The Age Of Electricity - 3

The Age Of Electricity - 3

With the first year of the new century came Volta's invention of the chemical battery as a

means of producing electricity. A well-known Italian picture represents Volta exhibiting

his apparatus before the young conqueror Napoleon, then ravishing from the Peninsula its

treasure of ancient art and founding an ephemeral empire. At such a moment this gift of

de- spoiled Italy to the world was a noble revenge, setting in motion incalculable

beneficent forces and agencies. For the first time man had command of a steady supply of

electricity without toil or effort. The useful results obtainable previously from the current

of a frictional machine were not much greater than those to be derived from the flight of a

rocket. While the frictional appliance is still employed in medicine, it ranks with the flint

axe and the tinder-box in industrial obsolescence. No art or trade could be founded on it;

no diminution of daily work or increase of daily comfort could be secured with it. But the

little battery with its metal plates in a weak solution proved a perennial reservoir of

electrical energy, safe and controllable, from which supplies could be drawn at will. That

which was wild had become domesticated; regular crops took the place of haphazard

gleanings from brake or prairie; the possibility of electrical starvation was forever left

behind.

Immediately new processes of inestimable value revealed themselves; new methods were

suggested. Almost all the electrical arts now employed made their beginnings in the next

twenty-five years, and while the more extensive of them depend to-day on the dynamo

for electrical energy, some of the most important still remain in loyal allegiance to the

older source. The battery itself soon underwent modifications, and new types were

evolved--the storage, the double-fluid, and the dry. Various analogies next pointed to the

use of heat, and the thermoelectric cell emerged, embodying the application of flame to

the junction of two different metals. Davy, of the safety-lamp, threw a volume of current

across the gap between two sticks of charcoal, and the voltaic arc, forerunner of electric

lighting, shed its bright beams upon a dazzled world. The decomposition of water by

electrolytic action was recognized and made the basis of communicating at a distance

even before the days of the electromagnet. The ties that bind electricity and magnetism in

twinship of relation and interaction were detected, and Faraday's work in induction gave

the world at once the dynamo and the motor. "Hitch your wagon to a star," said Emerson.

To all the coal-fields and all the waterfalls Faraday had directly hitched the wheels of

industry. Not only was it now possible to convert mechanical energy into electricity

cheaply and in illimitable quantities, but electricity at once showed its ubiquitous

availability as a motive power. Boats were propelled by it, cars were hauled, and even

papers printed. Electroplating became an art, and telegraphy sprang into active being on

both sides of the Atlantic.

At the time Edison was born, in 1847, telegraphy, upon which he was to leave so

indelible an imprint, had barely struggled into acceptance by the public. In England,

Wheatstone and Cooke had introduced a ponderous magnetic needle telegraph. In

America, in 1840, Morse had taken out his first patent on an electromagnetic telegraph,

the principle of which is dominating in the art to this day. Four years later the memorable

message "What hath God wrought!" was sent by young Miss Ellsworth over his circuits,

and incredulous Washington was advised by wire of the action of the Democratic

Convention in Baltimore in nominating Polk. By 1847 circuits had been strung between

Washington and New York, under private enterprise, the Government having declined to

buy the Morse system for $100,000. Everything was crude and primitive. The poles were

two hundred feet apart and could barely hold up a wash-line. The slim, bare, copper wire

snapped on the least provocation, and the circuit was "down" for thirty-six days in the

first six months. The little glass-knob insulators made seductive targets for ignorant

sportsmen. Attempts to insulate the line wire were limited to coating it with tar or

smearing it with wax for the benefit of all the bees in the neighborhood. The farthest

western reach of the telegraph lines in 1847 was Pittsburg, with three- ply iron wire

mounted on square glass insulators with a little wooden pentroof for protection. In that

office, where Andrew Carnegie was a messenger boy, the magnets in use to receive the

signals sent with the aid of powerful nitric-acid batteries weighed as much as seventyfive

pounds apiece. But the business was fortunately small at the outset, until the new

device, patronized chiefly by lottery-men, had proved its utility. Then came the great

outburst of activity. Within a score of years telegraph wires covered the whole occupied

country with a network, and the first great electrical industry was a pronounced success,

yielding to its pioneers the first great harvest of electrical fortunes. It had been a sharp

struggle for bare existence, during which such a man as the founder of Cornell University

had been glad to get breakfast in New York with a quarter-dollar picked up on Broadway.