Part 8 (1/2)
The following are some of the facts, in figures, of the business side of electricity in the United States at the present writing. In 1866, about twenty years after the establishment of the telegraph, but with a population of only a little more than half the present, there were 75,686 miles of telegraph wire in use, and 2,520 offices. In 1893 there were 740,000 miles of wire, and more than 20,000 offices. The receipts for the year first named are unknown, but for 1893 they were about $24,000,000. The expenses of the system for the same year were $16,500,000.
The telephone, an industry now about sixteen years old, had in 1893, for the Bell alone, over 200,000 miles of wire on poles, and over 90,000 miles of wire under ground. The instruments were in 15,000 buildings.
There were 10,000 employes, and 233,000 subscribers. All companies combined had 441,000 miles of wire. Ninety-two millions of dollars were invested in telephone _fixtures_.
In 1893, the average cost of a telegram was thirty-one and one six-tenths cents, and the average alleged cost of sending the same to the companies was twenty-two and three-tenths cents, leaving a profit of nine and three-tenths cents on every message. It must be remembered that with mail facilities and cheapness that are unrivalled, the telegraph message is always an extraordinary mode of communication; an emergency.
These few figures may serve to give the reader a dim idea of the importance to which the most ordinary and general of the branches of electrical industry have grown in the United States.
MEDICAL ELECTRICITY.--For more than fifty years the medical fraternity in regular practice persisted in disregarding all the claims made for the electric current as a therapeutic agent. In earlier times it was supposed to have a value that supplanted all other medical agencies.
Franklin seems to have been one of the earliest experimenters in this line, and to have been successful in many instances where his brief spark from the only sources of the current then known were applicable to the case. The medical department of the science then fell into the hands of charlatans, and there is a natural disposition to deal in the wonderful, the miraculous or semi-miraculous, in the cure of disease.
Divested of the wonder-idea through a wider study and greater knowledge of actual facts, electricity has again come forward as a curative agent in the last ten years. Instruction in its management in disease is included in the curriculum of almost every medical school, and most physicians now own an outfit, more or less extensive, for use in ordinary practice. To decry and utterly condemn is no longer the custom of the steady-going physician, the ethics of whose cloth had been for centuries to condemn all that interfered with the use of drugs, and everything whose action could not be understood by the examples of common experience, and without special study outside the lines of medical knowledge as prescribed.
Perhaps the developments based upon the discoveries of Faraday have had much to do with the adoption of electricity as a curative agent. The current usually used is the Faradic; the induced alternate current from an induction coil. This is, indeed, the current most useful in the majority of the nervous derangements in the treatment of which the current is of acknowledged utility.
In surgery the advance is still greater. ”Galvano-cautery” is the incandescent light precisely; the white-hot wire being used to cut off, or burn off, and cauterize at the same time, excrescences and growths that could not be easily reached by other means than a tube and a small loop of platinum wire. A little incandescent lamp with a bulb no bigger than a pea is used to light up and explore cavities, and this advance alone, purely mechanical and outside of medical science, is of immense importance in the saving of life and the avoidance of human suffering.
It may be added that there is nothing magical, or by the touch, or mysterious, in the treatment of disease by the electrical current. The results depend upon intelligent applications, based upon reason and experience, a varied treatment for varying cases. Nor is it a remedy to be applied by the patient himself more than any other is. On the contrary, he may do himself great injury. The pills, potions, powders and patent medicines made to be taken indiscriminately, and which he more or less understands, may be still harmful yet much safer. Even the application of one or the other of the two poles with reference to the course of a nerve, may result in injury instead of good.
INCOMPLETE POSSIBILITIES.--There are at least two things greatly desired by mankind in the field of electrical science and not yet attained. One of these, that may now be dismissed with a word, is the resolving of the latent energy of, say a ton of coal, into electrical energy without the use of the steam engine; without the intervention of any machine. For electricity is not manufactured; not created by men in any case. It exists, and is merely gathered, in a measure and to a certain extent confined and controlled, and sent out as a _concentrated form of energy_ on its various errands. Should a means for the concentration of this universally diffused energy be found whereby it could be made to gather, by the new arrangement of some natural law such as places it in enormous quant.i.ties in the thundercloud, a revolution that would permeate and visibly change all the affairs of men would take place, since the industrial world is not a thing apart, but affects all men, and all inst.i.tutions, and all thought.
The other desideratum, more reasonable apparently, yet far from present accomplishment, is a means of storing and carrying a supply of electricity when it has been gathered by the means now used, or by any means.
THE STORAGE BATTERY is an attempt in this last direction. The name is misleading, since even in this attempt electricity is in no sense ”stored,” but a chemical action producing a current takes place in the machine. The arrangement is in its infancy. Instances occur in which, under given circ.u.mstances, it is more or less efficient, and has been improved into greater efficiency. But many difficulties intervene, one of which is the great weight of the appliances used, and another, considerable cost. The term ”storage battery” is now infrequently used, and the name ”secondary” battery is usually subst.i.tuted. The principle of its action is the decomposing of combined chemicals by the action of a current applied from a stationary generator or dynamo, and that these chemicals again unite as soon as they are allowed to do so by the completing of a circuit, _and in re-combining give off nearly as much electricity as was first used in separating them._ The action of the secondary, ”storage,” battery, once charged, is like that of a primary battery. The current is produced by chemical action. Two metals outside of the solution contained in a primary battery cell, but under differing physical conditions from each other, will yield a current. A piece of polished iron and a piece of rusty iron, connected by a wire, will yield a small current. Rusty lead, so to speak, so connected with bright lead, has a high electromotive force. Oxygen makes lead rusty, and hydrogen makes it bright. Oxygen and hydrogen are the two gases cast off when water is subjected to a current. (See _ante_ under _Electrolysis_) So Augustin Plante, the inventor of as much as we yet have of what is called a storage or secondary battery, suspended two plates of lead in water, and when a current of electricity was pa.s.sed through it hydrogen was thrown off at one plate, making it bright, and oxygen at the other plate, peroxydizing its surface. When the current was removed the altered plates, connected by a wire, would send off a current which was in the opposite direction from the first, and this would continue until the plates were again in their original condition.
This is the principle and mode of action of the storage battery. So far it has a.s.sumed many forms. Scores of modifications have been invented and patented. The leaden plates have taken a variety of forms, yet have remained leaden plates, one cleaned and the other fouled by the electrolytic action of a current, and giving off an almost equivalent current again by the return process. The arrangement endures for several repet.i.tions of the process, but is finally expensive and always inconvenient. The secondary battery, in its infancy, as stated, presents now much the same obstacles to commercial use the galvanic, or primary, battery did before the induced current had become the servant of man.
CHAPTER IV.
ELECTRICAL INVENTION IN THE UNITED STATES.
A list of the electrical inventors of this country would be very long.
Many of the names are, in the ma.s.s and number of inventions, almost lost. It happens that many of the practical applications described in this volume, indeed most of them, are the work of citizens of this country.
In previous chapters I have referred briefly to Franklin, Morse, Field, and others. These men have left names that, without question, may be regarded as permanent. Their chiefest distinguis.h.i.+ng trait was originality of idea, and each one of them is a lesson to the American boy. In a sense the greatest of all these, and in the same sense, the greatest American, was Benjamin Franklin. A sketch of his career has been given, but to that may be added the following: He had arrived at conclusions that were vast in scope and startling in result by applying the reasoning faculty upon observations of phenomena that had been recurring since the world was made, and had been misunderstood from the beginning. He used the simplest means. His experiment was in a different way daily performed for him by nature. He was philosophically daring, indifferently a tinker with nature's terrific machinery; a knocker at the door of an august temple that men were never known to have entered; a mortal who smiled in the face of inscrutable and awful mystery, and who defied the lightning in a sense not merely moral. [Footnote: Professor Richmann, of St. Petersburg, was instantly killed by lightning while repeating Franklin's experiment.]
His genius lay in a power of swift inductive reasoning. His common sense and his sense of humor never forsook him. He uttered keen apothegms that have lived like those of Solon. He was a philosopher like Diogenes, lacking the bitterness. He wrote the ”Busy-Body,” and annually made the plebeian and celebrated ”Almanac,” and the ”Ephemera” that were not ephemeral, and is the author of the story of ”The Whistle,” that everybody knows, and everybody reads with shamefacedness because it is a brief chapter out of his own history.
He was apparently an adept in the art of caring for himself, one of the most successful worldings of his time, yet he wrote, thought, toiled incessantly, for his fellow men. He had little education obtained as it is supposed an education must be obtained. He was commonplace. No one has ever told of his ”silver tongue,” or remembered a brilliant after-dinner speech that he has made. Yet he finally stood before mankind the companion of princes, the darling of splendid women, covered with the laurels of a brilliant scientific renown. But he was a printer, a tinkerer with stoves, the inventor of the lightning rod, the man who had spent one-half his life in teaching apprentices, such as he himself had been when his jealous and common-minded brother had whipped him, that ”time is money,” that ”credit is money”--which is the most prominent fact in the commercial world of 1895--and that honor and self-respect are better than wealth, pleasure, or any other good.
Yet clear, keen, cold and inductive as was Franklin's mind, no vision reached him, in the moment of that triumph when he felt the lightning tingling in his fingers from a hempen string, of those wonders which were to come. He knew absolutely nothing of that necromancy through which others of his countrymen were to girdle the world with a common intelligence, and yet others were to use in sprinkling night with cl.u.s.ters as innumerable and mysterious as the higher stars.
The story of the Morse telegraph has been repeatedly told, and I have briefly sketched it in connection with the subject of the telegraph.
But, unlike the original, scientifically lonely and independent Franklin, Morse had the best a.s.sistance of his times in the persons of men more skilled than himself and almost as persistent. The chief of these was Alfred Vail, a name until lately almost unknown to scientific fame, who eliminated the clumsy crudities of Morse's conception, remade his instruments, and was the inventor of that renowned alphabet which spells without letters or writing or types, that may be seen or heard or felt or tasted, that is adapted to any language and to all conditions, and that performs to this day, and shall to all time, the miracle of causing the inane rattle of pieces of metal against each other to speak to even a careless listener the exact thoughts of one a thousand miles away.
Another of the men who might be appropriately included in any comprehensive list of aiders and abettors of the present telegraph system were Leonard D. Gale, then Professor of Chemistry in the University of New York, and Professor Joseph Henry, who had made, and was apparently indifferent to the importance of it because there was no alphabet to use it with, the first electric telegraph ever constructed to be read, or used, _by sound_. Last, though hardly least if all facts are understood, might be included a skillful youth named William Baxter, afterwards known as the inventor of the ”Baxter Engine,” who, shut in a room with Vail in a machine shop in New Jersey, made in conjunction with the author of the alphabet the first telegraphic instrument that, with Henry's magnet and battery cells, sent across s.p.a.ce the first message ever read by a person who did not know what the words of the message would say or mean until they had been received.
After the telegraph the state of electrical knowledge was for a long time such that electrical invention was in a sense impossible. The renowned exploit of Field was not an invention, but a heroic and successful extension of the scope and usefulness of an invention. But thought was not idle, and filled the interval with preparations for final achievements unequaled in the history of science. Two of these results are the electric light and the telephone. For the various ”candles,” such as that of Jablochkoff, exhibited at Paris in 1870, only served to stimulate investigation of the alluring possibilities of the subject. The details of these great inventions are better known than those of any others. The telegraph and the newspaper reporter had come upon the field as established inst.i.tutions. Every process and progress was a piece of news of intense interest. When the light glowed in its bulb and sparkled and flashed at the junction points of its chocolate-colored sticks it had been confidently expected. There was little surprise. The practical light of the world was considered probable, profitable, and absolutely sure. The real story will never be told. The thoughts, which phrase may also include the inevitable disappointments of the inventor, are never written down by him. That variety of brain which, with a few great exceptions, was not known until modern, very recent times, which does not speculate, contrive, imagine only, but also reduces all ideas to _commercial_ form, has yet to have its a.n.a.lysis and its historian, for it is to all intents a new phase of the evolution of mind.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THOMAS A. EDISON.]