Chapter 8

With the mastery of electricity man enters upon his first real sovereignty of nature. As we hear the whirr of the dynamo or listen at the telephone, as we turn the button of an incandescent lamp or travel in an electromobile, we are partakers in a revolution more swift and profound than has ever before been enacted upon earth. Until the nineteenth century fire was justly accounted the most useful and versatile servant of man. To-day electricity is doing all that fire ever did, and doing it better, while it accomplishes uncounted tasks far beyond the reach of flame, however ingeniously applied. We may thus observe under our eyes just such an impetus to human intelligence and power as when fire was first subdued to the purposes of man, with the immense advantage that, whereas the subjugation of fire demanded ages of weary and uncertain experiment, the mastery of electricity is, for the most part, the assured work of the nineteenth century, and, in truth, very largely of its last three decades. The triumphs of the electrician are of absorbing interest in themselves, they bear a higher significance to the student of man as a creature who has gradually come to be what he is. In tracing the new horizons won by electric science and art, a beam of light falls on the long and tortuous paths by which man rose to his supremacy long before the drama of human life had been chronicled or sung.

Of the strides taken by humanity on its way to the summit of terrestrial life, there are but four worthy of mention as preparing the way for the victories of the electrician--the attainment of the upright attitude, the intentional kindling of fire, the maturing of emotional cries to articulate speech, and the invention of written symbols for speech. As we examine electricity in its fruitage we shall find that it bears the unfailing mark of every other decisive factor of human advance: its mastery is no mere addition to the resources of the race, but a multiplier of them. The case is not as when an explorer discovers a plant hitherto unknown, such as Indian corn, which takes its place beside rice and wheat as a new food, and so measures a service which ends there. Nor is it as when a prospector comes upon a new metal, such as nickel, with the sole effect of increasing the variety of materials from which a smith may fashion a hammer or a blade. Almost infinitely higher is the benefit wrought when energy in its most useful phase is, for the first time, subjected to the will of man, with dawning knowledge of its unapproachable powers. It begins at once to marry the resources of the mechanic and the chemist, the engineer and the artist, with issue attested by all its own fertility, while its rays reveal province after province undreamed of, and indeed unexisting, before its advent.

Every other primal gift of man rises to a new height at the bidding of the electrician. All the deftness and skill that have followed from the upright attitude, in its creation of the human hand, have been brought to a new edge and a broader range through electric art. Between the uses of flame and electricity have sprung up alliances which have created new wealth for the miner and the metal-worker, the manufacturer and the shipmaster, with new insights for the man of research. Articulate speech borne on electric waves makes itself heard half-way across America, and words reduced to the symbols of symbols--expressed in the perforations of a strip of paper--take flight through a telegraph wire at twenty-fold the pace of speech. Because the latest leap in knowledge and faculty has been won by the electrician, he has widened the scientific outlook vastly more than any explorer who went before. Beyond any predecessor, he began with a better equipment and a larger capital to prove the gainfulness which ever attends the exploiting a supreme agent of discovery.

As we trace a few of the unending interlacements of electrical science and art with other sciences and arts, and study their mutually stimulating effects, we shall be reminded of a series of permutations where the latest of the factors, because latest, multiplies all prior factors in an unexampled degree.[5] We shall find reason to believe that this is not merely a suggestive analogy, but really true as a tendency, not only with regard to man's gains by the conquest of electricity, but also with respect to every other signal victory which has brought him to his present pinnacle of discernment and rule. If this permutative principle in former advances lay undetected, it stands forth clearly in that latest accession to skill and interpretation which has been ushered in by Franklin and Volta, Faraday and Henry.

Although of much less moment than the triumphs of the electrician, the discovery of photography ranks second in importance among the scientific feats of the nineteenth century. The camera is an artificial eye with almost every power of the human retina, and with many that are denied to vision--however ingeniously fortified by the lens-maker. A brief outline of photographic history will show a parallel to the permutative impulse so conspicuous in the progress of electricity. At the points where the electrician and the photographer collaborate we shall note achievements such as only the loftiest primal powers may evoke.

A brief story of what electricity and its necessary precursor, fire, have done and promise to do for civilization, may have attraction in itself; so, also, may a review, though most cursory, of the work of the camera and all that led up to it: for the provinces here are as wide as art and science, and their bounds comprehend well-nigh the entirety of human exploits. And between the lines of this story we may read another--one which may tell us something of the earliest stumblings in the dawn of human faculty. When we compare man and his next of kin, we find between the two a great gulf, surely the widest betwixt any allied families in nature. Can a being of intellect, conscience, and aspiration have sprung at any time, however remote, from the same stock as the orang and the chimpanzee? Since 1859, when Darwin published his "Origin of Species," the theory of evolution has become so generally accepted that to-day it is little more assailed than the doctrine of gravitation. And yet, while the average man of intelligence bows to the formula that all which now exists has come from the simplest conceivable state of things,--a universal nebula, if you will,--in his secret soul he makes one exception--himself. That there is a great deal more assent than conviction in the world is a chiding which may come as justly from the teacher's table as from the preacher's pulpit. Now, if we but catch the meaning of man's mastery of electricity, we shall have light upon his earlier steps as a fire-kindler, and as a graver of pictures and symbols on bone and rock. As we thus recede from civilization to primeval savagery, the process of the making of man may become so clear that the arguments of Darwin shall be received with conviction, and not with silent repulse.

As we proceed to recall, one by one, the salient chapters in the history of fire, and of the arts of depiction that foreran the camera, we shall perceive a truth of high significance. We shall see that, while every new faculty has its roots deep in older powers, and while its growth may have been going on for age after age, yet its flowering may be as the event of a morning. Even as our gardens show us the century-plants, once supposed to bloom only at the end of a hundred years, so history, in the large, exhibits discoveries whose harvests are gathered only after the lapse of æons instead of years. The arts of fire were slowly elaborated until man had produced the crucible and the still, through which his labours culminated in metals purified, in acids vastly more corrosive than those of vegetation, in glass and porcelain equally resistant to flame and the electric wave. These were combined in an hour by Volta to build his cell, and in that hour began a new era for human faculty and insight.

It is commonly imagined that the progress of humanity has been at a tolerably uniform pace. Our review of that progress will show that here and there in its course have been _leaps_, as radically new forces have been brought under the dominion of man. We of the electric revolution are sharply marked off from our great-grandfathers, who looked upon the cell of Volta as a curious toy. They, in their turn, were profoundly differenced from the men of the seventeenth century, who had not learned that flame could outvie the horse as a carrier, and grind wheat better than the mill urged by the breeze. And nothing short of an abyss stretches between these men and their remote ancestors, who had not found a way to warm their frosted fingers or lengthen with lamp or candle the short, dark days of winter.

Throughout the pages of this book there will be some recital of the victories won by the fire-maker, the electrician, the photographer, and many more in the peerage of experiment and research. Underlying the sketch will appear the significant contrast betwixt accessions of minor and of supreme dignity. The finding a new wood, such as that of the yew, means better bows for the archer, stronger handles for the tool-maker; the subjugation of a universal force such as fire, or electricity, stands for the exaltation of power in every field of toil, for the creation of a new earth for the worker, new heavens for the thinker. As a corollary, we shall observe that an increasing width of gap marks off the successive stages of human progress from each other, so that its latest stride is much the longest and most decisive. And it will be further evident that, while every new faculty is of age-long derivation from older powers and ancient aptitudes, it nevertheless comes to the birth in a moment, as it were, and puts a strain of probably fatal severity on those contestants who miss the new gift by however little. We shall, therefore, find that the principle of permutation, here merely indicated, accounts in large measure for three cardinal facts in the history of man: First, his leaps forward; second, the constant accelerations in these leaps; and third, the gap in the record of the tribes which, in the illimitable past, have succumbed as forces of a new edge and sweep have become engaged in the fray.[6]

The interlacements of the arts of fire and of electricity are intimate and pervasive. While many of the uses of flame date back to the dawn of human skill, many more have become of new and higher value within the last hundred years. Fire to-day yields motive power with tenfold the economy of a hundred years ago, and motive power thus derived is the main source of modern electric currents. In metallurgy there has long been an unwitting preparation for the advent of the electrician, and here the services of fire within the nineteenth century have won triumphs upon which the later successes of electricity largely proceed. In producing alloys, and in the singular use of heat to effect its own banishment, novel and radical developments have been recorded within the past decade or two. These, also, make easier and bolder the electrician's tasks. The opening chapters of this book will, therefore, bestow a glance at the principal uses of fire as these have been revealed and applied. This glance will make clear how fire and electricity supplement each other with new and remarkable gains, while in other fields, not less important, electricity is nothing else than a supplanter of the very force which made possible its own discovery and impressment.

[Here follow chapters which outline the chief applications of flame and of electricity.]

Let us compare electricity with its precursor, fire, and we shall understand the revolution by which fire is now in so many tasks supplanted by the electric pulse which, the while, creates for itself a thousand fields denied to flame. Copper is an excellent thermal conductor, and yet it transmits heat almost infinitely more slowly than it conveys electricity. One end of a thick copper rod ten feet long may be safely held in the hand while the other end is heated to redness, yet one millionth part of this same energy, if in the form of electricity, would traverse the rod in one 100,000,000th part of a second. Compare next electricity with light, often the companion of heat. Light travels in straight lines only; electricity can go round a corner every inch for miles, and, none the worse, yield a brilliant beam at the end of its journey. Indirectly, therefore, electricity enables us to conduct either heat or light as if both were flexible pencils of rays, and subject to but the smallest tolls in their travel.

We have remarked upon such methods as those of the electric welder which summon intense heat without fire, and we have glanced at the electric lamps which shine just because combustion is impossible through their rigid exclusion of air. Then for a moment we paused to look at the plating baths which have developed themselves into a commanding rivalry with the blaze of the smelting furnace, with the flame which from time immemorial has filled the ladle of the founder and moulder. Thus methods that commenced in dismissing flame end boldly by dispossessing heat itself. But, it may be said, this usurping electricity usually finds its source, after all, in combustion under a steam-boiler. True, but mark the harnessing of Niagara, of the Lachine Rapids near Montreal, of a thousand streams elsewhere. In the near future motive power of Nature's giving is to be wasted less and less, and perforce will more and more exclude heat from the chain of transformations which issue in the locomotive's flight, in the whirl of factory and mill. Thus in some degree is allayed the fear, never well grounded, that when the coal fields of the globe are spent civilization must collapse. As the electrician hears this foreboding he recalls how much fuel is wasted in converting heat into electricity. He looks beyond either turbine or shaft turned by wind or tide, and, remembering that the metal dissolved in his battery yields at his will its full content of energy, either as heat or electricity, he asks, Why may not coal or forest tree, which are but other kinds of fuel, be made to do the same?

One of the earliest uses of light was a means of communicating intelligence, and to this day the signal lamp and the red fire of the mariner are as useful as of old. But how much wider is the field of electricity as it creates the telegraph and the telephone! In the telegraph we have all that a pencil of light could be were it as long as an equatorial girdle and as flexible as a silken thread. In the telephone for nearly two thousand miles the pulsations of the speaker's voice are not only audible, but retain their characteristic tones.

In the field of mechanics electricity is decidedly preferable to any other agent. Heat may be transformed into motive power by a suitable engine, but there its adaptability is at an end. An electric current drives not only a motor, but every machine and tool attached to the motor, the whole executing tasks of a delicacy and complication new to industrial art. On an electric railroad an identical current propels the train, directs it by telegraph, operates its signals, provides it with light and heat, while it stands ready to give constant verbal communication with any station on the line, if this be desired.

In the home electricity has equal versatility, at once promoting healthfulness, refinement and safety. Its tiny button expels the hazardous match as it lights a lamp which sends forth no baleful fumes. An electric fan brings fresh air into the house--in summer as a grateful breeze. Simple telephones, quite effective for their few yards of wire, give a better because a more flexible service than speaking-tubes. Few invalids are too feeble to whisper at the light, portable ear of metal. Sewing-machines and the more exigent apparatus of the kitchen and laundry transfer their demands from flagging human muscles to the tireless sinews of electric motors--which ask no wages when they stand unemployed. Similar motors already enjoy favour in working the elevators of tall dwellings in cities. If a householder is timid about burglars, the electrician offers him a sleepless watchman in the guise of an automatic alarm; if he has a dread of fire, let him dispose on his walls an array of thermometers that at the very inception of a blaze will strike a gong at headquarters. But these, after all, are matters of minor importance in comparison with the foundations upon which may be reared, not a new piece of mechanism, but a new science or a new art.

In the recent swift subjugation of the territory open alike to the chemist and the electrician, where each advances the quicker for the other's company, we have fresh confirmation of an old truth--that the boundary lines which mark off one field of science from another are purely artificial, are set up only for temporary convenience. The chemist has only to dig deep enough to find that the physicist and himself occupy common ground. "Delve from the surface of your sphere to its heart, and at once your radius joins every other." Even the briefest glance at electro-chemistry should pause to acknowledge its profound debt to the new theories as to the bonding of atoms to form molecules, and of the continuity between solution and electrical dissociation. However much these hypotheses may be modified as more light is shed on the geometry and the journeyings of the molecule, they have for the time being recommended themselves as finder-thoughts of golden value. These speculations of the chemist carry him back perforce to the days of his childhood. As he then joined together his black and white bricks he found that he could build cubes of widely different patterns. It was in propounding a theory of molecular architecture that Kekulé gave an impetus to a vast and growing branch of chemical industry--that of the synthetic production of dyes and allied compounds.

It was in pure research, in paths undirected to the market-place, that such theories have been thought out. Let us consider electricity as an aid to investigation conducted for its own sake. The chief physical generalization of our time, and of all time, the persistence of force, emerged to view only with the dawn of electric art. When it was observed that electricity might become heat, light, chemical action, or mechanical motion, that in turn any of these might produce electricity, it was at once indicated that all these phases of energy might differ from each other only as the movements in circles, volutes, and spirals of ordinary mechanism. The suggestion was confirmed when electrical measurers were refined to the utmost precision, and a single quantum of energy was revealed a very Proteus in its disguises, yet beneath these disguises nothing but constancy itself.

"There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty." Because the geometers of old patiently explored the properties of the triangle, the circle, and the ellipse, simply for pure love of truth, they laid the corner-stones for the arts of the architect, the engineer, and the navigator. In like manner it was the disinterested work of investigation conducted by Ampère, Faraday, Henry and their compeers, in ascertaining the laws of electricity which made possible the telegraph, the telephone, the dynamo, and the electric furnace. The vital relations between pure research and economic gain have at last worked themselves clear. It is perfectly plain that a man who has it in him to discover laws of matter and energy does incomparably more for his kind than if he carried his talents to the mint for conversion into coin. The voyage of a Columbus may not immediately bear as much fruit as the uncoverings of a mine prospector, but in the long run a Columbus makes possible the finding many mines which without him no prospector would ever see. Therefore let the seed-corn of knowledge be planted rather than eaten. But in choosing between one research and another it is impossible to foretell which may prove the richer in its harvests; for instance, all attempts thus far economically to oxidize carbon for the production of electricity have failed, yet in observations that at first seemed equally barren have lain the hints to which we owe the incandescent lamp and the wireless telegraph.

Perhaps the most promising field of electrical research is that of discharges at high pressures; here the leading American investigators are Professor John Trowbridge and Professor Elihu Thomson. Employing a tension estimated at one and a half millions volts, Professor Trowbridge has produced flashes of lightning six feet in length in atmospheric air; in a tube exhausted to one-seventh of atmospheric pressure the flashes extended themselves to forty feet. According to this inquirer, the familiar rending of trees by lightning is due to the intense heat developed in an instant by the electric spark; the sudden expansion of air or steam in the cavities of the wood causes an explosion. The experiments of Professor Thomson confront him with some of the seeming contradictions which ever await the explorer of new scientific territory. In the atmosphere an electrical discharge is facilitated when a metallic terminal (as a lightning rod) is shaped as a point; under oil a point is the form least favourable to discharge. In the same line of paradox it is observed that oil steadily improves in its insulating effect the higher the electrical pressure committed to its keeping; with air as an insulator the contrary is the fact. These and a goodly array of similar puzzles will, without doubt, be cleared up as students in the twentieth century pass from the twilight of anomaly to the sunshine of ascertained law.

"Before there can be applied science there must be science to apply," and it is by enabling the investigator to know nature under a fresh aspect that electricity rises to its highest office. The laboratory routine of ascertaining the conductivity, polarisability, and other electrical properties of matter is dull and exacting work, but it opens to the student new windows through which to peer at the architecture of matter. That architecture, as it rises to his view, discloses one law of structure after another; what in a first and clouded glance seemed anomaly is now resolved and reconciled; order displays itself where once anarchy alone appeared. When the investigator now needs a substance of peculiar properties he knows where to find it, or has a hint for its creation--a creation perhaps new in the history of the world. As he thinks of the wealth of qualities possessed by his store of alloys, salts, acids, alkalies, new uses for them are borne into his mind. Yet more--a new orchestration of inquiry is possible by means of the instruments created for him by the electrician, through the advances in method which these instruments effect. With a second and more intimate point of view arrives a new trigonometry of the particle, a trigonometry inconceivable in pre-electric days. Hence a surround is in progress which early in the twentieth century may go full circle, making atom and molecule as obedient to the chemist as brick and stone are to the builder now.