474 TH E INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



vited him thither, and, to the joys of a country life, Gray 

 has the added felicity of plenty of room. The rod is 

 lengthened to thirty-two feet, and gives way to thread, so 

 that he can stand on Godfrey's balcony and swing the 

 ivory ball attached to its lower end over the scraps of foil 

 on the ground, thirty-four feet below. As he can find no 

 higher elevation, he concludes to suspend his experiments 

 until his return to London and try them in the dome of 

 St. Paul's, where he could get just ten times the above 

 altitude. He had thought of a horizontal line of thread, 

 and had tried one looped to a beam in order to suspend 

 the ball. But then the ball refused to attract, because, as 

 he says, the electric virtue runs to the beam and not to the 

 ball. 



Instead of going back to the Charterhouse, he proceeds 

 to Otterden Place, the residence of "Gran vile Wheler, 

 Esq., member R. S., with whom I have the honor to be 

 lately acquainted," and takes with him a little glass tube 

 44 in order to give Mr. Wheler a specimen of my experi- 

 ments." 



But the moment Wheler sees what has been done, he 

 wants much more than a specimen, for his interest is en- 

 thusiastic. In fact, he develops a desire more burning 

 even than that of Gray himself to find out how far the elec- 

 tricity will travel. He insists upon a long horizontal line 

 being put up immediately. Gray tells him that it will be 

 useless, for the virtue will run off at the supports. Then 

 says Gray, "he proposed a silk line to support the line by 

 which the electric virtue was to pass. I told him it might 

 be better upon the account of its smallness, so that there 

 would be less virtue carried from the line of communica- 

 tion." Gray therefore had already found out that the con- 

 ductivity of his line depended upon its "smallness," and 

 that the smaller it was the less virtue it would carry. 



There is a gallery eighty feet long in Wheler's house, 

 and there Wheler, and all his servants helping him, speed- 

 ily stretch a packthread line over taut silk threads. The 



