Page:Various Forces of Matter.djvu/149

Rh and connect the platinum of one vessel with the zinc of another, the platinum of this vessel with the zinc of that, and so on, we should only be using a series of these vessels instead of one. This we have done in that arrangement which you see behind me. I am using what we call a Grove's voltaic battery, in which one metal is zinc, and the other platinum, and I have as many as forty pairs of these plates all exercising their force at once in sending the whole amount of chemical power there evolved through these wires under the floor and up to these two rods coming through the table. We need do no more than just bring these two ends in contact, when the spark shows us what power is present; and what a strange thing it is to see that this force is brought away from the battery behind me, and carried along through these wires. I have here an apparatus (fig. 46) which Sir Humphry Davy constructed many years ago, in order to see whether this power from the voltaic battery caused bodies to attract each other in the same manner as the ordinary electricity did. He made it in order to experiment with his large voltaic battery, which was the most powerful then in existence. You see there are in this