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 distinguishing 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.]
A typical example of this cla.s.s of intellect is Mr. Thomas A. Edison. It may be doubted if such a man could, in the qualities that make him remarkable, be the product of any other country than ours. In common with nearly all those who have left a deep impression upon our country, Edison was the child of that hackneyed "respectable poverty" which here is a different condition from that existing all over Europe, where the phrase was coined. There, the phrase, and the condition it describes, mean a dull content, an incapacity to rise, a happy indifference to all other conditions, a dullness that does not desire to learn, to change, to think. To respectable poverty in other civilizations there are strong local a.s.sociations like those of a cat, not arising to the dignity of love of country. In the United States, without a word, without argument or question, a young man becomes a pioneer--not necessarily one of locality or physical newness, but a pioneer in mind--in creed, politics, business--in the boundless domain of hope and endeavor. In America no man is as his father was except in physical traits. No man there is a volunteer soldier fighting his country"s battles except from a conviction that he ought to be. A man is an inventor, a politician, a writer, first because he knows that valuable changes are possible, and, second, because he can make such changes profitable to himself. It is the great realm of immutable steadfastness combined with constant change; unique among the nations.
Edison never had more than two months regular schooling in his entire boyhood. There is, therefore, nothing trained, "regular," technical, about him. If there had been it is probable that we might never have heard of him. He is one of the innumerable standing arguments against the old system advocated by everybody"s father, and especially by the older fathers of the church, and which meant that every man and woman was practically cut by the same pattern, or cast in the same general mould, and was to be fitted for a certain notch by training alone. No more than thirty years ago the note of preparation for the grooves of life was constantly sounded. Natural apt.i.tude, "bent," inclination, were disregarded. The maxim concocted by some envious dull man that "genius is only another name for industry," was constantly quoted and believed.
But Edison"s mother had been trained, practically, as an instructor of youth. He had hints from her in the technical portions of a boy"s primary training. He is not an ignorant man, but, on the contrary, a very highly educated one. But it is an education he has constructed for himself out of his apt.i.tudes, as all other actual educations have really been. When he was ten years old he had read standard works, and at twelve is stated to have struggled, ineffectually perhaps, with Newton"s _Principia_. At that age he became a train-boy on the Grand Trunk railroad for the purpose of earning his living; only another way of pioneering and getting what was to be got by personal endeavor. While in that business he edited and printed a little newspaper; not to please an amateurish love of the beautiful art of printing, but for profit. He was selling papers, and he wanted one of his own to sell because then he would get more out of it in a small way. He never afterwards showed any inclination toward journalism, and did not become a reporter or correspondent, or start a rural daily. While he was a train-boy, enjoying every opportunity for absorbing a knowledge of human nature, and of finally becoming a pa.s.senger conductor or a locomotive engineer, something called his attention to the telegraph as a promoter of business, as a great and useful inst.i.tution, and he resolved to become an "operator." This was his electrical beginning. Yet before he took this step he was accused of a proclivity toward extraordinary things. In the old "caboose" where he edited, set up, and printed his newspaper he had established a small chemical laboratory, and out of these chemicals there is said to have been jolted one day an accident which caused him some unpopularity with the railroad people. He was all the time a business man. He employed four boy helpers in his news and publishing business. It took him a long time to learn the telegraph business under the circ.u.mstances, and when he was at last installed on a "plug" circuit he began at once to do unusual things with the current and its machines and appliances. This is what he tells of his first electrical invention.
There was an operator at one end of the circuit who was so swift that Edison and his companion could not "take" fast enough to keep up with him. He found two old Morse registers--the machines that printed with a steel point the dots and dashes on a paper slip wound off of a reel.
These he arranged in such a way that the message written, or indented, on them by the first instrument were given to him by the second instrument at any desired rate of speed or slowness.
This gave to him and his friend time to catch up. This, in Morse"s time, would have been thought an achievement. Edison seems to regard it as a joke. There was no time for prolonged experiment. It was an emergency, and the idea must necessarily have been supplemented by a quick mechanical skill.
It was this same automatic recorder, the idea embodied in it, that by thought and logical deduction afterwards produced that wonderful automaton, the phonograph. He rigged a hasty instrument that was based upon the idea that if the indentations made in a slip of paper could be made to repeat the ticking sound of the instrument, similar indentations made by a point on a diaphragm that was moved by the _voice_ might be made to repeat the voice. His rude first instrument gave back a sound vaguely resembling the single word first shouted into it and supposed to be indented on a slip of paper, and this was enough to stimulate further effort. He finally made drawings and took them to a machinist whom he knew, afterwards one of his a.s.sistants, who laughed at the idea but made the model. Previously he bet a friend a barrel of apples that he could do it. When the model was finished he arranged a piece of tin foil and talked into it, and when it gave back a distinct sound the machinist was frightened, and Edison won his barrel of apples, "which," he says, "I was very glad to get."
The "Wizard" is a man evidently pertaining to the cla.s.s of human eccentrics who excite the interest of their fellow-men "to see what they will do next," but without any idea of the final value of that which may come by what seems to them to be mere unbalanced oddity. Such people are invariably misunderstood until they succeed. When he invented the automatic repeating telegraph he was discharged, and walked from Decatur to Nashville, 150 miles, with only a dollar or two as his entire possessions. With a pa.s.s thence to Louisville, he and a friend arrived at that place in a snowstorm, and clad in linen "dusters." This does not seem scientific or professor-like, but it has not hindered; possibly it has immensely helped. It reminds one of the Franklinic episodes when remembered in connection with future scientific renown and the court of France.
One of the secrets of Edison"s great success is the ease with which he concentrates his mind. He is said to possess the faculty of leaving one thing and taking up another whenever he wills. He even carries on in his mind various trains of thought at the same time. The operations of his brain are imitated in his daily conduct, which is direct and simple in all respects. He is never happier than when engaged in the most absorbing and exacting mental toil. He dresses in a machinist"s clothes when thus employed in his laboratory, and was long accustomed to work continuously for as long as he was so inclined without regard to regularity, or meals, or day or night. He is willing to eat his food from a bench that is littered with filings, chips and tools. To relieve strain and take a moment"s recreation he is known to have bought a "cottage" organ and taught himself to play it, and to go to it in the middle of the night and grind out tunes for relaxation. He has a working library containing several thousand books. He pores over these volumes to inform himself upon some pressing idea, and does so in the midst of his work. No man could have made some of his inventions unaided by technical science and a knowledge of the results of the investigations of many others, and it has often been wondered how a man not technically educated could have seemed so well to know. There was a mistake. He _is_ educated; a scientific investigator of remarkable attainments.
In thinking of the inventions of Edison and their value, a dozen of the first cla.s.s, that would each one have satisfied the ambition or taken the time of an ordinary man, can be named. The mimeograph and the electric pen are minor. Then there are the stock printer, the automatic repeating telegraph, quadruplex telegraphy, the phono-plex, the ore-milling process, the railway telegraph, the electric engine, the phonograph. Some of these inventions seem, in the glow of his incandescent light, or with one"s ear to the tube of the telephone he improved in its most essential part, to be too small for Edison. But nothing was too small for Franklin, or for the boy who played idly with the lid of his mother"s tea-kettle and almost invented the steam-engine of today, or for Hero of Alexandria, who dreamed a thousand years before its time of the power that was to come. So was Henry"s first electric telegraph the merest toy, and his electro-magnet was supported upon a pile of books, his signal bell was that with which one calls a servant, and his idea was a mere experiment without result. There was a boy Edison needed there then, whose toys reap fortunes and light, and enlighten, the world. The electric pen was in its day immensely useful in the business world, because it was the application of the stencil to ordinary ma.n.u.script, and caused the making of hundreds of copies upon the stencil idea, and with a printer"s roller instead of a brush. The mimeograph was the same idea in a totally different form. It was writing upon a tablet that is like a b.a.s.t.a.r.d-file, with a steel-pointed stylus.
Each slight projection makes a hole in the paper, and then the stencil idea begins again.
Something has been previously said of the difficulties attending the making of the filament for the incandescent light. It is a little thing, smaller than a thread, frail, delicate, sealed in a bulb almost absolutely exhausted of air, smooth without a flaw, of absolutely even caliber from end to end. The world was searched for substances out of which to make it, and experiments were endlessly and tediously tried; all for this one little part of a great invention, which, like all other inventions, would be valueless in the want of a single little part.
There are hundreds, an unknown number, of inventions in electricity in this country whose authors are unknown, and will never be known to the general public. The patent office shows many thousands of such in the aggregate. Many useful improvements in the telephone alone have come under the eye of every casual reader of the newspapers. These are now locked up from the world, with many other patented changes in existing machines, because of the great expense attending their subst.i.tution for those arrangements now in use.
All the principles--the principles that, finally demonstrated, become laws--upon which electrical invention is based, are old. It seems impossible, during the entire era of modern thought, to have found a new trait, a development, a hitherto unsuspected quality. Tesla, in some of his most wonderful experiments, seems almost to have touched the boundaries of an unexplored realm, yet not quite, not yet, and most likely absolute discovery can no farther go. To play upon those known laws--to twist them to new utilities and give them new developments--has been the work of the creators of all the modern electrical miracles.
There is scarcely a field in which men work in which the results are not more apparent, yet all we have, and undoubtedly most we shall ever have, of electricity we shall continue to owe to the infant period of the science.
It may be truthfully claimed that most of these extraordinary applications of electricity have been made by American inventors.
Wherever there is steam, on sea or land, there, intimately a.s.sociated with American management, will be found the dynamic current and all its uses. The science of explosive destruction has almost entirely changed, and with a most extraordinary result. But one of the factors of this change has been the electric current, a something primarily having nothing to do with guns, ships or sailing. The modern man-of-war, beginning with those of our own navy, is lighted by the electric light, signalled and controlled by the current, and her ponderous guns are loaded, fired, and even _sighted_ by the same means. Her officers are a corps of electrical experts. A large part of her crew are trained to manipulate wires instead of ropes, and her total efficiency is perhaps three times what it would be with the same tonnage under the old regime. There is a new sea life and sea science, born full grown within ten years from a service encrusted with traditions like barnacles, and that could not have come by any other agency. A big gun is no longer merely that, but also an electrical machine, often with machinery as complicated as that of a chronometer and much more mysterious in operation.
I have said that the huge piece was even sighted by electricity. There is really nothing strange in the statement, though it may read like a fairy tale or a metaphor to whoever has never had his attention called to the subject. In a small way, with the name of its inventor almost unknown except to his messmates, it is one of the most wonderful, and one of the simplest, of the modern miracles. As a mere instance of the wide extent of modern ideas of utility, and of the possibilities of application of the laws that were discovered and formulated by those whose names the units of electrical measurements bear, it may be briefly stated how a group of gunners may work behind an iron breastwork, and never see the enemy"s hull, and yet aim at him with a hundred times the accuracy possible in the day of the _Old Ironsides_ and the _Guerriere_.
And first it may be stated that the _range-finder_ is largely a measure of mere economy. A two-million-dollar cruiser is not sailed, or lost, as a mere pastime. Whoever aims best will win the fight. Ten years ago the way of finding distance, or range, which is the same thing, was experimental. If a costly shot was fired over the enemy the next one was fired lower, and possibly between the two the range might be got, both vessels meantime changing positions and range. To change this, to either injure an antagonist quickly or get away, the "range-finder" was invented, as a matter not of business profit, by Lieutenant Bradley A.
Fiske, of the U. S. Navy, in 1889. It has its reason in the familiar mathematical proposition that if two angles and one side of a triangle are known, the other sides of the triangle are easily found. That is, that it can be determined how far it is to a distant object without going to it. But Fiske"s range-finder makes no mathematical calculations, nor requires them to be made, and is automatic. A base line permanently fixed on the ship is the one side of a triangle required. The distance of the object to be hit is determined by its being the apex of an imaginary triangle, and at each of the other angles, at the two ends of the base line, is fixed a spygla.s.s. These are directed at the object.
So far electricity has had nothing to do with the arrangement, but now it enters as the factor without which the device could have no adaptation. As the telescopes are turned to bear upon the target they move upon slides or wires bent into an arc, and these carry an electric current. The difference in length of the slide pa.s.sed over in turning the telescopes upon the object causes a greater or less resistance to the current, precisely as a short wire carries a current more easily; with less "resistance;" than a long one. A contrivance for measuring the current, amounting to the same thing that other instruments do of the same cla.s.s that are used every day, allows of this resistance being measured and read, not now in units of electricity, but _in distance to the apex of the triangle where the target is_; in yards. The man at each telescope has only to keep it pointed at the target as it moves, or as the vessel moves which wishes to hit it. And now even the telephone enters into the arrangement. Elsewhere in the ship another man may stand with the transmitter at his ear. He will hear a buzzing sound until the telescopes stop moving, and at the same time there will be under his eye a pointer moving over a graduated scale. The instant the sound ceases he reads the range denoted by the index and scale. The information is then conveyed in any desired way to the men at the guns; these, of course, being aimed by a scale corresponding to that under the eye of the man at the telephone. The plan is not here detailed as technical information valuable to the casual reader, but as showing the wide range of electrical applications in fields where possible usefulness would not have been so much as suspected a few years ago. The same gentleman, Lieut. Fiske, is also the author of ingenious electrical appliances for the working of those immense gun-carriages that have grown too big for men to move, and for the hoisting into their cavernous breeches of shot and sh.e.l.l. The men who work these guns now do not need to see the enemy, even through the porthole or the embrasure. They can attend strictly to the business of loading and firing, a.s.sisted by machines nearly or quite automatic, and can cant and lay the piece by an index, and fire with an electric lanyard. The genius of science has taken the throne vacated by the G.o.ddess of glory. The sailor has gone, and the expert mechanician has taken his place. The tar and his training have given way to the register, the gauge and the electrometer. The big black guns are no longer run backward amid shouts and flying splinters, and rammed by men stripped to the waist and shrouded in the smoke of the last discharge, but swing their long and tapering muzzles to and fro out of steel casemates, and tilt their ponderous breeches like huge grotesque animals lying down. The grim machinery of naval battle is moved by invisible hands, and its enormous weight is swayed and tilted by a concealed and silent wire.
This strange slave, that toils unmoved in the din of battle, has been reduced to domestic servitude of the plainest character. The demonstrations made of cooking by electricity at the great fair of 1893 leave that service possible in the future without any question.
Electrical ovens, models of neatness, convenience and _coolness_, were shown at work. They were made of wood, lined with asbestos, and were lighted inside with an incandescent lamp. The degree of temperature was shown by a thermometer, and mica doors rendered the baking or roasting visible. There could be no question of too much heat on one side and too little on another, because switches placed at different points allowed of a cutting off, or a turning on, whenever needed.
Laundry irons had an insulated pliable connection attached, so that heat was high and constant at the bottom of the iron and not elsewhere. There were all the appliances necessary for the broiling of steaks, the making of coffee and the baking of cakes, and the same mystery, which is no longer a mystery, pervaded it all. Woman is also to become an electrician, at least empirically, and in time soon to come will understand her voltage and her Amperes as she now does her drafts and dampers and the quality of her fuel.
It is a practical fact that chickens are hatched by the thousand by the electrical current, and that men have discovered more than nature knew about the period of incubation, and have reduced it by electricity from twenty-one to nineteen days. The proverb about the value of the time of the incubating hen has pa.s.sed into antiquity with all things else in the presence of electrical science.
Whenever an American mechanician, a manufacturer or an inventor, is confronted by a difficulty otherwise insolvable he turns to electricity.
Its laws and qualities are few. They seem now to be nearly all known, but the great curiosity of modern times is the almost infinite number of applications which these laws and qualities may be made to serve. One may turn at a single glance from the loading and firing of naval guns to the hatching of chickens and the cooking of chocolate by precisely the same means, silently used in the same way. Most of these applications, and all the most extraordinary ones, are of American origin. Their inventors are largely unknown. There is no attempt made here to more than suggest the possibilities of the near future by a glimpse of the present. The generation that is rising, the boy who is ten years old, should easily know more of electrical science than Franklin did. There are certain primal laws by which all explanations of all that now is, and most probably of almost all that is to come so far as principles go, may be readily understood, and these I have endeavored, in this and preceding chapters, to explain.