Chapter 31

Now take a second darning-needle like the first, and magnetise it in precisely the same manner: freely suspended it also will turn its eye to the north and its point to the south. Your next step is to examine the action of the two needles which you have thus magnetised upon each other.

Take one of them in your hand, and leave the other suspended; bring the eye-end of the former near the eye-end of the latter; the suspended needle retreats: it is repelled. Make the same experiment with the two points; you obtain the same result, the suspended needle is repelled. Now cause the dissimilar ends to act on each other--you have attraction--point attracts eye, and eye attracts point. Prove the reciprocity of this action by removing the suspended needle, and putting the other in its place. You obtain the same result. The attraction, then, is mutual, and the repulsion U mutual. You have thus demonstrated in the clearest manner the fundamental law of magnetism, that like poles repel, and that unlike poles attract, each other. You may say that this is all easily understood without doing; but _do it_, and your knowledge will not be confined to what I have uttered here.

I have said that one end of your bar magnet has a mark upon it; lay several silk fibres together, so as to get sufficient strength, or employ a thin silk ribbon, and form a loop large enough to hold your magnet. Suspend it; it turns its marked end towards the north. This marked end is that which in England is called the north pole. If a common smith has made your magnet, it will be convenient to determine its north pole yourself, and to mark it with a file. Vary your experiments by causing your magnetised darning-needle to attract and repel your large magnet; it is quite competent to do so. In magnetising the needle, I have supposed the point to be the last to quit the marked end of the magnet; the point of the needle is a south pole. The end which last quits the magnet is always opposed in polarity to the end of the magnet with which it, has been last in contact.

You may perhaps learn all this in a single hour; but spend several at it, if necessary; and remember, understanding it is not sufficient: you must obtain a manual aptitude in addressing Nature. If you speak to your fellow-man you are not entitled to use jargon. Bad experiments are jargon addressed to Nature, and just as much to be deprecated. Manual dexterity in illustrating the interaction of magnetic poles is of the utmost importance at this stage of your progress; and you must not neglect attaining this power over your implements. As you proceed, moreover, you will be tempted to do more than I can possibly suggest. Thoughts will occur to you which you will endeavour to follow out: questions will arise which you will try to answer. The same experiment may be twenty different things to twenty people. Having witnessed the action of pole on pole, through the air, you will perhaps try whether the magnetic power is not to be screened off. You use plates of glass, wood, slate, pasteboard, or gutta-percha, but find them all pervious to this wondrous force. One magnetic pole acts upon another through these bodies as if they were not present. Should you ever become a patentee for the regulation of ships' compasses, you will not fall, as some projectors have done, into the error of screening off the magnetism of the ship by the interposition of such substances.

If you wish to teach a class you must contrive that the effects which you have thus far witnessed for yourself shall be witnessed by twenty or thirty pupils. And here your private ingenuity must come into play. You will attach bits of paper to your needles, so as to render their movements visible at a distance, denoting the north and south poles by different colours, say green and red. You may also improve upon your darning-needle. Take a strip of sheet steel, heat it to vivid redness and plunge it into cold water. It is thereby hardened; rendered, in fact, almost as brittle as glass. Six inches of this, magnetised in the manner of the darning-needle, will be better able to carry your paper indexes. Having secured such a strip, you proceed thus:

Magnetise a small sewing-needle and determine its poles; or, break half an inch, or an inch, off your magnetised darning-needle and suspend it by a fine silk fibre. The sewing-needle, or the fragment of the darning needle, is now to be used as a test-needle, to examine the distribution of the magnetism in your strip of steel. Hold the strip upright in your left hand, and cause the test-needle to approach the lower end of your strip; one end of the test-needle is attracted, the other is repelled. Raise your needle along the strip; its oscillations, which at first were quick, become slower; opposite the middle of the strip they cease entirely; neither end of the needle is attracted; above the middle the test-needle turns suddenly round, its other end being now attracted. Go through the experiment thoroughly: you thus learn that the entire lower half of the strip attracts one end of the needle, while the entire upper half attracts the opposite end. Supposing the north end of your little needle to be that attracted below, you infer that the entire lower half of your magnetised strip exhibits south magnetism, while the entire upper half exhibits north magnetism. So far, then, you have determined the distribution of magnetism in your strip of steel.

You look at this fact, you think of it; in its suggestiveness the value of an experiment chiefly consists. The thought naturally arises: 'What will occur if I break my strip of steel across in the middle? Shall I obtain two magnets each possessing a single pole?' Try the experiment; break your strip of steel, and test each half as you tested the whole. The mere presentation of its two ends in succession to your test-needle, suffices to show that you have _not_ a magnet with a single pole--that each half possesses two poles with a neutral point between them. And if you again break the half into two other halves, you will find that each quarter of the original strip exhibits precisely the same magnetic distribution as the whole strip. You may continue the breaking process: no matter how small your fragment may be, it still possesses two opposite poles and a neutral point between them. Well, your hand ceases to break where breaking becomes a mechanical impossibility; but does the mind stop there? No: you follow the breaking process in idea when you can no longer realise it in fact; your thoughts wander amid the very atoms of your steel, and you conclude that each atom is a magnet, and that the force exerted by the strip of steel is the mere summation, or resultant, of the forces of its ultimate particles.

Here, then, is an exhibition of power which we can call forth at pleasure or cause to disappear. We magnetise our strip, of steel by drawing it along the pole of a magnet; we can demagnetise it, or reverse its magnetism, by properly drawing it along the same pole in the opposite direction. What, then, is the real nature of this wondrous change? What is it that takes place among the atoms of the steel when the substance is magnetised? The question leads us beyond the region of sense, and into that of imagination. This faculty, indeed, is the divining-rod of the man of science. Not, however, an imagination which catches its creations from the air, but one informed and inspired by facts; capable of seizing firmly on a physical image as a principle, of discerning its consequences, and of devising means whereby these forecasts of thought may be brought to an experimental test. If such a principle be adequate to account for all the phenomena--if from an assumed cause the observed acts necessarily follow, we call the assumption a theory, and, once possessing it, we can not only revive at pleasure facts already known, but we can predict others which we have never seen. Thus, then, in the prosecution of physical science, our powers of observation, memory, imagination, and inference, are all drawn upon. We observe facts and store them up; the constructive imagination broods upon these memories, tries to discern their interdependence and weave them to an organic whole. The theoretic principle flashes or slowly dawns upon the mind; and then the deductive faculty interposes to carry out the principle to its logical consequences. A perfect theory gives dominion over natural facts; and even an assumption which can only partially stand the test of a comparison with facts, may be of eminent use in enabling us to connect and classify groups of phenomena. The theory of magnetic fluids is of this latter character, and with it we must now make ourselves familiar.

With the view of stamping the thing more firmly on your minds, I will make use of a strong and vivid image. In optics, red and green are called complementary colours; their mixture produces white. Now I ask you to imagine each of these colours to possess a self-repulsive power; that red repels red, that green repels green; but that red attracts green and green attracts red, the attraction of the dissimilar colours being equal to the repulsion of the similar ones. Imagine the two colours mixed so as to produce white, and suppose two strips of wood painted with this white-; what will be their action upon each other? Suspend one of them freely as we suspended our darning-needle, and bring the other near it; what will occur? The red component of the strip you hold in your hand will repel the red component of your suspended strip; but then it will attract the green, and, the forces being equal, they neutralise each other. In fact, the least reflection shows you that the strips will be as indifferent to each other as two unmagnetised darning-needles would be under the same circumstances.

But suppose, instead of mixing the colours, we painted one half of each strip from centre to end red, and the other half green, it is perfectly manifest that the two strips would now behave towards each other exactly as our two magnetised darning-needles--the red end would repel the red and attract the green, the green would repel the green and attract the red; so that, assuming two colours thus related to each other, we could by their mixture produce the neutrality of an unmagnetised body, while by their separation we could produce the duality of action of magnetised bodies.

But you have already anticipated a defect in my conception; for if we break one of our strips of wood in the middle we have one half entirely red, and the other entirely green, and with these it would be impossible to imitate the action of our broken magnet. How, then, must we modify our conception? We must evidently suppose _each molecule of the wood_ painted green on one face and red on the opposite one. The resultant action of all the atoms would then exactly resemble the action of a magnet. Here also, if the two opposite colours of each atom could be caused to mix so as to produce white, we should have, as before, perfect neutrality.

For these two self-repellent and mutually attractive colours, substitute in your minds two invisible self-repellent and mutually attractive fluids, which in ordinary steel are mixed to form a neutral compound, but which the act of magnetisation separates from each other, placing the opposite fluids on the opposite face of each molecule. You have then a perfectly distinct conception of the celebrated theory of magnetic fluids. The strength of the magnetism excited is supposed to be proportional to the quantity of neutral fluid decomposed. According to this theory nothing is actually transferred from the exciting magnet to the excited steel. The act of magnetisation consists in the forcible separation of two fluids which existed in the steel before it was magnetised, but which then neutralised each other by their coalescence. And if you test your magnet, after it has excited a hundred pieces of steel, you will find that it has lost no force--no more, indeed, than I should lose, had my words such a magnetic influence on your minds as to excite in them a strong resolve to study natural philosophy. I should rather be the gainer by my own utterance, and by the reaction of your fervour. The magnet also is the gainer by the reaction of the body which it magnetises.

Look now to your excited piece of steel; figure each molecule with its opposed fluids spread over its opposite faces. How can this state of things be permanent? The fluids, by hypothesis, attract each other; what, then, keeps them apart? Why do they not instantly rush together across the equator of the atom, and thus neutralise each other? To meet this question philosophers have been obliged to infer the existence of a special force, which holds the fluids asunder. They call it _coercive force_; and it is found that those kinds of steel which offer most resistance to being magnetised--which require the greatest amount of 'coercion' to tear their fluids asunder--are the very ones which offer the greatest resistance to the reunion of the fluids, after they have been once separated. Such kinds of steel are most suited to the formation of _permanent_ magnets. It is manifest, indeed, that without coercive force a permanent magnet would not be at all possible.

Probably long before this you will have dipped the end of your magnet among iron filings, and observed how they cling to it; or into a nail-box, and found how it drags the nails after it. I know very well that if you are not the slaves of routine, you will have by this time done many things that I have not told you to do, and thus multiplied your experience beyond what I have indicated. You are almost sure to have caused a bit of iron to hang from the end of your magnet, and you have probably succeeded in causing a second bit to attach itself to the first, a third to the second; until finally the force has become too feeble to bear the weight of more. If you have operated with nails, you may have observed that the points and edges hold together with the greatest tenacity; and that a bit of iron clings more firmly to the corner of your magnet than to one of its flat surfaces. In short, you will in all likelihood have enriched your experience in many ways without any special direction from me.

Well, the magnet attracts the nail, and the nail attracts a second one. This proves that the nail in contact with the magnet has had the magnetic quality developed in it by that contact. If it be withdrawn from the magnet its power to attract its fellow nail ceases. Contact, however, is not necessary. A sheet of glass or paper, or a space of air, may exist between the magnet and the nail; the latter is still magnetised, though not so forcibly as when in actual contact. The nail thus presented to the magnet is itself a temporary magnet. That end which is turned towards the magnetic pole has the opposite magnetism of the pole which excites it; the end most remote from the pole has the same magnetism as the pole itself, and between the two poles the nail, like the magnet, possesses a magnetic equator.

Conversant as you now are with the theory of magnetic fluids, you have already, I doubt not, anticipated me in imagining the exact condition of an iron nail under the influence of the magnet. You picture the iron as possessing the neutral fluid in abundance; you picture the magnetic pole, when brought near, decomposing the fluid; repelling the fluid of a like kind with itself, and attracting the unlike fluid; thus exciting in the parts of the iron nearest to itself the opposite polarity. But the iron is incapable of becoming a permanent magnet. It only shows its virtue as long as the magnet acts upon it. What, then, does the iron lack which the steel possesses? It lacks coercive force. Its fluids are separated with ease; but, once the separating cause is removed, they flow together again, and neutrality is restored. Imagination must be quite nimble in picturing these changes--able to see the fluids dividing and reuniting, according as the magnet is brought near or withdrawn. Fixing a definite pole in your mind, you must picture the precise arrangement of the two fluids with reference to this pole, and be able to arouse similar pictures in the minds of your pupils. You will cause them to place magnets and iron in various positions, and describe the exact magnetic state of the iron in each particular case. The mere facts of magnetism will have their interest immensely augmented by an acquaintance with the principles whereon the facts depend. Still, while you use this theory of magnetic fluids to track out the phenomena and link them together, you will not forget to tell your pupils that it is to be regarded as a symbol merely,--a symbol, moreover, which is incompetent to cover all the facts, but which does good practical service whilst we are waiting for the actual truth. [Footnote: This theory breaks down when applied to diamagnetic bodies which are repelled by magnets. Like soft iron, such bodies are thrown into a state of temporary excitement, in virtue of which they are repelled; but any attempt to explain such a repulsion by the decomposition of a fluid will demonstrate its own futility.]

The state of excitement into which iron is thrown by the influence, of a magnet, is sometimes called 'magnetisation by influence.' More commonly, however, the magnetism is said to be 'induced' in the iron, and hence this mode of magnetising is called 'magnetic induction.' Now, there is nothing theoretically perfect in Nature: there is no iron so soft as not to possess a certain amount of coercive force, and no steel so hard as not to be capable, in some degree, of magnetic induction. The quality of steel is in some measure possessed by iron, and the quality of iron is shared in some degree by steel. It is in virtue of this latter fact that the unmagnetised darning-needle was attracted in your first experiment; and from this you may at once deduce the consequence that, after the steel has been magnetised, the repulsive action of a magnet must be always less than its attractive action. For the repulsion is opposed by the inductive action of the magnet on the steel, while the attraction is assisted by the same inductive action. Make this clear to your minds, and verify it by your experiments. In some cases you can actually make the attraction due to the temporary magnetism overbalance the repulsion due to the permanent magnetism, and thus cause two poles of the same kind apparently to attract each other. When, however, good hard magnets act on each other from a sufficient distance, the inductive action practically vanishes, and the repulsion of like poles is sensibly equal to the attraction of unlike ones.

I dwell thus long on elementary principles, because they are of the first importance, and it is the temptation of this age of unhealthy cramming to neglect them. Now follow me a little farther. In examining the distribution of magnetism in your strip of steel you raised the needle slowly from bottom to top, and found what we called a neutral point at the centre.

Now does the magnet really exert no influence on the pole presented to its centre? Let us see.

Let SN, fig. 13, be our magnet, and let n represent a particle of north magnetism placed exactly opposite the middle of the magnet. Of course this is an imaginary case, as you can never in reality thus detach your north magnetism from its neighbour. But supposing us to have done so, what would be the action of the two poles of the magnet on n? Your reply will of course be that the pole S attracts n while the pole N repels it. Let the magnitude and direction of the attraction be expressed by the line n m, and the magnitude and direction of the repulsion by the line n o. Now, the particle n being equally distant from s and N, the line n o, expressing the repulsion, will be equal to m n, which expresses the attraction. Acted upon by two such forces, the particle n must evidently move in the direction n p, exactly midway between m n and n o. Hence you see that, although there is no tendency of the particle n to move towards the magnetic equator, there is a tendency on its part to move parallel to the magnet. If, instead of a particle of north magnetism, we placed a particle of south magnetism opposite to the magnetic equator, it would evidently be urged along the line n q; and if, instead of two separate particles of magnetism, we place a little magnetic needle, containing both north and south magnetism, opposite the magnetic equator, its south pole being urged along n q, and its north along n p, the little needle will be compelled to set itself parallel to the magnet s N. Make the experiment, and satisfy yourselves that this is a true deduction.

Substitute for your magnetic needle a bit of iron wire, devoid of permanent magnetism, and it will set itself exactly as the needle does. Acted upon by the magnet, the wire, as you know, becomes a magnet and behaves as such; it will turn its north pole towards p, and south pole towards q, just like the needle.

But supposing you shift the position of your particle of north magnetism, and bring it nearer to one end of your magnet than to the other; the forces acting on the particle are no longer equal; the nearest pole of the magnet will act more powerfully on the particle than the more distant one. Let SN, fig. 14, be the magnet, and n the particle of north magnetism, in its new position. It is repelled by N, and attracted by S. Let the repulsion be represented in magnitude and direction by the line n o, and the attraction by the shorter line n M. The resultant of these two forces will be found by completing the parallelogram m n o p, and drawing its diagonal n p. Along n p, then, a particle of north magnetism would be urged by the simultaneous action of S and N. Substituting a particle of south magnetism for n, the same reasoning would lead to the conclusion that the particle would be urged along it q. If we place at n a short magnetic needle, its north pole will be urged along n p, its south pole along n q, the only position possible to the needle, thus acted on, being along the line p q, which is no longer parallel to the magnet. Verify this deduction by actual experiment.

In this way we might go round the entire magnet; and, considering its two poles as two centres from which the force emanates, we could, in accordance with ordinary mechanical principles, assign a definite direction to the magnetic needle at every particular place. And substituting, as before, a bit of iron wire for the magnetic needle, the positions of both will be the same.