Electricity and the electric telegraph Author:George Wilson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE FIRST ELECTRICAL MACHINE. 9 phenomenon had a much 'deeper significance than it had for unlettered fishermen or barbarian soldiers; but, after all, it taug... more »ht the former, so far at least as they have instructed us, little more than it did the latter ; and the fisherman and soldier, as the more experienced observers, must be counted the best electricians of an epoch in which no electrician was more than an observer. Electricity, as a science, may be considered as dating from the year 1600, when Dr. Gilbert, a native of Colchester, published, in London, a Latin treatise on the magnet. It discusses electricity as well as magnetism, explains certain of their fundamental laws, and announces certain conclusions in a truly sagacious and philosophical spirit. Curiously enough, this treatise, which we look back upon as far before its age, and destined to a lasting place among works on science, was selected by Lord Bacon as an example of inconclusive and vicious reasoning: so much more easy is it to give advice than to take it, or even to see that it has already been taken. The disparagement of Gilbert's inquiry prevented it attracting the attention it otherwise might have received; so that more than half a century passed before electricity was taken from its cradle. In 1670, however, the famous burgomaster of Magdeburgh, Otto Guericke, who is memorable in scientific annals as the deviser of the first air-pump, made a new claim on the reverence of posterity by his construction of the first electrical machine. It was a globe of sulphur, made to whirl on a vertical axis, whilst it was rubbed by the hand. Otto Guericke cast the sulphur in a mould of glass; and it was afterwards discovered that the hollow glass sphere did better than the core of solid brimstone, to set free which the...« less