Having brought our history down to the present day, it would seem scarcely necessary to recite that which everybody knows. It is well, however, to call a halt once in a while and compare our present conditions of civilization with those of the past. Our world is filled with croakers who are always sighing for the good old days. But we can easily imagine that if they could go back to those days their croaking would be still louder than it is.
Before the advent of electricity many things were impossible that are easy now. In the old days the world was very, very large; now, thanks to electricity, it is knocking at the door of every man's house. The lumbering stage-coach that was formerly our limited express—limited to thirty or forty miles a day—has been supplanted by one that covers 1000 miles in the same time, and this high rate of speed is made possible only by the use of the electric telegraph.
In the old days all Europe could be involved in a great war and the news of it would be weeks in reaching our shores, but now the firing of the first gun is heard at every fireside the world over, almost before the smoke has cleared away. Our planet is threaded with iron nerves that run over mountains and under seas, whose trembling atoms, thrilled with the electric fire, speak to us daily and hourly of the great throbbing life of the whole civilized world.
Electricity has given us a voice that can be heard a thousand miles, and not only heard, but recognized. It has given us a pen that will write our autograph in New York, although we are still in Chicago. It has given us the best light, both from an optical and a sanitary standpoint, that the world has ever seen. The old-fashioned, jogging horse-car has been supplanted by the electric "trolley," and we no longer have our feelings harrowed with pity for the poor old steeds that pulled those lumbering coaches through the streets, with men and women crowded in and hanging on to straps, while everybody trod on every other body's toes.
"In olden times we took a car
Drawn by a horse, if going far,
And felt that we were blest;
Now the conductor takes the fare
And puts a broomstick in the air—
And lightning does the rest.
"In other days, along the street,
A glimmering lantern led the feet,
When on a midnight stroll;
But now we catch, when night is nigh,
A piece of lightning from the sky
And stick it on a pole.
"Time was when one must hold his ear
Close to a whispering voice to hear,
Like deaf men—nigh and nigher;
But now from town to town he talks
And puts his nose into a box
And whispers through a wire."
So jogs the old world along. We sometimes think it is slow, but when we look back a few years and see what has been accomplished it seems to have had a marvelously rapid development.
Something like fifty years ago a professor of physics in one of our colleges was giving his class a course in electricity. The electric telegraph was too little known at that time to cut much of a figure in the classroom, so the stock experiments were those made with the frictional electric machine and the Leyden jar. One day the professor had, in one hour's time, taken his class through a course of electricity, and at the end he said: "Gentlemen, you were born too late to witness the development of this great science." I often wonder if the good professor is ever allowed to part the veil that separates us from the great beyond and to look down upon this busy world of ours in which electricity plays such an important part in our every-day life; and if so, what he thinks of that little speech he made to the boys fifty years or more ago.
If we make an analysis of the history of the science of electricity we shall see that it has progressed in successive eras, shortening as they approach our time. For a period of 2300 years, from Thales to Franklin, but little or no progress was made beyond the further development of the phenomena of frictional electricity—the most important invention being that of the Leyden jar. From Franklin to Volta was forty-eight years, and from Volta to Faraday about thirty-two years. From this time on the development was very rapid as compared with the old days. Soon after Faraday, Morse, Henry, Wheatstone, and others began experiments that have grown, during fifty or sixty years, into a most colossal system of electric telegraphs, telephones, electric lights and electric railroads. In the latter days marvel has succeeded marvel with such rapid strides that the ink is scarcely dry from the description of one before another crowds itself upon our attention. Where it will all end no one knows, but that it has ended no one believes. The human mind has become so accustomed to these periodic revelations of the marvelous that it must have the stimulus once in a while or it suffers as the toper does when deprived of his cups. The commercial instinct of the news-vender is not slow to see the situation, and if the development is too slow to suit the public demand his fertile brain supplies the lack. So that every few days we hear of some great discovery made by some one it may be unknown to fame. It has served its purpose. The public mind has had its mental toddy and has been saved from a fit of intellectual delirium tremens that it was in danger of from lack of its accustomed stimulus.
Having given you a very limited outline of the history of electricity, from ancient times down to the present, we will endeavor now to give you an elementary notion of the science as it stands to-day. To the common mind the science is a blank page. So little is known of it by the ordinary reader, who is fairly intelligent in other matters, that to account for anything that we do not understand it is only necessary to say that it is an electrical phenomenon and he accepts it. Electricity is a synonym for all that we cannot understand. Inasmuch as magnetism is so closely related to electricity in its uses as related to every-day life, we will carry the two subjects along together, as the one will to a large extent help to explain the other. In our next chapter we will look at the history of magnetism.