THE STORY OF ELECTRICITY


[Illustration: ERIPUIT CAELO FULMEN, SCEPTRUMQUE TYRANNIS.]

There is a sense in which electricity may be said to be the youngest of
the sciences. Its modern development has been startling. Its phenomena
appear on every hand. It is almost literally true that the lighting has
become the servant of man.

But it is also the oldest among modern sciences. Its manifestations have
been studied for centuries. So old is its story that it has some of the
interest of a mediaeval romance; a romance that is true. Steam is gross,
material, understandable, noisy. Its action is entirely comprehensible.
The explosives, gunpowder, begriming the nations in all the wars since
1350, nitroglycerine, oxygen and hydrogen in all the forms of their
combination, seem to be gross and material, the natural, though
ferocious, servants of mankind. But electricity floats ethereal, apart,
a subtle essence, shining in the changing splendors of the aurora yet
existent in the very paper upon which one writes; mysteriously
everywhere; silent, unseen, odorless, untouchable, a power capable of
exemplifying the highest majesty of universal nature, or of lighting the
faint glow of the fragile insect that flies in the twilight of a summer
night. Obedient as it has now been made by the ingenuity of modern man,
docile as it may seem, obeying known laws that were discovered, not
made, it yet remains shadowy, mysterious, impalpable, intangible,
dangerous. It is its own avenger of the daring ingenuity that has