Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/349

Rh engineering is based. For the first time mankind was furnished with a magnet the attractive power of which could be increased absolutely indefinitely by the mere expenditure of sufficient capital upon the iron core and its surrounding copper coils, and the provision of a sufficiently powerful source of electric current to excite the magnetization. Furthermore, the magnet was under control, and could be made to attract or to cease to attract at will by merely switching the current on or off; and, lastly, this could be accomplished from a distance, even from great distances away. How slowly the importance of this discovery was recognized is now a matter for astonishment. To state that Sturgeon died in poverty twenty-six years later is sufficient to indicate his place among the unrequited pioneers of whom the world is not worthy. Six years elapsed, and then there came a flood of suggestions of electric motors in which was applied the principle of intermittent attraction by an electromagnet, Henry in 1831 and Dal Negro in 1832 produced see-saw mechanisms so operated. Ritchie in 1833 and Jacobi in 1834 devised rotatory motors. Ritchie pivoted a rapidly commutated electromagnet between the poles of a permanent magnet—a true type of the modern motor—while Jacobi caused two multipolar electromagnets, one fixed, one movable, to put a shaft into rotation and propel a boat. A perplexing diminution of the current of the battery whenever the motor was running caused Jacobi to investigate mathematically the theory of its action. In a masterly memoir he laid down a few years later the theory of electric motive power. But in the intervening period, in 1831, Faraday had made the cardinal discovery of the mechanical generation of electric currents by magneto-electric induction, the fundamental principle of the dynamo. Down to that date the only known way—save for the feeble currents of thermopiles—to generate electric currents had been the pile of Volta, or one of the forms of battery which had been evolved from it. Now, by Faraday's discovery, the world had become possessed of a new source. And yet again, strange as it may seem, years elapsed before the world—that is, the world of engineers—discovered that an important discovery had been made. Not till some thirty years later were any magneto-electric machines made of a sufficient size to be of practical service even in telegraphy, and none were built of a sufficient power to furnish a single electric light until about the year 1857. In the meantime in America other electric motors, to be driven by batteries, had been devised by Davonport and by Page; the latter's machine had an iron plunger to be sucked by electromagnetic attraction into a hollow coil of copper wire, thereby driving a shaft and flywheel through the intermediate action of a connecting-rod and crank. Page's was, in fact, an electric engine, with two-foot stroke, single-acting, of between three and four horse-power. The battery occupied about three