THE ELECTRO-MAGNETIC APPARATUS OF DR. PACINOTTI.


In admiring the recent developments of electric science as evidenced
by the number of important inventions which have during the past few
years been given to the world, especially in those branches of applied
science which deal more particularly with the generation of
electricity and the production of the electric light, there is often
too great a tendency to forget, or, at least, to pass over in
comparative silence the claims which the great pioneer workers and
discoverers undoubtedly have to a large share of the merit of this
scientific development.

It is, of course, obviously impossible in anything approaching a
retrospect of the science of magneto-electric induction or its
application to illumination to pass slightly over the names of
Oersted, of Ampère, of Davy, and of Faraday, but, in other respects,
their work is too often lost sight of in the splendid modern
developments of their discoveries. Again, there is another group of
discoverer-inventors who occupy an intermediate position between the
abstract discoverers above named and the inventors and adapters of
still more recent times. To this group belong the names of Pixii and
Saxton, Holmes and Nollet, Wilde, Varley, Siemens, Wheatstone, and
Pacinotti, who was the first to discover a means of constructing a
machine capable of giving a continuous current always in the same
direction, and which has since proved itself to be the type of nearly
all the direct current electric machines of the present day, and
especially those such as the Gramme and Brush and De Meritens