THE DYNAMO.--To the man who has been all his life thinking of the steam engine as the highest and almost only embodiment of controlled mechanical power, another machine, both supplementary to the steam engine and far excelling it, whose familiar burring sound is now heard in almost every village in the United States and has become the characteristic sound of modern civilization, must constitute a source of continual question and surprise. To be accustomed to the dynamo, to look upon it as a matter of course and a conceded fact, one must have come to years of maturity and found it here.
Its practical existence dates back at furthest to 1870. Yet it is based upon principles long since known, and can scarcely be said to be the invention of any one mind or man. Its lineal ancestor was the magneto-electric machine, in the early construction of which figure the names of Siemens, Wilde, Ladd, and earlier and later electricians. Kidder's medical battery used forty years ago or more, and still used and purchasable in its first form, was a dynamo. A footnote in a current encyclopedia states that: "An account of the Magneto-electric machine of M. Gramme, in the London Standard of April 9th, 1873, confirmed by other information, leads to the belief that a decided improvement has been made in these machines." The word "dynamo" was then unknown. Later, Edison, Weston, Thompson, Hopkinson, Ferranti and others appear as improvers in the mechanism necessary for best developing a well-known principle, and many of these improvements may be classed among original inventions. As soon as the magneto-electric machine attained a size in the hands of experimenters that took it out of the field of scientific toys it began to be what we now know as a dynamo. A paragraph in the encyclopedia referred to says, in speaking of Ladd, of London, "These developments of electric action are not obtained without corresponding expenditure of force. The armatures are powerfully attracted by the magnets, and must be forcibly pulled away. Indeed, one of Wilde's machines, when producing a very intense electric light, required about five horse power to drive it."
Thus was the secret in regard to electric power unconsciously divulged some twenty years ago.
In all nature there is no recipe for getting something for nothing. The modern dynamo, apparently creating something out of nothing, like all other machines gives back only what is given to it, minus a fair percentage for waste, loss, friction, and common wear. Its advantages amount to a miracle of convenience only. So far as power is concerned, it merely transfers it for long distances over a single wire. So far as light is considered, it practically creates it where wanted, in new and convenient forms, with a new intensity and beauty, but with the same expenditure of transmitted energy in the form of burned coal as would be used in manufacturing the gas that was new, wonderful, and a luxury at the beginning of the century.
The dynamo is the most prominent instance of actual mechanical utility in the field of electrical induction. It seems almost incredible that the apparently small facts discovered by Faraday, the bookbinder, the employé of Sir Humphrey Davy at weekly wages the struggling experimenter in the subtleties of an infant giant, should have produced such results within sixty years. [[33]]
[33.] Faraday was not entirely alone in his life of physical research. He was associated with Davy, and quarreled with him about the liquefaction of chlorine and other gases, and was the companion of Wallaston, Herschel, Brand, and others. In connection with Stodart, he experimented with steel, with results still considered valuable. The scientific world still speaks of his quarrel with Davy with regret, since the personalities of great men should be free from ordinary weaknesses. But Lady Davy was not a scientist, and while the brilliant young mechanic was in her husband's employment for scientific purposes she insisted upon treating him as a servant, whereat the independence of thinking which made him capable of wandering in fields unknown to conventionality and routine blazed into natural resentment. The quarrel of 1823 must have been greatly augmented, in the lady's eyes, in 1824, for in that year Faraday was made a member of the Royal Society.
In his lectures and public experiments he was greatly assisted by a man now almost forgotten, an "intelligent artilleryman" named Andersen. This unknown soldier with a taste for natural science doubtless had his reward in the exquisite pleasure always derived from the personal verification of facts hitherto unknown. There is often a pecuniary reward for the servant of science. Just as often there is not, and the work done has been the same.
It was on Christmas morning, 1821, that Faraday first succeeded in making a magnetic needle rotate around a wire carrying an electric current. He was the discoverer of benzole, the basis of our modern brilliant aniline dyes. In 1831 he made the discovery he had been leading to for many years--that of magneto-electric induction. All we have of electricity that is now a part of our daily life is the result of this discovery.
Faraday was born in 1791, and died August, 1867, in a house presented to him by Victoria, who had not the same opinion of his relations to the aristocracy that Lady Davy seems to have had. His insight into science was something explainable only on the supposition that he was gifted with a kind of instinct. He was a scientific prophet. A man who could, in 1838, foresee the ocean cable, and describe those minute difficulties in its working that all in time came true, must be classed as one of the great, clear, intuitive intellects of his race. He was in youth apprenticed to a bookbinder, "and many of the books he bound he read." A line in his indentures says: "In consideration of his faithful service, no premium is to be given." When these words were written there was no dream that the "faithful service" should be for all posterity.