The Age Of Electricity - 2

The Age Of Electricity - 2

  Viewed from the standpoint of inventive progress, the first half of the nineteenth century

had passed very profitably when Edison appeared--every year marked by some notable

achievement in the arts and sciences, with promise of its early and abundant fruition in

commerce and industry. There had been exactly four decades of steam navigation on

American waters. Railways were growing at the rate of nearly one thousand miles

annually. Gas had become familiar as a means of illumination in large cities. Looms and

tools and printing-presses were everywhere being liberated from the slow toil of manpower.

The first photographs had been taken. Chloroform, nitrous oxide gas, and ether

had been placed at the service of the physician in saving life, and the revolver, guncotton,

and nitroglycerine added to the agencies for slaughter. New metals, chemicals, and

elements had become available in large numbers, gases had been liquefied and solidified,

and the range of useful heat and cold indefinitely extended. The safety-lamp had been

given to the miner, the caisson to the bridge- builder, the anti-friction metal to the

mechanic for bearings. It was already known how to vulcanize rubber, and how to

galvanize iron. The application of machinery in the harvest-field had begun with the

embryonic reaper, while both the bicycle and the automobile were heralded in primitive

prototypes. The gigantic expansion of the iron and steel industry was foreshadowed in the

change from wood to coal in the smelting furnaces. The sewing-machine had brought

with it, like the friction match, one of the most profound influences in modifying

domestic life, and making it different from that of all preceding time.

Even in 1847 few of these things had lost their novelty, most of them were in the earlier

stages of development. But it is when we turn to electricity that the rich virgin condition

of an illimitable new kingdom of discovery is seen. Perhaps the word "utilization" or

"application" is better than discovery, for then, as now, an endless wealth of phenomena

noted by experimenters from Gilbert to Franklin and Faraday awaited the invention that

could alone render them useful to mankind. The eighteenth century, keenly curious and

ceaselessly active in this fascinating field of investigation, had not, after all, left much of

a legacy in either principles or appliances. The lodestone and the compass; the frictional

machine; the Leyden jar; the nature of conductors and insulators; the identity of

electricity and the thunder-storm flash; the use of lightning-rods; the physiological effects

of an electrical shock--these constituted the bulk of the bequest to which philosophers

were the only heirs. Pregnant with possibilities were many of the observations that had

been recorded. But these few appliances made up the meagre kit of tools with which the

nineteenth century entered upon its task of acquiring the arts and conveniences now such

an intimate part of "human nature's daily food" that the average American to-day pays

more for his electrical service than he does for bread.