Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/353

Rh amongst "subjects uniting more or less of the most sure and valuable investigations of science with the most imaginary and unprofitable speculation, that are continually passing through their various phases of intellectual, experimental or commercial development, some to be established, some to disappear, and some to recur again and again, like ill weeds that can not be extirpated, yet can be cultivated to no result as wholesome food for the mind."

Fifty years have fled, and Hunt, Grove, Smee, Tyndall, Cowper, Joule, Bidder and Stephenson have long passed away. Lord Kelvin remains the sole and honored survivor of that remarkable symposium. But the electric motor is a gigantic practical success, and the electric motor industry has become a very large one, employing thousands of hands. Hundreds of factories have discarded their steam-engines to adopt electric-motor driving. All traveling cranes, nearly all tramcars, are driven by electric motors. In the navy and in much of the merchant service the donkey-engines have been replaced by electric motors. Electric motors of all sizes and outputs, from one twentieth of a horse-power to 8,000 horse-power, are in commercial use. One may well ask: What has wrought this astonishing revolution in the face of the unanimous verdict of the engineers of 1857?

The answer may be given in terms of the action and reaction of pure and applied science. Pure science furnished a discovery; industrial applications forced its development; that development demanded further abstract investigation, which in turn brought about new applications. It was beyond all question the development of the dynamo for the purposes of electrotyping and electric light which brought about the commercial advent of the electric motor. For about that very time Holmes and Siemens and Wilde and Wheatstone were at work developing Faraday's magneto-electric apparatus into an apparatus of more practical shape; and the electric lighthouse lamp was becoming a reality which Faraday lived to see before his death in 1867, That eventful year witnessed the introduction of the more powerful type of generator which excited its own magnets. And even before that date a young Italian had made a pronouncement which, though it was lost sight of for a time, was none the less of importance. Antonio Pacinotti in 1864 described a machine of his own devising, having a specially wound revolving ring-magnet placed between the poles of a stationary magnet, which, while it would serve as an admirable generator of electric currents if mechanically driven, would also serve as an excellent electric motor if supplied with electric currents from a battery. He thereupon laid down the principle of reversibility of action, a principle more or less dimly foreseen by others, but never before so