Steam, Steel and Electricity Part 6

The invention of Gray is a departure. The sender of a message sits down at a small desk and takes up a pencil, writing with it on ordinary paper and in his usual manner. A pen at the other end of the circuit follows every movement of his hand. The result is an autograph letter a hundred miles or more away. A man in Chicago may write and sign a check payable in Indianapolis. Personal directions may be given authoritatively and privately. As in the case of the telephone, no intervening operator is necessary. No expertness is required. Even the use of the alphabet is not necessary. A drawing of any description, anything that can be traced with a pen or pencil, is copied precisely by the pen at the receiving desk. The possibilities of this instrument, the uses it may develop, are almost inconceivable. It might be imagined that the lines drawn would be continuous. On the contrary, when the pen is lifted by the writer at the sending desk it also lifts itself from the paper at that of the receiver.

The action of the telautograph depends upon the variations in magnetic strength between two small electro-magnets. It has been seen that an electro-magnet exerts its attractive force in proportion to the current which pa.s.ses through its coil. To use a phrase entirely non-technical, it will "pull" hard or easy in proportion to the strength of the pa.s.sing current. This fact has been observed as the cause of action in the telephone, where one diaphragm, moved by the air-vibrations caused by the voice, causes a varying current to pa.s.s over the wire, attracting the other diaphragm less or more as the first is moved toward or away from its magnet. In the telautograph the varying currents are caused not by the diaphragm influenced by the voice, but _by a pencil moved by the hand_.

To show how these movements may be caused let us imagine a case that may occur in nature. It is an interesting mechanical study. There is an upright rush or reed growing in the middle of a running stream. The stem of this rush has elasticity naturally; it has a tendency to stand upright; but it bends when there is a current against it. It is easy enough to imagine it bending down stream more or less as the current is more or less strong.

Imagine now another stream entering the first at right angles to it, and that the rush stands in the center of both currents. It will then bend to the force of the second stream also, and the direction in which it will lean will be a compromise between the forces of the two. Lessen the flow of the current in one of the streams, and the rush will bend a little less before that current and swing around to the side from which it receives less pressure. Cut off either of the currents entirely, and it will bend in the direction of the other current only. In a word, _if the quant.i.ty or strength of the current of both streams can be controlled at will, the rush can be made to swing in any direction between the two, and its tip will describe any figure desired, aided, of course, by its own disposition to stand upright when there is no pressure_.

Let us imagine the rush to be a pen or pencil, and the two streams of water to be two currents of electricity having power to sway and move this pencil in proportion to their relative strength, as the streams did the rush. Imagine further that these two currents are varied and changed with reference to each other by the movements of a pen in a man's hand at another place. It is an essential part of the mechanism of the telautograph, and the movement is known among mechanicians as "compounding a point."

Gray, while using the principles involved in compounding a point, seems to have discarded the ways of transmitting magnetic impulses of varying strength commonly in use. His method he calls the "step-by-step"

principle, and it is a striking example of what patience and ingenuity may accomplish in the management of what is reputedly the most elusive and difficult of the powers of nature. The machine was some six years in being brought into practical form, and was perfected only after a long series of experiments. In its operation it deals with infinitesimal measurements and quant.i.ties. The first attempts were on the "variable current" system, which was later discarded for the "step-by-step" plan mentioned.

In writing an ordinary lead pencil may be used. From the point of this two silk cords are extended diagonally, their directions being at right angles to each other, and the ends of these cords enter openings made for them in the cast iron case of the instrument on each side of the small desk on which the writing is done.

Inside the case each cord is wound on a small drum which is mounted on a vertical shaft. Now if the pencil-point is moved straight upward or downward it is manifest that both shafts will move alike. If the movement is oblique in any direction, one of the shafts will turn more than the other, and the degree of all these turnings of each shaft in reference to the other will be precisely governed by the direction in which the pencil-point is moved.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DIAGRAM OF MECHANICAL TELAUTOGRAPH. BOW-DRILL ARRANGEMENT.]

Now, suppose each shaft to carry a small, toothed wheel, and that upon these teeth a small arm rests. As the wheel turns this arm will move as a pawl does on a ratchet. Imagine that at each slight depression between the ratchet-teeth it breaks a contact and cuts off a current, and at each slight rise renews the contact and permits a current to pa.s.s. This current affects an electro-magnet--one for each shaft--at the receiving end, and each of these magnets, when the current is on, attracts an armature bearing a pawl, which, being lifted, allows the notched wheel, upon which it bears, to turn _to the extent of one notch_. The arrangement may be called an electric clutch, that may be arranged in many ways, and the detail of its action is unimportant in description, so that it be borne in mind that _each time a notch is pa.s.sed in turning the shaft by drawing upon or relaxing the cords attached to the pencil-point_, an impulse of electricity is sent to an electro-magnet and armature which allows _a corresponding wheel and its shaft to turn one notch, or as many notches, as are pa.s.sed at the transmitting shaft_. In moving the pencil one inch to one side, we will suppose it permits the shaft on which the cord is wound to turn forty notches. Then forty impulses of electricity have been sent over the wire, the clutch has been released forty times, and the shaft to which it is attached has turned precisely as much as the shaft has which was turned, or was allowed to turn, by the cord wound upon it and attached to the pencil.

It will be remembered that the arrangement is double. There are two shafts operated by the writer's pencil--one on each side of it. Two corresponding shafts occupy relative positions in respect to the automatic pen of the receiving instrument. There are two circuits, and two wires are at present necessary for the operation of the instrument.

It remains to describe the manner of operating the automatic pen by connection with its two shafts which are turned by the step-by-step arrangement described, precisely as much and at the same time as those of the transmitting instrument are.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WORK OF THE TELAUTOGRAPH. COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION, 1893.]

To each shaft of the receiving instrument is attached an aluminum pen-arm by means of cords, each arm being fixed, in regard to its shaft, as a bow drill is in regard to its drill. These arms meet in the center of the writing tablet, V-shaped, as the cords are with relation to the writer's pencil in the sending instrument. A small tube conveys ink from a reservoir along one of the pen-arms, and into a gla.s.s tube upright at the junction of the arms. This tube is the pen. Now, let us imagine the pencil of the writer pushed straight upward from the apex of the V-shaped figure the cords and pencil-point make on the writing desk.

Then both the shafts at the points of the arms of the V will rotate equally. [Footnote: See diagram of mechanical Telautograph, and of bow drill. In the latter, in ordinary use, the stick and string; rotate the spool. Rotating the spool will, in turn, move the stick and string, and this is its action in the pen-arms of the Telautograph.] The number of impulses sent from each of these shafts, by the means explained, will be equal. Each of the shafts of the receiving instrument will rotate alike, and each draw up its arm of the automatic pen precisely as though one took hold of the points of the two legs of the V, and drew them apart to right and left in a straight line. This moves the apex of the V, with its pen, in a straight line upward at the same time the writer at the sending instrument pushed his pencil upward. If this one movement, considered alone, is understood, all the rest follow by the same means.

This is, as nearly as it may be described without the use of technical mechanical terms, the principle of the telautograph. It must be seen that all that is necessary to describe any movement of the sender's pencil upon the paper under the receiving pen is that the rotating upright shafts of the latter should move precisely as much, and at the same time, with those two which get their movement from the wound cords and attached pencil-points in the hand of the writer.

Only one essential item of the movement remains. The shafts of both instruments must be rotated by some separate mechanical agency, capable of being automatically reversed. By an arrangement unnecessary to explain in detail, the pencil of the writer lifted from the paper resting on the metallic table which forms the desk; results in the automatic lifting of the pen from the paper at the receiving desk.

Prof. Elisha Gray was born in 1835, in Ohio. He was a blacksmith, and later, a carpenter. But he was given to chemical and mechanical experiments rather than to the industries. When twenty-one, he entered Oberlin College, remaining there five years, and earning all the money he spent. He devoted his time chiefly to studies of the physical sciences. As a young man he was an invalid. Later he was not remarkably successful in business, failing several times in his beginnings. His first invention was a telegraph self-adjusting relay. It was not practically successful. Afterwards he was employed with an electrical manufacturing company at Cleveland and Chicago. Most of his earlier inventions in the line of electrical utility are not distinctively known. He has never been idle, and they all possessed practical merit.

For many years before he was known as the wizard of the telautograph, he was foremost in the ranks of physicists and electricians. He is not a discoverer of great principles, but is professionally skillful and accomplished, and eminently practical. His every effort is exerted to avoid intricacy and clumsiness in machinery. In 1878 he was awarded the grand prize at the Paris Exposition, and was given the degree of Chevalier and the decorations of the Legion of Honor by the French Government, and again in 1881, at the Electrical Exposition at Paris, he was honored with the gold medal for his inventions. He secured the degree of A.M. at Oberlin College, and was the recipient of the degree of Ph.D. from the Ripon (Wis.) College. For years he was connected with those inst.i.tutions as non-resident Lecturer in Physics. Another University gave him the degree of LL.D. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the Society of Electrical Engineers of England, and the Society of Telegraph Engineers of London. He received an award and a certificate from the Centennial Exposition for his inventions in electricity.

The same lesson is to be gathered from his career, so far, that is given by the life of every noted American. It means that money, family, prestige, have no place as leverages of success in any field. The rule is toward the opposite. The qualities and capacities that win do so without these early advantages, and all the more surely because there is an inducement to use them. There is no "luck."

CHAPTER III.

THE ELECTRIC LIGHT.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

It has been stated that modern theory recognizes two cla.s.ses of electricity, the _Static_ and the _Dynamic_. The difference is, however, solely noticeable in operation. Of the dynamic cla.s.s there can be no more common and striking example than the now almost universal electric light. Yet, with a sufficient expenditure of chemicals and electrodes, and a sufficient number of cells, electric lighting, either arc or incandescent, can be as effectively accomplished as with the current evolved by a powerful dynamo. [Footnote: As an ill.u.s.tration of the day of beginnings, a few years ago the _thalus_, or lantern, the pride of the rural Congressman, on the dome of the Capitol at Washington was lighted by electricity, and an immense circular chamber beneath the dome was occupied by hundreds of cells of the ordinary form of battery. The lamps were of the incandescent variety, and what we now know as the filament was platinum wire. Vacuum bulb, filament, carbon, dynamo, were all unknown. But the current, and the heat of resistance, and every fact now in use in electric lighting, were there in operation.]

The reader will understand that modern dynamic electricity owes its development to the principle of economy in production. Practical science most effectively awakens from its lethargy at the call of commerce.

Nevertheless, from the earliest moment in which it became known that electricity was akin to heat--that an interruption of the easy pa.s.sage of a current produced heat--the minds of men were busy with the question of how to turn the tremendous fact to everyday use. Progress was slow, and part of it was accidental. The great servant of modern mankind was first an untrained one. It was a marked advance when the gaslights in a theater could be all lighted at once by means of batteries and the spark of an induction coil. The bottom of h.e.l.l Gate, in New York harbor, was blown out by Gen. Newton by the same means, and would have been impossible otherwise. But these were only incidents and suggestions.

The question was how to make this instantaneous spark _continuous_.

There was pondering upon the fact that the only difference between heat and electricity is one of molecular arrangement. Heat is a molecular motion like that of electricity, without the symmetry and harmony of action electricity has. The vibrations of electricity are accomplished rapidly, and without loss. Those of heat are slow, and greatly radiated. _When a current of electricity reaches a place in the conductor where it cannot pa.s.s easily, and the orderly vibrations of its molecules are disturbed, they are thrown into the disorderly motion known as heat._ So, when the conductor is not so good; when a large wire is reduced suddenly to a small one; when a good conductor, such as copper, has a section of resisting conduction, such as carbon; heat and light are at once evolved at that point, and there is produced what we know as the electric light. However concealed by machinery and devices, and all the arrangements by which it is made more lasting, steady, economical and automatic, it is no more nor less than this. _The difference between heat and electricity is only a difference in the rates of vibration of their molecules._ Whatever the theory as to molecules, or essence, or actual nature and origin, the practical fact that heat and light are the results of the circ.u.mstances described above remains. This has long been known, and the question remained how to produce an adequate current economically. The result was the machine we know as the Dynamo.

The first electric light was very brief and brilliant and was made by accident. Sir Humphrey Davy, in 1809, in pulling apart the two ends of wires attached to a battery of two thousand small cells, the most powerful generator that had been made to that time, produced a brief and brilliant spark, the result of momentarily _imperfect contact._ Every such spark, produced since then innumerable times by accident, is an example of electric lighting. There are now in use in the United States some two million arc lights and nearly double that number of incandescent.

There are two princ.i.p.al systems of electric lighting; one is by actually burning away the ends of carbon-points in the open air. This is the "arc." The other is by heating to a white heat a filament of carbon, or some substance of high resistance, in a gla.s.s bulb from which the air has been exhausted. This is the "incandescent."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE INCANDESCENT LIGHT]

In the arc light the current pa.s.ses across an _imperfect contact_, and this imperfection consists in a gap of about one-sixteenth of an inch between the extremities of two rods of carbon carrying a current.

This small gap is a place of bad conduction and of the piling up of atoms, producing heat, burning, light. In the body of the lamp there are appliances for the automatic holding apart of the two points of the carbon, and the causing of them to continually creep together, yet never touch. Many devices have been contrived to this end. With all theories and reasons well known, and all effects accurately calculated, upon this small arrangement depends the practical utility of the arc light. The best arrangement is the invention of Edison, and is controlled most ingeniously by the current itself, acting through the increased difficulty of its pa.s.sage when the two carbon-points are too far apart, and the increased ease with which it flows when they are too near together. The current, in leaping the small gap between the carbon-points, takes a _curved_ path, hence the name "arc" light.

In pa.s.sing from the positive to the negative carbon it carries small particles of incandescent carbon with it, and consequently the end of the positive carbon is hollowed out, while the end of the negative is built up to a point.

The incandescent light is in principle the same as the arc, produced by the same means and based upon the same principle of impediment to the free pa.s.sage of the current. It was first produced by heating with the current to incandescence a fine platinum wire. As stated above, electricity that quietly traverses a large wire will suddenly develop great heat upon reaching a point where it is called upon to traverse, a smaller one. Platinum was attempted for this place of greater resistance because of its qualities. It does not rust, has a low specific heat, and is therefore raised to a higher temperature with less heat imparted. But it was a scarce and expensive material, and so long as it was heated to incandescence in the open air, that is, so long as its heat was fed as other heat is, by oxygen, it was slowly consumed. Platinum is no longer in the field of electric lighting, and the subst.i.tute which takes its place in the present incandescent lamp, and which is known as a "filament," is not heated in contact with the air. The experiments and endeavors that brought this result const.i.tute the story of the incandescent lamp.

The result is due to the patient intelligence of the American scientist and inventor, Thomas A. Edison. After all the absolute essentials of a practical incandescent lamp had been thought out; after the qualities and characteristics of the current were all known under the circ.u.mstances necessary to its use in lighting, the practical accomplishment still remained. Edison is said to have once worked for several weeks in the making of a single loop-shaped carbon filament that would bear the most delicate handling. This was then carefully carried to a gla.s.s-worker to be inclosed in a bulb, and at the first movement he broke it, and the work must be done over and done better. It finally was. The little pear-shaped bulb with its delicate loop of filament, which cost months of toil and experiment at first, is now a common article, manufactured at an absurdly small cost, packed in barrelfuls and shipped everywhere, and consumed by the million. A means has been found for producing the vacuum of its interior rapidly, cheaply and thoroughly, and the beautiful incandescent glow hangs in lines and cl.u.s.ters over the civilized world. The phenomenon of incandescence without oxygen seems peculiar to these lights alone. [Footnote: The "electric field," previously explained, seemed to exist by giving a magnetic quality to the surrounding air. It would be as true if one should speak of a magnetized vacuum, since the same field would exist in that as in surrounding air.]

So simple are great facts when finally accomplished that there remains little to add on the subject of the mechanism of the electric light. The two varieties, arc and incandescent, are used together as most convenient, the large and very brilliant arc being especially adapted to out-of-doors situations, and the gentler, steadier and more permanent glow of the incandescent to interiors. The latter is also capable of a modification not applicable to the arc. It can, in theaters and other buildings, be "turned down" to a gentle, blood-red glow. The means by which this is accomplished is ingenious and surprising, since it means that the supply of electricity over a wire--seemingly the most subtle and elusive essence on earth--may be controlled like a stream from a c.o.c.k, or the gas out of a burner. But this reduction of the current that makes the red glow in the cl.u.s.ters in a theater is by no means the only instance. The trolley-car, and even the common motor, may be made to start very slowly, and the unseen current whose touch kills is fed to its consumer at will.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

THE DYNAMO.--To the man who has been all his life thinking of the steam engine as the highest and almost only embodiment of controlled mechanical power, another machine, both supplementary to the steam engine and far excelling it, whose familiar _burring_ sound is now heard in almost every village in the United States and has become the characteristic sound of modern civilization, must const.i.tute a source of continual question and surprise. To be accustomed to the dynamo, to look upon it as a matter of course and a conceded fact, one must have come to years of maturity and found it here.

Its practical existence dates back at furthest to 1870. Yet it is based upon principles long since known, and can scarcely be said to be the invention of any one mind or man. Its lineal ancestor was the _magneto-electric machine_, in the early construction of which figure the names of Siemens, Wilde, Ladd, and earlier and later electricians. Kidder's medical battery used forty years ago or more, and still used and purchasable in its first form, was a dynamo. A footnote in a current encyclopedia states that: "An account of the Magneto-electric machine of M. Gramme, in the London _Standard_ of April 9th, 1873, confirmed by other information, leads to the belief that a decided improvement has been made in these machines." The word "dynamo" was then unknown. Later, Edison, Weston, Thompson, Hopkinson, Ferranti and others appear as improvers in the mechanism necessary for best developing a well-known principle, and many of these improvements may be cla.s.sed among original inventions. As soon as the magneto-electric machine attained a size in the hands of experimenters that took it out of the field of scientific toys it began to be what we now know as a dynamo. A paragraph in the encyclopedia referred to says, in speaking of Ladd, of London, "These developments of electric action are not obtained without corresponding expenditure of force. The armatures are powerfully attracted by the magnets, and must be forcibly pulled away.

Indeed, one of Wilde's machines, when producing a very intense electric light, required about five horse power to drive it."

[Ill.u.s.tration: MAGNETO-ELECTRIC MACHINE. THE PREDECESSOR OF THE DYNAMO.]

Thus was the secret in regard to electric power unconsciously divulged some twenty years ago.

In all nature there is no recipe for getting something for nothing. The modern dynamo, apparently creating something out of nothing, like all other machines _gives back only what is given to it_, minus a fair percentage for waste, loss, friction, and common wear. Its advantages amount to a miracle of convenience only. So far as power is concerned, it merely transfers it for long distances over a single wire. So far as light is considered, it practically creates it where wanted, in new and convenient forms, with a new intensity and beauty, but with the same expenditure of transmitted energy in the form of burned coal as would be used in manufacturing the gas that was new, wonderful, and a luxury at the beginning of the century.

The dynamo is the most prominent instance of actual mechanical utility in the field of electrical induction. It seems almost incredible that the apparently small facts discovered by Faraday, the bookbinder, the employe of Sir Humphrey Davy at weekly wages the struggling experimenter in the subtleties of an infant giant, should have produced such results within sixty years. [Footnote: Faraday was not entirely alone in his life of physical research. He was a.s.sociated with Davy, and quarreled with him about the liquefaction of chlorine and other gases, and was the companion of Wallaston, Herschel, Brand, and others. In connection with Stodart, he experimented with steel, with results still considered valuable. The scientific world still speaks of his quarrel with Davy with regret, since the personalities of great men should be free from ordinary weaknesses. But Lady Davy was not a scientist, and while the brilliant young mechanic was in her husband's employment for scientific purposes she insisted upon treating him as a servant, whereat the independence of thinking which made him capable of wandering in fields unknown to conventionality and routine blazed into natural resentment.

The quarrel of 1823 must have been greatly augmented, in the lady's eyes, in 1824, for in that year Faraday was made a member of the Royal Society.

In his lectures and public experiments he was greatly a.s.sisted by a man now almost forgotten, an "intelligent artilleryman" named Andersen. This unknown soldier with a taste for natural science doubtless had his reward in the exquisite pleasure always derived from the personal verification of facts. .h.i.therto unknown. There is often a pecuniary reward for the servant of science. Just as often there is not, and the work done has been the same.

It was on Christmas morning, 1821, that Faraday first succeeded in making a magnetic needle rotate around a wire carrying an electric current. He was the discoverer of benzole, the basis of our modern brilliant aniline dyes. In 1831 he made the discovery he had been leading to for many years--that of magneto-electric induction. All we have of electricity that is now a part of our daily life is the result of this discovery.

Faraday was born in 1791, and died August, 1867, in a house presented to him by Victoria, who had not the same opinion of his relations to the aristocracy that Lady Davy seems to have had. His insight into science was something explainable only on the supposition that he was gifted with a kind of instinct. He was a scientific prophet. A man who could, in 1838, foresee the ocean cable, and describe those minute difficulties in its working that all in time came true, must be cla.s.sed as one of the great, clear, intuitive intellects of his race. He was in youth apprenticed to a bookbinder, "and many of the books he bound he read." A line in his indentures says: "In consideration of his faithful service, no premium is to be given." When these words were written there was no dream that the "faithful service" should be for all posterity.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Faraday's Spark. Striking the leg of a horseshoe magnet with an iron bar wound with insulated wire causes a contact between loose end of wire and small disc, and a spark.

Faraday's First Magneto-Electric Experiment. A horseshoe magnet pa.s.sed near a bent soft iron wound with insulated wire caused an induced current in the wire.

TWO OF FARADAY'S EARLY EXPERIMENTS IN INDUCTION.]