Lightning in a cat’s back.
Lighting gas.
When you see the lightning in a thunder-storm, you would think it strange if I should tell you that there is lightning in every thing; but so it is, as you will see. Did you ever have your fingers tingle, and hear a snapping when you stroked a cat’s back? This is because you waked up, as we may say, the lightning in her fur and in your hand together. There is lightning in you as well as in the cat. It only needs a little rubbing to show it. I have known persons to light the gas with the lightning that is in them as readily as you would with a match. They wake up or excite the lightning by walking across the carpet, rubbing their feet on it as they go, and then put a finger to the open gas-burner. A spark of lightning goes to it from the finger and lights the gas.
It is in very clear cold weather that it is most easy to excite the lightning or electricity that is in different things. It is then that you can make the cat’s fur snap. Then, too, silk things will snap when you rub them or fold them up.
Lightning is electricity.
Though it is really lightning that is made by rubbing things, we do not call it so. We call it electricity. We did not know that lightning and electricity were the same thing till Dr. Franklin showed that they were. He found it out by an experiment with a kite, which I will relate to you after I have told you some other things about electricity.
You can make electricity more easily by rubbing some things than by rubbing others. I have already told you how easily it is waked up on the cat’s back by stroking it. If you rub a stick of sealing-wax back and forth rapidly across your coat sleeve, you wake up a good deal of electricity for so small a thing. It is shown in this way: If you bring the sealing-wax near some light thing like down, this will cling to it for a moment, and then fly off again, as if it did not like the sealing-wax. It is the electricity which you have excited that does this.
A good deal of electricity can be made by rubbing glass. In the machine which is used in making electricity for experiments there is a large glass cylinder, which is turned round quickly against a leather rubber that has a preparation of mercury on it.
Description of an electrical machine.