BOSK'S EXPERIMENTS. 499 



Teutonic achievements was now beginning to show itself, 

 the electricians determined to test the matter, and to that 

 end, as Priestley remarks, "went to a great deal of ex- 

 pense." Ultimately Dr. Watson, of whom there will be 

 much to say hereafter, procured a huge cake of pitch, 

 three feet high, mounted it himself, and submitted to 

 vigorous electrification, with no better result than the cob- 

 web sensation and a slight tingling of the scalp. A sharp 

 correspondence followed between Watson and Bose, ending 

 in the discomfiture of the latter and the admission that his 

 boasted discovery was a mere trick ; the beatification, as he 

 called it, being produced by dressing the electrified person 

 in a suit of concealed armor having many points, at which 

 the brush discharge appeared. The older German his- 

 torians either omit this episode in Bose's career, or else 

 treat Bose's claims as mere u poetic license," on a par with 

 his offer to shock an entire army if some one would fur- 

 nish it. 



Bose tried to increase the strength of the discharge by 

 multiplying the number of rotating globes in his machine, 

 and asserts that he obtained especially vivid sparks from 

 ail apparatus constructed of three globes, varying in diam- 

 eter from ten to eighteen inches, and a beer glass. By 

 like means he produced, in exhausted vessels, glow dis- 

 charges which he says, u flowed, and turned, and wandered 

 and flashed," so that u no name is so applicable to them as 

 that of Northern Lights." This was the first suggestion 

 of the electrical origin of the Aurora Borealis. So power- 

 ful, says Bose, were the discharges from the multiple^ obe 

 machine, that the blood escaping from the opened vein of 

 an electrified person appeared " lucid like phosphorus," 1 

 and escaped faster, because of the electrification. In fact, 

 water spouting from an electrified fountain flowed more 

 freely than before. Thus came to light the principle now 

 embodied in the Thomson siphon-recorder and other ap- 



1 Phil. Trans., No. 476, p. 419, 1745. 



