The Universe a Vast Electric Organism

by Geo. W. Warder

He says further: "Heat is believed to be a certain mode of molecular motion, and electricity to be another mode; but the nature of the motion of each has never been discovered." And I think never will, as long as the false notion prevails that heat and electricity are modes of motion. A mode of motion is nonsense, for motion is an effect produced by a cause—it is not a cause. And all cause of motion is electricity, and the mode of operation is the law of electro-magnetism.

There is no difference in the law or the mode of operation of electric currents in a volcano, in a cloud, in the earth, in the sun or planets, in an electric light, or in a man's body. The same law exists and the same natural results follow when one lights the gas with a flash of electricity from his finger, as when a meteor blazes, a comet flares out in space, or a sun becomes luminous. The same force that man causes to run along a telegraph wire, or through a telephone circuit, or which runs a street car line, or is taken by the brushes from a revolving dynamo, is the same force and operated under the same law or mode of force as the electric life-giving currents that come from the sun constantly in an omnipotent tide of power.

Prof. Thomson says: "The earth is generally found to be negatively electrified, and is insulated in its atmosphere, being in fact a conductor touched only by air—a strong insulator."

He says further: "The quality of non-resistance to electric force of the interplanetary ether being considered, the earth, the atmosphere and the surrounding medium may be regarded as constituting respectively, the inner coating, the dielectric and the outer coating of a large Leyden jar charged negatively."

Prof. S. P. Thomson in "Electricity and Magnetism," says: "Gilbert made the discovery that the compass points north and south because the earth is also a great magnet. Faraday said: 'All matter is in a magnetic condition.' Sir Oliver Lodge says: 'The idea that magnetism is a whirl of electricity is as old as Ampere. Perceiving that a magnet could be initiated by an electric whirl, he made the hypothesis that an electric whirl existed in every magnet.'"

Maxwell announced the proposition that electro-magnetic phenomena and light phenomena have their origin in the same medium and are identical in nature. Hertz, by actually producing, detecting and controlling electric waves, caused the discovery of wireless electricity. And it is by the wonderful wireless telegraphy of light that man is put in communication with every considerable body in the universe, including even the invisible. By it the goings on in Sirius and Algol, Orion and the Pleiades are reported across enormous stretches of millions of millions of miles of space. And by the vibratory motion of the invisibly small, all things are revealed; the infinitely little has enabled us to conquer the inconceivably big. I hold seeing and hearing are the simplest examples of wireless telegraphy.

Elihu Thomson, the great electrician, says: "Hertz proved that all luminous phenomena are in essence electrical. Wireless electricity is the outcome of Hertz's experiments on electric waves, and electrical conditions and actions are more fundamental than hitherto regarded."

William Ramsey, the distinguished chemist, says: "It is a primary assumption that atoms of elements or in certain cases groups of atoms are themselves electrified, and atoms possess positive and negative poles, and combinations ensue between such oppositely electrified bodies."

Mr. Francis Grierson, a prominent scientist of London, in a recent London periodical, says: "So far as we know electricity is the soul of visible form. What we call brain waves have an analogy to electric waves. The discoveries and inventions of the last ten years have made child's play of every previously known system of philosophy. The simple but amazing facts disclosed during the past five years, render the dreams, speculations and guesswork of the past absurd. The little we know in a practical way is more than all the philosophers of the past knew from Aristotle to Leibnitz."

Prof. Langley, in his address at the 1902 session of the American Association of Science, stated that, "up to 1872 it was almost universally believed that there were three different kinds of energy—actinic, luminous and thermal—represented in the spectrum;" but he affirmed: "There is only one radiant energy which appears to us as actinic, luminous or thermal, according to the way we observe it.