CHAPTER I.

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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.--Pixü'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 resumé 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 Réaumur, 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 Ampère 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 Ampère 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. Ampère 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 Ampère. 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 Ampère, 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.]