114 Galvanic Defiagrator. 
brilliancy and energy, totally surpass any thing before effected 
by the same surface of metal, arranged in the same number of 
combinations. This will appear the more remarkable, when it 
is remembered, that your apparatus produces these effects with- 
out insulation. Although through your civility I have just re- 
ceived the glass jars by which you insulate your coils, I have not 
yet been able to use them, and can therefore pete only of the 
results obtained without them. 
With your eighty coils of fourteen inches by six, for the cop- 
per, and of nine by six for the zinc, | obtained effects which, as 
to every thing that related to intense heat and light, and brilliant 
combustion, far surpassed the powers of a battery of the common 
form of six hundred and twenty pairs of plates—one hundred and 
fifty pairs of which, of six inches square, are insulated by glass 
paruitions—one hundred pairs of the same size, and three hun- 
dred of four inches square, are insulated by resin, and the rest 
either by Wedgwood’s ware or by resin, making in the whole a 
battery with a surface of thirty-six thousand eight hundred and 
eighty square inches, Yours has a surface of only twenty-two 
thousand and eighty square inches, but even without insulation 
it is incomparably more powerful than the other with that advan- 
tage. This is the most singular circumstance connected with 
your new apparatus, and which goes far to shake our previous 
theoretical opinions, if not to support your own, 
I repeated every important experiment stated in your memoir, 
aud with results so similar, that it is scarcely necessary to relate 
them. The combustion of the metals was brilliant beyond every 
thing which I had witnessed before, and the ignition of the char- 
coal points was so intense, as to equal the brilliancy of the sun ; 
the light was perfectly intolerable to eyes of only common 
strength. If I were to name any metallic substance which burned 
with more than common energy, it would be a common brass 
pin, which, when held in the forceps of one pole, and touched 
to the charcoal point on the other, was consumed with such 
energy, that it might be said literally to vanish in flame. 
The light produced between the charcoal points when im- 
mersed beneath acids, oils, alcohol, ether, water, &c, was very 
intense, and platina melted in air as readily as wax in the blaze 
of a candle. It is a very great advantage of your Deflagrator, 
that we cau suspend the operation at any moment, with the same 
facility with which it was commenced. A look, directed to the 
assistant, is sufficient to raise the coils out of the fluid.. All ac- 
tion instantly ceases—neither the metal nor the fluid is wasting 
any further, and the lecturer is therefore at ease while he illus- 
trates and reasons; and when he is ready, and not before, he 
proceeds to his next experiment. In the mean time, the instru- 
ment, 
