Part 3 (1/2)

It was in June, 1752, that this great exeenius 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 rown impatient of delay in the ht, 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 cas 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 he, 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 beca out from it, as he had often seen them do in his experiments with the electrical er, and finally charged a Leyden jar from this key, and perfor drawn frohtest indication of the presence of the current in the string was sufficient to have deht to fix But it would have been insufficient to the generalscientists of the first class less was then known about electricity and its phenomena, and the causes of theone to school No estimate of the boldness and value of Franklin's renowned experiment can be s He demonstrated that which was undreae have been the toys and tools of the next through the entire history ofof the de The experiations must, in a sense, include the universe Perhaps the obscure uely understood the realof his temerity For he had, as usual, an intensely practical purpose in view He wished to find a way of ”drawing fro them harmless to the earth” He was the first inventor of a practical machine, for a useful purpose, hich electricity had to do That -rod Whatever its purpose, reatness 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 hiold letters, that sentence which is a poele 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 non by that ter a maker of soaps and candles Benjamin was the fifteenth of a family of seventeen children He was so much of the sao to sea, and to keep hi so he was apprenticed to his brother, as a printer To be apprenticed then was to be absolutely indentured; to belong to the h, the boy anted to be a sailor was a reader and student, captivated by the style of the _Spectator_, a s afterwards He was not assisted in his studies, and all he ever knew ofaddicted 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 authorshi+p of them was discovered, and this led to a quarrel between the two brothers

Nevertheless, when Jaed seditious articles printed by hi Benjamin's name But the quarrel continued, the boy was iht have been expected under the circu 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 ti that came into his hands

A book of any kind had a char this had intended hi 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 fa his ht, for the sa Franklin was a member of that extensive fraternity non as ”cranks” [Footnote: Most people, then and now, can point to people of their acquaintance whoinals 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 roove; who differed more or less from otherexclusive subsistence upon a vegetable diet and ietarianism for several years But there is another reason hinted He saved etable scheme, and when his printer's lunch had consisted of ”biscuits (crackers) and water” for soh to buy a new book

This young printer, who, at school, in the little time he attended one, had ”failed entirely in ,” and appreciate a translation of the Memorabilia of Xenophon Even after his study of this latter book he had a fondness for the cal of Socrates, and wished to i There is no question but that the great heathen had his influence across the abyss of ti 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 hiun to attract attention as a writer in one of the only tspapers then printed in A orously 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-cli reat career

Upon his first arrival in Philadelphia as a runaway apprentice, with one piece of lealy Socratic life He says he walked in Market Street with a baker's loaf under each ar in his pockets, and eating a third piece of bread as he walked, and this on a SundayUnder 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 hi by He was one of those whose sense of huh 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 reer, he drank out of the Delaware and went to church; that is, he sat down upon a bench in a Quaker -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 reat 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 uidance that are so often quoted The first of these is the geal 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 reat e, 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 youngto adopt soirl who had laughed at hiotten her She had meantime married another man, and was no In 1730 hebusiness on his own account, he often trundled his paper along the streets in a wheelbarrow, and was intensely occupied with his affairs His acquisitive an the publication of the celebrated ”Poor Richard's Al the most successful of all American publications, was continued for twenty-five years, and in the last issue, in 1757, he collected the principalnumbers, 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 hih consideration as a leader of public opinion in ti to be troubled by the questions that finally brought about a separation from thelike a detailed account of the life of this remarkableof the kite, was an illegitimate child, and it is a remarkable instance of unlikeness that this only son becaovernor of New Jersey, was never an Aland and died there The sum of Franklin's life is that he was a statesman, a financier of remarkable ability, a skillful diploh without iination 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 Arew into the present University of Pennsylvania To hi 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 chi 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 rooanized the postal systener of the Declaration of Independence He sailed as coave all his money to his country on the eve of his departure, yet died wealthy for his time Serene, even-teacious, 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- every subject to which his attention was turned; and province-born and reared in the business of iate 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 tiue 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 out, the stone, and old age”

[Illustration: THE FRANKLIN STOVE]

After Franklin, electrical experi results, confined within what now seereat facts outside of the startling disclosure made by Franklin's experiments remained unknown It was another forty years of a 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 anatona It ht 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 ani all, he was yet unconsciously the first experinate _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 pro of which was the actual reason of the advance that washis 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 noh the accidental discovery of the plodding dee, a norance of theof his oork, 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 i so thereon uncookedto te it, and had hung it upon one of the copper hooks The only use intended to be asked of this renowned batrachian was theof 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 Heabout his own profession, familiar to hiated 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 h 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 caiven 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 ith 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 sae pair is, indeed, theand 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 , 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 allis 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 , the fluids of the recently killed body furnished the liquid containing the acid, the copper hook and the iron railing furnished the dissi's body, connecting the two ood 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 knoho has held the metallic handles of an ordinary small battery Many years passed before thebeen plain was solved by acute ht he saw the electric quality _in the tissues of the_ frog Volta came to see them as produced _by chemical action upon two dissiainst facts that becaations of several years, yet he asserted them with all the pertinacious conservatises 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 rereatest 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 iven is that it is _by the conversion of the energy of chey of electrical vibrations_ Many mixtures produce heat The explanation can be no clearer than that for electricity Electricity and heat are both _fory_, and, indeed, are so similar that one is alinal 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 Oneproduces e call ”heat,” and the actual question cannot be answered The action of fire in consu metals, are similar actions They each result in the production of a new fory in the form of vibrations In the action of fire the vibrations are irregular and spasmodic; in electricity they are controlled by a certain rhythularity 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 probley of electricity without the interposition of the steaine and machinery There apparently exist reasons why the probleence equal to answering the question as to precisely where the heat came fro of a coh friction The means were necessary Friction, or its precise equivalent in energy, e, and in the sae, as any of the pheno 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 de chiefly for three reasons: newness, silence, and inconceivable rapidity of action

Let one hold a wire in one's hand six or eight inches froas-jet It is as old as human experience that that part of the hich is not in the flae 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 h not in degree, is as unaccountable as anything in thesupernatural, or even wonderful, in all the vast universe of law If ould learn the facts in regard to anything, it e 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 ae It is the first lesson for all those ould understand

The time had now come when that which had seeated, formulated and explained A man named Coulomb, a Frenchman, is the author of a system of measurements of the electric current, and he it ho discovered that the action of electricity varies, not with the distance, but, like gravity, _in the inverse ratio of the square of the distance_ Coulo a current, which was known as the _torsion balance_ The results of his practical investigations made easier the practical application of electrical power asuse 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 shadohen, in 1820, Professor H

C Oersted, of Copenhagen, discovered the law upon which were afterwards slowly built the electrical appliances of reat principle of INDUCTION The student of electricity in 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 Ained previously that there was sonetisations of Ained that the phenonetism

This was not untrue, but it was only a part of the truth Anetism could also readily be produced by a current of electricity_ Frorew the ELECTRO MAGNET, and to Ampere we are indebted for the actual discovery of the elementary principles ofcall electrodynamics, or dynamic electricity, [Footnote: In all science there is a continual going back to the past for a s whose application is most modern _Dynamic_; DYNAMO, is the Greek word for power; to be able Once established, these na our electrical power-producinga steanificance if used at all, it has conation 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 _e, can the action of electricity be explained in connection with the iron core which is ain 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 denetized by the passage of a current through a helix of rapping it as the thread does a spool, is the indispensable feature, in so, with the saiven net It isplaced in the ”electrical field” and tean his brilliant series of experiments in 1831 To express briefly the laws of action under which he worked, he wrote the celebrated statenetic 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 noed from the Faradic position

The story of electricity, as men studied it in the prian Under the immutable laws he discovered and formulatedenter the field of result, of action, of coht 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 ht existed froress, the destiny of man, has kept pace in other fields We live our tirown-up children, e uess, the children of rown old in waiting, and ”shall be as Gods, knowing good from evil”