impulse is thus given, and from this moment a movement in advance goes
on increasing at a headlong pace from day to day.

With electricity this period has been of comparatively short duration,
since scarcely a century and a half separate us from the first
experiments made in this line of research. Now that it has truly taken
its place in a rank with the other sciences, we like to go back to the
hesitations of the first hour, and trace, step by step, the history of
the progress made, so as to assign to each one that portion of the
merit that belongs to him in the common work. When we thus cast a
retrospective glance we find ourselves in the presence of one strange
fact, and that is the simultaneousness of discoveries. That an
absolutely original idea, fertile in practical consequences, should
rise at a given moment in a fine brain is well; we admire the
discovery, and, in spite of us, a little surprise mingles with our
admiration. But is it not a truly curious thing that _several_
individuals should have had at nearly the same time that idea that was
so astonishing in one? This, however, is a fact that the history of
electrical inventions offers more than one example of. No one ignores
the fact that the invention of the telephone gave rise to a notorious
lawsuit, two inventors having had this ingenious apparatus patented on
the same day and at nearly the same hour. This is one example among a
thousand. In the history of dynamo-electric machines it is an equally
delicate matter to fix upon the one to whom belongs the honor of
having first clearly conceived the possibility of engendering
continuous currents.

We do not wish to take up this debate nor to go over the history of
the question again. Every one knows that the first continuous current
electric generator whose form was practical is due to Zenobius Gramme,