Thus the battery will be as if one had a loop of thread, and at one point twisted it between one’s finger and thumb. Twist and image twist, starting from this point, unwind each other on the opposite part of the loop. And if the loop is not joined, but the threads are held, each will become twisted with increasing tension till they can twist no longer. The objects which hold the ends of the thread, and prevent them twisting, represent insulators.
It is found that when a strong current of electricity passes through some water which has had a little sulphuric acid added to it, two effects take place.
In the first place some of the current passes through as through a wire. In the next place a part of the current is used up in producing an effect on the water. It splits the water up into two parts, each of them containing very much more energy than the water. One part is called hydrogen, and comes off at the wire which comes from the zinc, which we will call the zinc wire. The other part of the water comes off at the wire coming from the carbon, or at the carbon wire, and is called oxygen.
Let us now suppose that the twist of the zinc wire calls up in the molecule of water next to it an image twist. If it could pass on its twist at once, the water would form an ordinary conductor; but the water is not a conductor. Hence we suppose the same relation to hold good between the end of the zinc wire and the water molecules as between the zinc wire and any other body to which the twist cannot be communicated.
Now in the part of the molecule nearest the zinc wire an image twist is called up. And hence the molecule, being unable to twist as a whole, in the end of it away from the zinc wire a twist is produced. Thus the water molecule is strained into image twist and twist. Now let us suppose that by a powerful current it is wrenched in two. It is separated into a part having an image twist “hydrogen,” which comes off at the zinc wire, and into a part with the twist “oxygen.”
But this part with the twist calls up an image twist in the molecule next to it, wrenches it in two. Thus the oxygen of the first molecule separates up the next molecule into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen has a twist, the hydrogen an image twist. These twists run each other out, and leave an oxygen part free.
This oxygen part does the same to the next molecule, and so this action is transmitted through the whole body of the water till the carbon wire is reached—when, the oxygen part finding no other molecule to wrench asunder, is left isolated, and comes off in the form of gas.
Thus we see that oxygen and hydrogen would be bodies having in them twist and image twist—that is, that they would have an active rotation each of them; but the rotation would be different in the two cases, and such that if put together they would run each other out: the light and heat produced by the union of the two being probably the exhibition of the effects of this running out.
If we adopt the supposition, which seems most in accordance with facts, that there are in water two different elements occurring in distinct particles, the one called oxygen, the other hydrogen; and if, moreover, we suppose that these particles are perpetually changing places, and that each oxygen particle is sometimes linked with this hydrogen particle, sometimes with that, then it is obvious that the oxygen and the hydrogen in the water are in such a state that, if collected together separately, they would form liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen; and the effect of the electric twist is to give them those active image rotations, or strains, which make them take the gaseous form, and assume that peculiar relation to each other which exhibits itself so strikingly in combustion.
With regard to magnetism, the same phenomenon of a particular state or disturbance of matter and its image state or disturbance is very strikingly obvious.