Lightning Conductors. F.C.S. Richard Anderson
from those known at the present time. The Greeks found out that amber, or ‘electron,’ attracted certain other bodies under friction, and named the force after it; and the Romans were aware that the shocks discharged by the torpedo fish were of electrical nature, and they used them for the cure of rheumatic complaints in the reign of the Emperor Tiberius. Both Greeks and Romans also observed the sparks emitted, under certain circumstances, from clothing and from the fur of animals. But this represented the total sum of knowledge about electricity for ages and ages.
It was not until the year 1600 that Dr. William Gilbert, physician to Queen Elizabeth, made a great step forward by showing in his celebrated work, ‘De magnete, magneticisque corporibus, et de magno magnete tellure, physiologia nova,’ that the two classes of phenomena, the magnetic and the electric, are emanations of a single fundamental force pervading all nature. Dr. Gilbert further discovered that many other substances besides amber possess the electric power, and that this power is easily excited when the air is dry and cool, and with difficulty when it is moist and warm. These discoveries caused great commotion in the European learned world, yet produced no further result for another half a century. In 1650, Otto von Guericke, burgomaster of Magdeburg, the inventor of the air-pump, who had studied with deep interest Dr. Gilbert’s book, succeeded in constructing a little electrical machine, composed mainly of a ball of sulphur mounted on a revolving axis. By the aid of this instrument, very rude in construction, he produced powerful sparks and flashes of electric light, and it helped him likewise to discover, first, that bodies excited by friction communicate their electricity to other bodies by mere contact, and, secondly, that there resides in electrified substances the power of repulsion as well as that of attraction.
Those who followed in the wake of the ingenious burgomaster of Magdeburg for the next ninety or hundred years, till towards the middle of the eighteenth century, did very little towards adding to the already acquired knowledge of electricity. Sir Isaac Newton constructed an electrical machine of glass, very superior to that of Otto von Guericke, with which he made some amusing experiments; but, strangely enough, drew no conclusions from them, treating the mighty force under his eyes as only a plaything. This was all the more singular as a contemporary of the great philosopher, Francis Hauksbee, like him a Fellow of the Royal Society, called attention, in a volume entitled ‘Physico-mechanical Experiments,’ published in 1709, to the great similarity between the electric flash and lightning, hinting that the two might possibly be offspring of the same mysterious force. Dr. Wall, in 1708, said that the light and crackling of rubbed amber seemed in some degree to represent thunder and lightning. Another member of the Royal Society, Stephen Gray—the first man in England who made the study of electricity the devotion of his life, but of whose career very little is known beyond the fact that he was very poor, and a pensioner of the Charterhouse—added numberless experiments to those previously made, and was bold enough to declare, in 1720, six years before Sir Isaac Newton’s death, that ‘electricity seems to be of the same nature with thunder and lightning—if we may compare great things with small.’ For this audacity in ‘comparing things’ he was sharply taken to task by all the scientific men of the age, and, as deserved, set down as a man out of his senses.
Nothing more was done for the next twenty-five years to enlarge the knowledge of the phenomena of electricity. It stood, in fact, on a footing not very far advanced from what it had been two thousand years before. The achievements mainly consisted in a great number of entertaining experiments performed for the delectation of great and little children. Various machines had been made for exciting electricity, but they served only, or at least chiefly, for amusement, allowing ladies to fire off a cannon by a touch of their delicate hand, and bringing ladies and gentlemen together to behold the wonderful spectacle of an infant’s hair being made to stand on end, the little creature having been placed upon cakes of resin, and fastened to the ceiling by silken cords. The whole was little more than a repetition, on a greater scale and with improved means, of the ancient Greek experiment of rubbing a piece of amber on the sleeve of a philosopher’s coat.
The first great step towards a practical insight into the nature and phenomena of electricity, hitherto a mere plaything, was made in the year 1745 in the ancient Dutch city and university of Leyden. Two professors of the high school, John Nicholas Allamand, a member of the Royal Society of London, and Peter Van Musschenbroek, author of a treatise entitled ‘Introductio ad philosophiam naturalem,’ had been trying, like many other scientific men of the time, electrical experiments, when the thought occurred to them that the real reason why all the work of the same kind had as yet produced such slight results was that the electrical force was absolutely unstable. It slipped, so to speak, through their hands, before they could look at it; it vanished ‘like a dream, leaving no substance behind.’ One body, they knew, had the power of electrifying another, but only to let the mysterious force pass on, like a current of water running down a cataract. Could they but ‘bottle up’ electricity, what a grand gain would this be to science! So thought the two professors of Leyden university; and thought justly. They went on experimenting, with this end in view, till at last so-called ‘accident,’ the mother of millions of human inventions and discoveries, threw a brilliant light on the dark road along which they were groping their way.
One day Professor Allamand and Van Musschenbroek, together with a pupil named Cuneus—a sort of Wagner, it would seem, sitting at the feet of Dr. Faust—were trying the effects of electricity on a small iron cannon, suspended by silk threads, and connected by a wire with a glass bottle half full of water, when whey were startled by an extraordinary incident. Curious, like all students of occult sciences, young Cuneus took it into his head to see what would happen if he held the prime conductor of the electrical machine in one hand and the electrified bottle of water in the other. Something wonderful happened, indeed, causing profound amazement and terror to the three persons witnessing it, most of all to the immediate experimenter, who sank down on the floor, half dead with fright. Master Cuneus had received an electric shock. It was the first electric shock ever administered by artificial means to any human being.
Such was the origin of the long-famous ‘Leyden jar,’ or, as it was originally called, ‘Leyden phial.’ The whole of the scientific world of Europe was as much startled by the discovery that electricity could be imprisoned, like Ariel in an oak-tree, as the two Leyden professors and their pupil had been, and a perfect fury set in for more experiments. A professor of the University of Leipzig, in Germany, Dr. Winckler, started the excitement by submitting his body to frequent powerful shocks, opening up, besides, a scientific discussion in which he came forth as the champion of the proposition that the discovery of the ‘Leyden phial’ was due, not to the professors in the Dutch university, but to a German ecclesiastic, Ewald George von Kleist, who made the experiments of Messrs. Allamand and Van Musschenbroek a year before them. His own sensations in submitting to the force of electric shocks, Professor Winckler described, doubtless with some exaggeration, as being convulsed from head to toe, and the prey of violent agitations, which threw his arms about, and made the blood rush from his nose. Dr. Winckler did not venture upon many experiments; but his spouse, undismayed by the arm-shaking and nose-bleeding of her lord, and having the combined curiosity of a woman and a professor’s wife, continued upon her own person the electric shocks. However, she did not take many, nor did science gain by the sacrifice. When a few graspings of the ‘Leyden phial’ had deprived her of the power to walk, and, what was worse, to speak, she followed the example of her bleeding husband, and took ‘cooling medicines.’ All these wonderful facts were made widely known at the time, and created the most profound interest. Professor Musschenbroek, of Leyden, added not a little to the prevailing excitement by writing to his friend René Antoine de Réaumur, inventor of the thermometer named after him, a long letter, given at once to the public, in which he dwelt upon the terrible effects of the mysterious agency which he had helped to call into being, and wound up by declaring that he had become terrified by his own foster-child, and that he would not submit to another electric shock ‘for the whole kingdom of France.’
Experiments in electricity now became the prevailing mania. Louis XV. of France set the fashion among crowned heads of having his soldiers electrified, to see what benefit he, or they, would derive from it. On the instigation of Abbé Nollet, considered a man of high scientific attainments, and who made several important discoveries in electricity, the King submitted, in his own presence, 180 of the tallest men of his life-guards, fastened