituted. The principle
+of its action is the decomposing of combined chemicals by the action of
+a current applied from a stationary generator or dynamo, and that these
+chemicals again unite as soon as they are allowed to do so by the
+completing of a circuit, _and in re-combining give off nearly as much
+electricity as was first used in separating them._ The action of the
+secondary, "storage," battery, once charged, is like that of a primary
+battery. The current is produced by chemical action. Two metals outside
+of the solution contained in a primary battery cell, but under differing
+physical conditions from each other, will yield a current. A piece of
+polished iron and a piece of rusty iron, connected by a wire, will yield
+a small current. Rusty lead, so to speak, so connected with bright lead,
+has a high electromotive force. Oxygen makes lead rusty, and hydrogen
+makes it bright. Oxygen and hydrogen are the two gases cast off when
+water is subjected to a current. (See _ante_ under
+_Electrolysis_) So Augustin Plant�, the inventor of as much as we
+yet have of what is called a storage or secondary battery, suspended two
+plates of lead in water, and when a current of electricity was passed
+through it hydrogen was thrown off at one plate, making it bright, and
+oxygen at the other plate, peroxydizing its surface. When the current
+was removed the altered plates, connected by a wire, would send off a
+current which was in the opposite direction from the first, and this
+would continue until the plates were again in their original condition.
+This is the principle and mode of action of the storage battery. So far
+it has assumed many forms. Scores of modifications have been invented
+and patented. The leaden plates have taken a variety of forms, yet have
+remained leaden plates, one cleaned and the other fouled by the
+electrolytic action of a current, and giving off an almost equivalent
+current again by the return process. The arrangement endures for several
+repetitions of the process, but is finally expensive and always
+inconvenient. The secondary battery, in its infancy, as stated, presents
+now much the same obstacles to commercial use the galvanic, or primary,
+battery did before the induced current had become the servant of man.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+ELECTRICAL INVENTION IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+
+A list of the electrical inventors of this country would be very long.
+Many of the names are, in the mass and number of inventions, almost
+lost. It happens that many of the practical applications described in
+this volume, indeed most of them, are the work of citizens of this
+country.
+
+In previous chapters I have referred briefly to Franklin, Morse, Field,
+and others. These men have left names that, without question, may be
+regarded as permanent. Their chiefest distinguishing trait was
+originality of idea, and each one of them is a lesson to the American
+boy. In a sense the greatest of all these, and in the same sense, the
+greatest American, was Benjamin Franklin. A sketch of his career has
+been given, but to that may be added the following: He had arrived at
+conclusions that were vast in scope and startling in result by applying
+the reasoning faculty upon observations of phenomena that had been
+recurring since the world was made, and had been misunderstood from the
+beginning. He used the simplest means. His experiment was in a different
+way daily performed for him by nature. He was philosophically daring,
+indifferently a tinker with nature's terrific machinery; a knocker at
+the door of an august temple that men were never known to have entered;
+a mortal who smiled in the face of inscrutable and awful mystery, and
+who defied the lightning in a sense not merely moral. [Footnote:
+Professor Richmann, of St. Petersburg, was instantly killed by lightning
+while repeating Franklin's experiment.]
+
+His genius lay in a power of swift inductive reasoning. His common sense
+and his sense of humor never forsook him. He uttered keen apothegms that
+have lived like those of Solon. He was a philosopher like Diogenes,
+lacking the bitterness. He wrote the "Busy-Body," and annually made the
+plebeian and celebrated "Almanac," and the "Ephemera" that were not
+ephemeral, and is the author of the story of "The Whistle," that
+everybody knows, and everybody reads with shamefacedness because it is a
+brief chapter out of his own history.
+
+He was apparently an adept in the art of caring for himself, one of the
+most successful worldings of his time, yet he wrote, thought, toiled
+incessantly, for his fellow men. He had little education obtained as it
+is supposed an education must be obtained. He was commonplace. No one
+has ever told of his "silver tongue," or remembered a brilliant
+after-dinner speech that he has made. Yet he finally stood before
+mankind the companion of princes, the darling of splendid women, covered
+with the laurels of a brilliant scientific renown. But he was a printer,
+a tinkerer with stoves, the inventor of the lightning rod, the man who
+had spent one-half his life in teaching apprentices, such as he himself
+had been when his jealous and common-minded brother had whipped him,
+that "time is money," that "credit is money"--which is the most
+prominent fact in the commercial world of 1895--and that honor and
+self-respect are better than wealth, pleasure, or any other good.
+
+Yet clear, keen, cold and inductive as was Franklin's mind, no vision
+reached him, in the moment of that triumph when he felt the lightning
+tingling in his fingers from a hempen string, of those wonders which
+were to come. He knew absolutely nothing of that necromancy through
+which others of his countrymen were to girdle the world with a common
+intelligence, and yet others were to use in sprinkling night with
+clusters as innumerable and mysterious as the higher stars.
+
+The story of the Morse telegraph has been repeatedly told, and I have
+briefly sketched it in connection with the subject of the telegraph.
+But, unlike the original, scientifically lonely and independent
+Franklin, Morse had the best assistance of his times in the persons of
+men more skilled than himself and almost as persistent. The chief of
+these was Alfred Vail, a name until lately almost unknown to scientific
+fame, who eliminated the clumsy crudities of Morse's conception, remade
+his instruments, and was the inventor of that renowned alphabet which
+spells without letters or writing or types, that may be seen or heard or
+felt or tasted, that is adapted to any language and to all conditions,
+and that performs to this day, and shall to all time, the miracle of
+causing the inane rattle of pieces of metal against each other to speak
+to even a careless listener the exact thoughts of one a thousand miles
+away.
+
+Another of the men who might be appropriately included in any
+comprehensive list of aiders and abettors of the present telegraph
+system were Leonard D. Gale, then Professor of Chemistry in the
+University of New York, and Professor Joseph Henry, who had made, and
+was apparently indifferent to the importance of it because there was no
+alphabet to use it with, the first electric telegraph ever constructed
+to be read, or used, _by sound_. Last, though hardly least if all
+facts are understood, might be included a skillful youth named William
+Baxter, afterwards known as the inventor of the "Baxter Engine," who,
+shut in a room with Vail in a machine shop in New Jersey, made in
+conjunction with the author of the alphabet the first telegraphic
+instrument that, with Henry's magnet and battery cells, sent across
+space the first message ever read by a person who did not know what the
+words of the message would say or mean until they had been received.
+
+After the telegraph the state of electrical knowledge was for a long
+time such that electrical invention was in a sense impossible. The
+renowned exploit of Field was not an invention, but a heroic and
+successful extension of the scope and usefulness of an invention. But
+thought was not idle, and filled the interval with preparations for
+final achievements unequaled in the history of science. Two of these
+results are the electric light and the telephone. For the various
+"candles," such as that of Jablochkoff, exhibited at Paris in 1870, only
+served to stimulate investigation of the alluring possibilities of the
+subject. The details of these great inventions are better known than
+those of any others. The telegraph and the newspaper reporter had come
+upon the field as established institutions. Every process and progress
+was a piece of news of intense interest. When the light glowed in its
+bulb and sparkled and flashed at the junction points of its
+chocolate-colored sticks it had been confidently expected. There was
+little surprise. The practical light of the world was considered
+probable, profitable, and absolutely sure. The real story will never be
+told. The thoughts, which phrase may also include the inevitable
+disappointments of the inventor, are never written down by him. That
+variety of brain which, with a few great exceptions, was not known until
+modern, very recent times, which does not speculate, contrive, imagine
+only, but also reduces all ideas to _commercial_ form, has yet to
+have its analysis and its historian, for it is to all intents a new
+phase of the evolution of mind.
+
+[Illustration: THOMAS A. EDISON.]
+
+A typical example of this class of intellect is Mr. Thomas A. Edison. It
+may be doubted if such a man could, in the qualities that make him
+remarkable, be the product of any other country than ours. In common
+with nearly all those who have left a deep impression upon our country,
+Edison was the child of that hackneyed "respectable poverty" which here
+is a different condition from that existing all over Europe, where the
+phrase was coined. There, the phrase, and the condition it describes,
+mean a dull content, an incapacity to rise, a happy indifference to all
+other conditions, a dullness that does not desire to learn, to change,
+to think. To respectable poverty in other civilizations there are strong
+local associations like those of a cat, not arising to the dignity of
+love of country. In the United States, without a word, without argument
+or question, a young man becomes a pioneer--not necessarily one of
+locality or physical newness, but a pioneer in mind--in creed, politics,
+business--in the boundless domain of hope and endeavor. In America no
+man is as his father was except in physical traits. No man there is a
+volunteer soldier fighting his country's battles except from a
+conviction that he ought to be. A man is an inventor, a politician, a
+writer, first because he knows that valuable changes are possible, and,
+second, because he can make such changes profitable to himself. It is
+the great realm of immutable steadfastness combined with constant
+change; unique among the nations.
+
+Edison never had more than two months regular schooling in his entire
+boyhood. There is, therefore, nothing trained, "regular," technical,
+about him. If there had been it is probable that we might never have
+heard of him. He is one of the innumerable standing arguments against
+the old system advocated by everybody's father, and especially by the
+older fathers of the church, and which meant that every man and woman
+was practically cut by the same pattern, or cast in the same general
+mould, and was to be fitted for a certain notch by training alone. No
+more than thirty years ago the note of preparation for the grooves of
+life was constantly sounded. Natural aptitude, "bent," inclination, were
+disregarded. The maxim concocted by some envious dull man that "genius
+is only another name for industry," was constantly quoted and believed.
+
+But Edison's mother had been trained, practically, as an instructor of
+youth. He had hints from her in the technical portions of a boy's
+primary training. He is not an ignorant man, but, on the contrary, a
+very highly educated one. But it is an education he has constructed for
+himself out of his aptitudes, as all other actual educations have really
+been. When he was ten years old he had read standard works, and at
+twelve is stated to have struggled, ineffectually perhaps, with Newton's
+_Principia_. At that age he became a train-boy on the Grand Trunk
+railroad for the purpose of earning his living; only another way of
+pioneering and getting what was to be got by personal endeavor. While in
+that business he edited and printed a little newspaper; not to please an
+amateurish love of the beautiful art of printing, but for profit. He was
+selling papers, and he wanted one of his own to sell because then he
+would get more out of it in a small way. He never afterwards showed any
+inclination toward journalism, and did not become a reporter or
+correspondent, or start a rural daily. While he was a train-boy,
+enjoying every opportunity for absorbing a knowledge of human nature,
+and of finally becoming a passenger conductor or a locomotive engineer,
+something called his attention to the telegraph as a promoter of
+business, as a great and useful institution, and he resolved to become
+an "operator." This was his electrical beginning. Yet before he took
+this step he was accused of a proclivity toward extraordinary things. In
+the old "caboose" where he edited, set up, and printed his newspaper he
+had established a small chemical laboratory, and out of these chemicals
+there is said to have been jolted one day an accident which caused him
+some unpopularity with the railroad people. He was all the time a
+business man. He employed four boy helpers in his news and publishing
+business. It took him a long time to learn the telegraph business under
+the circumstances, and when he was at last installed on a "plug" circuit
+he began at once to do unusual things with the current and its machines
+and appliances. This is what he tells of his first electrical invention.
+
+There was an operator at one end of the circuit who was so swift that
+Edison and his companion could not "take" fast enough to keep up with
+him. He found two old Morse registers--the machines that printed with a
+steel point the dots and dashes on a paper slip wound off of a reel.
+These he arranged in such a way that the message written, or indented,
+on them by the first instrument were given to him by the second
+instrument at any desired rate of speed or slowness.
+
+This gave to him and his friend time to catch up. This, in Morse's time,
+would have been thought an achievement. Edison seems to regard it as a
+joke. There was no time for prolonged experiment. It was an emergency,
+and the idea must necessarily have been supplemented by a quick
+mechanical skill.
+
+It was this same automatic recorder, the idea embodied in it, that by
+thought and logical deduction afterwards produced that wonderful
+automaton, the phonograph. He rigged a hasty instrument that was based
+upon the idea that if the indentations made in a slip of paper could be
+made to repeat the ticking sound of the instrument, similar indentations
+made by a point on a diaphragm that was moved by the _voice_ might
+be made to repeat the voice. His rude first instrument gave back a sound
+vaguely resembling the single word first shouted into it and supposed to
+be indented on a slip of paper, and this was enough to stimulate further
+effort. He finally made drawings and took them to a machinist whom he
+knew, afterwards one of his assistants, who laughed at the idea but made
+the model. Previously he bet a friend a barrel of apples that he could
+do it. When the model was finished he arranged a piece of tin foil and
+talked into it, and when it gave back a distinct sound the machinist was
+frightened, and Edison won his barrel of apples, "which," he says, "I
+was very glad to get."
+
+The "Wizard" is a man evidently pertaining to the class of human
+eccentrics who excite the interest of their fellow-men "to see what they
+will do next," but without any idea of the final value of that which may
+come by what seems to them to be mere unbalanced oddity. Such people are
+invariably misunderstood until they succeed. When he invented the
+automatic repeating telegraph he was discharged, and walked from Decatur
+to Nashville, 150 miles, with only a dollar or two as his entire
+possessions. With a pass thence to Louisville, he and a friend arrived
+at that place in a snowstorm, and clad in linen "dusters." This does not
+seem scientific or professor-like, but it has not hindered; possibly it
+has immensely helped. It reminds one of the Franklinic episodes when
+remembered in connection with future scientific renown and the court of
+France.
+
+One of the secrets of Edison's great success is the ease with which he
+concentrates his mind. He is said to possess the faculty of leaving one
+thing and taking up another whenever he wills. He even carries on in his
+mind various trains of thought at the same time. The operations of his
+brain are imitated in his daily conduct, which is direct and simple in
+all respects. He is never happier than when engaged in the most
+absorbing and exacting mental toil. He dresses in a machinist's clothes
+when thus employed in his laboratory, and was long accustomed to work
+continuously for as long as he was so inclined without regard to
+regularity, or meals, or day or night. He is willing to eat his food
+from a bench that is littered with filings, chips and tools. To relieve
+strain and take a moment's recreation he is known to have bought a
+"cottage" organ and taught himself to play it, and to go to it in the
+middle of the night and grind out tunes for relaxation. He has a working
+library containing several thousand books. He pores over these volumes
+to inform himself upon some pressing idea, and does so in the midst of
+his work. No man could have made some of his inventions unaided by
+technical science and a knowledge of the results of the investigations
+of many others, and it has often been wondered how a man not technically
+educated could have seemed so well to know. There was a mistake. He
+_is_ educated; a scientific investigator of remarkable attainments.
+
+In thinking of the inventions of Edison and their value, a dozen of the
+first class, that would each one have satisfied the ambition or taken
+the time of an ordinary man, can be named. The mimeograph and the
+electric pen are minor. Then there are the stock printer, the automatic
+repeating telegraph, quadruplex telegraphy, the phono-plex, the
+ore-milling process, the railway telegraph, the electric engine, the
+phonograph. Some of these inventions seem, in the glow of his
+incandescent light, or with one's ear to the tube of the telephone he
+improved in its most essential part, to be too small for Edison. But
+nothing was too small for Franklin, or for the boy who played idly with
+the lid of his mother's tea-kettle and almost invented the steam-engine
+of today, or for Hero of Alexandria, who dreamed a thousand years before
+its time of the power that was to come. So was Henry's first electric
+telegraph the merest toy, and his electro-magnet was supported upon a
+pile of books, his signal bell was that with which one calls a servant,
+and his idea was a mere experiment without result. There was a boy
+Edison needed there then, whose toys reap fortunes and light, and
+enlighten, the world. The electric pen was in its day immensely useful
+in the business world, because it was the application of the stencil to
+ordinary manuscript, and caused the making of hundreds of copies upon
+the stencil idea, and with a printer's roller instead of a brush. The
+mimeograph was the same idea in a totally different form. It was writing
+upon a tablet that is like a bastard-file, with a steel-pointed stylus.
+Each slight projection makes a hole in the paper, and then the stencil
+idea begins again.
+
+Something has been previously said of the difficulties attending the
+making of the filament for the incandescent light. It is a little thing,
+smaller than a thread, frail, delicate, sealed in a bulb almost
+absolutely exhausted of air, smooth without a flaw, of absolutely even
+caliber from end to end. The world was searched for substances out of
+which to make it, and experiments were endlessly and tediously tried;
+all for this one little part of a great invention, which, like all other
+inventions, would be valueless in the want of a single little part.
+
+There are hundreds, an unknown number, of inventions in electricity in
+this country whose authors are unknown, and will never be known to the
+general public. The patent office shows many thousands of such in the
+aggregate. Many useful improvements in the telephone alone have come
+under the eye of every casual reader of the newspapers. These are now
+locked up from the world, with many other patented changes in existing
+machines, because of the great expense attending their substitution for
+those arrangements now in use.
+
+All the principles--the principles that, finally demonstrated, become
+laws--upon which electrical invention is based, are old. It seems
+impossible, during the entire era of modern thought, to have found a new
+trait, a development, a hitherto unsuspected quality. Tesla, in some of
+his most wonderful experiments, seems almost to have touched the
+boundaries of an unexplored realm, yet not quite, not yet, and most
+likely absolute discovery can no farther go. To play upon those known
+laws--to twist them to new utilities and give them new developments--has
+been the work of the creators of all the modern electrical miracles.
+There is scarcely a field in which men work in which the results are not
+more apparent, yet all we have, and undoubtedly most we shall ever have,
+of electricity we shall continue to owe to the infant period of the
+science.
+
+It may be truthfully claimed that most of these extraordinary
+applications of electricity have been made by American inventors.
+Wherever there is steam, on sea or land, there, intimately associated
+with American management, will be found the dynamic current and all its
+uses. The science of explosive destruction has almost entirely changed,
+and with a most extraordinary result. But one of the factors of this
+change has been the electric current, a something primarily having
+nothing to do with guns, ships or sailing. The modern man-of-war,
+beginning with those of our own navy, is lighted by the electric light,
+signalled and controlled by the current, and her ponderous guns are
+loaded, fired, and even _sighted_ by the same means. Her officers
+are a corps of electrical experts. A large part of her crew are trained
+to manipulate wires instead of ropes, and her total efficiency is
+perhaps three times what it would be with the same tonnage under the old
+r�gime. There is a new sea life and sea science, born full grown within
+ten years from a service encrusted with traditions like barnacles, and
+that could not have come by any other agency. A big gun is no longer
+merely that, but also an electrical machine, often with machinery as
+complicated as that of a chronometer and much more mysterious in
+operation.
+
+I have said that the huge piece was even sighted by electricity. There
+is really nothing strange in the statement, though it may read like a
+fairy tale or a metaphor to whoever has never had his attention called
+to the subject. In a small way, with the name of its inventor almost
+unknown except to his messmates, it is one of the most wonderful, and
+one of the simplest, of the modern miracles. As a mere instance of the
+wide extent of modern ideas of utility, and of the possibilities of
+application of the laws that were discovered and formulated by those
+whose names the units of electrical measurements bear, it may be briefly
+stated how a group of gunners may work behind an iron breastwork, and
+never see the enemy's hull, and yet aim at him with a hundred times the
+accuracy possible in the day of the _Old Ironsides_ and the
+_Guerriere_.
+
+And first it may be stated that the _range-finder_ is largely a
+measure of mere economy. A two-million-dollar cruiser is not sailed, or
+lost, as a mere pastime. Whoever aims best will win the fight. Ten years
+ago the way of finding distance, or range, which is the same thing, was
+experimental. If a costly shot was fired over the enemy the next one was
+fired lower, and possibly between the two the range might be got, both
+vessels meantime changing positions and range. To change this, to either
+injure an antagonist quickly or get away, the "range-finder" was
+invented, as a matter not of business profit, by Lieutenant Bradley A.
+Fiske, of the U. S. Navy, in 1889. It has its reason in the familiar
+mathematical proposition that if two angles and one side of a triangle
+are known, the other sides of the triangle are easily found. That is,
+that it can be determined how far it is to a distant object without
+going to it. But Fiske's range-finder makes no mathematical
+calculations, nor requires them to be made, and is automatic. A base
+line permanently fixed on the ship is the one side of a triangle
+required. The distance of the object to be hit is determined by its
+being the apex of an imaginary triangle, and at each of the other
+angles, at the two ends of the base line, is fixed a spyglass. These are
+directed at the object.
+
+So far electricity has had nothing to do with the arrangement, but now
+it enters as the factor without which the device could have no
+adaptation. As the telescopes are turned to bear upon the target they
+move upon slides or wires bent into an arc, and these carry an electric
+current. The difference in length of the slide passed over in turning
+the telescopes upon the object causes a greater or less resistance to
+the current, precisely as a short wire carries a current more easily;
+with less "resistance;" than a long one. A contrivance for measuring the
+current, amounting to the same thing that other instruments do of the
+same class that are used every day, allows of this resistance being
+measured and read, not now in units of electricity, but _in distance
+to the apex of the triangle where the target is_; in yards. The man
+at each telescope has only to keep it pointed at the target as it moves,
+or as the vessel moves which wishes to hit it. And now even the
+telephone enters into the arrangement. Elsewhere in the ship another man
+may stand with the transmitter at his ear. He will hear a buzzing sound
+until the telescopes stop moving, and at the same time there will be
+under his eye a pointer moving over a graduated scale. The instant the
+sound ceases he reads the range denoted by the index and scale. The
+information is then conveyed in any desired way to the men at the guns;
+these, of course, being aimed by a scale corresponding to that under the
+eye of the man at the telephone. The plan is not here detailed as
+technical information valuable to the casual reader, but as showing the
+wide range of electrical applications in fields where possible
+usefulness would not have been so much as suspected a few years ago. The
+same gentleman, Lieut. Fiske, is also the author of ingenious electrical
+appliances for the working of those immense gun-carriages that have
+grown too big for men to move, and for the hoisting into their cavernous
+breeches of shot and shell. The men who work these guns now do not need
+to see the enemy, even through the porthole or the embrasure. They can
+attend strictly to the business of loading and firing, assisted by
+machines nearly or quite automatic, and can cant and lay the piece by an
+index, and fire with an electric lanyard. The genius of science has
+taken the throne vacated by the goddess of glory. The sailor has gone,
+and the expert mechanician has taken his place. The tar and his training
+have given way to the register, the gauge and the electrometer. The big
+black guns are no longer run backward amid shouts and flying splinters,
+and rammed by men stripped to the waist and shrouded in the smoke of the
+last discharge, but swing their long and tapering muzzles to and fro out
+of steel casemates, and tilt their ponderous breeches like huge
+grotesque animals lying down. The grim machinery of naval battle is
+moved by invisible hands, and its enormous weight is swayed and tilted
+by a concealed and silent wire.
+
+This strange slave, that toils unmoved in the din of battle, has been
+reduced to domestic servitude of the plainest character. The
+demonstrations made of cooking by electricity at the great fair of 1893
+leave that service possible in the future without any question.
+Electrical ovens, models of neatness, convenience and _coolness_,
+were shown at work. They were made of wood, lined with asbestos, and
+were lighted inside with an incandescent lamp. The degree of temperature
+was shown by a thermometer, and mica doors rendered the baking or
+roasting visible. There could be no question of too much heat on one
+side and too little on another, because switches placed at different
+points allowed of a cutting off, or a turning on, whenever needed.
+Laundry irons had an insulated pliable connection attached, so that heat
+was high and constant at the bottom of the iron and not elsewhere. There
+were all the appliances necessary for the broiling of steaks, the making
+of coffee and the baking of cakes, and the same mystery, which is no
+longer a mystery, pervaded it all. Woman is also to become an
+electrician, at least empirically, and in time soon to come will
+understand her voltage and her Amp�res as she now does her drafts and
+dampers and the quality of her fuel.
+
+It is a practical fact that chickens are hatched by the thousand by the
+electrical current, and that men have discovered more than nature knew
+about the period of incubation, and have reduced it by electricity from
+twenty-one to nineteen days. The proverb about the value of the time of
+the incubating hen has passed into antiquity with all things else in the
+presence of electrical science.
+
+Whenever an American mechanician, a manufacturer or an inventor, is
+confronted by a difficulty otherwise insolvable he turns to electricity.
+Its laws and qualities are few. They seem now to be nearly all known,
+but the great curiosity of modern times is the almost infinite number of
+applications which these laws and qualities may be made to serve. One
+may turn at a single glance from the loading and firing of naval guns to
+the hatching of chickens and the cooking of chocolate by precisely the
+same means, silently used in the same way. Most of these applications,
+and all the most extraordinary ones, are of American origin. Their
+inventors are largely unknown. There is no attempt made here to more
+than suggest the possibilities of the near future by a glimpse of the
+present. The generation that is rising, the boy who is ten years old,
+should easily know more of electrical science than Franklin did. There
+are certain primal laws by which all explanations of all that now is,
+and most probably of almost all that is to come so far as principles go,
+may be readily understood, and these I have endeavored, in this and
+preceding chapters, to explain.
+
+There are in the United States new applications of electricity literally
+every day. Before the written page is printed some startling application
+is likely to be made that gives to that page at once an incompleteness
+it is impossible to guard against or avoid. There is a strong
+inclination to prophesy; to tell of that which is to come; to picture
+the warmed and illuminated future, smokeless and odorless, and the homes
+in which the children of the near future shall be reared. Some of those
+few apprehended things, suggested as being possible or desirable in
+these chapters, have been since done and the author has seen them. This
+American facility of electrical invention has one great cause, one
+specific reason for its fruitfulness. It is because so many acute minds
+have mastered the simple laws of electrical action. This knowledge not
+only fosters intelligent and fruitful experiment but it prevents the
+doing of foolish things. No man who has acquired a knowledge of
+mechanical forces, who understands at least that great law that for all
+force exerted there is exacted an equivalent, ever dreams upon the folly
+of the perpetual motion. In like manner does a knowledge, purely
+theoretical, of the laws of electricity prevent that waste of time in
+gropings and dreams of which the story of science and the long human
+struggle in all ages and in all departments is full.
+
+Finally, I would, if possible dispell all ideas of strangeness and
+mystery and semi-miracle as connected with electrical phenomena. There
+is no mystery; above all, there is no caprice. There are, in electricity
+and in all other departments of science, still many things undiscovered.
+It is certain that causes lead far back into that realm which is beyond
+present human investigation. _Force_ has innumerable manifestations
+that are visible, that are understood, that are controlled. Its
+_origin_ is behind the veil. A thousand branching threads of
+argument may be taken up and woven into the single strand that leads
+into the unknown. Out of the thought that is born of things has already
+arisen a new conception of the universe, and of the Eternal Mind who is
+its master. Among these things, these daily manifestations of a seeming
+mystery, the most splendid are the phenomena of electricity. They court
+the human understanding and offer a continual challenge to that faculty
+which alone distinguishes humanity from the beasts. The assistance given
+in the preceding pages toward a clear understanding of the reason why,
+so far as known, is perhaps inadequate, but is an attempt offered for
+what of interest or value may be found.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Steam Steel and Electricity, by James W. Steele
+
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