Lives of the electricians

by William T. Jeans

Of books on electricity there is already abundance. They have been poured from the press in yearly increasing numbers. During the present generation the laws of electricity have been explained in every variety of form—in the rigid demonstrations of the geometrician, in the abstract symbolism of the mathematician, in the technical language of numerous text-books, and in the experimental illustrations of popular lecturers. But to the ordinary reader the theorems of the mathematician are written in an unknown tongue; and more elementary books on electricity, to be made interesting to the popular mind, would have to be written in “that language which can give a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of mathematics.” Add to this the fact that, as Prof. C. A. Young puts it, “since 1848 all things have become new in the scientific world. There is a new mathematics and a new astronomy, a new chemistry and a new electricity, a new geology and a new biology. Great voices have spoken, and have transformed the world of thought and research as much as the material products of science have altered the aspects of external life. The telegraph and dynamo-machine have not more changed the conditions of business and industry than the speculations of Darwin and Helmholtz and their compeers have affected those of philosophy and science.”

The conquest of these fresh fields of knowledge has been almost the life’s work of professional scientists; and is that which was said of the past to continue true of the future, that ideas which in one generation are those of the learned few, in the next become those of the educated and middle class, and in the third those of the general public?

Even if no work were necessary to indicate the advances made in electrical knowledge, biographies of the electricians would still be a desideratum. Carlyle has said of art in general that biography is almost the one thing needful. In the literature of electricity, it has hitherto been the one thing lacking. The subject is not destitute of historic as well as scientific interest; and hence it is possible that the general reader may be led to regard it from Terence’s point of view that “whatsoever concerns mankind concerns me.” It is possible, too, that a record of the achievements which have brought electricity to its present state of utility, may impart a reflex interest to that science. “Art is art,” says Carlyle, “yet man also is man. Had the Transfiguration of Raphael been painted without human hand; had it grown merely on the canvas, say by atmospheric influences, as lichen pictures do on rocks—it were a grand picture doubtless; yet nothing like so grand as the picture which on opening our eyes we everywhere in heaven and earth see painted, and everywhere pass over with indifference,—because the Painter was not Man. Think of this; much lies in it. The Vatican is great; yet poor to Chimborazo or the Peak of Teneriffe; its dome is but the foolish chip of an egg-shell, compared with that star-fretted dome where Arcturus and Orion glance for ever; which latter notwithstanding who looks at? The biographic interest is wanting: no Michael Angelo was He who built that ‘Temple of Immensity;’ therefore do we, pitiful Littlenesses as we are, turn rather to wonder and to worship in the little toy-box of a Temple built by our like.” Now it has been well observed that science is to the present age what art was to the middle ages; and such being the case, may not a similar interest to that described by Carlyle attach to the marvellous things done by means of electricity? A great deal is said about electricity, but very little about the men who made it subject to the will of man, who converted it into “the pulse of speech” which annihilates time and space, and who made it “the greatest blessing that science has given to civilisation.” Of them it has often been said that “their line has gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world,” but of their lives not much has been communicated to the general public in a popular form.

The men who have made electricity the handmaid of industry are nearly as widespread as the subtle force with which they have had to deal. The United Kingdom was the birth-place of the monarch of modern machinery—the steam-engine,—and also of the leading inventions in metallurgy which supply the framework of all our manufacturing machinery; but the pioneers and engineers of electricity have been of different nations and tongues. In the infancy of the science no country produced more electricians than Germany; in the discovery and exposition of its subtlest laws, as well as in their application to useful purposes, no country has done more than England; while in the most novel and most extensive use of electrical appliances for industrial purposes the New World may be said to have outstripped the Old. But smaller countries have also made splendid contributions to the general store of knowledge. Volta, the first philosopher who from his youth devoted himself to the study of electricity, and who has given his name to one department of it, was an Italian; so was Galvani, who discovered that a frog was the most sensitive electrometer, and whose name became a synonym for electricity. Oersted, who made himself famous by the discovery of the mutual action of magnets and electrical conductors, was a Dane; while Ampère, whom some writers have called “the Newton of electricity,” and Arago, who discovered the development of magnetism by rotation, were Frenchmen.

Most of these pioneers have already taken their place in the Temple of Science; and this work not being intended to go over beaten ground, it was expected, at the outset, to comprise in one volume sufficient biographies to illustrate the more recent progress of electrical science and its applications to industrial purposes; but the more the writer investigated the subject, the more it grew, not only in magnitude, but in magnetic attractiveness. He found that to give a complete account of the revolution effected by means of electricity would require biographies of the three classes of men,—scientific, engineering, and commercial—that had been instrumental in bringing electricity to its present state of usefulness; while to do justice to these men would require such a varied picture of their lives as would illustrate their marvellous versatility, or their multifarious works, thus showing that they were among the ornaments as well as the benefactors of their race. He was encouraged to begin this work by the success of his previous effort, and he was encouraged to continue it beyond the limit originally intended by experiencing a feeling of pleasure akin to that which led Plutarch to say in the course of his work, that when he first applied himself to the writing of ancient lives it was for the sake of others, but he pursued that study for his own sake: for it was like living and conversing with these illustrious men, when he considered how great and wonderful they were. More recently Lord Bacon said he “could not but wonder that our own times have so little value for what they enjoy, as not more frequently to write the lives of eminent men; for though kings, princes, and great personages are few, yet there are many excellent men who deserve better than vague reports and barren eulogies.” Nor is there any lack of authority as to the value of our subject in the estimation of contemporary schools of thought. An eminent Greek scholar (Dr. Lushington) in addressing the students of Glasgow University as their Lord Rector in 1885, observed that “the hope of adding something more to the store of accomplished good to mankind cheered and upheld many daring pioneers of science, whose venerated names, now become household words, are linked together for ever in the history of human progress, known and honoured throughout the whole civilised world. Yet who in the age of Watt, even in the boldest flights of presaging imagination, could have foretold such wondrous conquests over space and time as the spectroscope, the electric telegraph, and the telephone have revealed?”

The object of this work is to give some account of “such wondrous conquests.” The guiding principle in its compilation has been the maxim of Goethe, that the main object of biography is to exhibit man in relation to the features of his time; and not as Dumas, on the other hand, sarcastically put it, “to trace each man’s innermost life, ascertain whether he was born on a calcareous or a granite soil, learn whether his ancestors and himself have drunk wine, cider, or beer, or eaten meat, fish, or vegetables—nay, to penetrate the meanest details of his existence, to descend from the heights of criticism and from a scientific system to the gratification of a paltry curiosity.”

This volume opens with an account of the labours of the physicist who made a special study of the phenomena of magnetism, electricity, and co-relative forces; and in the course of it occasion is taken to explain certain elementary principles of these forces. It then proceeds to give, in the life of Professor Wheatstone, an account of some of the methods by which such scientific principles were made serviceable to man; and it concludes with an account of the man who made it the labour of his life to produce a telegraphic apparatus and alphabet which have found universal favour. Technical language has been avoided as far as possible, and yet it is hoped that the descriptions given of electrical laws and mechanism will convey substantially correct impressions, without entering into elaborate details or straining after scientific exactness. While it may thus become a means of imparting to unscientific readers some knowledge of the history of electrical science and engineering, it is hoped that the narrative will be found sufficiently instructive to point a moral to that wider class of readers who take a sympathetic interest in the struggles and achievements of those unobtrusive but beneficent men, “who, departing, leave behind them foot-prints on the sands of time.”

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The Creators of the Age of Steel.

LIVES OF THE ELECTRICIANS.