Page:A history of the theories of aether and electricity. Whittacker E.T. (1910).pdf/359

 translatory motion of electric charges. That the convection of electricity is equivalent to a current had been suggested long before by Faraday. "If," he wrote in 1838, "a ball be electrified positively in the middle of a room and be then moved in any direction, effects will be produced as if a current in the same direction had existed." To decide the matter a new experiment inspired by Helmholtz was performed by H. A. Rowland in 1876. The electrified body in Rowland's disposition was a disk of ebonite, coated with gold leaf and capable of turning rapidly round a vertical axis between two fixed plates of glass, each gilt on one side. The gilt faces of the plates could be earthed, while the ebonite disk received electricity from a point placed near its edge; each coating of the disk thus formed a condenser with the plate nearest to it. An astatic needle was placed above the upper condenser-plate, nearly over the edge of the disk; and when the disk was rotated a magnetic field was found to be produced. This experiment, which has since been repeated under improved conditions by Rowland and Hutchinson, H. Penders, and Eichenwald, shows that the "convection-current" produced by the rotation of a charged disk, when the other ends of the lines of force are on an earthed stationary plate parallel to it, produces the same magnetic field as an ordinary conduction-current flowing in a circuit which coincides with the path of the convection-current. When two disks forming a condenser are rotated together, the magnetic action is the sum of the magnetic actions of cach of the disks separately. It appears, therefore, that electric charges cling to the matter of a conductor and move with it, so far as Rowland's phenomenon is concerned.

The first examination of the matter from the point of view of Maxwell's theory was undertaken by J. J. Thomson, in 1881, If an electrostatically charged body is in motion, the change in