Electricity

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 1, 3 January 1901, Page 17

Electricity

The science of electricity touches that of chemistry at many points. Few of the physical sciences showed such

bold and many-sided developments as thab of electricity during the century that has just kissed us its good-bye and gone, like Hans Breitmann's 'barty,' 'afay in the EwigTceit." 1 To Catholic brains and hands modern electric science owes its beginning and much of its later development. To Galvani we owe dynamical electricity ; to Volta the first battery ; to Coulomb the torsion-balance, which, says Stanley Jevons, gives * a delicate measure of electric forces, and is indispensable in the thermo-electric pile * ; to Nobili and Melloni the galvanometer, the thermo-electric multiplier and many other important instruments which are deemed indispensable in modern laboratories. Amperk, a devout French Catholic, raised dynamoelectricity to the rank of a science, and, says Dr. Zahm, 'nearly all the apparatus now used for the illustration of the laws of electro-magnetism were devised by this distinguished savant/ In compliment to his genius, his name (ampere) has "been given to the unit by which the electric current is measured. In the same way the unit which expresses difference of potential has been named ' volt ' in honor of the great Italian Catholic electrician, Alessandro Volta, whose discoveries have given to the world such scientific terms as ' voltaic,' ' voltaic pile,' ' voltagraphy,' etc. ; just as Galvani's fame has enriched our tongue with 'galvanic,' * galvanise,' • galvanism,' and a number of other words that are familiar to many of our readers. * • • The power of the electric current to establish communication at a distance was known to students of the science as far back as the middle of the eighteenth century. But the knowledge remained comparatively barren till th*e early years of the nineteenth century. The first working telegraph line (with Gauss and Weber's instruments) actually constructed and used was set up at Gottingen in 1883. Four years later the first English line was ticking out its messages — railway signals only — on the Blackwall Railway. Some pusliing business men were ablaze with thirst to use the new invention for commercial purposes. As a result, the Blackwall line was thrown open to the public, for a consideration. Thereafter the extension of telegraph lines went on at a merry pace. Dublin was connected with London in 1850 ; Dover with Calais in the following year ; and the first successful transatlantic cable was laid in 1866. In 1896 — four years before the century closed — there were, according to Mulhall, ' 1480 submarine cables, in all 168,000 miles long.' The telegraphs of the world in the same year had 933,000 miles of line, and the forty-seven countries controlled by the Central Bureau at Berne reported the number of messages passed over their wires at almost 400,000,000 a year. In his efforts to improve the electric telegraph, Professor Bell, in 1874, stumbled across the telephone — somewhat after the manner in which, according to Mark Twain, Columbus discovered America. A few years later Edison's carbon lond-speaking telephone and its later developments soon brought the new invention into general use in office, shop, factory, and dwelling. In 1888 people were conversing by wire from Paris to Marseilles ; two years later they were exchanging ideas by word of mouth between London and Paris. Long distance telephony has achieved one of its greatest successes over the wide span of a thousand miles that separates New York from Chicago. The idea of * laying on ' concerts and operas by telephone to private dwellings has been realised only in a partial and scrappy and tentative way. But if we may credit a statement made by Alfred Russel Wallace in one of his recent books, a •telephonic newspaper' is one of the startling and successful facts of daily life in Buda-Pesth. Other important applications of electrical science daring the vanished century are electric railways, the first of which was constructed in Berlin in 1882, the second from Portrush to the Giant's Causeway in Ireland in the following year ; electric tramways ; Marconi's and .other systems of wireless telegraphy ; electric light ; electric fire and burglar alarms ; the electric fan ; the electric furnace and stove ; the electric cautery ; the application of magneto-electricity to electroplating ; and the various dynamo-electric machines. The first electric lamp was invented by a Catholic scientist, Leon Faucault, in 1848. To another French Catholic, M. Carre, we owe the carbons used for eleojbric lights. 'The first storage battery/ says Dr. Zahm, ' than which nothing seems to promise greater or more important results in the near

future, is due to Gaston Plante, a member of the Catholic Scientific Society of Brussels.' 'In 1860,' says the same authority, « Dr. Antonio Pacinotti, a professor in Florence, devised an electro-magnetic machine which embodied in principle all that we find in the more improved dynamos of to-day. Pacinotti's great invention was the armature he employed, of which all the armatures now in use are only modifications.' M. Gramme, a Belgian, and, like Pacinotti, a Catholic produced, in 1871, the first modern type of commercial dynamo. He was also, says Dr. Zahm, * the inventor of the electro-motor, as he was the first to discover the reversibility of the armature of a dynamo on the passage through of an electric current. This was justly pronounced by the eminent English physicist, Professor Clerks Maxwell, the greatest discovery of the latter half of the nineteenth century.'