Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/238

224 thanks to electricity, gone the length of combining his wires and magnets into something very like a conscious and responsive brain: his intelligence culminates in duplicating itself.

Prodigal as electricity is of gifts to the mechanic and engineer, it as generously multiplies the resources of their friend and partner, the chemist. Electricity, we must not forget, was presented to the world as a stream of tolerably even flow, by a process of chemical undoing, in Volta's crown of cups. If chemical taking apart can yield a current, a current can in turn be used to build, as every piece of plating proves. Yet to construct a battery in which both processes shall alternate, without undue weight or waste of material, is a task as yet not satisfactorily accomplished, despite constant and ingenious attack. A thoroughly good and simple storage battery would mean nearly as much for electric art as the dynamo. From a dynamo it would receive currents derived from wind or water powers, or from engines temporarily laden below their capacity, and use these currents to restore a metal from its solution by a process exactly that of electroplating. Then, on demand, it would yield electricity once more by surrendering this metal to solution, as a common voltaic battery does. If the chemist has thus far been somewhat baffled by the problems of the storage battery, he has had better fortune in other fields of endeavor. Electricity joined to heat hands him a two-edged sword of irresistible cleaving power. Compounds, such as those of chromium, of peculiar refractoriness, are readily parted in the electric furnace of Moissan, and elements once extremely rare are now marketed in quantity at prices steadily falling. A generation ago aluminum was so scarce and dear that it was formed into jewelry; to-day the metal has been so cheapened by electricity that it finds a ready sale as kitchen ware. Minute diamonds and rubies of electric manufacture are now competing with the product of the mine, and materials used on a gigantic scale in the arts—caustic soda, bleaching powder, and the like—are produced at less cost than ever by electrical agency. The chemist, when he chooses, can beat his electrical sword into a trowel, and build compounds which seem prophetic of the day when the slow elaborations of the farm and orchard shall make way for the artificial synthesis of sugars, oils, and starch.

Greater than all the wealth created by electricity in workshop or laboratory are its aids to pure research. The chief physical generalization of our time, the persistence of force, came into view only when electricity was recognized as a phase of energy, only when electrical means of measurement had become trustworthy. It is because men of absolutely disinterested spirit, like Faraday and Henry, devoted themselves to ascertaining the laws of electricity that we have to-day the telegraph, the telephone, and