Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/66

56 in the conductor. It sometimes suits our purpose to augment the transformation of electrical into heat energy at certain points of the circuit when the heat-rays become visible, and we have the incandescent electric light. In effecting a complete severance of the conductor for a short distance, after the current has been established, a very great local resistance is occasioned, giving rise to the electric arc, the highest development of heat ever attained. Vibration is another form of lost energy in mechanism, but who would call it a loss if it proceeded from the violin of a Joachim or a Norman-Neruda?

Electricity is the form of energy best suited for transmitting an effect from one place to another; the electric current passes through certain substances—the metals—with a velocity limited only by the retarding influence caused by electric charge of the surrounding dielectric, but approaching probably under favorable conditions that of radiant heat and light, or 300,000 kilometres per second; it refuses, however, to pass through oxidized substances, glass, gums, or through gases except when in a highly rarefied condition. It is easy, therefore, to confine the electric current within bounds, and to direct it through narrow channels of extraordinary length. The conducting wire of an Atlantic cable is such a narrow channel: it consists of a copper wire, or strand of wires, five mm. in diameter, by nearly 5,000 kilometres in length, confined electrically by a coating of gutta-percha about four mm. in thickness. The electricity from a small galvanic battery passing into this channel prefers the long journey to America in the good conductor, and back through the earth, to the shorter journey across the four mm. in thickness of insulating material. By an improved arrangement the alternating currents employed to work long submarine cables do not actually complete the circuit, but are merged in a condenser at the receiving station after having produced their extremely slight but certain effect upon the receiving instrument, the beautiful siphon recorder of Sir William Thomson. So perfect is the channel and so precise the action of both the transmitting and receiving instruments employed, that two systems of electric signals may be passed simultaneously through the same cable in opposite directions, producing independent records at either end. By the application of this duplex mode of working to the direct United States cable under the superintendence of Dr. Muirhead, its transmitting power was increased from twenty-five to sixty words a minute, being equivalent to about twelve currents or primary impulses per second. In transmitting these impulse-currents simultaneously from both ends of the line, it must not be imagined, however, that they pass each other in the manner of liquid waves belonging to separate systems; such a supposition would involve momentum in the electric flow, and although the effect produced is analogous to such an action, it rests upon totally different grounds—namely, that of a local circuit at each terminus being called into action automatically whenever two similar