Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/517

Rh even lighted a room by producing in it such a condition that an illuminating appliance may be placed anywhere and lighted without being electrically connected with anything. He has produced the required condition by creating in the room a powerful electrostatic field alternating very rapidly. He suspends two sheets of metal, each connected with one of the terminals of the coil. If an exhausted tube is carried anywhere between these sheets, or placed anywhere, it remains always luminous.

The extent to which this method of illumination may be practically available experiments alone can decide. In any case, our insight into the possibilities of static electricity has been extended, and the ordinary electric machine will cease to be regarded as a mere toy.

Alternating currents have at the best a rather doubtful reputation. But it follows from Tesla's researches that as the rapidity of the alternation increases they become not more dangerous but less so. It further appears that a true flame can now be produced without chemical aid—a flame which yields light and heat without the consumption of material and without any chemical process. To this end we require improved methods for producing excessively frequent alternations and enormous potentials. Shall we be able to obtain these by tapping the ether? If so, we may view the prospective exhaustion of our coal-fields with indifference; we shall at once solve the smoke question, and thus dissolve all possible coal rings.

Electricity seems destined to annex the whole field, not merely of optics, but probably also of thermotics.

Rays of light will not pass through a wall, nor, as we know only too well, through a dense fog. But electrical rays of a foot or two wave-length of which we have spoken will easily pierce such mediums, which for them will be transparent.

Another tempting field for research, scarcely yet attacked by pioneers, awaits exploration. I allude to the mutual action of electricity and life. No sound man of science indorses the assertion that "electricity is life"; nor can we even venture to speak of life as one of the varieties or manifestations of energy. Nevertheless, electricity has an important influence upon vital phenomena, and is in turn set in action by the living being—animal or vegetable. We have electric fishes—one of them the prototype of the torpedo of modern warfare. There is the electric slug which used to be met with in gardens and roads about Hornsey Rise; there is also an electric centiped. In the study of such facts and such relations the scientific electrician has before him an almost infinite field of inquiry.

The slower vibrations to which I have referred reveal the bewildering possibility of telegraphy without wires, posts, cables, or