506 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



tions of this and that apparatus mostly experimental and 

 of no consequence. Andrew Gordon, a Scotch Benedictine 

 monk and a teacher in Erfurt, substituted a glass cylinder 

 for the glass globe commonly employed. Johann Hein- 

 rich Winkler, professor of Greek and L,atin in the Univer- 

 sity of Leipsic, replaced the dry palm of the hand with a 

 leather cushion rubber adjusted to the glass by springs, 

 and rotated the cylinder by a cord passing around its axle 

 and connected at its ends respectively to a foot treadle and 

 an elastic rod. By this means he managed to revolve his 

 cylinder six hundred and eighty times per minute, and 

 thus not only had the extreme satisfaction of producing 

 brighter sparks and more severe shocks than any of his 

 rivals, but of being able to do so, as he says, in any 

 weather, no matter how damp. 



He vied with Bose in wonder working, by lighting spir- 

 its in the presence of a large assembly, by sparks emitted 

 from "his fingers, and devised a machine which he termed 

 a u Pirorganon," which is a tangle of little cylinders be- 

 tween which sparks are supposed to pass, and to form 

 fanciful figures such as a winged wheel, etc. It was the 

 first attempt to outline designs in electrical glow. 1 He 

 was of an inquisitive mind, and I am inclined to think 

 that he was the first who undertook to discover the speed 

 with which electricity travels. At all events he suspended 

 a cord 120 feet in length, which he considered amply long 

 for his purpose, so that, returning on itself, the ends came 

 within a few feet of one another, got some one to hold a 

 tray of gold-leaf under one extremity, while he, fixing his 

 eyes upon the gold-leaf and standing electrified upon his 

 pitch cake, suddenly grasped the other extremity. "It is 

 absolutely impossible," he says with great emphasis, "to 

 distinguish any interval of time between the touching of 

 the cord and the instant when the gold-leaf begins its 

 movement. " 



Later, he devoted himself entirely to evolving new elec- 



il. Trans., No. 493, p. 497, 



