Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/774

754 Faraday of the electro-chemical theory—these are facts fresh in all our memories. The justice of time, however, in this case, if it has been tardy, has been none the less sure. The experiments of Thomson have vindicated Volta and established the contact theory as a vera causa. And, more curiously still, it now appears to be proved that both contact and chemical action underlie the production of that very animal electricity so stoutly battled for by Galvani and his associates.

Volta's experiments to prove that a difference of potential is developed by the contact of two heterogeneous metals were not crucial. But Thomson, repeating them with the aid of more delicate apparatus, has shown that, whenever copper and zinc are brought in contact, the copper becomes negative to the zinc. In proof that the chemical action of atmospheric moisture was not the cause of the phenomenon, he showed that, when a drop of water served to connect the copper and the zinc, no charge at all was produced. The fact may therefore be regarded as established, as the result of numerous and varied experiments, that a difference of electrical potential is always developed at the surfaces of contact of heterogeneous media. Not only is this true of solids in contact with solids, but also of solids in contact with liquids, and of liquids in contact with each other. Of course, the production of electricity by contact must result from a loss of energy elsewhere. In the opinion of Cumming, it is the loss of energy which is owing to the unsymmetrical swinging of the molecules on the two sides of the surfaces of contact, which reappears as difference of potential between the solids or as the energy of electrical separation.

But we may carry the sequence yet another step backward. The energy which is thus lost at the surfaces of separation must be heat, and this junction must be cooled thereby. Thus the production of thermo-electricity is seen only to be a special case of a general law, a view to which the well-known Peltier effect gives support. In this phenomenon, when two metals are joined together in the form of a ring and one junction is heated, a current is produced which cools the other junction. From a study of these conditions, Thomson has concluded that the absorption of heat in a thermo-electric circuit varies for different metals with the direction of the current. Thus in iron, the current from hot to cold absorbs heat, while in copper the current which absorbs heat is from cold to hot. In entire accordance with these results are the conclusions recently reached by Hoorweg. Whenever two conductors come into contact, motion of heat results in the development of electricity, the current produced existing at the cost of heat at one part of the point of contact, and evolving heat at the other for a result. Hence all voltaic currents are thermo-currents.

To return to the muscle, it must now be apparent that the electrical charge which appears in its fiber may have its origin in so purely a physical cause as the contact of the heterogeneous substances of which the tissue is built up; the maintenance of this charge being effected