402 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



But a still more wonderful discovery is yet to be re- 

 corded. Von Guericke says to rub the sulphur globe with 

 the dry palm of the hand. Then if "you take the globe 

 with you into a dark room and rub it, especially at night, 

 light will result, as when sugar is beaten." 



And that is the first announcement of the electric light. 



He -had seen a brush discharge between the electrified 

 globe and his hand, and although he does not connect the 

 two phenomena, he had also heard the snaps and crackling 

 incident thereto. u There is likewise a virtue of sound," 

 he says, u in this globe, for when it is carried in the hand 

 or is held in a warm hand and thus brought to the ear, 

 roarings and crashings are heard in it." 



And thus von Guericke established, to his own satisfac- 

 tion, that the sulphur globe is endowed with many virtues. 

 When thrown by the hand it had momentum or impulsive 

 virtue because of its weight. It drew light bodies to it 

 and expelled others from it, and hence had both the con- 

 servative and expulsive virtues. It had also the sound- 

 ing, lighting and heating (by friction) virtues, but not the 

 turning and directing virtues. But in that it had the 

 conservative and expulsive virtues it was like the earth. 

 It was an electric instead of a magnetic terrella showing 

 that our globe is not a mass of primordial terrene Matter 

 drawing things to itself while directing its own axis by 

 its inherent magnetic quality, but a great electric mass 

 having for its chief characteristic its conservative or at- 

 tractive virtue, and endowed from outside with a capacity 

 whereby its axis is prevented from wabbling; a vast elec- 

 tric machine rotated by the hand of the Almighty and 

 excited by the friction of the solar rays. 1 



1 The first record in the annals of the Royal Society which has any re- 

 lation to electricity is a review of von Guericke's treatise. It was 

 quickly recognized that his sulphur globe was an electric terrella "by 

 which experiment," it is added, "he thinks may be represented the 

 chief virtues he enumerates of our earth," and that "the impulsive, 

 attractive, expulsive and other virtues of the earth, as he calls them, may 

 be ocularly exerted." Phil. Trans., 1672, No. 88, p. 5103. 



