Makers of Electricity

by Brother Potamian; James J. Walsh

Having received the elements of his education in the Grammar School of Colchester, his native town, Gilbert entered St. John's College, Cambridge, from which university he took his B. A. degree in 1560, M. A. in 1564 and M. D. in 1569. In all, he appears to have been connected with the University for a period of eleven or twelve years, as student, Fellow, and examiner.

On leaving Cambridge, Gilbert traveled for four years on the Continent, principally in Italy, visiting medical schools and studying methods of treatment under the leading physicians and surgeons of the day as well as discussing scientific theory with the leaders of thought. On his return to England in 1573, he practised medicine in London "with great applause and success." He was elected President of the Royal College of Physicians in 1599, and appointed Physician to Queen Elizabeth in 1601 and to her successor, James I., in 1603.

On one occasion, he hears that Baptista Porta, whom he calls "a philosopher of no ordinary note," said that a piece of iron rubbed with a diamond turns to the north. He suspects this to be heresy. So, forthwith he proceeds to test the statement by experiment. He was not dazzled by the reputation of Baptista Porta; he respected Porta, but respected truth even more. He tells us that he experimented with seventy diamonds in presence of many witnesses, employing a number of iron bars and pieces of wire, manipulating them with the greatest care while they floated on corks; and concludes his long and exhaustive research by plaintively saying: "Yet never was it granted me to see the effect mentioned by Porta."

Though it led to a negative result, this probing inquiry was a masterpiece of experimental work.

Gilbert incidentally regrets that the men of his time "are deplorably ignorant with respect to natural things," and the only way he sees to remedy this is to make them "quit the sort of learning that comes only from books and that rests only on vain arguments and conjectures," for he shrewdly remarks that "even men of acute intelligence without actual knowledge of facts and in the absence of experiment easily fall into error."

Acting on this intimate conviction, he labored for twenty years over the theories and experiments which he sets forth in his great work on the magnet. "There is naught in these books," he tells us, "that has not been investigated, and again and again done and repeated under our eyes." He begs any one that should feel disposed to challenge his results to repeat the experiments for himself "carefully, skilfully and deftly, but not heedlessly and bunglingly."

It has been said that we are indebted to Sir Francis Bacon, Queen Elizabeth's Chancellor, for the inductive method of studying the phenomena of nature. Bacon's merit lies in the fact that he not only minutely analyzed the method, pointing out its uses and abuses, but also that he showed it to be the only one by which we can attain an accurate knowledge of the physical world around us. His sententious eulogy went forth to the world of scholars invested with all the importance, authority and dignity which the high position and worldwide fame of the philosophic Chancellor could give it. But while Bacon thought and wrote in his study, Gilbert labored and toiled in his workshop. By his pen, Bacon made a profound impression on the philosophic mind of his age; by his researches, Gilbert explored two provinces of nature and added them to the domain of science. Bacon was a theorist, Gilbert an investigator. For twenty years he shunned the glare of society and the throbbing excitement of public life; he wrenched himself away from all but the strictest exigencies of his profession, in order to devote himself undistractedly to the pursuit of science. And all this forty years before the appearance of Bacon's Novum Organum, the very work which contains the philosopher's "large thoughts and lofty phrases" on the value of experiment as a means for the advancement of learning. During that long period Gilbert haunted Colchester, where he delved into the secrets of nature and prepared the materials for his great work on the magnet. The publication of this Latin treatise made him known in the universities at home and especially abroad: he was appreciated by all the great physicists and mathematicians of his age; by such men as Sir Kenelm Digby; by William Barlowe, a great "magneticall" man; by Kepler, the astronomer, who adopted and defended his views; by Galileo himself, who said: "I extremely admire and envy the author of De Magnete."

The science of magnetism owes more to Gilbert than to any other man, Peregrinus (1269) excepted. He repeated for himself the numerous and ingenious experiments of the medieval philosopher, and added much of his own which he discovered during the long period of a life devoted to the diligent exploration of this domain in the world of natural knowledge.

The ancients spoke of the lodestone as the Magnesian stone, from its being found in abundance in the vicinity of Magnesia, a city of Asia Minor. In his Latin treatise of 254 (small) folio pages, Gilbert uses the adjective form of the term, but never the noun "Magnetismus" itself. Our English term magnetism appears for the first time on page 2 of Archdeacon Barlowe's "Magneticall Advertisements," published in 1616; while the surprising compound, "electro-magnetismos," is the title of a chapter in Father Kircher's "Magnes, sive de Arte Magnetica," printed in the year 1641.

Gilbert showed that a great number of bodies could be electrified; but maintained that those only could exhibit magnetic properties which contain iron. He satisfies himself of this by rubbing with a lodestone such substances as wood, gold, silver, copper, zinc, lead, glass, etc., and then floating them on corks, quaintly adding that they show "no poles, because the energy of the lodestone has no entrance into their interior."