TOUCHING THE LIGHTNING GENIUS OF THE AGE.

"Primus philosophiam devocavit è cœlo, et in urbibus collocavit, et in domos etiam introduxit." CICERO (of Socrates.) Science first summoned electricity from heaven, established it in cities, and even introduced it into households.-(Free translation.)

modern miracle of iron wires, whereon Intelligence moves, from land to land, as on a highway, charioted by the Lightnings of Heaven!

ONCE upon a time, as we may read in old | Lydgate's "Bochas," there were set up in the Pantheon, at Rome, statues, bearing the names of the various provinces of the empire; and before each of these was a bell, on The fancy of that strange medieval trawhich the figure struck to give the alarm dition is apparently destined to become a whenever the dependency it represented was fulfilment in the nineteenth century. The in revolt or in peril of barbaric invasion. So marvel of it is ready to become a familiar that when the woad streaked Britons grew fact in more than one empire of the world. restless beside the Trent or the Severn; or Look at England. She is preparing to make the Picts were storming the great wall; or a Pantheon of her Horse Guards, or some the kilted Gauls made wild work on the other centre of military power in London, Rhine; or the Danube-conjuratus Ister- where she may gather instant news of her overflowed its rebellious banks once more; wide-spread dependencies. She is about layor the Parthians, the quivered Gelonians, ing down wires to Ireland, and has laid them pharetrali Geloni,-the Scythians, or the down to France and the continent of Europe, Getæ flung their periodical defiance against on their way to "the farthest steep of India;" the S. P. Q.R., the grim eidolon from his niche while the thought of laying them under the would let fall his truncheon on the sounding bed of the ocean to Canada is busy in her brass. And sometimes half a dozen of these brain. So that, whether poor Ireland shall giants would be hammering away-ding, theorize another hopeless insurrection; or dong-all together, like the Cyclops, "Bron- Gibraltar, standing sentinel by the Pillars of tes and Steropes and the naked-limbed Py- Hercules, shall see the Russians coming to racmon!" For, Rome being somewhat in thunder-strike the rock; or the Lion-Singhs its decline about that time, and the outside of Lahore shall come out of their jungles and barbarians incessantly rushing on the failing shake the dew-drops from their angry manes barriers of the empire, these bell-ringers had once more; or whether Jonathan shall go a very great amount of business on their to take Quebec, or vex the Bermoothes with hands-or, under them. This was a very his jolly propagandists-cast his shoe, in fine, curious and striking old Gothic legend, cer- over all the continent and the isles-the tainly, and carried an imperial air of grim news shall be literally struck upon the bells romance with it-taking the fancy wonder- arranged round what shall represent the temfully. But it was only a foreshadowing of ple of British dominion, and the whole island what was to come in our own days-a pro- shall instantly ring of it! In the same way phecy of the ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH-that this subtle machinery of despotic alarm is

VOL. VIII. NO. III. NEW SERIES.

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calculated to operate in Germany, France, | Thales of Miletus is said to have first found and other lands where impious men bear that amber (electron) when rubbed receives sway, as yet, and Science, like Samsom, may the property of drawing certain particles of still be compelled to work for the Philis-matter. Hence the amber-science of which tines. we speak Electricity. The philosopher went But it is here, in America, that the story about with his stick of amber, capturing bits of the bells will be most auspiciously retold. of feather and other light matters; as foolWe shall yet have our capital fixed some-ishly employed, in the eyes of his neighbors, where in the centre of this continent, though, in his last great Washington oration on the extension of the Capitol, Mr. Webster wished to pronounce an esto perpetua over it where it stands, and seemed to think no place so fit for it as beside the Potomac. But all things change; the fashion of all things passeth away. And the metropolis of American empire, the umbilicus terrarum, will probably, in time, be where the lordly Missouri

as was Sir Isaac Newton with his pipe and bubbles; Franklin with his kite; Galvani over the deceased frog; or Plantagenet (Marquis of Worcester) watching the cover of his boiling kettle in the Tower of London. Thales was much struck with his discovery, and thought there must be a soul in matter; like Miranda, when she first saw Ferdinand, he said: ""Tis a spirit." And, indeed, with all our science, we have not got far beyond the old Greek in our comprehension of this principle. In process of time, the world "Coraiger Hesperidum fluvis, regnator aquarum"-found out that electricity belonged to other

matters, such as sulphur, glass, resins, and so

surrenders his name and honors to the sea-forth. Glass was made use of in machines like Mississippi; and there, about midway between all the fraternal divisions of the Union, will the "Central Telegraph Station" be the Pantheon of this great democracy of ours; receiving intelligence, not of revolts, nor, we should hope, of foreign invasions, but of the peaceful doings of all the brotherly States; of their achievements on the broad fields of commerce, and in the arts that brighten and benefit social life; and interchanging their signals as they march simultaneously, one Grand Army of the future, along the highways of progress.

to produce frictional electricity, and many persons and things were in the habit of being shocked. It was also found that glass, oils, metallic oxides, &c., were non-conductors; and, arguing from these facts, Muschenbrock of Leyden, over a century ago, made a successful attempt to arrest and gather quantities of electric power, in what has been termed the "Leyden Jar." This was a wonder and a wonder-worker for a time; and a crowd of high names are connected with its operations and improvements in it. But a better order of electricity was to be discovered. About 1790, Galvani, the Italian, observed the effect of two dissimilar metals touching a dead frog, which the cook was making soup of for an invalid. This was the germ of the idea which Volta matured into Chemical Electricity, such as we now have it,

Quitting our Gothic fancies for facts, we find Electricity exercising and promising to exercise upon our times an influence not less than those of printing and the discovery of America in the days that have gone by. Steam seems feeble compared with it, and is, in fact, likely to be supplanted by it. Electri-racing round the world on wires. By means city is now doing a great many things, simultaneously-opening wonderful vistas into the coming time. It is still in its infancy; but, like Hercules, it is performing prodigies in its cradle, so to speak. What its "twelve labors" are yet to be, the most sanguine minds cannot venture to prophesy.

This electric principle was not unknown to the ancients. Existing, as we now know it does, as a universal element of nature, it could not escape the observation of the earlier generations; and it has received its Greek name from the means by which it was detected.

of the battery that bears his name, he was enabled to generate a steady current of electricity, and pour it to any distance along the wires connecting the poles of the battery. Frictional electricity had been found impulsive and unmanageable. But this chemical article proved as tractable as it was potent and easy of generation. Experimentalists who had been in the habit of making distant signals with the frictional machine, now telegraphed more effectively than before. The battery was made to decompose water at a distance and show air-bubbles as signals, and

and termed their polarity. This dualistic working seems the agency of all electric phenomena; and the acutest philosophers are anxiously endeavoring to reach the secret of it. We can as little comprehend electricity as the cause of light and heat; but it seems to be ceaselessly exercising its forces in the clouds, the atmosphere, the rocks, the clays of the earth, and the waves of the ocean. The more generally received opinion is, that it is derived from the rays of the sun. Hansteen, Sir David Brewster, and others, hold that the sun is a magnetic centre; and Ampere has put forth a theory that electrical currents, by a great cosmical law, are continually traveising our globe from east to west, and that the repulsion of currents, which is the nature of this principle, is that which forces the needle to point always to the north, and not any independent virtue in the pole itself.

Numa is said to have brought fire from heaven. Living in retirement, he combined statesmanship with philosophy, like Franklin, and probably amused his leisure in the Egerian Grotto with scientific experiments, which he would shrewdly make use of, after the fashion of all great lawgivers of the olden days, in practising wholesome imposi tions upon the ignorant vulgar, as a matter of state policy. He probably knew the use of the lightning-rod, and was as awfully looked on as Friar Bacon, Cornelius Agrippa, and Albert de Groot were in after times. Ovid tells us how Numa and Egeria captured a pair of sylvan gods in the forest, Faunus and Picus, and, having made them tipsy with a perfumed, pleasant wine, drew from them the secret of bringing down and warding off lightning. It is recorded that Tullus Hostilius, king of Rome-if Niebuhr will permit us to call him so-was killed by In the beginning of the last century, men lightning, as he attempted to bring it out of science began to suspect some resem- of the clouds. Concerning Prometheus and blance between electricity and lightning. his theft of fire, it is remarkable that he was While D'Alibard in France was coming to said by certain traditions to have brought the conclusion they were one and the same, it from above, on the point of a rod or Franklin sent up his silk handkerchief and ferula. A good deal of what is considered brought out of a dark cloud this most bril-new in modern science may doubtless be liant truth of the age. His own sensations traced among the fables, mythologies, and must also have electrified him at that mo- superstitions of the elder generations of ment. After this-as in the case of Fran- men. cesca and Paulo, when the memorable kiss was given-we may conclude

"The silken kite was flown no more that day." We must here observe that this drawing lightning from the atmosphere would not seem to be solely a modern achievement. Livy and Pliny speak of bringing it down. It may not, in fact, be too much to suppose that some philosopher, following Thales, may have anticipated Franklin in theorizing from what he knew of the shocks and sparks of electricity, and suggesting its likeness to the free element. Be this as it may, the ancients knew that lightning could be conducted from the clouds at least, conducted aside after it had left them. Dr. Lardner states that the ancient Temple of Jerusalem was guarded by lightning-rods, terminating in the ground. Thus the philosophers of Mount Moriah could protect its sacred pinnacles from the thunder-stone, though not against the catapults of Titus.

However this may be, as regards the electric principle, Magnetism was certainly known to the ancients. Pliny, Aristotle, and others, mention the lode-stone, and Lucretius thus speaks of it:

"Quem magneta vocant patrio de nomine Graii Magnetum, quia sit patriis in finibus ortus."

The stone was first found in Magnesia. It is on record that the Chinese and Arabians knew the use of the magnet so far back as the beginning of the Christian era. A thousand years later, the Scandinavian Vikings used to steer their piratical dragons by the mariner's compass, as we are informed by the old Icelandic writers. Vasco de Gama used the compass when he rounded the Cape of Good Hope, in 1427. And its well-known property happily strengthened the assurance of Columbus, when he dared his immortal voyage to a distant and traditionary land, in a small, frail caravel, through the billows of a broad and unexplored

ocean.

The civilization of the modern world is

"Runs the great circle, and is still at home."

destined to be largely indebted to the mag- poles. The force shows itself along the net, whether we consider it as pointing to whole line, but does not change place. the north with steadiness, or falling fitfully It to the east and west. After Ersted had discovered the deflection of the magnet by the electric wire, the telegraph, which had been more a curious experiment than any thing else, began to be contemplated as a thing practicable on a large scale. The men of science and the experimentalists went to work every where, and after the attempts and improvements of thirty years, the electric telegraph seems to be in satisfactory operation, in the principal civilized nations. Batteries on the Voltaic principle are used to generate electricity for telegraphing purposes; and metals and sulphuric acids make that powerful chemistry which could send the mild lightning a thousand miles in a

second

"To speed swift intercourse from soul to soul, And waft a thought from Indus to the Pole."

Thales would be curiously astonished to see how his old amber-principle is brought to life in a timber or gutta-percha tub, from a few pieces of dissimilar metal-copper and zinc-arranged alternately in sulphuric acid. From the extreme copper plate to the extreme zinc plate is carried a copper wire. When the communication between the two poles is thus complete, the circuit is formed; and electricity, rising from the chemistry of the metals and the acid, flashes through the wire-whether this last be ten feet or one thousand miles long. Electricity lives in a circle, and will not begin to move till it has the circle to travel in! The law of this principle is a mystery. Some suppose it runs like a current along the wire. In using the phraseology of a current, we can best speak of it. Two currents are said to run along the curved wire, from the opposite poles, and may be supposed to pass each other in the wire. This property of the electric wire has been called, in the language of another theory, polarity. According to this latter theory, it is thought all the molecules of the wire are stirred into alternate electro-positive and electro-negative conditions. So that we may be made to understand that nothing actually runs along the wire, but that each particle of it, remaining in its place, stirs the adjacent particles with a duplicate impulse, exhibited at last at the

Thus, instinct with its double power, the wire is carried from the copper and the zinc ends to the distance of hundreds of miles, where the magnetic discovery of Ersted enables the wonderful errand to be satisfactorily performed. All telegraphs are worked on that principle of electro-magnetism. On lines where intelligence is communicated by means of the deflections of the needle, the wire is so arranged that it shall run either above or below the former and parallel to it. The result is, that the needle is made to courtesy right and left on its pivot, and in this way indicate letters of the alphabet

and arbitraries. Another mode of telegraphing exhibits a soft iron horse-shoe involved in a coil of wire. When electricity is excited in this last, the shoe, from a piece of dead metal, becomes a living magnet, and catches up an armature, or bar, lying across its poles. When the operator breaks the circuit, the iron shoe becomes no better than a leathern one, and the armature falls. In this way an apparatus is set going, and a pencil made to impress intermittent marks on paper carried under it by a cylinder; these marks being interpreted, the news is told. Another plan is more complicated and ingenious still. By means of magnets, the dædal machinery actually prints the intelligence of itself!

These plans, of which we can only speak in a rapid and general way, are receiving gradual improvements, and more changes for the better may be confidently looked for. As it is, innovators are treading on each other's heels, and patents are put in peril by the hasty genius of the age. House has eluded Morse, and gone ahead with his printing machine; and it is not at all unlikely that somebody else will turn House's flank by some unheard-of mode of telegraphing. The electro-magnetic principle is common property, and no power or patent can justify any man in putting a cosmical element of the universe in his pocket. Patentholders stand as bad a chance of being able to repress the invasions of inventive men, as Knute did in trying to stop the waves of the English channel.

The electric principle seems to be only in