Makers of Electricity. James J. Walsh
near the suspicion of plagiarism.
Gilbert died, probably of the plague, in the sixtieth year of his age, on December 10th, 1603, and was buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church, Colchester, where a mural tablet records in Latin the chief facts of his life.
Dr. Fuller in his "Worthies of England" (1662) describes Gilbert as tall of stature and cheerful of "complexion," a happiness, he quaintly remarks, not ordinarily found in so hard a student and retired a person." Concluding his appreciation of the philosopher, Fuller writes: "Mahomet's tomb at Mecha[7] is said strangely to hang up, attracted by some invisible loadstone; but the memory of this Doctor will never fall to the ground, which his incomparable book De Magnete will support to eternity."
Animated by a similar spirit of national pride, Dryden wrote
Gilbert shall live till loadstones cease to draw,
Or British fleets the boundless ocean awe.
We shall close these remarks by Hallam's estimate of Gilbert as a scientific pioneer, contained in his Introduction to the Literature of Europe. "The year 1600," he says, "was the first in which England produced a remarkable work in physical science; but this was one sufficient to raise a lasting reputation for its author. Gilbert, a physician, in his Latin treatise on the magnet, not only collected all the knowledge which others had possessed on the subject, but became at once the father of experimental philosophy in this island; and, by a singular felicity and acuteness of genius, the founder of theories which have been revived after a lapse of ages and are almost universally received into the creed of science."
For well-nigh three hundred years, De Magnete remained untranslated, being read only by the scholarly few. The first translation was made by P. Fleury Mottelay, of New York, and published by Messrs. Wiley and Sons in the year 1893. Mr. Mottelay has given much attention to the bibliography of the twin sciences of electricity and magnetism, as the foot-notes which he has added to the translation abundantly prove.
A second translation appeared in the tercentenary year, 1900, and was the work of the members of the Gilbert Club, London, among whom were Dr. Joseph Larmor and Prof. Silvanus P. Thompson. It is a page-for-page translation with facsimile illustrations, initial letters and tail-pieces.
As one would infer from the numerous references contained in De Magnete, Gilbert had a considerable collection of valuable books, classical and modern, bearing on the subject of his life-work; but these, as well as his terrellas, globes, minerals and instruments, perished in the great fire of London, 1666, with the buildings of the College of Physicians, in which they were located.
A portrait of Gilbert was preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for many years; but has long since disappeared from its walls. On the occasion of the three hundredth anniversary (1903) of Gilbert's death, a fine painting representing the Doctor in the act of showing some of his electrical experiments to Queen Elizabeth and her court (including Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake and Cecil, Lord Burleigh, famous Secretary of State), was presented to the Mayor of Colchester by the London Institute of Electrical Engineers. A replica of the painting was sent to the St. Louis Exposition, 1904, where it formed one of the attractions of the Electricity Building.
The house in which Gilbert was born (1544) still stands in Holy Trinity Street, Colchester, where it is frequently visited by persons interested in the history of electric and magnetic science.
Brother Potamian.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] "Souvenir of Gilberd's Tercentenary," p. 6.
[7] See magnetic myths, page 5.
CHAPTER III.
Franklin and Some Contemporaries.
As already seen, the writers of Greece and Rome knew little about the lodestone; we have now to add that the knowledge of electricity which they possessed was of the same elementary character. They knew that certain resinous substances, such as amber and jet had, when rubbed, the property of attracting straws, feathers, dry leaves and other light bodies; beyond this, their philosophy did not go. The Middle Ages added little to the subject, as the Schoolmen were occupied with questions of a higher order. The Saxon Heptarchy came and went, Alcuin taught in the schools of Charlemagne, Cardinal Langton compelled a landless and worthless king to sign Magna Charta, universities were founded with Papal sanction in Italy, France, Germany, England and Scotland, Copernicus wrote his treatise on the revolution of heavenly bodies and dedicated it to Pope Paul III., Tycho Brahé made his famous astronomical observations at Uranienborg and befriended at Prague the penniless Kepler, and Columbus gave a New World to Castile and Leon—all this before the man appeared who, using amber as guide, discovered a new world of phenomena, of thought and philosophy. This man was no other that Gilbert, whose discoveries in magnetism were described in an earlier chapter. The trunk line of his work was magnetism; electricity was only a siding. One was the main subject of a life-long quest while the other was only a digression. It was a digression in which the qualities of the native-born investigator are seen at their very best: alertness and earnestness, resourcefulness and perseverance, all rewarded by a rich harvest of valuable results. It is refreshing and inspiring to read the Second Book of Gilbert's treatise, De Magnete, in which are recorded in quick succession the twenty important discoveries which he made in his new field of labor.
At the very outset, he found it necessary to invent a recording instrument to test the electrification produced by rubbing a great variety of substances. This he appropriately called a versorium; we would call it an electroscope. "Make to yourself," he says, "a rotating needle of any sort of metal three or four fingers long and pretty light and poised on a sharp point." He then briskly rubs and brings near his versorium glass, sulphur, opal, diamond, sapphire, carbuncle, rock-crystal, sealing-wax, alum, resin, etc., and finds that all these attract his suspended needle, and not only the needle, but everything else. His words are remarkable: "All things are drawn to electrics." Here is a great advance on the amber and jet, the only two bodies previously known as having the power to attract "straws, chaff and twigs," the usual test-substances of the ancients. Pursuing his investigations, he finds numerous bodies which perplex him, because when rubbed they do not affect his electroscope. Among these, he enumerates: bone, ivory, marble, flint, silver, copper, gold, iron, even the lodestone itself. The former class he called electrica, electrics; the latter was termed anelectrica, non-electrics.
To Gilbert we, therefore, are indebted for the terms electric and electrical, which he took from the Greek name for amber instead of succinic and succinical, their Latin equivalents. The noun electricity was a coinage of a later period, due probably to Sir Thomas Browne, in whose Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 1646, it occurs in the singular number on page 51 and in the plural on page 79. It may interest the reader to be here retold that we owe the chemical term affinity to Albertus Magnus, barometer to Boyle, gas to van Helmont, magnetism to Barlowe, magnetic inclination to Bond, electric circuit to Watson, electric potential to Green, galvanometer to Cumming, electro-magnetism to Kircher, electromagnet to Sturgeon, and telephone to Wheatstone.
Gilbert was perplexed by the anomalous behavior of his non-electrics. He toiled and labored hard to find out the cause. He undertook a long, abstract, philosophical discussion on the nature of bodies which, from its very subtlety, failed to reveal the cause of his perplexing