But let us first advert to the forgetfulness of the man who really invented the machine that was capable of the opposite action of both dynamo and motor. This was the Italian, Pacinotti. [[34]] He mentioned that his machine could be used either to generate a current of electricity on the application of motive power to its armature, or to produce motive power on connecting it with a source of electricity. Yet it did not occur to him to definitely experiment with two of his machines for the purpose of accomplishing that which in less than twenty years has revolutionized our ideas and practice in transmitted force. He did not suggest that two of his machines could be run together, one as a generator and the other as a motor. He did not think of its advantages with the facilities for it, of his own creation, in his hands.
[34.] Moses G. Farmer, an American, and celebrated in his day for intelligent electrical researches, is claimed to have made the first reversible motor ever contrived. A small motor made by Farmer in 1847, and embodying the electro-dynamic principle was exhibited at the great exposition at Chicago in 1893. If the genealogy of this machine remains undisputed it fixes the fact that the discovery belongs to this country, and to an American.
M. Fontaine states that at the Vienna Exposition of 1873 there was a Gramme machine intended to be operated by a primary battery, to show that the Gramme was capable of being worked by a current, and, as there was also a second machine of the same kind there, of also generating one. These two machines were to demonstrate this range of capacity as separately worked, one by power, the other with a battery. There was, then, no intention of coupling them together as late as 1873, with the means at hand and the suggestion almost unavoidable. The dynamo and motor had not occurred to any one. But M. Fontaine states that he failed to get the primary (battery) current in time for the opening, and was troubled by the dilemma. Then the idea occurred to him, as he could do no better, to work one of the machines with a current "deprived," partly stolen, from the other, as a temporary measure. A friend lent him the necessary piece of wire, and he connected the two machines. The machine used as a motor was connected with a pumping apparatus, and when the machine intended as a generator started, and this make-shift, temporarily-stolen current was carried to the acting motor, the action of the last was so much more vigorous than was intended that the water was thrown over the sides of the tank. Fontaine was forced to remedy this excessive action by procuring an additional wire of such length that its resistance permitted the motor to work more mildly and throw less water. This accidentally established the fact of distance, convenience, a revolution in the power of the industrial world. Fontaine states that Gramme had previously told him that he had done the same thing with his machines. The idea was never patented. Neither Pacinotti, who invented the machine originally, nor Gramme, one of the great names of modern electricity, nor this skilled practical electrician, Fontaine, who had charge of the exhibit of the Gramme system at Vienna, considered the fact of the transmission of concentrated power over a thin wire to a great distance as one of value to its inventor or to the industries of mankind. With the motor and the dynamo already made, it was an accident that brought them together after all.
It may be amusing, if not useful, to spend a moment in reviewing of the efforts of men to utilize the power of the electrical current in mechanics before the day of the dynamo and a motor, and while yet the electric light was an infant in the nursery of the laboratory. They knew then, about 1835 to 1870, of the laws of induction as applied to the electro-magnet, or in small machines the generating power, so called, of the magneto-electric arrangement embodied, as a familiar example, in Kidder's medical battery. There is a long list of those inventors, American and European. The first patent issued for an American electro-motor was in 1837, to a man named Thomas Davenport, of Brandon, Vt. He was a man far ahead of his times. He built the first electric railroad ever seen, at Springfield, Mass., in 1835, and considering the means, whose inadequacy is now better understood by any reader of these lines than it then was by the deepest student of electricity, this first railroad was a success. Davenport came as near to solving the problem of an electric motor as was possible without the invention of Pacinotti. Following this there were many patents issued for electro-magnetic motors to persons residing in all parts of the country, north and south. One was made by C. G. Page, of the Smithsonian Institute, in which the motive power consisted in a round rod, acting as a plunger, being pulled into the space where the core would be in an ordinary electro-magnet, and thereby working a crank. [[35]] A large motor of this kind is alleged, in 1850, to have developed ten horse power. It was actually applied to outdoor experiment as a car-motor on an actual railroad track, and was efficient for several miles. But it carried with it its battery-cells, and they were disarranged and stirred by the jolting, and being made of crockeryware were broken. The chemicals cost much more than fuel for steam, and there could be no economical motive for further experiment. It was a huge toy, as the entire sum of electrical science was until it was made useful first in the one instance of the telegraph, and long after that date the use of the electro-magnet, with a cam to cut off and turn on again the current at proper intervals, which was the one principle of all attempts, was a repeated and invariable failure. That which was wanted and lacking was not known, and was finally discovered and successively developed as has been described.
[35.] The National Intelligencer, a prominent Washington newspaper, said with reference to Page's motor "He has shown that before long electro-magnetic action will have dethroned steam and will be the adopted motor," etc. This was an enthusiasm not based upon any fact then known about a machine not even in the line of the present facts of electro-dynamics.
Electric railroads.--There was an instance of almost simultaneous invention in the case of the first practical electric railroads. S. D. Field, Dr. Siemens, and Thomas A. Edison all applied for patents in 1880. Of these, Field was first in filing, and was awarded patents. The combined dynamo and motor were, of course, the parents of the practical idea. Field's patents covered a motor in or under the car, operated by a current from a stationary source of electricity--of course a dynamo. These first electric roads had the current carried on the rail. They were partially successful, but there was something wrong in the plan, and that something was induction by the earth. Later came, as a remedy for this, the "Trolley" system; the trolley being a small, grooved wheel running upon a current-carrying wire overhead. The question of how best to convey a current to the car-motor is a serious one, doubtless at this moment occupying the attention of highly-trained intelligence everywhere. The motor current is one of high power, and as such intractable; and it is in the character of this current, rather than in methods of insulation, that the remedy for the much-objected-to overhead wire is to be found. It will be remembered that all the phenomena of induction are unhindered by insulation.
Aside from the current-carrying problem, the electric road is explainable in all its features upon the theory and practice of the dynamo and motor. It is merely an application of the two machines. The last is, in usual practice, under the car, and geared to the truck-axle. A more modern mechanical improvement is to make the axle the shaft of the motor armature. When the motor has used the current it passes by most systems into the rail and the ground. By others there is a "metallic circuit"--two wires. Many men whose interest and occupation leads them to a study of such matters know that the use of electricity, instead of steam locomotion, is merely a question of time on all railroads. I have said elsewhere that the actual age of electricity had not yet fully come. It seems to us now that we have attained the end; that there is little more to know or to do. But so have all the generations thought in their day. In the field of electricity there are yet to come practical results of which one may have some foreshadowings in the experiments of men like Tesla, which will make our present times and knowledge seem tame and slow.
Electrolysis.--In all history, fire has been the universal practical solvent. It has been supplanted by the electrical current in some of the most beautiful and useful phenomena of our time. Electrolysis is the name of the process by which fluid chemicals are decomposed by the current.
A familiar early experiment in electrolysis is the decomposition of water--a chemical composed of oxygen and hydrogen, though always thought of and used as a simple, pure fluid. If the poles of a galvanic battery are immersed in water slightly mixed with sulphuric acid to favor electrical action, these poles will become covered with bubbles of gas which presently rise to the surface and pass off. These bubbles are composed of the two constituents of water, the oxygen rising from the positive and the hydrogen from the negative pole. Particles of the substance decomposed are transferred, some to one pole and some to the other; and, therefore, electrolysis is always practiced in a fluid in order that this transference may more readily occur.