THE STORAGE BATTERY is an attempt in this last direction. The name is misleading, since even in this attempt electricity is in no sense "stored," but a chemical action producing a current takes place in the machine. The arrangement is in its infancy. Instances occur in which, under given circumstances, it is more or less efficient, and has been improved into greater efficiency. But many difficulties intervene, one of which is the great weight of the appliances used, and another, considerable cost. The term "storage battery" is now infrequently used, and the name "secondary" battery is usually substituted. The principle of its action is the decomposing of combined chemicals by the action of a current applied from a stationary generator or dynamo, and that these chemicals again unite as soon as they are allowed to do so by the completing of a circuit, and in re-combining give off nearly as much electricity as was first used in separating them. The action of the secondary, "storage," battery, once charged, is like that of a primary battery. The current is produced by chemical action. Two metals outside of the solution contained in a primary battery cell, but under differing physical conditions from each other, will yield a current. A piece of polished iron and a piece of rusty iron, connected by a wire, will yield a small current. Rusty lead, so to speak, so connected with bright lead, has a high electromotive force. Oxygen makes lead rusty, and hydrogen makes it bright. Oxygen and hydrogen are the two gases cast off when water is subjected to a current. (See ante under Electrolysis) So Augustin Planté, the inventor of as much as we yet have of what is called a storage or secondary battery, suspended two plates of lead in water, and when a current of electricity was passed through it hydrogen was thrown off at one plate, making it bright, and oxygen at the other plate, peroxydizing its surface. When the current was removed the altered plates, connected by a wire, would send off a current which was in the opposite direction from the first, and this would continue until the plates were again in their original condition. This is the principle and mode of action of the storage battery. So far it has assumed many forms. Scores of modifications have been invented and patented. The leaden plates have taken a variety of forms, yet have remained leaden plates, one cleaned and the other fouled by the electrolytic action of a current, and giving off an almost equivalent current again by the return process. The arrangement endures for several repetitions of the process, but is finally expensive and always inconvenient. The secondary battery, in its infancy, as stated, presents now much the same obstacles to commercial use the galvanic, or primary, battery did before the induced current had become the servant of man.
[CHAPTER IV.]
ELECTRICAL INVENTION IN THE UNITED STATES.
A list of the electrical inventors of this country would be very long. Many of the names are, in the mass and number of inventions, almost lost. It happens that many of the practical applications described in this volume, indeed most of them, are the work of citizens of this country.
In previous chapters I have referred briefly to Franklin, Morse, Field, and others. These men have left names that, without question, may be regarded as permanent. Their chiefest distinguishing trait was originality of idea, and each one of them is a lesson to the American boy. In a sense the greatest of all these, and in the same sense, the greatest American, was Benjamin Franklin. A sketch of his career has been given, but to that may be added the following: He had arrived at conclusions that were vast in scope and startling in result by applying the reasoning faculty upon observations of phenomena that had been recurring since the world was made, and had been misunderstood from the beginning. He used the simplest means. His experiment was in a different way daily performed for him by nature. He was philosophically daring, indifferently a tinker with nature's terrific machinery; a knocker at the door of an august temple that men were never known to have entered; a mortal who smiled in the face of inscrutable and awful mystery, and who defied the lightning in a sense not merely moral. [[39]]
[39.] Professor Richmann, of St. Petersburg, was instantly killed by lightning while repeating Franklin's experiment.
His genius lay in a power of swift inductive reasoning. His common sense and his sense of humor never forsook him. He uttered keen apothegms that have lived like those of Solon. He was a philosopher like Diogenes, lacking the bitterness. He wrote the "Busy-Body," and annually made the plebeian and celebrated "Almanac," and the "Ephemera" that were not ephemeral, and is the author of the story of "The Whistle," that everybody knows, and everybody reads with shamefacedness because it is a brief chapter out of his own history.
He was apparently an adept in the art of caring for himself, one of the most successful worldings of his time, yet he wrote, thought, toiled incessantly, for his fellow men. He had little education obtained as it is supposed an education must be obtained. He was commonplace. No one has ever told of his "silver tongue," or remembered a brilliant after-dinner speech that he has made. Yet he finally stood before mankind the companion of princes, the darling of splendid women, covered with the laurels of a brilliant scientific renown. But he was a printer, a tinkerer with stoves, the inventor of the lightning rod, the man who had spent one-half his life in teaching apprentices, such as he himself had been when his jealous and common-minded brother had whipped him, that "time is money," that "credit is money"--which is the most prominent fact in the commercial world of 1895--and that honor and self-respect are better than wealth, pleasure, or any other good.
Yet clear, keen, cold and inductive as was Franklin's mind, no vision reached him, in the moment of that triumph when he felt the lightning tingling in his fingers from a hempen string, of those wonders which were to come. He knew absolutely nothing of that necromancy through which others of his countrymen were to girdle the world with a common intelligence, and yet others were to use in sprinkling night with clusters as innumerable and mysterious as the higher stars.
The story of the Morse telegraph has been repeatedly told, and I have briefly sketched it in connection with the subject of the telegraph. But, unlike the original, scientifically lonely and independent Franklin, Morse had the best assistance of his times in the persons of men more skilled than himself and almost as persistent. The chief of these was Alfred Vail, a name until lately almost unknown to scientific fame, who eliminated the clumsy crudities of Morse's conception, remade his instruments, and was the inventor of that renowned alphabet which spells without letters or writing or types, that may be seen or heard or felt or tasted, that is adapted to any language and to all conditions, and that performs to this day, and shall to all time, the miracle of causing the inane rattle of pieces of metal against each other to speak to even a careless listener the exact thoughts of one a thousand miles away.