

CONNECTION. 557 



explosion and shock follows, and both jars are discharged; 

 how half the charge in an electrified jar will go to a non- 

 electrified jar; how jars are oppositely electrified according 

 as the charge is imparted to the inside or the outside, and 

 how the suspended cork ball will continue vibrating be- 

 tween the hooks on the ends of the inserted wires of two 

 oppositely-charged jars, u fetching the electric fluid from 

 the one and delivering it to the other, till both vials are 

 nearly discharged." 



It will be remembered that when Winkler or Watson 

 desired to combine the strengths of two or more L,eyden 

 jars, they arranged the latter in the parallel or multiple 

 arc relation. Franklin, studying the charging process, 

 now suspends "two or more vials on the prime con- 

 ductor, one hanging on the tail of the other, and a wire 

 from the last to the floor." "An equal number of turns 

 of the wheel," he says, "shall charge them all equally, and 

 every one as much as one alone would have been; what 

 is driven out at the tail of the first serving to charge the 

 second; what is driven out of the second charging the 

 third, and so on. By this means a great number of bottles 

 might be charged with the same labor and equally high 

 with one alone, were it not that every bottle receives new 

 fire and loses its old with some reluctance, or rather gives 

 some small resistance to charging." 



That is the first announcement of the arrangement of 

 electrical sources in the series or tandem relation an in- 

 vention which, as will now be seen, Franklin immediately 

 turned to practical account. 



Meanwhile he made a little series of experiments which, 

 for neatness and exquisite ingenuity, remind one of 

 Dufay, which show incidentally how the coated pane 

 came to the inventor under circumstances entirely differ- 

 ent from those which led to its suggestion by Bevis, and 

 which ended in the famous Franklinian battery. 



The question which especially puzzled Franklin was 

 where the charge went in the jar, and how there could 



