512 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



concerning it which the philosophers have never thought 

 of or completely missed. And the more complex the in- 

 tellectual gymnastics of a certain class of these erudite per- 

 sons around it, the more certain it seems to be that the 

 discoverer will be found to have solved the problem either 

 by his simple wits or by accident and his wits combined. 



It is not unlikely that among the more thoughtful stu- 

 dents of electricity were some who did not look with favor 

 upon the universal effort directed to the production of 

 more and more powerful discharges. A maximum sooner 

 or later must be reached possible improvements in ma- 

 chines must terminate some time and then what? There 

 was nothing to show that the shocks which shook every 

 joint in a man's body were capable of any effects, different 

 in kind, from those which he could easily bear. More- 

 over, the electrical action came and went like tl e light- 

 ning quicker than in the twinkling of an eye. Nothing 

 could be more fugitive, nothing less utilizable, than force 

 exerted under such conditions as this. Could it be im- 

 prisoned? Who would dare suggest the possibility? Who 

 would risk the ridicule sure to follow the conception that 

 the subtle electrical matter which, whether identified with 

 the Newtonian ether or not, the philosophers agreed to be 

 capable of penetrating all substances, could in some bonds 

 be "cabined, cribbed, confined?'* Even if one could im- 

 prison it, how was an explosive emanation, shooting in 

 right lines in all directions and never moving continuously 

 in a definite path, to be caught? The attempt would be 

 as idle as trying to box a sunbeam in a soap bubble. 



It being now, perhaps, sufficiently clear that not only 

 did the knowledge of the time offer no way of practically 

 confining or accumulating electricity, but that, on the con- 

 trary, the idea thereof would have been scouted on all 

 sides as contrary to every respectable hypothesis and hence 

 necessarily absurd, the conditions for the doing of the thing 

 were manifestly ripe, and accordingly it was done. 



On the nth of October, 1745, Dean Von Kleist of the 



