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NATURE 



[Nov. 7, 1889 



■work of all the Chancelleries in Europe is now practically con- 

 ducted by the light of that great science, which is not so old as 

 the century in which we live. And there is a strange feeling that 

 you have in communicating constantly and frequently day by day 

 with men whose inmost thoughts you know by the telegraph, but 

 whose faces you have never seen. It is something more than a 

 mere departmental effect which these great discoveries have had 

 upon the government of the world. I have often thought that if 

 history were more philosophically written, instead of being 

 divided according to the domination of particular dynasties 

 or the supremacy of particular races, it would be cut off into 

 the compartments indicated by the influence of particular 

 discoveries upon the destinies of mankind. Speaking only of 

 these modern times, you would have the epoch marked by 

 the discovery of gunpowder, the epoch marked by the dis- 

 covery of the printing-pres«, and you would have the epoch 

 marked by the discovery of the steam-engine. And those 

 discoveries have had an influence infinitely more powerful, not 

 only upon the large collective destinies, but upon the daily 

 life and experience of multitudes of human beings, than even 

 the careers of the greatest conquerors or the devices of the 

 greatest statesmen. In that list which our ignorance of ancient 

 history in its essential character forbids us to make as long as no 

 doubt it might be made, the last competitor for notice and 

 not the least would be the science of electricity. I think the 

 historian of the future when he looks back will recognize that 

 there has been a larger influence upon the destinies of mankind 

 exercised by this strange and fascinating discovery than even 

 in the discovery of the steam-engine itself, because it is a 

 discovery which operates so immediately upon the moral and 

 intellectual nature and action of mankind. The electric tele- 

 graph has achieved this great and paradoxical result, that it has, 

 as it were, assembled all mankind upon one great plane where 

 they can see everything that is done, and hear everything that is 

 said, and judge of every policy that is pursued at the very 

 moment when those events take place ; and you have by the 

 action of the electric telegraph, combine! together almost at 

 one moment, and acting at one moment upon the agencies which 

 govern mankind, the influences of the whole intelligent world 

 with respect to everything that is passing at that time on the 

 face of the globe. It is a phenomenon to which nothing in the 

 history of our planet up to this time presents anything which is 

 equal or similar, and it is an effect and operation of which the 

 intensity and power increases year by year. When you ask 

 what is the effect of the electric telegraph upon the condition 

 of mankind, I would ask you to think of what is the most 

 conspicuous feature in the politics of our time, the one 

 which occupies the thoughts of every statesman, .-xnd which 

 places the whole future of the whole civilized world in a con- 

 dition of doubt and question. It is the existence of those 

 gigantic armies held in leash by the various Governments of the 

 world, whose tremendous power may be a guarantee for the 

 happiness of mankind and the maintenance of civilization, but 

 who, on the other hand, hold in their hands powers of destruc- 

 tion which are almost equal to the task of levelling civilization 

 to the ground. What gives these armies their power? What 

 enables them to exist ? By what power is it that one single will 

 can control these vast millions of men and direct their destructive 

 energies at one moment on one point ? What is the condition of 

 simultaneous direction and action which alone gives to these vast 

 armies this tremendous power ? It is nothing less than the electric 

 telegraph. And it is from that small discovery, worked out by 

 a few distinguished men in their laboratories upon experiments 

 of an apparently trivial character, on matter and instruments 

 not, in the first instance, of a very recondite description — -it is 

 on that discovery that the huge belligerent power of modern 

 States, which marks off our epoch of history from all that have 

 gone before, must be held, by anyone who investigates into the 

 causes of things, absolutely to depend. I would venture to hope 

 that this is not all, in its great effect upon the history and govern- 

 ment of our race, that electricity may achieve. Whether it so 

 far is good or evil in the main, it must be for the future to deter- 

 mine. We only know that the effect, whatever it is, will be 

 gigantic. But in the latter half of the short life of this young 

 science another aspect of it has been developed — an aspect which 

 I cannot help hoping may be connected with great benefits to the 

 vast community of industrious and labouring men — I mean that 

 facility for the distribution of pover of which electricity has 

 given such a splendid instance. The event of the last century 

 was the discovery of the steam-engine. But the steam-engine 



was such that the forces which it produced could only act in 

 its own immediate neighbourhood, and therefore those who were 

 to utilize its forces and translate them into practical work were 

 compelled to gather round the steam-engine in vast factories, in 

 great manufacturing towns, and in great establishments where 

 men were collected together in unnatural, and often unwhole- 

 some, aggregation. Now an agent has been di-:covered, by 

 which the forces of the steam-engine, stiff, confined to its own 

 centre, can be carried along, far away from its original sources, 

 to distances which are already great, and which science promises 

 to make more considerable still. I do not despair of the result 

 that this distribution of forces may scatter those aggregations of 

 humanity, which I think it is not one of the highest merits of 

 the discovery of the steam-engine to have produced. If it ever 

 does happen that in the house of the artisan you can turn on 

 power as now you can turn on gas — and there is nothing in the 

 essence of the problem, nothing in the facts of the science, as 

 we know them, that should prevent such a consummation from 

 taking place — if ever that distribution of power should be so 

 organized, you will then see men and women able to pursue in 

 their own homes many of the industries which now require the 

 aggregation at the factory. You may, above all, see women 

 and children pursue these industries without that disruption of 

 families which is one of the most unhappy results of the present 

 requirements of industry. And if ever that result should come 

 from the discoveries of Oersted and Faraday, you may say that 

 they have done more than merely to add to the physical forces of 

 mankind. They will have done much to sustain that unity, that 

 integrity of the family, upon which rest the moral hopes of our 

 race and the strength of the community to which we belong. 

 These are some of the thoughts which electricity suggests to one 

 of my trade. Pardon me if I have wandered into what may 

 seem to be speculative and unfamiliar fields. But, after all, the 

 point of view from which we must admire the splendid additions 

 to our knowledge which the scientific men of the world, and 

 especially of England, during this century have made, i«, that 

 they have enabled mankind to be more happy, to be more con- 

 tented, and therefore to be more moral. 



vSir Frederick Abel proposed, and Sir George Gabriel Stokes 

 responded for, "The Learned Societies" ; and Sir John Coode 

 responded for the toast of "The Professional Societies," which 

 was proposed by Mr. Latimer Clark. The toast of " The In- 

 stitution of Electrical Engineers " was then proposed by Lord 

 Salisbury. In the course of his response, S!r William Thomson 

 said : — 



One very renarkable piece of work they should think of 

 especially this year, and during the last few weeks, when they 

 deplored the loss of one of the greatest workers in electrical 

 science and its practical application that the world had ever seen 

 — Joule. The great scientific discoveries of Faraday, which 

 were prepared almost deliberately for the purpose of allowing 

 others to turn them to account for the good of man, had been 

 going on for about fifteen years, when a young man took up the 

 subject with a profound dnd penetrating genius most rare in any 

 branch of human study, and perceived relitions with mechanical 

 pDwer which had never been suspected before. Joule saw the 

 relations between electricity and force, and his very first deter- 

 mination of the mechanic 1 1 equivalent was an electrical measure- 

 ment. His communication to the British Association, when it 

 met in Cork in the year 1841, pointed out for the first time the 

 distinct mechanical relation between electric phenomena and 

 mechanical force. Joule was not a mere visionary who saw and 

 admired something in the air, but he pursued what he saw to the 

 very utmost practical point of work, and he it was who deter- 

 mined the mechanical equivalent of heat. Afterwards he 

 thoroughly confirmed the principle of his first determination of 

 the mechanical equivalent of heat. Both in electricity and 

 mechanical action he laid the foundation of the great develop- 

 ment of thermodynamics, which would be' looked upon in 

 future generations as the crowning scientific work of the present 

 century. It was not all due to Joule, but he had achieved one 

 of the very greatest monuments of scientific work in the present 

 century. For an Institution of Electrical Engineers it was 

 interesting to think that the error relating to one of the most 

 important electrical elements, the unit of resistance (now called 

 the ohm), as determined electrically in the first place by a Com- 

 mittee of the British Association, and by purely electrical 

 method, was first discovered by Joule's mechanical measurement. 

 It was Joule's mechanical measurement which first corrected the 

 British Association unit, and gave the true ohm. 



