Part 28 (1/2)
If electricity could be secured, acc.u.mulated, and discharged, what might not follow as the results of further experiments?
It was several days before the professor recovered from the shock. ”I would not take a second shock,” he said, ”for the kingdom of France!”
Thus the Leyden jar came into use. The news of the experiment flew over Germany and Europe. Scientific people everywhere went to making Leyden jars and imprisoning electricity.
Society took up the invention as a wonder toy. Gunpowder was discharged from the point of the finger by persons charged on an insulating stool.
Electrical kisses pa.s.sed from bold lips to lips in social circles. Even timid people mounted up on cakes of resin that their friends might see their hair stand on end. Sir William Watson, of London, completed the electrical fountain by coating the bottle in and out with tinfoil.
The great news reached America. Franklin heard of it; no ears were more alert than his to profit by suggestions like this.
Mr. Peter Collinson, of London, sent to him an account of Professor Musschenbroek's magical bottle.
He told his friends of the Junto Club of the invention, and set them all to rubbing electric substances for sparks.
He had invented many useful things. A new force had fallen under the control of man. He must investigate it; he must experiment with it; he too must have a magical bottle.
”I never,” he wrote in 1747, ”was before engaged in any study that so totally engrossed my attention and time as this has lately done; for what with making experiments when I can be alone, and repeating them to my friends and acquaintances who from the novelty of the thing come continually in crowds to see them, I have during some months past had little leisure for anything else.”
What was magnetism? What was electricity? What secrets of Nature might the magical bottle reveal? To what use might the new power which might be stored and imprisoned be put? Silence Dogood, ponder night and day over the curious toy. The world waits for you to speak, for Nature is about to reveal one of her greatest secrets to you--you who gave two penny rolls to the poor woman and child on the street, after Deborah Read, your wife now, had had her good laugh. Your good wife will laugh again some day, when you have further poked around among electrical tubes and bottles, and have brought your benevolent mind to bear upon some of the secrets contained in the magical bottle. You have added virtue to virtue; you are adding intelligence to intelligence; such things grow. Discoveries come to those who are prepared to receive them.
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE ELECTRIFIED VIAL AND THE QUESTIONS IT RAISED.
THERE came from Europe to America at this time some electrical tubes, which being rubbed produced surprising results. To the curious they were toys, but to Franklin they were prophecies. There were three Philadelphians who joined with Franklin in the study of the effects that could be produced by these tubes and the Leyden vial.
Franklin's son William was verging on manhood. He was beyond the years that we find him experimenting with his father in the old pictures. He became the last royal Governor of New Jersey some years afterward, and a Tory, and his politics at that period was a sore grief to his father's heart. But he was a bright, free-hearted boy now, nearly twenty, and his father loved him, and the two were harmonious and were companions for each other.
Franklin, we may suppose, interested the boy in the bristling tubes and the magical bottle. The stored electricity in the latter was like the imprisoned genii of the Arabian Nights. Let the fairy loose, he suddenly mingled with native elements, and one could not gather him again. But another could be gathered.
The Philadelphia philosophers wondered greatly at the new effects that Franklin was able to produce from the tubes and the bottle. Did not the genii in the vial hold the secret of the earth, and might not the earth itself be a magnet, and might not magnetism fill interstellar s.p.a.ce?
The wonder grew, and its suggestions. One of the Philadelphia philosophers, Philip Sing, invented an electrical machine. A like machine had been made in Europe, but of this Mr. Sing did not know.
The Philadelphia philosophers discovered the power of metallic points to draw off electricity.
”Electricity is not created by friction,” observed one of these men. ”It is only collected by it.”
”And all our experiments show,” argued Franklin, ”that electricity is positive and negative.”
During the winter of 1746-'47 these men devoted as much of their time as they could spare to electrical experiments.
”William,” said one of the philosophers to the son of Franklin one day, ”you have brought your friends here to see the vial genii; he is a lively imp. Let me show you some new things which I found he can do.”
He brought out a bottle of spirits and poured the liquid into a plate.
”Stand up on the insulating stool, my boy, and let me electrify you, and see if the imp loves liquor.”
The lively lad obeyed. He pointed his finger down to the liquor in the plate. It burst into flame, startling the audience.