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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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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 resum? 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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

THE STORY OF ELECTRICITY

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.

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.

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 R?aumur, 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.

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.

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."

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." 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 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.

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. 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."

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.

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

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:

It has the unique power of drawing, "attracting" other objects at a distance.

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.

It has the power of decomposing chemicals , and it should be remembered that even water is a chemical, and that substances composed of one pure organic material are very rare.

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.

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.

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.

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:--

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.

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