Scientific American Supplement, No. 275, April 9, 1881

by Various

But there is another set of phenomena, usually regarded as distinct and of another order, but which are not so distinct as they appear, which manifest themselves when you join the pump to a piece of glass, or any non-conductor, and try to force the electricity through that. You succeed in driving some through, but the flow is no longer like that of water in an open pipe; it is as if the pipe were completely obstructed by a number of elastic partitions or diaphragms. The water can not move without straining and bending these diaphragms, and if you allow it, these strained partitions will recover themselves, and drive the water back again. [Here was explained the process of charging a Leyden jar.] The essential thing to remember is that we may have electrical energy in two forms, the static and the kinetic; and it is, therefore, also possible to have the rapid alternation from one of these forms to the other, called vibration.

Now we will pass to the second question: What do you mean by light? And the first and obvious answer is, Everybody knows. And everybody that is not blind does know to a certain extent. We have a special sense organ for appreciating light, whereas we have none for electricity. Nevertheless, we must admit that we really know very little about the intimate nature of light--very little more than about electricity. But we do know this, that light is a form of energy, and, moreover, that it is energy rapidly alternating between the static and the kinetic forms--that it is, in fact, a special kind of energy of vibration. We are absolutely certain that light is a periodic disturbance in some medium, periodic both in space and time; that is to say, the same appearances regularly recur at certain equal intervals of distance at the same time, and also present themselves at equal intervals of time at the same place; that in fact it belongs to the class of motions called by mathematicians undulatory or wave motions. The wave motion in this model (Powell's wave apparatus) results from the simple up and down motion popularly associated with the term wave. But when a mathematician calls a thing a wave he means that the disturbance is represented by a certain general type of formula, not that it is an up-and-down motion, or that it looks at all like those things on the top of the sea. The motion of the surface of the sea falls within that formula, and hence is a special variety of wave motion, and the term wave has acquired in popular use this signification and nothing else. So that when one speaks ordinarily of a wave or undulatory motion, one immediately thinks of something heaving up and down, or even perhaps of something breaking on the shore. But when we assert that the form of energy called light is undulatory, we by no means intend to assert that anything whatever is moving up and down, or that the motion, if we could see it, would be anything at all like what we are accustomed to in the ocean. The kind of motion is unknown; we are not even sure that there is anything like motion in the ordinary sense of the word at all.

Now, how much connection between electricity and light have we perceived in this glance into their natures? Not much, truly. It amounts to about this: That on the one hand electrical energy may exist in either of two forms--the static form, when insulators are electrically strained by having had electricity driven partially through them (as in the Leyden jar), which strain is a form of energy because of the tendency to discharge and do work; and the kinetic form, where electricity is moving bodily along through conductors or whirling round and round inside them, which motion of electricity is a form of energy, because the conductors and whirls can attract or repel each other and thereby do work.

And, on the other hand, that light is the rapid alternation of energy from one of these forms to the other--the static form where the medium is strained, to the kinetic form when it moves. It is just conceivable, then, that the static form of the energy of light is electro static, that is, that the medium is electrically strained, and that the kinetic form of the energy of light is electro-kinetic, that is, that the motion is not ordinary motion, but electrical motion--in fact, that light is an electrical vibration, not a material one.

On November 5, last year, there died at Cambridge a man in the full vigor of his faculties--such faculties as do not appear many times in a century--whose chief work has been the establishment of this very fact, the discovery of the link connecting light and electricity; and the proof--for I believe it amounts to a proof--that they are different manifestations of one and the same class of phenomena--that light is, in fact, an electro-magnetic disturbance. The premature death of James Clerk-Maxwell is a loss to science which appears at present utterly irreparable, for he was engaged in researches that no other man can hope as yet adequately to grasp and follow out; but fortunately it did not occur till he had published his book on "Electricity and Magnetism," one of those immortal productions which exalt one's idea of the mind of man, and which has been mentioned by competent critics in the same breath as the "Principia" itself.

But it is not perfect like the "Principia;" much of it is rough-hewn, and requires to be thoroughly worked out. It contains numerous misprints and errata, and part of the second volume is so difficult as to be almost unintelligible. Some, in fact, consists of notes written for private use and not intended for publication. It seems next to impossible now to mature a work silently for twenty or thirty years, as was done by Newton two and a half centuries ago. But a second edition was preparing, and much might have been improved in form if life had been spared to the illustrious author.

The main proof of the electro-magnetic theory of light is this: The rate at which light travels has been measured many times, and is pretty well known. The rate at which an electro-magnetic wave disturbance would travel if such could be generated (and Mr. Fitzgerald, of Dublin, thinks he has proved that it can not be generated directly by any known electrical means) can be also determined by calculation from electrical measurements. The two velocities agree exactly. This is the great physical constant known as the ratio V, which so many physicists have been measuring, and are likely to be measuring for some time to come.

Many and brilliant as were Maxwell's discoveries, not only in electricity, but also in the theory of the nature of gases, and in molecular science generally, I can not help thinking that if one of them is more striking and more full of future significance than the rest, it is the one I have just mentioned--the theory that light is an electrical phenomenon.

The first glimpse of this splendid generalization was caught in 1845, five and thirty years ago, by that prince of pure experimentalists, Michael Faraday. His reasons for suspecting some connection between electricity and light are not clear to us--in fact, they could not have been clear to him; but he seems to have felt a conviction that if he only tried long enough and sent all kinds of rays of light in all possible directions across electric and magnetic fields in all sorts of media, he must ultimately hit upon something. Well, this is very nearly what he did. With a sublime patience and perseverance which remind one of the way Kepler hunted down guess after guess in a different field of research, Faraday combined electricity, or magnetism, and light in all manner of ways, and at last he was rewarded with a result. And a most out-of-the-way result it seemed. First, you have to get a most powerful magnet and very strongly excite it; then you have to pierce its two poles with holes, in order that a beam of light may travel from one to the other along the lines of force; then, as ordinary light is no good, you must get a beam of plane polarized light, and send it between the poles. But still no result is obtained until, finally, you interpose a piece of a rare and out-of-the-way material, which Faraday had himself discovered and made--a kind of glass which contains borate of lead, and which is very heavy, or dense, and which must be perfectly annealed.

And now, when all these arrangements are completed, what is seen is simply this, that if an analyzer is arranged to stop the light and make the field quite dark before the magnet is excited, then directly the battery is connected and the magnet called into action, a faint and barely perceptible brightening of the field occurs, which will disappear if the analyzer be slightly rotated. [The experiment was then shown.] Now, no wonder that no one understood this result. Faraday himself did not understand it at all. He seems to have thought that the magnetic lines of force were rendered luminous, or that the light was magnetized; in fact, he was in a fog, and had no idea of its real significance. Nor had any one. Continental philosophers experienced some difficulty and several failures before they were able to repeat the experiment. It was, in fact, discovered too soon, and before the scientific world was ready to receive it, and it was reserved for Sir William Thomson briefly, but very clearly, to point out, and for Clerk-Maxwell more fully to develop, its most important consequences. [The principle of the experiment was then illustrated by the aid of a mechanical model.]