1^4 GEORGE HERBERT STOCKBRIDGE 



had been their presence, to give the structure its original 

 shape and strength." 



Charles Grafton Page might have fitly paraphrased 

 Hawthorne, by claiming that for many years at the outset 

 of his career he had enjoj^ed the distinction of being the 

 obscurest man of science in America. The statement would 

 be made more accurate by adding the Hibernianism that his 

 obscurity was entirely transoceanic, and that Henry suffered 

 in much the same way. The whole truth is that the old 

 world paid little attention in the thirties to what was going 

 on in America. For, while many (American) writers agree 

 in saying that the researches of Henry in electromagnetism 

 gave him at once a world wide fame, yet it remains to be ex- 

 plained why, so late as 1837, men Hke Wheatstone and Cooke 

 were entirely ignorant of them or quite unimpressed by them. 

 Page was even more unfortunate. While a medical student 

 in Salem, Mass., in 1836, he took up the induction apparatus 

 of Faraday and subjected it during several years following 

 to the most careful and exhaustive study. At the beginning, 

 his object was to adapt the Faradic coil to the production 

 of enhanced therapeutical effects. He soon learned, however, 

 to take a scientific as well as a professional interest in his 

 experiments. The discoveries and improvements which he 

 made gave the induction coil its permanent form and well 

 nigh its present efficiency; yet nearly fifteen years later, the 

 results of his labors were appropriated by M. Ruhmkorff, 

 a Paris instrument maker, whose name is still attached de- 

 scriptively to the invention of Page. Mr. Edward S. Ritchie, 

 a Boston inventor, should be named in connection with Page 

 for his improvements in the induction coil. Among other 

 things it may be mentioned that Page first wound a secondary 

 coil outside the primary, that he first produced all the phe- 

 nomena of static electricity from the induced current, and 

 that he first discovered the increased electrostatic effects 

 rising from giving the secondary a greater length than the 

 primary. These are only a few of many alterations and dis- 

 coveries, more or less radical, which Page embodied in working 

 apparatus. Incidentally, the necessity arose for an auto- 

 matic circuit breaker, and Page was actually the first to in- 



