Page:Experimental researches in electricity.djvu/207

Rh chemical action at the exciting place, is here sufficiently evident. But in order to place it in a clearer point of view, and to show that the decomposing effect was not at all dependent, in the latter cases, upon the mere capability of evolving more electricity, experiments were made in which the quantity evolved could be increased without variation in the intensity of the exciting cause. Thus the experiments in which dilute sulphuric acid was used (634) were repeated, using large plates of zinc and platina in the acid; but still those bodies which resisted decomposition before, resisted it also under these new circumstances. Then again, where nitro-sulphuric acid was used (641), mere wires of platina and zinc were immersed in the exciting acid; yet, notwithstanding this change, those bodies were now decomposed which resisted any current tending to be formed by the dilute sulphuric acid. For instance, muriatic acid could not be decomposed by a single pair of plates when immersed in dilute sulphuric acid; nor did making the solution of sulphuric acid strong, nor enlarging the size of the zinc and platina plates immersed in it, increase the power; but if to a weak sulphuric acid a very little nitric acid was added, then the electricity evolved had power to decompose the muriatic acid, evolving chlorine at the anode and hydrogen at the cathode, even when mere wires of metals were used. This mode of increasing the intensity of the electric current, as it excludes the effect dependent upon many pairs of plates, or even the effect of making any one acid stronger or weaker, is at once referable to the condition and force of the chemical affinities which are brought into action, and may, both in principle and practice, be considered as perfectly distinct from any other mode.

644. The direct reference which is thus experimentally made in the simple voltaic circle of the intensity of the electric current to the intensity of the chemical action going on at the place where the existence and direction of the current is determined, leads to the conclusion that by using selected bodies, as fused chlorides, salts, solutions of acids, etc., which may act upon the metals employed with different degrees of chemical force; and using also metals in association with platina, or with each other, which shall differ in the degree of chemical action exerted between them and the exciting fluid of electrolyte, we shall be able to obtain a series of comparatively constant effects due to electric currents of different intensities, which will serve to assist in the construction of a scale competent to supply the