4 PREFACE. 



relative to immaterial points, which impose only needless 

 labor and uncertainty upon the student. 



Above all things, I have sought to write a straight, 

 plain, simple, and, I hope, fairly logical and interesting 

 story. I have rigidly excluded technicalities and scien- 

 tific demonstrations, which, however interesting to the 

 professional electrician, are as Greek to the general reader ; 

 for I address this no more to the wise men of the wires 

 and the dynamos and the batteries, than to the great pub- 

 lic whom we all serve, and for whose good we all labor. 

 Popular science, so called, is too often dilute science. 

 Scientific discussions of a didactic or abstract nature, or 

 involving a Babylonish terminology, and requiring minds 

 trained to understand them, cannot be rendered any easier 

 to the mental digestion of intellects engrossed in other 

 departments of the world's work, and, hence, not so edu- 

 cated, by mechanically mixing them with the water of an 

 engaging rhetoric. The facts and the arguments based on 

 them must be digested and brought into true solution, so 

 that the food offered will be easily assimilable ; and that is 

 what I have tried here to do. 



Perhaps this work may usefully tend to show that elec- 

 tricity, at the present time, is not u in its infancy." It 

 has undoubtedly a vast amount of work yet to do, and I 

 am patriotic enough to believe at the hands of our Amer- 

 ican inventors, first of all will yet accomplish things un- 

 dreamt of in our philosophy ; but it will do this not with 

 the feeble uncertainty of the nursling, but with the vigor 

 and might of maturity. Moreover, although in ancient 

 days electricity, in common with all other natural mani- 

 festations, was regarded as a mystery, none the less the 

 knowledge of it, as these pages seek to prove, forced its 

 way through the clouds of ignorance and superstition with 

 the unerring directness of a projectile driven through the 

 mist from a modern gun. Electricity is not now occult, it 

 is not mystic, it is not magic, its workings are no more 

 wonderful than are the rise and fall of the tides ; in fact, it 



