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by John Munro
This entertaining book from 1915 contains the following articles,
which have been extracted & and titled for your perusal.
Electricity, like fire, was probably discovered by some primeval savage. According to Humboldt, the Indians of the Orinoco sometimes amuse themselves by rubbing certain beans to make them attract wisps of the wild cotton, and the custom is doubtless very old. Certainly the ancient Greeks knew that a piece of amber had when rubbed the property of attracting light bodies. Thales of Miletus, wisest of the Seven Sages, and father of Greek philosophy, explained this curious effect by the presence of a "soul" in the amber, whatever he meant by that.Amber, the fossil resin of a pine tree, was found in Sicily, the shores of the Baltic, and other parts of Europe. It was a precious stone then as now, and an article of trade with the Phoenicians, those early merchants of the Mediterranean. The attractive power might enhance the value of the gem in the eyes of the superstitious ancients, but they do not seem to have investigated it, and beyond the speculation of Thales, they have told us nothing more about it.
Towards the end of the sixteenth century Dr. Gilbert of Colchester, physician to Queen Elizabeth, made this property the subject of experiment, and showed that, far from being peculiar to amber, it was possessed by sulphur, wax, glass, and many other bodies which he called electrics, from the Greek word elektron, signifying amber. This great discovery was the starting-point of the modern science of electricity. That feeble and mysterious force which had been the wonder of the simple and the amusement of the vain could not be slighted any longer as a curious freak of nature, but assuredly none dreamt that a day was dawning in which it would transform the world.
Otto von Guericke, burgomaster of Magdeburg, was the first to invent a machine for exciting the electric power in larger quantities by simply turning a ball of sulphur between the bare hands. Improved by Sir Isaac Newton and others, who employed glass rubbed with silk, it created sparks several inches long. The ordinary frictional machine as now made consists of a disc of plate glass mounted on a spindle and turned by hand. Rubbers of silk, smeared with an amalgam of mercury and tin, to increase their efficiency, press the rim of the plate between them as it revolves, and a brass conductor, insulated on glass posts, is fitted with points like the teeth of a comb, which, as the electrified surface of the plate passes by, collect the electricity and charge the conductor with positive electricity. Machines of this sort have been made with plates 7 feet in diameter, and yielding sparks nearly 2 feet long.
It was proved, however, by Alessanjra Volta, professor of physics in the University of Pavia, that the electricity was not in the animal but generated by the contact of the two dissimilar metals and the moisture of the flesh. Going a step further, in the year 1800 he invented a new source of electricity on this principle, which is known as "Volta's pile." It consists of plates or discs of zinc and copper separated by a wafer of cloth moistened with acidulated water. When the zinc and copper are joined externally by a wire, a CURRENT of electricity is found in the wire One pair of plates with the liquid between makes a "couple" or element; and two or more, built one above another in the same order of zinc, copper, zinc, copper, make the pile. The extreme zinc and copper plates, when joined by a wire, are found to deliver a current.
Lodestone, a magnetic oxide of iron (Fe3O4), is found in various parts of China, especially at T'szchou in Southern Chihli, which was formerly known as the "City of the Magnet." It was called by the Chinese the love-stone or thsu-chy, and the stone that snatches iron or ny-thy-chy, and perchance its property of pointing out the north and south direction was discovered by dropping a light piece of the stone, if not a sewing needle made of it, on the surface of still water. At all events, we read in Pere Du Halde's Description de la Chine, that sometime in or about the year 2635 B.C. the great Emperor Hoang-ti, having lost his way in a fog whilst pursuing the rebellious Prince Tchiyeou on the plains of Tchou-lou, constructed a chariot which showed the cardinal points, thus enabling him to overtake and put the prince to death.
A magnetic car preceded the Emperors of China in ceremonies of state during the fourth century of our era. It contained a genius in a feather dress who pointed to the south, and was doubtless moved by a magnet floating in water or turning on a pivot. This rude appliance was afterwards refined into the needle compass for guiding mariners on the sea, and assisting the professors of feng- shui or geomancy in their magic rites.
Magnetite was also found at Heraclea in Lydia, and at Magnesium on the Meander or Magnesium at Sipylos, all in Asia Minor. It was called the "Heraclean Stone" by the people, but came at length to bear the name of "Magnet" after the city of Magnesia or the mythical shepherd Magnes, who was said to have discovered it by the attraction of his iron crook.
The ancients knew that it had the power of communicating its attractive property to iron, for we read in Plato's "Ion" that a number of iron rings can be supported in a chain by the Heraclean Stone. Lucretius also describes an experiment in which iron filings are made to rise up and "rave" in a brass basin by a magnet held underneath. We are told by other writers that images of the gods and goddesses were suspended in the air by lodestone in the ceilings of the temples of Diana of Ephesus, of Serapis at Alexandria, and others. It is surprising, however, that neither the Greeks nor Romans, with all their philosophy, would seem to have discovered its directive property.
During the dark ages pieces of Lodestone mounted as magnets were employed in the "black arts."
Apparently it was not until the twelfth century that the compass found its way into Europe from the East. In the Landnammabok of Ari Frode, the Norse historian, we read that Flocke Vildergersen, a renowned viking, sailed from Norway to discover Iceland in the year 868, and took with him two ravens as guides, for in those days the "seamen had no lodestone (that is, no lidar stein, or leading stone) in the northern countries." The Bible, a poem of Guiot de Provins, minstrel at the court of Barbarossa, which was written in or about the year 890, contains the first mention of the magnet in the West. Guiot relates how mariners have an "art which cannot deceive" of finding the position of the polestar, that does not move. After touching a needle with the magnet, "an ugly brown stone which draws iron to itself," he says they put the needle on a straw and float it on water so that its point turns to the hidden star, and enables them to keep their course. Arab traders had probably borrowed the floating needle from the Chinese, for Bailak Kibdjaki, author of the Merchant's Treasure, written in the thirteenth century, speaks of its use in the Syrian sea. The first Crusaders were probably instrumental in bringing it to France, at all events Jacobus de Vitry (1204-15) and Vincent de Beauvais (1250) mention its use, De Beauvais calling the poles of the needle by the Arab words aphron and zohran.
Ere long the needle was mounted on a pivot and provided with a moving card showing the principal directions. The variation of the needle from the true north and south was certainly known in China during the twelfth, and in Europe during the thirteenth century. Columbus also found that the variation changed its value as he sailed towards America on his memorable voyage of 1492. Moreover, in 1576, Norman, a compass maker in London, showed that the north- seeking end of the needle dipped below the horizontal.
With the "pencil" microphone, in which a pointed rod of hard carbon, delicately poised between two brackets of carbon, which are connected in circuit with a battery and a Bell telephone. The joints of rod and bracket are so sensitive that the current flowing across them is affected in strength by the slightest vibration, even the walking of an insect. If, therefore, we speak near this microphone, the sonorous waves, causing the pencil to vibrate, will so vary the current in accordance with them as to reproduce the sounds of the voice in the telephone.
More on detecting the foot-falls of chitinous creatures of from 'Intermediate Physics' Watson 1932
Wires of platinum, iridium, and other inoxidisable metals raised to incandescence by the current are useful in firing mines, but they are not quite suitable for yielding a light, because at a very high temperature they begin to melt. Every solid body becomes red-hot--that is to say, emits rays of red light, at a temperature of about 1000 degrees Fahrenheit, yellow rays at 1300 degrees, blue rays at 1500 degrees, and white light at 2000 degrees. It is found, however, that as the temperature of a wire is pushed beyond this figure the light emitted becomes far more brilliant than the increase of temperature would seem to warrant. It therefore pays to elevate the temperature of the filament as high as possible. Unfortunately the most refractory metals, such as platinum and alloys of platinum with iridium, fuse at a temperature of about 3450 degrees Fahrenheit. Electricians have therefore forsaken metals, and fallen back on carbon for producing a light. In 1845 Mr. Staite devised an incandescent lamp consisting of a fine rod or stick of carbon rendered white-hot by the current, and to preserve the carbon from burning in the atmosphere, he enclosed it in a glass bulb, from which the air was exhausted by an air pump.
Edison and Swan, in 1878, and subsequently, went a step further, and substituted a filament or fine thread of carbon for the rod. The new lamp united the advantages of wire in point of form with those of carbon as a material. The Edison filament was made by cutting thin slips of bamboo and charring them, the Swan by carbonising linen fibre with sulphuric acid. It was subsequently found that a hard skin could be given to the filament by "flashing" it -- that is to say, heating it to incandescence by the current in an atmosphere of hydrocarbon gas. The filament thus treated becomes dense and resilient.
The induction balance has been used as a "Sonometer" for measuring the sense of hearing, and also for telling base coins. The writer devised a form of it for "divining" the presence of gold and metallic ores which has been applied by Captain M'Evoy in his "submarine detector" for exploring the sea bottom for lost anchors and sunken treasure. When President Garfield was shot, the position of the bullet was ascertained by a similar arrangement.
The old instrument consisted, as is well known, of a vibrating tympan or drum, from the centre of which projected a steel point or stylus, in such a manner that on speaking to the tympan its vibrations would urge the stylus to dig into a sheet of tinfoil moving past its point. The foil was supported on a grooved barrel, so that the hollow of the groove behind it permitted the foil to give under the point of the stylus, and take a corrugated or wavy surface corresponding to the vibrations of the speech. Thus recorded on a yielding but somewhat stiff material, these undulations could be preserved, and at a future time made to deflect the point of a similar stylus, and set a corresponding diaphragm or tympan into vibration, so as to give out the original sounds, or an imitation of them.
Tinfoil, however, is not a very satisfactory material on which to receive the vibrations in the first place. It does not precisely respond to the movements of the marking stylus in taking the impression, and does not guide the receiving stylus sufficiently well in reproducing sounds. Mr. Edison has therefore adopted wax in preference to it; and instead of tinfoil spread on a grooved support, he now employs a cylinder of wax to take the print of the vibrations. Moreover, he no longer uses the same kind of diaphragm to print and receive the sounds, but employs a more delicate one for receiving them. The marking cylinder is now kept in motion by an electric motor, instead of by hand-turning, as in the earlier instrument.
The new phonograph is about the size of an ordinary sewing machine, and is of exquisite workmanship, the performance depending to a great extent on the perfection and fitness of the mechanism. It consists of a horizontal spindle, carrying at one end the wax cylinder, on which the sonorous vibrations are to be imprinted. Over the cylinder is supported a diaphragm or tympan, provided with a conical mouthpiece for speaking into. Under the tympan there is a delicate needle or stylus, with its point projecting from the centre of the tympan downwards to the surface of the wax cylinder, so that when a person speaks into the mouthpiece, the voice vibrates the tympan and drives the point of the stylus down into the wax, making an imprint more or less deep in accordance with the vibrations of the voice. The cylinder is kept revolving in a spiral path, at a uniform speed, by means of an electric motor, fitted with a sensitive regulator and situated at the base of the machine. The result is that a delicate and ridgy trace is cut in the surface of wax along a spiral line. This is the sound record, and by substituting a finer tympan for the one used in producing it, the ridges and inequalities of the trace can be made to agitate a light stylus resting on them, and cause it to set the delicate tympan into vibrations corresponding very accurately to those of the original sounds. The tympan employed for receiving is made of gold-beater's skin, having a stud at its centre and a springy stylus of steel wire. The sounds emitted by this device are almost a whisper as compared to the original ones, but they are faithful in articulation, which is the main object, and they are conveyed to the ear by means of flexible hearing-tubes.
These tympans are interchangeable at will, and the arm which carries them is also provided with a turning tool for smoothing the wax cylinder prior to its receiving the print. The cylinders are made of different sizes, from 1 to 8 inches long and 4 inches in diameter. The former has a storage capacity of 200 words. The next in size has twice that, or 400 words, and so on. Mr. Edison states that four of the large 8-inch cylinders can record all "Nicholas Nickleby," which could therefore be automatically read to a private invalid or to a number of patients in a hospital simultaneously, by means of a bunch of hearing-tubes. The cylinders can be readily posted like letters, and made to deliver their contents viva voce in a duplicate phonograph, every tone and expression of the writer being rendered with more or less fidelity. The phonograph has proved serviceable in recording the languages and dialects of vanishing races, as well as in teaching pronunciation.
Other fishes--the silurus, malapterurus, and so on--are likewise endowed with electric batteries for stunning and capturing their prey. The action of the organs is still a mystery, as, indeed, is the whole subject of animal electricity. Nobili and Matteucci discovered that feeble currents are generated by the excitation of the nerves and the contraction of the muscles in the human subject.
Crookes, the celebrated English chemist, went still further, and by exhausting the bulbs with an improved Sprengel air-pump, obtained an extremely high vacuum, which gave remarkable effects. The diffused glow or cloudy light of the tube now shrank into a single stream, which joined the sparking points inserted through the ends of the tube as with a luminous thread A magnet held near the tube bent the streamer from its course; and there was a dark space or gap in it near the negative point or cathode, from which proceeded invisible rays, having the property of impressing a photographic plate, and of rendering matter in general on which they impinged phosphorescent, and, in course of time, red-hot. Where they strike on the glass of the tube it is seen to glow with a green or bluish phosphorescence, and it will ultimately soften with heat.
These are the famous "cathode rays" of which we have recently heard so much. Apparently they cannot be produced except in a very high vacuum, where the pressure of the air is about 1-100th millionth of an atmosphere, or that which it is some 90 or 100 miles above the earth. Mr Crookes regards them as a stream of airy particles electrified by contact with the cathode or negative discharging point, and repelled from it in straight lines. The rarity of the air in the tube enables these particles to keep their line without being jostled by the other particles of air in the tube. A molecular bombardment from the cathode is, in his opinion, going on, and when the shots, that is to say, the molecules of air, strike the wall of the tube, or any other body within the tube, the shock gives rise to phosphorescence or fluorescence and to heat. This, in brief, is the celebrated hypothesis of "radiant matter," which has been supported in the United Kingdom by champions such as Lord Kelvin, Sir Gabriel Stokes, and Professor Fitzgerald, but questioned abroad by Goldstem, Jaumann, Wiedemann, Ebert, and others.
Lenard, a young Hungarian, pupil of the illustrious Heinrich Hertz, was the first to inflict a serious blow on the hypothesis, by showing that the cathode rays could exist outside the tube in air at ordinary pressure. Hertz had found that a thin foil of aluminium was penetrated by the rays, and Lenard made a tube having a "window" of aluminium, through which the rays darted into the open air. Their path could be traced by the bluish phosphorescence which they excited in the air, and he succeeded in getting them to penetrate a thin metal box and take a photograph inside it. But if the rays are a stream of radiant matter which can only exist in a high vacuum, how can they survive in air at ordinary pressure? Lenard's experiments certainly favour the hypothesis of their being waves in the luminiferous ether.
Professor Rontgen, of Wirzburg, profiting by Lenard's results, accidentally discovered that the rays coming from a Crookes tube, through the glass itself, could photograph the bones in the living hand, coins inside a purse, and other objects covered up or hid in the dark. Some bodies, such as flesh, paper, wood, ebonite, or vulcanised fibre, thin sheets of metal, and so on, are more or less transparent, and others, such as bones, carbon, quartz, thick plates of metal, are more or less opaque to the rays. The human hand, for example, consisting of flesh and bones, allows the rays to pass easily through the flesh, but not through the bones. Consequently, when it is interposed between the rays and a photographic plate, the skeleton inside is photographed on the plate. A lead pencil photographed in this way shows only the black lead, and a razor with a horn handle only the blade.
Thanks to the courtesy of Mr. A. A. Campbell Swinton, of the firm of Swinton & Stanton, the well-known electrical engineers, of Victoria Street, Westminster, a skilful experimentalist, who was the first to turn to the subject in England, I have witnessed the taking of these "shadow photographs," as they are called, somewhat erroneously, for "radiographs" or "cryptographs" would be a better word, and shall briefly describe his method. Rontgen employs an induction coil insulated in oil to excite the Crookes tube and yield the rays, but Mr. Swinton uses a "high frequency current," obtained from apparatus similar to that of Tesla, namely, a high frequency induction coil insulated by means of oil and excited by the continuous discharge of twelve half-gallon Leyden jars charged by an alternating current at a pressure of 20,000 volts produced by an ordinary large induction coil sparking across its high pressure terminals.
A vacuum bulb connected between the discharge terminals of the high frequency coil, was illuminated with a pink glow, which streamed from the negative to the positive pole--that is to say, the cathode to the anode, and the glass became luminous with bluish phosphorescence and greenish fluorescence. Immediately under the bulb was placed my naked hand resting on a photographic slide containing a sensitive bromide plate covered with a plate of vulcanised fibre. An exposure of five or ten minutes is sufficient to give a good picture of the bones.
It has been found that the immediate source of the rays is the fluorescence and phosphorescence of the glass, and they are more effective when the fluorescence is greenish-yellow or canary colour. Certain salts--for example, the sulphates of zinc and of calcium, barium platino-cyanide, tungstate of calcium, and the double sulphate of uranium and potassium--are more active than glass, and even emit the rays after exposure to ordinary light, if not also in the dark.
Salvioni of Perugia has invented a "cryptoscope," which enables us to see the hidden object without the aid of photography by allowing the rays to fall on a plate coated with one of these phosphorescent substances. Already the new method has been applied by doctors in examining malformations and diseases of the bones or internal organs, and in localising and extracting bullets, needles, or other foreign matters in the body. There is little doubt that it will be very useful as an adjunct to hospitals, especially in warfare, and, if the apparatus can be reduced in size, it will be employed by ordinary practitioners. It has also been used to photograph the skeleton of a mummy, and to detect true from artificial gems. However, one cannot now easily predict its future value, and applications will be found out one after another as time goes on.
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